As many of you know I work as the communications manager for NALS…the association for legal professionals.  Last week we hosted our Professional Development & Education Conference in Tulsa.  For most people the conference started on Thursday or Friday and went through Saturday night.  For me it started Monday morning.  I was challenged with facilitating a think tank whose goal is to evaluate and make recommendations on how the association can change and adapt to make it viable for years to come.  We had some great conversation leading to some great ideas, we will be conducting research to see if our thoughts are aligned with the general membership before we move onto the next steps, but we are off to a great start.  I also worked with the NALS Strategic Planning committee so that we can make sure that our committees are working on the things they need to be to help the association reach its strategic goals.  Next up was some work with the committees I work with and then (along with the general operating a conference tasks) I held two sessions focusing on social media and marketing.

I talked a lot about the history of social media and threw out a lot of statistics trying to show those in attendance that social media was not just a fad, but a shift in the way we all communicate.  It was great to see the willingness of these legal professionals to listen and learn about the ways people are using social media.  They had great questions and we even saw some new folks sign up on Twitter!   We used #NALSPD as the hashtag so that we could track the Twitter activity during the conference.  We had 36 people use the hashtag reaching just under 30,000 people generating close to a quarter of a million impressions.  We had one person (@legalninjakris) generate 180,000 impressions on her own!  She posted her entire experience and gave us some great insight into the experiences of our attendees.  And it is hard to beat those numbers of impressions for no cost!

One thing that happened that could not have been planned was a spontaneous illustration of how social media is making the world smaller.  I was speaking during my session and I pulled up a Twitter search for the hashtag and to my surprise I saw @jsnovel in the search.  He had re-tweeted a post that was made by someone in the session.  He actually re-tweeted a tweet that was re-tweeted by a third person.  What makes this crazy is that I went to high school with @jsnovel!  He even wound up doing a blog post about social media in education, which he claims to have been inspired to do because of the tweets being made from my session.  He had no idea that I was the one doing the session until I sent him a message after the session was done.  It was crazy to me that someone I have known for years wound up following a session I was doing without even knowing that I was presenting the information.  Really a great illustration.

I am going to post an article that I wrote on social media to the blog this week as well, so keep your eyes open!