“What do you do?” I am often asked.
“I’m a lawyer,” I say, “but I don’t practice.”
“Okay, so what do you do?” the person continues.
“I help companies market themselves using social media and the Internet,” I say to mostly blank stares.
For those who are interested, I will gladly talk about the joy of working with clients to find where they can use an injection of creativity, content, and better presentation to attract more business. We’ll talk shop about our favorite online tools and resources, and even trade tips if they are a dork like me. The interesting thing about all this is I never thought I would end up here, and it was social media (blogging in particular) that opened the doors to an unexpected career.
At the start of my illustrious career, I washed dishes at the Feast of San Genaro pizza restaurant in Franklin Park, NJ. Only 13-years old at the time, I worked weekends and enjoyed it not for the pitiful minimum wage but rather the opportunity to work in a fun place with great food. I will never forget when I found the chefs one day eating these green vegetables I had never seen before, and when I asked they said to try one because it tasted like candy. That was my first jalapeno pepper, and no, it didn’t taste like candy.
Through high school I worked in other places like the local ice cream shop, running my own baseball card business, and the movie theater. When I got to college I discovered waitering, which would become a job I loved and thrived in for the next 8 years. This was before the social web as we know it today, but I learned many of the skills I employ in community management and marketing today while slinging Mexican food for tips. For example, everybody loves a party – good community managers are like party hosts: they make everyone feel welcome and try to get other people on the dance floor. Another example, giving people a great experience is the key to getting good tips – providing others with value by making your content unique, personal, and helpful is the key to getting good traffic.
On the education side, I studied theater in college. This helped me lay a foundation for the presentation skills I rely on today when giving seminars and doing sales. I then went to law school where I was forced to tap into my analytical side, something that is not my first go-to skill (I like the creative stuff if you haven’t noticed), and it got me writing, A LOT. In fact, it was law school where I started my first blog “Fragmintz of Video Game Law and Other IP Issues” (later retitled to “Jurisgamer”), while taking a course in Intellectual Property. Here is the big take away of this post: by creating an online asset that could speak for itself, even when I was not present, I created new opportunities and opened doors with my publicly shared work. It was not long after starting that blog that I was offered an internship at a boutique law firm with a large video game client all because I had put myself out there in social media writing about something I was interested in.
That was in 2005. By 2007 I found myself graduating law school, passing the bar exam while my wife gave birth to our first child (yes, she was born the day of the test – a post for another time), and taking a job managing the law school publishing for LexisNexis. I continued blogging and being active on networks like LinkedIn. Then something really cool happened; LexisNexis launched a new lawyers community called Martindale.com Connected. They wanted a community manager that was a lawyer who understood how social media worked. One of the product managers started following my blog and as we became friends encouraged me to go for the position. I have worked for this company ever since and really grown into a role that I love.
Without any formal experience as a “social media expert, ninja, pirate, guru, or otherwise” I landed a really great gig and found a new direction for my life. For anyone thinking of putting themselves out there, social media presents an opportunity to distinguish yourself in a given field. There is a caveat here: you need to have something to say. Social media and all it entails is not a gimmick: don’t start a blog because you think it will make you look relevant – start it because you want to write about something important to you and not doing it bothers you. These tools are powerful, can open doors, and allow you to create an online presence that speaks for itself (in law we call that “res ipsa loquiter,”).
