ILTA through Tweets

The amount of Twittering at ILTA this year was pretty phenomenal.  I know that some sessions were covered so well that you really, truly did not need to be there to cover the flow of the session.

I was sitting in an iManage session and following the tweets from the very popular session on Leadership, and felt like I was actually able to attend two sessions at once.

With all of this Twitter activity though, it can be hard to go back and read what was said.  Lucky for all of us, Niki Black has been collecting up the best tweets from the various keynote sessions and she has archived them on her Legal Tweets site.  I suggest checking it out if you want to see what was said on Twitter.  You can also simply do a search using the #ilta09 tag on Twitter and find all the Tweets or limit the search by keyword or date.

I posted a few hundred tweets.  What was everyone’s thoughts on the use of Twitter at ILTA this year?  I know that I found a number of new people to follow and was told a number of times that people appreciated the coverage.  Always looking for more feedback though.

Sunday Recap – What’s with all this social stuff?

Conference officially kicks off tomorrow, but Sunday has it’s fair share of activities.  I started the day with a trip into the city, and a whirlwind tour of three museums.  I was able to get my shopping for the kids out of the way, one less thing to worry about.

The first session of the day was the new Communities of Interest meetup.  I decided to join in with the other social networkers and meet a few of fellow twitterers in real life.  The room for our meetup was closed, and there was some discussion on whether or not that meant we were supposed to be meeting virtually, but we decided to stay for a face to face discussion.

The discussion was awesome, and quickly turned to the issues around ethics and social media policy.  Quite a firms have taken a serious look at creating a social media policy, and have researched the policies of other companies, firms and many (even all) of the various state bar groups.  It was a very interesting discussion and one that I need to do some serious thinking on for my firm.  It was mentioned that IBM, Intel, the New York Times and the AP all have good policies that can be used as a reference (I was not able to find links to the NYT or AP policies in a quick search).  Some other searches that might be useful to those wanting to research more on social media policies can be found at Google News, Blog Search and Twitter.

There has been a good amount of talk about the social media aspects of this years conference.  This is certainly the best year to not be attending conference as it will be so easy to see, hear and understand what is going on.  The official conference blog had an article the other day about the social media aspects of conference which is a worthwhile read if you have not already.  I think the big take away from conference, especially for those who are not 100% sure on the whole social networking thing, is summed up nicely in the article with this:

“I feel like I need a personal testimony before I can imagine ways to suggest employing it to the advantage of my Firm…”

Hopefully everyone leaves conference this year with a better understanding of social media and how it can be utilized.  It will be interesting to see what changes are made in firms when we get to the 2010 conference, social media is here to stay.

How is social media/networking playing into your daily life, and your attendance at conference?