Note: A few weeks ago I saw that the law library at the law firm of Bryan Cave had a Twitter account and was actively tweeting. The concept of a large law firm tweeting isn’t that unusual, but the idea of a library within the firm publicly tweeting did sound a little foreign to me. So, I contacted the two librarians behind the Twitter account and asked if they would guest-post here on 3 Geeks and let us know what the goals were for having a Twitter account, who follows them and who do they follow. Karen Lasnick (Santa Monica, CA office) and Joan Thomas (Kansas City, MO office) took me up on the offer and explained their reasoning for creating the @BryanCaveLib account. My thanks to Karen and Joan for sharing their experiences with us.

Tweeting At The Cave

Joan Thomas and I started our Twitter feed @BryanCaveLib last year. I was interested because I had just personally started Tweeting and wanted to jump on the Library Twitter bandwagon. Our first Library tweet was on September 8, 2011: “Welcome to the Bryan Cave Library and Research Services Twitter. We would love to have you follow us as we Tweet all things legal and more!” Now 365 tweets and retweets later, I find that I enjoy Twitter even more than Angry Birds.

Our goals?
One of them is to establish a presence where our attorneys are. We follow 108 twitter accounts including several Bryan Cave LLP accounts and individual Bryan Cave attorneys. We often retweet (RT) tweets from the people we follow. This helps develop a rapport by sharing good information while giving credit for the good stuff we read in our stream. A little more than one third of our tweets are RT’s.

Who follows us?
All kinds of people: attorneys, including our own (several of our practice groups also Tweet) and others outside of the firm, legal publications, social media gurus, individuals who find us interesting and the occasional misguided soul trying to tell us we have won a free iPad. We have 93 followers as of this writing.

Who do we follow?
The same kind of people that follow us: whatever or whoever strikes us as interesting or relevant. Some of our tweets come from our own personal Twitter feeds that we think our followers would enjoy. So far, we have not duplicated each other’s Tweets!

We recently started marketing @BryanCaveLib. Every three weeks, our research librarians compile our newsletter, “in the KNOW”, which is distributed firmwide. We added this blurb at the beginning of each issue to market @BryanCaveLib: Bryan Cave Library & Research Services is now on Twitter. We tweet about general research and legal news. Follow @BryanCaveLib ! We also have a “Follow us on Twitter” link on eCave2, the firm’s intranet. Our email signature’s marketing tagline for this month is @BryanCaveLib . We noticed that these small marketing efforts have increased our in-house followers.

Twitter is a subtle way to develop relationships with attorneys by giving us an opportunity to casually interact with attorneys from all of our offices. Our Bryan Cave followers are starting to visit us when they happen to be in the Kansas City or Santa Monica offices. Joan and I communicate more with each other via Twitter. We often tweet at each other over the weekend or way too late at night. Twitter is proving to be worth the small amount of time we devote to it. We encourage other law firm libraries to start tweeting. You may discover that it can help build relationships with your attorneys and co-workers!