TIP: Whatever You Do, Don’t Offer Online Collaboration

There is a lot of good information out there about using technology to collaborate directly with clients.

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technology: Smart Ways to Work Together, by Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell Don’t read it. It might give you ideas about offering up to clients the ability to see, review and edit their documents with you online. Since peoples’ expectations are for more real-time services, make sure you use older, slower delivery options. Another dangerous tool to avoid: online surveys like Survey Monkey or Zoomerang. Clients will like these since they give them a convenient opportunity to tell you what they like and don’t like about your services. Talk about NOT annoying. And to top it off, clients may tell you something you don’t want to hear, causing the backfire effect of annoying you.

Conclusions

Using technology can be challenging. Using technology to annoy clients is an art form. Just remember: Whichever technologies you choose, follow our ‘best practices’ and you will be sure to get your clients’ undivided attention.

TIP:  Under No Circumstances Personalize Anything for the Client One of the best ways to annoy your client is to remind them that they are just one of the cogs of your great legal empire.  Taking the time to personalize a communication and making the client feel that they are important to you, is just wasting your time in your efforts to annoy them.  If you see something that one of your colleagues has written to his clients, and it may be relevant to your client, what ever you do, DO NOT FORWARD IT on to your client with a simple note saying that you saw this and thought it was relevant to your client’s business.  Nothing is more annoying than talking with your client weeks later and saying – “Oh, yeah…  We put something about that out a few weeks ago, but I didn’t think to send it to you.” Perhaps you’re tempted to create an Extranet for your clients to make it easier for them to share documents back and forth with you — or, to keep them abreast of the status of a matter without having to call you to ask about it. One of the highest levels of annoyance comes when a client has to call you for an update on an open matter, and then you later bill them for their inconvenience.  Putting together an Extranet would only make the client feel that they were involved in the matter, and that you were taking the time to make sure they had access to relevant information on their case.  What’s so annoying about that? 

TIP: Use Technology to Deliver Boring Stuff

A classic, annoying favorite of ours is building PowerPoint presentations with tons of text in small font on each slide. Don’t bother utilizing graphics, videos and other visually appealing tools. The only thing that makes this approach better is if you read the text to them. An annoying PowerPoint is meant to make the point and not to just emphasize it. So include the whole point, the entire point, word-for-word.

Here’s another tried-and-tested annoyer. When you hold a client teleconference or web-conference, don’t bother with more sophisticated tools like auto-mute for attendees. If an attendee puts the conference on hold and they have ‘hold’ music, everyone will be struggling to hear you above the music. Classic!

A word of warning: When giving online presentations, interactive web tools should be avoided. Do not, we repeat, do NOT give clients an opportunity for real-time participation. If they have a question or comment to share about the presentation, make them put in the extra effort to remember and ask you later.

I’m interrupting the “Tech Annoyances” to make a comment on the Presidential debates.

Listening to the 2nd installment of Obama vs. McCain last night, I heard both of the candidates say that one of the best ways to make health care in America more affordable is to improve the technology and make patient records available electronically.  [skip ahead to about the 51st minute of the debate.]

Now, I know that many viewers saw that answer as an Information Technology issue, but for those of us in the “business”, I’d say that it is really a Knowledge Management issue.   It will be a KM issue to pull data from multiple databases, and set up the network of risk analysis programs against that data to prevent those preventable health care errors that injure or kill thousands each year.  It will be KM that will be working with Doctors, Nurses, and Pharmacists to construct the work flow of health care technology, all the way from proper data entry to verifying that there are no dangerous drug interactions.
Many of us have heard of the nearly tragic story of Dennis Quaid’s twin newborn’s accidental over dosage of Heperin.  Situations like that can be reduced not solely by improving the technology in health care, but, by increasing the ability to leverage the information against existing data, and producing a process that improves the ability for health care professionals to make informed decisions, and be given the overall risks associated with a procedure (ranging from administering drugs to operations.)  That, my friends and fellow Americans, is what Knowledge Management is all about.
Yes, technology is a great resource, but it cannot by itself make health care more efficient.  Knowledge Management is the key to making health care and IT  more efficient. 
In the words of Bruce Dickinson,  “Health care has a fever, and the only prescription… is more KM!”
 

TIP:  Make It Complicated for the Client (the more difficult, the more satisfying) The more technologically advanced you make your web site, the more your clients will see you for the technology wizard that you are.  One of the best ways to annoy your clients is to assume that they are all using Internet Explorer (IE) version 7, and then use the most advanced plug-ins available.  Since some of your clients are still using an older version of IE, or may even have the audacity of using another web browser like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, this will give them the extra motivation of taking the time to upgrade to IE 7 just to view your very cool site. Another best practice is to not test your flash or javascript inserts and send out a presentation that is completely unusable.  Your client will benefit by being able to send out the “Friday Funny” to his peers showing just how useless your communication really is.  If it is really good, they’ll send out the “Friday Funny” on a Wednesday. Since all of your recipients are using high-speed Internet services, they want you to test the limits of their e-mail attachment capabilities.   A great way to do this is to print out a high-quality document with lots of colors, and then scan it into a high-resolution PDF document.  Nothing says “I don’t know what I’m doing” better than a 15 Mb PDF document that has only two pages of content.  They would probably send this to their peers as another “Friday Funny,” but their peers’ email boxes would reject it because the attachment is too large. 

TIP: Provide Content Rarely and Irregularly

Blogs are HOT and in demand, so this best practice will take some effort … Not. Since people prefer blogs that are regularly updated with fresh, compelling content, this is another easy best practice: You should only post up information on your legal topic blog when you feel like it. This will likely coincide with when your work slows down, and you have time and really need more clients. This has the added advantage of impacting your writing style, so it comes across as desperate.

Oh – and think about all the Web 2.0 tools you can use, especially those social networking sites like LinkedIn. This social networking, where people participate in online communities, can be powerful. Best Practice: Join, but don’t add anything to the group. Or if you have an urge to contribute, send out connection invitations to people you don’t really know. A potential downside to joining these sites is that you may end up connecting with old contacts who could send you work.

TIP: Send A LOT of Content Daily email newsletters are perhaps the best thing you can do to annoy your clients each every morning. Clients truly desire the minutia of legal issues like “European Practice” or “Corporate Finance” and giving them anything less than a daily newsletter on such generic legal topics would be a serious disappointment.
This works extremely well for those clients that cannot figure out how to create a rule to send these newsletters straight to their trash folders. For those lucky few, they can truly see you are the expert in your field, and that you must be available to work on these issues immediately because you have a lot of time on your hands to write these annoying daily newsletters.
Some firms tailor their newsletters to make sure that the right content is going to the right clients. Taking the time to understand what issues effect your individual clients and then dissemenating targeted information in an as needed manner is breaking every annoyance rule we’re attempting to lay out for you. So, remember, dump as much information as you can, as often as you can, to as many clients as you can! That’s truly annoying.

TIP: Share Useless ContentA lawyer once said: “It is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and resolve all doubt.”  Following Abe Lincoln’s advice, send clients e-mail announcements on major changes regarding a government regulation, but only send the title of the regulation and a link to the Code of Federal Regulations to let them figure out the change for themselves.  Or, even better, cut and paste the entire regulation and put it in the body of your email.Taking this approach tells your clients that they are savvy enough to understand the issues all on their own.  We’ve actually seen some lawyers accidentally give clients a one or two paragraph overview of major legal changes and how that may affect their business.  Remember, useful is not annoying.

Greg and I put together a fun article on how to annoy clients with technology. It was on track to be published, but at the 11th hour was rejected. Apparently our writing style lacks a certain diplomacy. But then we had our “duh” moment and wonder why the heck we were trying to publish something in paper. The obvious response was publishing on our own blog. So over the next days we will be posting up the various tips from that article. Here’s the intro and first tip:

Using Technology to Annoy Clients

Given the ever-expanding universe of technology, there is truly no end to the ways you can annoy your clients. To help you along in this process, we want to arm you with some ‘best practices’ for aggravating and just plain bothering your clients. Remember the old adage: “If one cookie tastes good, make them eat the whole bag.”

TIP: Share the Wrong Content

Spam presents a great opportunity to annoy since it already has people annoyed. So this is an easy best practice. Every time you e-mail out an e-newsletter or event notice, send it to all of your clients. This will ensure that each client will get at least one e-mail on a topic that is of no concern to them. Less-worthy lawyers waste valuable time developing targeted lists so that bankruptcy clients only get bankruptcy content. If you want to move up the ladder another notch on this tip, make sure you send these e-mails often.

I’d been saying this all along . . . (see my post: Online Social Networking: A Fancy Word for Friendship ).

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@ Mixx: Social Networking: From Shut-Ins To Political Action To Products
By David Kaplan – Tue 23 Sep 2008 06:56 AM PST

It’s day two of Advertising Week in New York, and to keep people in their seats at theInteractive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx conference, Charlie Rose was tapped to bring his talk show format to a morning session with new media academic Clay Shirky. In offering a primer of social networkings evolution, Shirky told Rose that it started with with people who didn’t leave the house—“people who were confined in some way”—and then spread to others who wanted to share photos and details about their lives. It then got serious as political activists started using it, which was shortly followed by the business world.

— Almost all you need is love: In seeking to understand how social networks work, Shirky says you have to understand “household economics.” Shirky: “Economists have a tough time explaining why you feed your children. Household economics is not seen as terribly important. But it is and it explains a lot about why we do what we do, especially in social networking. Non-financial motivations are getting people to do something. People create value for each other because we’re human. We’re not self-obsessed, we like to know other people. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBaysaid the idea behind it was that people are basically good. He was proven wrong three months later when eBay nearly tanked because people were stealing from another. ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll send you a check for those Beanie Babies.’ But when the grades were added for buyers and sellers, people suddenly got good.”