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One of the most frustrating things about social media platforms is their propensity to change.
I’m not sure what it is about tech people that inspires them to keep changing things that work fine as they are. Or perhaps it is that the technology environment is evolving so rapidly that new things emerge all the time and those running social media platforms have to adapt and incorporate the advances. I have no idea the genesis of the problem, but the problem remains: social media platforms change frequently.
For lawyers, that is frustrating because we are generally late adopters anyway, and once we learn how to use something we like it to stay that way. We don’t want to continually learn how to use the new versions of things that we have mastered in their old form.
Unfortunately, there is no way around this. Many of you will have seen the changes made by Google, LinkedIn and Facebook over the past couple of years, and I don’t see that slowing down this year or, really, any time soon. In the electronic environment we are in, it seems that the expectation is that things will continue to change, and if they don’t change at the proper rate they will be considered stale and lose ground to their competitors.
In addition to changes on the platforms we know, there are new platforms constantly emerging that might prove useful to us in some cases and a complete waste of time in other cases. Regardless, we will have to keep abreast of those changes and make decisions about whether to spend the time learning them or not.
Changes are going to continue to happen and we are going to have to find ways to keep ourselves apprised of them, work with them, and not get frustrated by them. My advice?
If you are in a firm, find the tech person or young lawyer that is really into this stuff and ask them to take responsibility for keeping you in the loop about any changes that should matter to you and for helping you incorporate those changes, whether that means helping you create a new account on a new platform or adapting your practices on platforms you are already on to take advantage of any good new features. That way, someone else who enjoys it can cull out all the time wasters and you only have to deal with the things that will actually make sense in relation to how you use social media.
If you don’t have a tech-interested person in your sphere, get on YouTube and start searching for videos on the changes that are happening. Most of the time you will find a video that teaches you, in just a few minutes, what you need to do to adapt to the change and whether or not it is worth your time to do so.
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