For News From Syrian Battleground, a Reliance on Social Media

Western journalists are struggling to cover what the world has so far seen largely through YouTube. But while some television news crews have been filing reports from Damascus, the dangers of reporters being killed or kidnapped there — as well as visa problems — have kept most journalists outside the country’s borders and heightened the need for third-party images.

“The difficulty of getting into Syria, the shrunken foreign correspondent corps, and the audience gains for social media make it likely this story will be consumed differently by the American public than tensions or conflicts in past years,” said Ann Marie Lipinski, the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Syria the deadliest country in the world for reporters. Last year, 28 journalists working there were killed, and 18 have died so far this year, according to the group, a nonprofit based in New York.

Among the few television outlets broadcasting from Damascus are CBS News, the BBC and ITN, a British news provider. A CNN correspondent, Fred Pleitgen, had been reporting from Damascus, but his visa expired this week and he was relocated to Beirut, Lebanon, a spokeswoman for the network said.

The Wall Street Journal has a reporter in Damascus, and Reuters and The Associated Press both said that they had journalists inside Syria.

For many news organizations, though, Beirut or Syria’s borders are the closest they can safely get. Richard Engel, an NBC News correspondent who was held hostage for five days last year in Syria, traveled inside the country earlier this week, but most recently reported from the Turkish-Syrian border.

Reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times are in Beirut, and this week ABC News reopened its bureau there after two decades.

“It’s risky being in Damascus in the best of times, and when you’ve got U.S. missiles raining down on the city, it adds to the sense of risk,” said Jon Williams, ABC News’s managing editor for international news.

For networks without a Syrian correspondent, partnerships with other organizations supply some video. ABC works with the BBC, for example, and NBC with ITN. But the networks also rely on YouTube and other third-party sources, which have yielded some of the most vivid and disturbing video of the conflict, but has also brought a host of verification problems.

This week, CNN broadcast a film showing what purported to be evidence of mass graves, and said that it came from “an independent filmer who is absolutely trustworthy.” CBS News uses a team of Arabic-speaking employees in London to review third-party videos, according to Christopher Isham, its Washington bureau chief.

ABC News, Reuters and other outlets use Storyful, a company that scours social sites and verifies videos through tests like comparing street scenes to maps and checking an uploader’s affiliated accounts. The New York Times has also worked with Storyful in the past. David Clinch, Storyful’s executive editor, said it first learned of a possible chemical attack last week from videos, and alerted its clients within an hour of the incident.

“This content is often the only content available,” Mr. Clinch wrote in an e-mail, “because news organizations either can’t get to the scene of suspected chemical attacks, don’t have anyone in Syria (some do but most don’t) or their staff cannot go out from Damascus.”

For those still within Syria, the challenge has simply been to stay safe. Mr. Isham said that CBS went to “extreme lengths” to protect its staff there, although he did not elaborate.

“Anytime you go into a combat zone, your folks are at risk,” he said. “You want to reduce that risk as much as possible.”

Obama Says Income Gap Is Fraying U.S. Social Fabric

Upward mobility, Mr. Obama said in a 40-minute interview with The New York Times, “was part and parcel of who we were as Americans.”

“And that’s what’s been eroding over the last 20, 30 years, well before the financial crisis,” he added.

“If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” he said. “That’s not a future that we should accept.”

A few days after the acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case prompted him to speak about being a black man in America, Mr. Obama said the country’s struggle over race would not be eased until the political process in Washington began addressing the fear of many people that financial stability is unattainable.

“Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot,” Mr. Obama said. “If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested. Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction.”

Mr. Obama, who this fall will choose a new chairman of the Federal Reserve to share economic stewardship, expressed confidence that the trends could be reversed with the right policies.

The economy is “far stronger” than four years ago, he said, yet many people who write to him still do not feel secure about their future, even as their current situation recovers.

“That’s what people sense,” he said. “That’s why people are anxious. That’s why people are frustrated.”

During much of the interview, Mr. Obama was philosophical about historical and economic forces that he said were tearing at communities across the country. He noted at one point that he has in the Oval Office a framed copy of the original program from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 50 years ago, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

He uses it, he said, to remind people “that was a march for jobs and justice; that there was a massive economic component to that. When you think about the coalition that brought about civil rights, it wasn’t just folks who believed in racial equality. It was people who believed in working folks having a fair shot.”

For decades after, Mr. Obama said, in places like Galesburg people “who wanted to find a job — they could go get a job.”

“They could go get it at the Maytag plant,” he said. “They could go get it with the railroad. It might be hard work, it might be tough work, but they could buy a house with it.”

Without a shift in Washington to encourage growth over “damaging” austerity, he added, not only would the middle class shrink, but in turn, contentious issues like trade, climate change and immigration could become harder to address.

Striking a feisty note at times, he vowed not to be cowed by his Republican adversaries in Congress and said he was willing to stretch the limits of his powers to change the direction of the debate in Washington.

“I will seize any opportunity I can find to work with Congress to strengthen the middle class, improve their prospects, improve their security,” Mr. Obama said. But he added, “I’m not just going to sit back if the only message from some of these folks is no on everything, and sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.”

Addressing for the first time one of his most anticipated decisions, Mr. Obama said he had narrowed his choice to succeed Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve to “some extraordinary candidates.” With current fiscal policy measurably slowing the recovery, many in business and finance have looked to the Fed to continue its expansionary monetary policies to offset the drag.

Mr. Obama said he wanted someone who would not just work abstractly to keep inflation in check and ensure stability in the markets. “The idea is to promote those things in service of the lives of ordinary Americans getting better,” he said. “I want a Fed chairman that can step back and look at that objectively and say, Let’s make sure that we’re growing the economy.”

The leading Fed candidates are believed to be Lawrence H. Summers, Mr. Obama’s former White House economic adviser and President Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, and Janet Yellen, the current Fed vice chairwoman and another former Clinton official. The president said he would announce his choice “over the next several months.”

E-Discovery and Social Media: Recap From TLI Litigation Summit, Part II

In September, The Legal Intelligencer hosted its first annual Litigation Summit in Philadelphia. This blog covers some of the information provided by Peter L. Mansmann, CEO of Precise Inc., who spoke about e-discovery challenges, solutions and trends. He was joined by Erin C. Burns of Roda Nast, Tara Gill Nalencz of Rawle & Henderson and Stuart Clair of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. During the program, I shared some of this information via Twitter with followers of the program?s hashtag. Here are some of the key points.

Case Study: A Social Entrepreneur’s Dilemma: Nonprofit or For-Profit?

Matthew Staver for The New York TimesSaul Garlick, founder of Student Movement for Real Change, considered closing the nonprofit and starting a for-profit venture after missing a few payrolls.

In 2002, at the age of 18, Saul Garlick started a program to fight poverty by building schools in rural South Africa. By 2004, his vision had broadened and he started an organization, Student Movement for Real Change, to encourage entrepreneurship in third world communities. Through this organization, he sent students to live with local families, hunt for water sources, farm alongside villagers and absorb the day-to-day nuances of life in a developing country with the goal of building social businesses along with the local residents.

The time and effort spent on fund-raising for a nonprofit has left its founder debating whether it is worth it to change the group.s business model.

Over the last two years, Mr. Garlick and his team have produced some 50 such “microenterprises” — including one that finances water projects in Kenya, one that sells charcoal and stoves in Rwanda and a cocoa nursery in Ghana.

THE CHALLENGE By 2009, Mr. Garlick’s social enterprise, renamed ThinkImpact, was raising about $400,000 a year to support the cause. But along with running the enterprise, it had to raise funds, monitor and evaluate programs, and provide transparency. Its employees were paid below-market wages, the hours seemed endless and the organization would soon be missing payrolls. “Nothing about that scenario was sustainable,” Mr. Garlick said. “And scale depended solely on fund-raising ability.” He was convinced there had to be a better way.

THE BACKGROUND In 2007, Mr. Garlick started taking a salary. He was 23, out of school and working full time for his organization — mostly to find supporters for the cause. The workload grew and he hired another recent graduate to run daily operations.

“I thought that was going to make everything easier, but it didn’t,” said Mr. Garlick, expressing a common frustration for nonprofits: the endless pressure to raise funds takes away from time spent doing the organization’s work. “Many of the aspirational young nonprofit employees become beggars. They are seeking a way out of a tortuous financial reality where they are building the plane while flying it.”

Adding to the pressure was the way Mr. Garlick and his team were encouraged to raise funds. They were advised not to “place all their eggs in one basket,” by relying on a sole funder or a single government agency. Instead, ThinkImpact diversified its reach and sought donations in smaller denominations. Eventually, Mr. Garlick realized that trying to please hundreds of stakeholders was a rather chaotic way to raise money and run a business. “In actual fact, unless you’re running for president, or have a team that exists to raise small dollars, you can’t meet payroll that way,” he said. “People give $20 and think they own your decision-making.”

On the ground, ThinkImpact broadened its reach. More than 100 young people worked with the organization in Africa, primarily in South Africa and Kenya, where they established a strong presence. In addition to developing a curriculum for social enterprise educational experiences, they were adapting to local needs, providing health workshops that reached hundreds of villages in Kenya, and building more than 50 homegrown development projects with the participation of the local community.

But in 2010, after attending a weeklong workshop where he met fellow social entrepreneurs and investors, Mr. Garlick started asking serious questions about his own business model. The questions included: What is our specialty? What value do we produce in people’s lives? How big can we get? How do we arrange for sufficient financing to let us focus on our real work?

THE OPTIONS After missing a couple of payrolls in 2010, Mr. Garlick concluded he had three options.

Option 1: Remain a nonprofit. With contracts from two universities for about $50,000 and funds from donations, grants and foundations expected to bring in $25,000 to $100,000, Mr. Garlick felt constricted. To really grow, he estimated that he would need $200,000 to $250,000 more. But raising that money would be exceedingly difficult using traditional methods and would keep the company almost endlessly locked into fund-raising mode.

Disruptions: Social Media Images Form a New Language Online

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Economic View: To Fix Social Security, Use the Right Wrench

Congress seems to want a ruse to disguise a cut in benefits as something else — like the discovery of a technical error that, once corrected, would let the government write smaller checks without taking the blame for cutting benefits.

In a spirit of compromise, President Obama has proposed changing how inflation is measured in benefit calculations. In his 2014 budget proposal released in April, he proposed that retirees’ Social Security benefits be indexed to something called the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers or C-CPI-U, rather than the current benchmark, the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W.

This seems to correct a real technical error. Economists have argued that the current index overstates the actual inflation rate, and that a switch to the C-CPI-U would make the inflation indexing more accurate, seemingly justifying the resulting gradual reduction in benefits. (And it would be a reduction, to the point that someone retiring today would be receiving about 5 percent less in 20 years.)

But here is the rub: the proposal solves the wrong problem and, in doing so, undermines the integrity of the Social Security system.

The purpose of Social Security is to help families. It reinforces the intergenerational sharing that families already — though imperfectly — provide. It helps retirees by stabilizing their income, and it helps their grown children, who are relieved of any excessive burden of supporting them. This purpose strongly suggests that the Social Security benefits should be indexed to some measure of the available, aggregate economic pie. That means a formula that looks completely different from the ones being discussed today.

Clearly, something needs to be done: if nothing changes, and the trust fund runs out in 2033, the system would be able to pay only about 75 percent of promised benefits.

The issues are complex, as economic theorists like Henning Bohn at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have shown. But now that an index change is on the table, we should take this opportunity to get it right.

One alternative that we should consider is a different kind of index switch, linking retirees’ benefits to gross domestic product per capita, in current dollars. This measure responds to inflation just as the C-CPI-U does, but, in contrast, it also responds to changes in the nation’s resources, as measured by real G.D.P. There could also be corrections for other factors, like the dependency ratio, which compares the number of “dependents” (retired people and children) to the number of working adults.

Such an index switch, however, has received hardly any public discussion, and that fact alone will make some people think that something is wrong with it. But political talk is limited; it is too focused on the identified problem of somehow fixing the projected Social Security insolvency. While this new idea won’t solve insolvency — we may need to raise Social Security contributions to do that — it would support the principle that one generation shouldn’t be more burdened than another.

Before 1972, Social Security wasn’t indexed at all, and there was little public talk about tying it to inflation despite periodic, inflation-induced disasters for retirees. Congress simply made occasional, ad hoc, upward adjustments in the benefit formula. Proponents of these adjustments often justified the increases as offsetting the rising cost of living. But at the same time, they also described retirees as needy, suffering hardships and deserving dignity. While there were no explicit references to G.D.P., it’s plausible that their sense of “needy” was influenced by comparison with the rising American standard of living for working adults. As a matter of fact, total Social Security benefits more than kept up with the rapid G.D.P. growth in the couple of decades before they were indexed to inflation.

Now that inflation indexing has been in place, some people see the formula as always providing the scientifically “right” amount of benefits. They don’t think much about other factors that might enter into the determination of benefits. And, in fact, since 1982, Social Security benefits as a fraction of G.D.P. have generally been falling, at least until the latest recession.

The fact is that per capita G.D.P., in current dollars, has grown 1.2 percent faster a year, on average, than the CPI-W in the last 20 years, despite the Great Recession. If we indexed Social Security benefits to G.D.P. per capita, and not to the C-CPI-U, people who retire today and live 20 additional years would get a third more in real, inflation-corrected benefits — provided, of course, that the next 20 years are like the last.

If the economy grew unusually rapidly, however, they might get 50 or 60 percent more, in real terms. But even that wouldn’t break the budget of the Social Security system, because contributions would be higher, too, in response to the greater economic growth. And if the economy stagnated in a deep depression in the next 20 years, retirees might see no growth at all, or conceivably even a decline, in real terms. That’s O.K., too, because everyone else would be suffering as well. We have other programs, like Medicare, that deal with any extreme hardships that some older Americans with special conditions might encounter.

THE point of G.D.P. indexing is to align the interests of the retired with society as a whole. Older Americans should share both the windfalls and the losses with other generations — with working adults, and with children. It shouldn’t be otherwise. If the system’s rules force us to maintain the real benefits of retirees at all costs, we may find ourselves, in difficult times, taking excessively from our children via cuts in education, or from our working adults. Why should retired people feel no effect at all from the recession while younger people are left suffering? They should be sharing the hardships, if we have familial feelings for one another.

The issue is especially salient today because the demographics have shifted: the aging of the baby boomers will create many retirees relative to adults who are still working. This huge shift could not have been foreseen by Social Security’s designers.

Achieving the right benefit formula while fixing Social Security’s solvency problem might require increasing the contribution rate — now in the form of 6.2 percent taxes on employees and employers. But so be it. We need to say what is right, keeping our eyes on the integrity of Social Security, which is crucial to our identity as a civil society.

Robert J. Shiller is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale.

E-Discovery and Social Media: Recap From TLI Litigation Summit, Part II

In September, The Legal Intelligencer hosted its first annual Litigation Summit in Philadelphia. This blog covers some of the information provided by Peter L. Mansmann, CEO of Precise Inc., who spoke about e-discovery challenges, solutions and trends. He was joined by Erin C. Burns of Roda Nast, Tara Gill Nalencz of Rawle & Henderson and Stuart Clair of Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. During the program, I shared some of this information via Twitter with followers of the program?s hashtag. Here are some of the key points.

DealBook: A Social Media View of the Davos of Hedge Funds

Michael Nelson/European Pressphoto AgencyThe night scene on the Las Vegas Strip outside the Bellagio Casino.

A look at some of the social media dispatches from SALT conference in Las Vegas. The SkyBridge Alternatives Conference brings together more than 1,800 wealthy investors and hedge funds for four days of conferences, concerts and revelry.

Peter Lattman of DealBook called the Anthony Scaramucci, the host of the event, a PT Barnum in a Ferragamo tie. While the event brings together senior money managers and Washington power brokers, it is also highlights the bacchanalia which Wall Street has tried to avoid since the financial crisis.

You're the Boss Blog: Questioning the TOMS Shoes Model for Social Enterprise

A social entrepreneur tries to change the way people shop.

After visiting Argentina and seeing the impact of poverty on some of its children, Blake Mycoskie was inspired to create a philanthropic “for-profit business that was sustainable and not reliant on donations.” The result was Toms Shoes, which promised that for every pair of shoes it sold, it would give away another pair to a child in need.

Since its founding in 2006, Toms has given more than 2 million pairs of shoes to children living in poverty in more than 51 countries. And it now has a line of eyewear that offers the same promise. The organization Mr. Mycoskie created has become a well-known example of a company that is based on business principles but also gives back.

It is also responsible for getting lots of Gen X and Gen Y entrepreneurs to think about business in a different way and for globalizing the buy-one, give-one model that is now so popular. In fact, there are many buy-one, give-one companies that have taken inspiration from Toms, and many of them apply to sell through my company, Fashioning Change. As you can see from our roster of brands, however, only two such companies have met our criteria, which we call our Promise of 5. In fact, if Toms Shoes were to apply to Fashioning Change to sell shoes through our site — it has not done so — it would not make the cut.

It’s for this reason that we have begun to question whether the buy-one, give-one model is the best choice for aspiring social entrepreneurs.

The tenets that drive Toms Shoes’s model are spelled out on the company’s Web site.

Identify Communities That Need Shoes
Together, we find communities that will benefit most from Toms shoes due to economic, health and educational needs, and where local businesses will not be negatively affected.Give Shoes That Fit
Our Giving Partners order the sizes children in their community need. …Help Our Shoes Have a Bigger Impact 
Children who are given Toms shoes receive them as part of larger health and education programs run by our Giving Partners. …Give Children Shoes As They Grow
Children grow fast! Toms works to give shoes to children in need throughout their childhood. …Provide Feedback and Help Us Improve
We rely on our incredible Giving Partners to provide feedback on shoes’ fit and durability, the giving process and the needs of the community. …

It would be hard to fault an organization that helps people and children get the things they need to survive and even thrive. But while Toms has done an amazing job of providing children with shoes, I wonder if it couldn’t do more to solve the underlying problem that inspired Mr. Mycoskie to create Toms in the first place.

Here’s my concern: Rather than solve the root cause of why children don’t have shoes, Toms has created a business model that actually needs poor children without shoes in order to sell its shoes. Those children are an essential part of the company’s marketing.

The root cause of poverty in many developing countries is a lack of access to fair-paying, sustainable employment. Imagine the positive impact Toms could have if it were to use every decision in its supply chain to address the causes of poverty. Before writing this post, I contacted Toms to see what the company had to say about the pros and cons of the buy-one, give-one business model.

Eventually, I was connected with the company’s chief giving officer, Sebastian Fries, who acknowledged that there were aspects of the Toms approach that could still be improved. When I asked Mr. Fries whether Toms might be perpetuating the poverty of the children who get free shoes, he responded that Toms is “not in the business of poverty alleviation.”

Interestingly, though, that does seem to be the business Toms is in when it comes to selling eyewear. The company’s eyewear contributes to the employment of nurses and doctors that in turn provide sight-giving support and surgeries so that people can become employable, create a sustainable living and get themselves out of poverty. What this contrast told me is that Toms is very good at public relations and marketing and recognizes that it could be doing more.

At Fashioning Change, we understand that every decision that goes into manufacturing a product — the materials, the factory, the packaging, the method of distribution — can produce social empowerment. That’s why we work with companies who are committed to doing things right every step of the way. Based on my conversations with Toms, it is clear to me that the company has a huge opportunity to share the lessons it has learned with the many Gen X and Gen Y entrepreneurs it has inspired.

In fact, I was told that Toms is now trying a program in Ethiopia in which it manufactures in one of the communities where it gives away shoes. The company has plans to do the same in Kenya and India. I asked what percentage of Toms shoes might be made in these factories, but I was told the number was not yet known. I also asked about plans to manufacture in the United States and was told that the United States did not have factories that could fill the company’s needs. I strongly disagree, but that is a topic for another post.

In any case, I think Toms may be evolving in the right direction. What started as philanthropy may now be moving toward what I think of as a real social enterprise — a business that creates systemic solutions to social issues through the use of business principles. One of the many wonderful things about Toms and many other “do good” companies is that we all share an intention to make the world a better place. And we’re all learning as we go.

What do you think? Is the buy-one, give-one model right for social entrepreneurs?

Adriana Herrera is chief executive of Fashioning Change. You can e-mail her at adrianah@fashioningchange.com, and you can follow her on Twitter at @Adriana_Herrera.

Twitter Hacks Force Companies to Confront Security on Social Media

Burger King’s Twitter account had just been hacked. The company’s logo had been replaced by a McDonald’s logo, and rogue announcements began to appear. One was that Burger King had been sold to a competitor; other posts were unprintable.

“Every time this happens, our sales phone lines light up,” said Ryan Holmes, the chief executive of HootSuite, which provides management and security tools for Twitter accounts, including the ability to prevent someone from gaining access to an account. “For big brands, this is a huge liability,” he said, referring to the potential for being hacked.

What happened to Burger King — and, a day later, to Jeep — is every brand manager’s nightmare. While many social media platforms began as a way for ordinary users to share vacation photos and status updates, they have now evolved into major advertising vehicles for brands, which can set up accounts free but have to pay for more sophisticated advertising products.

Burger King and Jeep, owned by Chrysler, are not alone. Other prominent accounts have fallen victim to hacking, including those for NBC News, USA Today, Donald J. Trump, the Westboro Baptist Church and even the “hacktivist” group Anonymous.

Those episodes raised questions about the security of social media passwords and the ease of gaining access to brand-name accounts. Logging on to Twitter is the same process for a company as for a consumer, requiring just a user name and one password.

Twitter, like Facebook, has steadily introduced a number of paid advertising options, raising the stakes for advertisers. Brands that pay to advertise on Twitter are assigned a sales representative to help them manage their accounts, but they are not given any more layers of security than those for a typical user.

Ian Schafer, the founder and chief executive of Deep Focus, a digital advertising company that also fielded a few phone calls from clients concerned about the Burger King attack, argued that Twitter bore some responsibility.

“I think Twitter needs to step up its game in providing better security,” Mr. Schafer said. In a memo to his staff about such attacks, he called on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest “and anyone else serious about having brands on their platform” to “invest time in better understanding how brands operate day to day.”

“It’s also time for these platforms to use their influence to shape security standards on the Web,” he wrote.

The risk for Twitter is in offending potential business partners as the company tries to build its advertising dollars, which make up the bulk of its revenue. In 2012, the company grew more than 100 percent, earning $288.3 million in global advertising revenue, according to eMarketer.

On Wednesday, it introduced a product that would allow advertisers to create and manage ads through third parties like HootSuite, Adobe and Salesforce.com. Advertising is estimated to account for more than 90 percent of the company’s revenue.

“This is not something we take lightly,” said Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, in an interview last month. (The company declined to comment on the Burger King hacking, saying it did not discuss specific accounts.) Mr. Prosser said Twitter had manual and automatic controls in place to identify malicious content and fake accounts, but acknowledged that the practice was more art than science.

Mr. Prosser said Twitter had taken an active role in combating the biggest sources of malicious content.

Last year, the company sued those responsible for five of the most-used spamming tools on the site. “With this suit, we’re going straight to the source,” it said in a statement. “We hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter.”

But security experts say, and the recent hacks of Burger King, Jeep and other brands have demonstrated, that Twitter could do more.

Drafting a Nonprofit Organization's Social Media Policy

Lawyers often find themselves representing nonprofit organizations or serving on nonprofit boards. When the issue of a social media policy arises, it is important to understand how social media has changed the communication landscape and the critical elements of a policy. It is not practicable, advisable or even legal in some cases to prohibit or unduly restrict the social media activities of employees. Guidelines for acceptable use, however, are crucial to mitigating the risks inherent in social media engagement. Here are a few FAQs regarding drafting a nonprofit?s social media policy.

New Service Helps Put a Dollar Value on Lawyers' Social Media Efforts

Do tweets and Facebook posts add up to billable hours?

Now that the Internet has displaced the Yellow Pages, many lawyers use social media to try to build their businesses, but few know whether the outreach is effective, legal consultants say.

"The reality is that the vast majority of lawyers just aren't keeping track," said Adrian Dayton, a consultant who helps law firms devise strategies for social media.

Avvo Ignite, a new service offered by the legal directory and forum Avvo, aims to change that by letting lawyers see how many inquiries originate from their presences on and offline -- and how many yield new clients.

Without monitoring what works and what doesn't, lawyers struggle to make the most of the new outlets available to them online, said Avvo executive Sachin Bhatia, who researched lawyers' social media habits before launching the service in November. Rather than sealing the deal, some lawyers spend too much time qualifying clients, he said. Many do not have a sound system for logging their prospects. And some do not get many leads from social media, he noted.

"We saw lawyers spending money to market in places when clients weren't even there," said Bhatia, who is vice president of products at Avvo Inc.

The Avvo Ignite Suite is supposed to help attorneys avoid that fate by documenting how each prospect found the firm and then facilitating communication and payment to bring clients on board. Another edition, Avvo Ignite Starter, creates basic websites and monthly activity reports and can be accessed on mobile devices. The Starter edition costs $199 per month with a $499 setup fee that can be waived with a yearlong contract.

Most who have signed up so far are lawyers at small to midsize firms and solo practitioners, Bhatia said. Social media can neutralize the reputational advantage enjoyed by Big Law, consultants note.

"It costs a fortune to launch an ad campaign in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but not on social media," law firm consultant Peter Zeughauser said. "Social media levels the playing field for smaller firms."

And yet some lawyers -- particularly those who did not grow up with the Internet -- remain skeptical about social media, Zeughauser said. Lewis Rosenblum, an Orange County, Calif.-based criminal defense attorney, once questioned how much he stood to gain through the channels. When he launched his own office four years ago, he relied on the contacts that he made in 29 years as a prosecutor to generate business. Answering questions on Avvo showed him that there were clients to be found online. He now has accounts on Google Plus and Yahoo as well.

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Social Media and Electronic Communication Statistics Lawyers Should Not Ignore

Like it or not, social media and electronic communications are here to stay and they are tools that cannot be overlooked in the legal marketing strategy by law firms and lawyers. Here are 10 statistics that should not be ignored.

Social Media Done Right: Many Firms Slow to the Plate

In a conversation among various legal marketers, we discussed whether or not any law firms are "hitting the proverbial social media ball out of the park."

Social Media and Electronic Communication Statistics Lawyers Should Not Ignore

Like it or not, social media and electronic communications are here to stay and they are tools that cannot be overlooked in the legal marketing strategy by law firms and lawyers. Here are 10 statistics that should not be ignored.

Social Media Done Right: Many Firms Slow to the Plate

In a conversation among various legal marketers, we discussed whether or not any law firms are "hitting the proverbial social media ball out of the park."

Social Media and Electronic Communication Statistics Lawyers Should Not Ignore

Like it or not, social media and electronic communications are here to stay and they are tools that cannot be overlooked in the legal marketing strategy by law firms and lawyers. Here are 10 statistics that should not be ignored.

Social Media Done Right: Many Firms Slow to the Plate

In a conversation among various legal marketers, we discussed whether or not any law firms are "hitting the proverbial social media ball out of the park."

The State of Social Security Disability On Sunday's American Law Journal

No doubt, there's fraud in the disability system — and it's a big issue when governments are running deficits. But really how much?

Social Media Done Right: Many Firms Slow to the Plate

In a conversation among various legal marketers, we discussed whether or not any law firms are "hitting the proverbial social media ball out of the park."