CubeSocial, a new service that helps law firms and other professionals manage their social media relationships has been chosen as a Top 20 Start-up of 2011 by entrepreneur magazine Startups.
Linda Cheung, CubeSocial CEO commented “At its heart all business is about relationships. CubeSocial allows professionals to cut through the noise of social media in order to identify new prospects and build profitable business relationships. CubeSocial takes the best of traditional contact management tools and combines that with social feeds from Twitter and LinkedIn to provide a platform where fee earners and marketing staff can work together engage with prospects and clients.
“At a time when the English Law Society** has issued its first guidance on social media usage by law firms it’s particularly timely that we have received this award. When we created CubeSocial, we wanted to address the compliance needs of law firms around social media. CubeSocial automatically logs social media conversations between your team and their contacts for complete accountability, providing a full historical archive of your organisation’s social media interactions.”
• CubeSocial was founded by former Morgan Stanley executive director Linda Cheung and former Microsoft lead program manager Mark Bower to capitalize on the growing Social CRM market that Gartner predicts will grow to US$1billion in 2012. Sign up for a free account at http://cubesocial.com
** And here’s that Law Society guidance… The full practice note (dated 20 December 2011) is published here http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/productsandservices/practicenotes/socialmedia/5049.article – The general messaging is that:
Solicitors should be cautious and think carefully before adding a client on Facebook.
Befriending clients on the social networking site merges professional and personal lives, and could risk a breach of client confidentiality.
While online social networking provides opportunities for the legal profession, both commercially and in terms of professional networking, there is just cause for concern.
The nature of social networking, including the ability for status updates and posting of opinions, can present challenges to the core duties of solicitors (eg personal integrity and confidentiality) but that if steps are taken to mitigate the risks then online social networking can be advantageous to the legal profession.
There are also other networking sites that are specifically geared towards professional use, such as LinkedIn, and the Law Society sees no issue with solicitors adding clients or colleagues as contacts on these sites