Manage Your Online Presence

Create a personal brand

• Create your personal brand and professional persona online.

• Create a presence in social media that is strictly professional.  Join LinkedIn if you haven’t yet or revamp your profile as a future attorney.  Create a twitter account, blog or other platform dedicated to convey the appropriate message about your professional interests and aspirations.

Create professional content

• Create content that contributes to your designed professional image and avoids the pitfalls for sharing your personal life online.  

• Take this chance to showcase your academic and professional interests.  Show prospective employers that you have a valuable contribution to make in your desired field.

• Create your own digital dossier rather than allow everything else, like Facebook, Twitter, and ancient online postings, to represent you and and your work.  An e-portfolio done well will outrank all the other stuff in the google rankings

• Get started by featuring your current resume, your best academic work and a statement about your professional aspirations.

• You don’t have to be a web design pro to create an e-portfolio.  Try free options at Google Sites, or Wix.com, or Squarespace.com go simple with a personal landing page from Flavors.me

Need help?  Come see us!  Andy Briggs at briggsja@wlu.edu or Stephanie Miller at millersc@wlu.edu

Make your profile stand out.

Add a professional photo, personalize your vanity URL, choose your headline carefully.  

Pro Tip: Check out profiles of lawyers you admire

Connect and Engage

When connecting, personalize the invitation instead of using the default, join groups, and post interesting items related to your practice area.  

Pro Tip:  if you have a professional Twitter account link it to your LinkedIn profile.

• Susan Adams, 6 Steps for Managing Your Online Reputation, Forbes (Mar. 14, 2013) http://onforb.es/1i0oyQe

• David Brooks, Should Graduate Students Create E-Portfolios?, The Chronicle of Higher Education (Nov. 22, 2011) http://bit.ly/TPAVE1

• Marina Sarmiento Feehan, LinkedIn:  Facebook for Lawyers, NALP, https://www.nalp.org/uploads/LinkedinEguide.pdf

• Robin Kear, Digital Dossier:  Manage Your Online Presence and Use Web Tools Effectively, pitt.libguides.com,  http://pitt.libguides.com/students

• Simon Chester & Daniel del Gobbo, Social Media Networking for Lawyers:  A Practical Guide to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Blogging,  38 Law Practice Magazine, https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Social-Media-Networking-for-Lawyers-ABA.pdf

• Piyali Syam, Online Reputation Management for Lawyers, @WashULaw Blog (Nov. 13, 2013), http://bit.ly/1i0qJmY