Pinterest for Lawyers: Marketers Say Waste of Time and Copyright Issues Uncertain

By Gina F. Rubel
Special to the Legal

According to Law Technology News, “A new report from ALM Legal Intelligence finds that after years of showing only tepid interest in social media, the legal industry is beginning to recognize the significant-and multipronged-value that blogs and social networking sites can offer.” With each new social media site comes questions about strategic usage, ROI, ethics, copyright laws and so much more. After my last post, "Pinterest for Lawyers: Legal Marketing or Waste of Time?", I shared a link with my networks on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. There was a lot of conversation and commentary – especially with the Legal Marketing | Grow Your Practice LinkedIn Group as it relates to marketing strategy and copyright issues. In fact, an article came out on March 9, 2012, from Ragan’s PR Daily titled "Pinterest and legal issues: Read this before you pin anything". I suggest you read it.

As it relates to law firm marketing, Mark Zamora, an attorney in Georgia said, “I'm a strong lean to Pinterest being a waste of time for lawyers. At some point, you have diminishing returns, a limit to your day, and work to do.” He concluded by saying that adding Pinterest and Google+ would cause him to “wave the white flag of surrender.”

LeAnna Easterday of a Web marketing firm in Kentucky agreed with Zamora about the overwhelming laundry list of "must-dos," but added that “if you're hoping to rank well in the Google search engine, you may want to push Google+.” She said, “Google is emphasizing even low quality G+ content over other non-G+ content in search results.” She’s absolutely right.

Neither marketers Rebecca Palumbo (Chicago) or Tim Piazza (Indiana) would recommend Pinterest as a marketing tool for law firms. Piazza doesn’t believe Pinterest is effective for lawyers. However, he does share some thoughts about how Pinterest engagement could be successful for those who choose to jump on the bandwagon. He advises users to “create new content that has a higher potential for being shared by the mostly female audience on Pinterest.” Palumbo generally advises that lawyers should focus on blogging and “other social media opportunities that will give them a much stronger return on investment.”

One of the most compelling reasons why lawyers may want to avoid Pinterest for the time being is its terms of use, which say that Pinterest's members are solely responsible for what they pin and re-pin.

"You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services. Accordingly, you represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services or you have all rights, licenses, consents and releases that are necessary to grant to Cold Brew Labs the rights in such Member Content, as contemplated under these Terms; and (ii) neither the Member Content nor your posting, uploading, publication, submission or transmittal of the Member Content or Cold Brew Labs’ use of the Member Content (or any portion thereof) on, through or by means of the Site, Application and the Services will infringe, misappropriate or violate a third party’s patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, moral rights or other proprietary or intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy, or result in the violation of any applicable law or regulation."

According to Business Insider, users must have explicit permission from the owner to post everything. There are many blogs and other articles weighing in on how to manage copyright issues on Pinterest. PC World has an excellent article outlining the copyright issues but, as of yet, I don’t see a clear solution.

I agree with my legal marketing colleagues that for now, there is too much uncertainty about Pinterest for lawyers and law firms to add it to their marketing mix. But, as with all marketing strategy, this opinion can quickly change depending on the terms of use and other changes in the social media environment. If you would have asked me five years ago if law firms should engage in Facebook, I would have said an emphatic no. But Facebook has become an excellent marketing tool for SOME law firms (it’s not a one-size-fits-all tool) so stay tuned as the social media marketing environment continues to evolve.

Gina F. Rubel is the owner of Furia Rubel Communications Inc., a strategic marketing and public relations agency with a niche in legal marketing. A former trial attorney, she is the author of Everyday Public Relations for Lawyers. Gina and her agency have won many awards for legal communications, PR, media relations, website and graphic design, strategic planning, corporate philanthropy and leadership. She maintains a blog, is a contributor to National Law Review, The Legal Intelligencer Blog, AVVO Lawyernomics and The Huffington Post. You can find her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.

Comments

[Jayne Navarre]

Great links and insight about Pinterest, Gina. Thanks for pulling this together. I've not signed up for Pinterest because I'm not all that p-interested. Seems like more content overload, though I did find a recipe there that was good :-). Still, as you point out, professionals were reluctant to use Facebook, fearing it to be a time sink as well as a digitized record of your life so it could be that Pinterest will prove useful for some practices, who knows. I do know, however, that almost all social sites that host user generated content or comments have broad terms of use and copyright responsibilities that pass on to the user. Not sure how this is compares? Is it much different? I haven't looked too closely yet. Have you?

[Gina Rubel]

The copyright issues are steaming up, Jayne. In fact, there's an Above the Law post about them today that was just brought to my attention. I don't think the Pinterest policy is going to hold up for long and I do think they have to come up with a way to credit the original source. As with all social media, it will play itself out over time.

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