My article Twitter as a source of e-discovery information drew a comment from Nick Wade, Group Product Manager for Symantec’s Enterprise Vault – Discovery. I had focused on Twitter as merely a source of information. Nick draws attention to its value for keeping in touch with customers, and points to other resources. His comment is as follows:

Great article on the expanding role of social media in our world of Discovery news, Twitter being one of those prime avenues of faster information dissemination. I was also interested as I worked at Mallesons quite some time ago, and I still enjoy seeing my old colleagues’ names in the stream. 🙂

I also think an excellent example of Twitter’s use is to find like-minded people and have a new ability to engage in short conversations with them. Shel Israel (http://twitter.com/shelisrael) has written a fine book about this and I’m reading it now; Twitterville. I heartily recommend it, as it’s a strong follow-up to his first book co-written with Robert Scoble (Naked Conversations). And here’s one final use; a lot of companies use it to find new avenues with which to talk to their customers. We do it at Symantec and it has been very useful not only to point people at articles, releases, technotes, webcasts and so forth, but to help with problems and resolve questions – all more quickly than we could before. Companies should be in Twitterville (as Shel says).

One quick thing – I’d certainly find it useful if you provided a link to Michelle’s twitter (in this instance) [quite right – have done so].

It will be a while, I suspect, before I get to read the books which Nick recommends (will we still have Twitter by the time I have retired or will we have moved on to something yet more immediate?). And before you lawyers dismiss this use of social media as something for students, techies and lonely obsessives, you may care to recall my report of what Richard Susskind said at ILTA (Collaborating to avoid the end of lawyers ) about in-house lawyers engaging in information exchange over their lawyers’ heads, and the implications which this has for the lawyers’ traditional advisory role. These people no longer need to wait to be introduced, or to set up distant meetings via their PAs — they can start talking to each other today. Imagine  thousands of parallel conversations in the pub, club or hair-dresser – “Your lawyers still do that, do they? How interesting”. You would rather be part of it, would you not?

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