Understandably, there are many lawyers not yet willing to invest time messing around with Social Media tools like Twitter. When we do our CLE program on Social Media for Lawyers a core theme is that lawyers should pay attention to these things because their clients use them (often to get into trouble), and opponents try to discover them in litigation. If you don’t know anything about them it makes it harder to do your job, unless you work in an area of law that is completely insulated from social media.
For those of you that are willing to try some of these tools, we suggest Twitter as the most valuable tool for rapid information gathering. And for those of you just starting out, here is an excellent article entitled A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter. It explains what those weird symbols are (e.g. RT, DM, and hashtag or #something), and it even suggests some good software tools to use to gather in twitter posts (“tweets”).