We are a society of ‘instant gratification’ – we want it now, and we want it perfect. That’s a great philosophy if you’re ordering a hamburger. Not a great model for building a website.

  As summer creeps in, kids all over the country are strapping on shin guards, helmets, and cleats in anticipation joining a sports team. As professionals, we too are looking for teams (organizations) to join.

Our ‘teams’ are often found by networking online.　 However, to be truly successful, you need to build a foundation that integrates the online with the offline. Not only can social media tools help you build your social capital (connections and networks) to accelerate your business relationships, it’s also a great tool to explore organizations to join. Our tips below are for both online and offline.

Call us the "Super Sleuths of the Web".

We recently reviewed over 150 accounting and law firm websites to find out what separates a good site from a GREAT site. Frankly, we had a hard time identifying firm websites that knocked our socks off, especially with smaller firms which obviously have fewer resources.

 As a kid, I used to trudge over to the local community center to play bingo on a Saturday afternoon (ok, Iowa was really boring in the dead of winter). 

Sitting on rock hard metal chairs, I would lay out six or seven bingo cards in front of me, grasping my bottle of highlighter ink with the mushy sponge top.  N9H4DRY5HMS9

I had the opportunity to visit the Newseum (www.Newseum.com), in Washington, DC, a 250,000-square-foot museum of news that offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits. As a self-professed ‘news junkie’, I spent hours wandering through exhibits, learning how the business of gathering news has moved pen and paper to online blogs and live video feeds. We live in a society of “instant news” – a story that used to take days to write now takes just a few hours. And as newsrooms shrink, reporters are covering multiple assignments, often struggling to make a deadline.

Way to go Congress! From WebCPA.........The devastating earthquake in Haiti last week is spurring relief efforts from countries around the world, but the U.S. is playing a key role in providing both help and security, along with much-needed funds. U.S. taxpayers have been stepping forward to provide money to charities like the American Red Cross and Unicef, raising tens of millions of dollars through text messages alone. Now Congress is considering legislation that would allow U.S.

Nearly half of lawyers are tapping social media sites for marketing, networking, educating and investigating people in casework, compared to 15% in 2008 according to the American  Bar Association.  Not so fast, says the Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee which decided in December that lawyers and judges can not 'friend' each other on social media sites.  So what are the other considerations lawyers should think about before using social media?  Check out the article from the Jacksonville Business Times

Far be it for us to draw a relationship between a clogged sink drain and a stopped up sales pipeline, but humor us for a minute.