Finishing off this trilogy of posts (previous entries here and here), there is another important factor to consider when you tell your secretary to sit down and take screenshots of an individual’s social media profiles. That factor, is volume.
By it’s very nature, social media is constantly changing. For an individual who uses social platforms infrequently, it is to be expected that a significant number of changes will occur in their profile over the course of a matter, most of which will likely run into several months if not years. For an avid social media user, there are likely to be many updates to their online presence per day, spread across multiple platforms (eg Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Ello). Trying to keep up with the screenshots of the first individual would be difficult enough in a busy law firm; for the second individual, forget it. Relevant and potentially persuasive material may scroll into and out of that person’s presence before your secretary has a chance to collect it.
The answer? Correctly configured and maintained programmatic collection. What’s that you say? Here’s the breakdown, but we’ll go in reverse.
- Programmatic collection – using software tools to automate the data collection process in a scheduled, systematic, verifiable and rigorous fashion. In other words, let computers do what they are good at: repeating the same thing over and over again.
- Correctly maintained – the software tools used in this area are not mature products that come in a box on a shelf at Officeworks. These tools, like the social media platforms that they interface with, are constantly and rapidly evolving, and require a dedicated team ofübersmart people to keep them working at their peak efficiency.
- Correctly configured – in the same way as the point above, these software tools are not iPhone apps that install when you click one button in the App Store. They take many hours to install and fine tune to achieve peak performance.
So why go to all the bother if the tools take all that time and money to get right? Because when they work, they provide many multiples of efficiency over what ever the best human operators can do.
To illustrate that, we were engaged recently on an urgent matter in which the negotiation team had been handed a file three days before a binding mediation. In the space of 24 hours we had collected over 130,000 items from social media, filtered that data set to the most relevant items and provided the negotiating team with evidence that materially affected the outcome of the mediation. You just couldn’t achieve that outcome no matter how many staff you had working on the project. That and you’d likely be looking for a new secretary if you tried.
