21st Century Online Tools for Growing your Dispute Resolution Practice

21st Century Online Tools for Growing your Dispute Resolution Practice

Moderated by Jeff Bean

 

As dispute resolution professionals we help our clients to form, restructure, change or even sever their relationships. We can use the same skills we use to help our clients manage their relationships to build our own practices. With social network environments offering us to place our own content and establish our web-presence, we have new tools to leverage our relationship-building skills. We can use them to establish our web-presence, develop our personal reputation and grow our professional brand. We can use these online environments to form the authentic relationships that grow our practices.

 

In this discussion we will identify the options for building a web-presence that you can use to develop your business. We will share strategies for creating the interactions that result in real relationships, referrals and clients. 

 

Here are some of the questions we'll explore:

  • What is my web-presence? What is my online reputation?
  • What are the online tools available for dispute resolution professionals?
  • How do we find and choose the tools that we will have the capacity to use and that work for us?
  • What strategies are there for using them that are effective?
  • How can we manage our time among all the choices?
  • How do we stay on top of the constantly changing field of online opportunities?
  • How do we use these technologies to create authentic human interaction?

 

Moderator Bio:

Jeff Bean, Facilitator/Mediator. For 30 years Jeff's been using leading-edge technologies in his dispute resolution work, first in the practice of law and now in his facilitation/mediation practice. Jeff has launched and managed the online assets for several businesses and professional organizations. With others at eDeliberation.com he partners with dispute resolution and conflict management professionals to deploy technological tools in consensus-building work. In 2012 he received Washington Mediation Association's Technology Integration Award. Jeff created and hosts www.BeyondtheCourthouse.net to bring people with disputes together with professionals in a social network integrated with a flexible ODR platform.

______________________________________________

Return to Cyberweek 2012 Homepage

Views: 802

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Hi Jeff!!! we posted you discussion in spanish cyberweek chapter all the best Alberto

Herramientas del Siglo 21 en línea para el crecimiento en su Práctica de Resolución de Conflictos

De la Cyberweek en ingles, traducido por Alex Daelli
Como profesionales de la resolución de conflictos, ayudamos a nuestros clientes para crear, reestructurar, modificar o incluso servir a  sus relaciones. Podemos usar las mismas habilidades que utilizamos para  ayudar a nuestros clientes  para construir nuestras propias bases prácticas.Con entornos llenos de redes sociales que nos ofrecen esablecer  nuestros propios contenidos y nuestra presencia en la web, tenemos nuevas herramientas para aprovechar nuestras habilidades para construir esas relaciones. Podemos usarlos para establecer nuestra presencia en la web, desarrollar nuestra reputación personal y hacer crecer nuestra marca profesional. Podemos utilizar estos entornos en línea para formar las relaciones auténticas que harán crecer nuestras prácticas.
En esta discusión vamos a identificar opciones para la construcción de una presencia en la web que se podrá  utilizar para desarrollar su negocio. Vamos a compartir estrategias para la creación de las interacciones que resultan en relaciones reales, referencias y clientes
Estas son algunas de las preguntas que vamos a explorar:

     ¿Cuál es mi presencia en la web? ¿Cuál es mi reputación online?
     ¿Cuáles son las herramientas disponibles en línea para los profesionales en resolución de controversias?
     ¿Cómo encontrar y elegir las herramientas que vamos a tener con la  capacidad de usar y trabajar para nosotros?
     ¿Qué estrategias existen para su uso que son eficaces?
     ¿Cómo podemos manejar  nuestro tiempo entre todas las opciones?
     ¿Cómo podemos permanecer en la cima del campo siempre cambiante,  de oportunidades en línea?
     ¿Cómo podemos utilizar estas tecnologías para crear una interacción humana auténtica?

 

 

¡gracias

Let's rephrase the last question this way:

How do you engage with prospective clients online?

We also have an engagement issue in mediation. One person (the initiating party) comes to us and would like to mediate with us. Often the other person (the responding party) may be reticent to engage, or even to respond.

Are the same tools we use to engage there helpful to us here? What do we do to provide a responding party the opportunity to engage? What can we do online to provide an opportunity for our prospective clients engage with us online?

This is a great topic to discuss. As a business student, a great deal of my studies focus on comparing social and traditional media. An important dynamic to investigate is how professionals can utilize different social media tools to best meet their business needs. One of the nice benefits of social media involves the ability to reach both large and niche audiences. With this, credibility is very important as professionals attempt to spread awareness of their firm as well as establish influence with continuous quality in their messages. For example, Facebook is a strong way to expose people to a "brand," allow professionals to seek comments and feedback from customers or users, and serve as a way for engaging people and answering questions. On the other hand, Twitter works as a very successful way to track customer communication through trends or other monitoring programs. Furthermore, YouTube can be a powerful way to allow dispute resolution professionals to explain complex ideas or emotions that text cannot. Different social networks offer varying strengths; it's up to each business to decide how their individual needs can best be met. 

Adam

Jeff Bean said: 

What are the online tools available for dispute resolution professionals?

Before we get to the issue raised for me in Larry's comment - about how we spend our time - and before getting further into Jason's ideas of how we use online tools, let's identify some of the tools we use. Do you use any of these? Any others?

  • Website/blog
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Directories: Avvo (for lawyers); mediate.com

I took the opportunity (finally!) to watch the archive of Jason Dykstra's webinar Using the Internet to Build Your Practice. In it he posits the same question posed here. I could rephrase it this way: 

What are the skills we use in dispute resolution that we can use to connect with prospective clients online?

Jason offered some suggested answers and riffing on that added a few of my own:

  • Listening, really listening, actively
  • Restating: so others can hear; sharing information
  • Reflecting: observation from a more objective and less-interested viewpoint
  • Reframing: providing a new angle on an old issue; a useful insight from a different perspective
  • Curious questions
  • Withholding judgment: letting others have their say; allowing and encouraging differing opinions and ideas
  • Focus on interests: yours, mine, theirs; what's important to you?
  • Managing the dynamic: what's the interaction? Is it going where the participants want it to go? How can you help them get there?
  • Giving voice to the isolates: bringing out the quieter voice; the less obvious perspective

How do these skills translate to interacting with people online who may (or may not) choose at some point to retain you for your dispute resolution services?

I'll like to put a wrap on this discussion for today - but not forever - this discussion will stay open and I'll stay involved with it.

I'd like to encourage us to continue to think about our well-developed conflict management and dispute resolution skills and using those skills as we deploy online tools to grow our practices. We have significant skills in developing relationships which should serve us well as we look to establish relationships with people who may become clients and referrers.

I don't know all about how it will be and how we will do it, yet I remain optimistic that the online technologies available to us can be used in service of authentic human interaction and relationship.

The core of connecting, online or in-person, is authenticity: of being real and having integrity in our communication. 

Here's an example of not being authentic, which I mention mainly because I just love this pic:

Don't robo-post. We can tell. And it's creepy.

photo credit: Ric e Ette via photopin cc

Thanks for moderating this discussion Jeff, some great insights shared by people! And that pic is awesome! 

Jason

Jeff Bean said:

I'll like to put a wrap on this discussion for today - but not forever - this discussion will stay open and I'll stay involved with it.

I'd like to encourage us to continue to think about our well-developed conflict management and dispute resolution skills and using those skills as we deploy online tools to grow our practices. We have significant skills in developing relationships which should serve us well as we look to establish relationships with people who may become clients and referrers.

I don't know all about how it will be and how we will do it, yet I remain optimistic that the online technologies available to us can be used in service of authentic human interaction and relationship.

The core of connecting, online or in-person, is authenticity: of being real and having integrity in our communication. 

Here's an example of not being authentic, which I mention mainly because I just love this pic:

Don't robo-post. We can tell. And it's creepy.

photo credit: Ric e Ette via photopin cc

RSS

@ADRHub Tweets

ADRHub is supported and maintained by the Negotiation & Conflict Resolution Program at Creighton University

Members

© 2024   Created by ADRhub.com - Creighton NCR.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service