Trying to make sense of it all, law firms and legal marketers too often analogize social platforms to familiar, off-line venues (e.g. MySpace is a bar, Twitter a cocktail party, Facebook a barbeque, and LinkedIn an office meeting). Or they make generalizations like: Facebook is for social networking; LinkedIn is for professional networking.

At the end of the day, though, these semantic constructs are simply that – constructs. They do little to help lawyers successfully network online. Worse yet, these constructs are based on the false premise that the participants are one-dimensional demographics.

If they are to be analogized to anything offline, social networks are simply virtual buildings – with rooms and accoutrements by which people can share information and connect...