Fabulous Finds for February

Here are three resources that have made my life easier this month.  I hope at least one will be helpful for you.

1. Last week, I needed to schedule a quick teleconference with five ABA contacts to plan a program.  Just imagining the back-and-forth emails that could generate made my head hurt.  So I used a simple, intuitive, free service called Doodle.com that allowed me to set up several options and send a link to each participant so they could mark their availability.  Within four hours, we had a time set — and best of all, I’d sent only one email and received none in response.  Win!  Doodle.com
2. Planning to start an email newsletter or to send client alerts?  Check out this webinar that reveals the Science of Email Marketing.  You’ll pick up some good tips.  And be sure to read this post if you’re considering sending client alerts — because I agree that way too many lawyers send useless “me too” case analyses that don’t advance business development (but do create the illusion of useful bizdev activity, which is the worse sin).
3. I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter (and the ‘net in general), and part of the “hate” side comes from the fact that I can wreck an entire day by checking out all the sites and resources that get tweeted.  I tried bookmarking pages, but that got unwieldy pretty quickly.  And then I found Pocket, which allows you to mark a page for later reading, even offline.  All it takes is a click (once you’ve installed the application into your browser), and you’re good to go.  You can read your saves pages offline, and there are apps for the iPhone, iPad, Droid, Blackberry — you get the idea.