My pals Kevin O’Keefe and Larry Bodine will be celebrating my birthday on February 17 with a blogging webinar directed to lawyers and law firms. Kevin and Larry are the real deal and this webinar will be filled with great info. Highly recommended.
In Larry’s blurb about the webinar, he notes the growing interest of large firms in the blogging phenomenon. It’s very easy for law firms, big or small, to mishandle blogs and blogging. That’s why it’s important to get your information from experts like Kevin and Larry who can speak about integrating blogging into a complete marketing effort.
However, I think that blogging is fraught with danger for most law firms, especially large law firms.
A few of my notes on this topic:
If you already have a history of twice-a-year “quarterly” newsletters, a similar effort in blogging will embarrasss your firm greatly, publicly and perhaps expensively.
Ask the lawyer bloggers who have been blogging for a couple of years (I’m coming up on the end of my second full year, which makes me something of an old-timer among lawyer bloggers) how difficult it is to sustain a blog for a significant period of time. Law firm blogs are notorious for starting out with great fanfare and disappearing.
Blog planning is much, much easier than blog execution.
For large law firms especially, blogging ultimately is a side issue – the real focus should be on RSS feeds. Whenever I talk with long-time lawyer bloggers, the conversations are always about RSS feeds, not blogging itself. If the previous two sentences do not mean anything to you, you simply are not ready to be launching a blog for legal marketing or any other purposes.
Blogging can be a marketing tool, but because blogging is designed for something other than marketing yourself, it will be a difficult tool to master, especially if your focus is solely on marketing and you feel that you “need to be blogging.”
Please keep in mind that there’s a lot to learn in the blogosphere, before and after you enter it. I learn something new and important on a regular basis. I recommend Kevin and Larry’s webinar as a great starting point for one part of the new landscape.