Solicitors Online Blog

Blogging – Part 1

As most people will know, a blog is a sort of online diary – the name is a shorted form of weblog. The blog owner will blog ‘posts’ which will appear in a list with the most recent at the top.

Blogs have been around for some time, and most people are familiar with them. There are hundreds of millions of them around, ranging from blogs with just a few posts which no-one wants to read by someone no-one has ever heard of, to highly influential blogs read by millions every day.

Most newspapers will have at least one blog, and some will have many, kept by their journalists on particular topics, for example The Times and The Guardian. Perhaps the most popular of these is the American Huffington Post blog. Many TV channels will also have blogs, for example Robert Peston of the BBC and Jon Snow of Channel Four.

Many businesses now have blogs. Some will be anodyne company speak which will be largely ignored, others will be interesting and worth reading. You may have a blog for your firm. Many solicitors firms do now. I have written the Landlord Law Blog for my business since February 2006.

Many of the best known blogs are anonymous. Most of you will have heard of the blog by Belle de Jour, a London call girl. This became so famous that it was published as a book, and there has been a TV show based on it starring Billie Piper. Another anonymous blog recently in the news was that written by Night Jack, a policeman who told it like it was, which was closed down after The Times discovered and published his identity (after a court case seeking to preserve his identity failed).

There are many anonymous legal blogs, for example Nearly Legal which covers housing law cases, Geeklawyer an intellectural property barrister, and Baby Barista who blogs for The Times. Law Blogs are sometimes called Blawgs, for obvious reasons.

Although there are many more lawyers blogging now, we have come fairly late to the blogging scene. When I started there were just a handful, mainly John Bloches excellent Family Lore blog, The Charon QC blog, and Geeklawyer. There are far more legal bloggers (as you would expect) in America. Two well known ones are Susan Cartier Liebel's Solo Practice blog (and since I first knew her, her consultancy for sole practitioners has turned into a University) and Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

But why write a blog? We will look at that next.

Social Media – Whats the point? (Part 2)

Contacts. Social media is an excellent way of keeping in touch with your contacts. “But” I hear you say, “I can do that via my address book. Why do I need to do this on the internet?”. Well you can of course, just rely on traditional methods. But social media goes a step further and provides a more positive way you can keep in touch.

Firstly, there is less danger that you will lose touch with people as a result of their moving away or changing firms or telephone numbers. Assuming that they keep their Facebook or Linkedin account (and most people will), you can always contact them via this. And they will be able to contact you.

Secondly, if they are active in social networking, you can also keep tabs on what they are doing. For example you might learn that they have set up a new company, or are launching a new product. If you are active in keeping your account up to date, all your contacts will know, for example, if you develop a new service, or write a book.

This may open up possibilities for business. For example if you have just written an article on business tenancies, and one of your contacts is considering renting new premises, this may prompt them to instruct you and your firm to act for them. Or you may find that the office widgets they have developed are just the thing your office manager has been looking for.

Thirdly, when you connect with a contact online via social medial, you also get to see who their contacts are. All sorts of things can develop from this. You may get back in touch with someone you knew years ago. You may learn of someone offering a service you require, or they may find out about you. The possibilities are endless.

Contacts and people and making connections are at the heart of social media. It is a new way of connecting with people and can be a very productive one. Its worth a try!

Social Media - Whats the point? (Part 1)

Lawyers are often disdainful about social media, and don’t want to bother with it. “Whats the point” they say, “I’m not interested in knowing what people had for breakfast (twitter) or having connections with people or ‘friends’ I have never met (facebook, Linkedin, Ecademy etc). 

Well if you have a web-site there is a very good reason. Search engines. There is not much point in having a web-site if no-one ever sees it. And most people find web-sites nowadays via the search engines, mainly Google. 

For example, web-site statistics for my Landlord-Law site show that about three quarters of visitors found it via Google. However, to get Google to recognise your site and put it on the first page of that search report (most people only ever look at the first two or three pages at most) you need to have lots of good quality links going to your site. This is because Google will place more weight on a link from a popular site (such as the BBC site) than a link from a small web-site no-one ever sees. 

Social media links are good therefore because they are high ranking links and if the search engine spiders and bots find your site linked from there, it will get higher placements on Google searches. 

Question answered! But see also Part 2 (to be continued ...)

Twitter

Twitter has been very much in the news recently, what with high profile twitterers such as Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. But is it something law firms should do? I have been ‘twittering’ for a few months now. In many ways it is a bit of a timewaster. However I have discovered the following ways it can be usefully used:

• to make announcements about new services being launched
• to keep clients up to date with other firm news
• to make announcements about new legal developments
• to make announcements when you post a new item on your blog (NB there are ways of doing this automatically)

With twitter, you follow other ‘twitterers’ and are followed by others in turn. Often they are the same people, but not necessarily. One way you can make yourself known to other people is to ‘follow’ them (you do this by visiting their profile and clicking the follow button). They then get an email telling them that you are now following them. The hope is that they will then be prompted to visit your profile, and follow you in turn. They will then read your tweets and may end up being a client! 

This could happen. However many people seem only concerned to get as many followers as possible. If you are following several thousand people you probably won’t have much time to read everything (or perhaps anything). Also if someone follows you, there is no guarantee that they will always follow you. It is very easy to ‘unfollow’ someone by re-visiting their profile and clicking the follow button again. 

Twitter is also a very ‘in the moment’ service. If you log in to your twitter account at 5.50 pm you are unlikely to scroll back as far as to read the tweets published in the morning (unless you only follow a handful of people in which case there may not be many tweets to read). Therefore if you make an announcement about, say, a new service, it will only be read by those who are online at or shortly after the time it is published. One way around this is to ‘tweet’ it again later. However you don’t want to do this too often or you will start to annoy people. 

Twitter can also be useful in keeping you informed. Virtually all the newspapers now have twitter accounts and you can subscribe to those which interest you. For example I follow a number of twitter accounts from the Times and the Guardian and a number of legal information services. You can also follow people who write blogs you admire, so you will be informed when they write a new post. 

However although my twitter experience has been mainly a positive one, Larry Bodine, a legal marketing blogger in the USA, believes that it is not an effective marketing tool for law firms. He points out that it generates a lot of leads but little sales, can get lawyers and firms in a lot of trouble in the event of litigation, and is a distraction to getting real marketing work done. He goes on to say: 

“After months of using Twitter, I've learned that it is a shouting post for relentless self-promoters, a dumping ground for press releases and advertising, an ego-driven competition to amass followers, and a target for computer-automated Tweets.  It's always been a good place to learn what sandwich someone had for lunch and when someone changed a baby's diapers.  But Twitter is supposed to be "all about the conversation," and I see few conversations that lead to new business.” 

I have to say that there is a lot of truth in this, and personally cannot put my hand on my heart (at the time of writing this) and point to any new client who has specifically come to me via twitter (although a number of existing clients have joined twitter just so they can follow my tweets). 

Although I accept that there is a lot of truth in what Larry Bodine says, I still think that twitter is worth persevering with. However, it is for each firm to make their own decision.