Legal marketing expert Larry Bodine answered that question with a resounding yes in a recent presentation to the Chicago chapter of the Legal Marketing Association: “Blogs can be a great tool for establishing a law firm and especially for building awareness of a specific practice group or individual lawyer.”
One success story Larry cited was a patent law blog by McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP that gets 30,000 visitors per week. Another was “In Search of Perfect Client Service,” which is ranked #2 on the list of “Most Popular Blawgs All-Time.” (A “blawg” is a blog about the law.) Patrick Lamb, the attorney who writes the blog about perfect client service, says it’s “the best marketing tool he’s used in his 20 years of law practice.”
As Larry summed up the implications: “There are 1,131 law firms with blogs in the US, according to Blawg.org. Those that don't have them by 2006 will get left behind in the dust.”
But before you sign up to start your own blog at Typepad or Blogger or WordPress, you should know that some experts disagree. I first read about Larry’s talk on LMA Listserv, a message board for members of the Legal Marketing Association. Within two days of the original item, 25 spirited responses appeared – some in favor of blogs, some against, and some with mixed opinions.
One issue raised by several LMA experts is something I talked about in my presentation on “Using Blogs in Marketing” at the recent ISA Sales and Marketing Conference: blogging can take a lot of time. So it must be stacked up against all the other marketing tasks you could be working on, to see whether you agree with me that it’s a priority.
When I gave my ISA talk, many people were more interested in the non-marketing uses of the technology. For example, Randall Murphy, the president of Acclivus, had a number of ideas about how to use private password protected group blogs to facilitate communications between the dozens of sales trainers who are constantly on the road teaching his courses.
I had a similar conversation a few weeks later with Bill Ives, author of the blog Portals and KM (Knowledge Management), which tracks the practical applications of blogs, wikis, and other technologies. Bill’s book Business Blogs: A Practical Guide (written with Amanda Watlington) includes 5 chapters of case studies illustrating a wide variety of uses.
One of Bill’s favorite cases was a blog set up for 16 top doctors at a California hospital, when they needed to comment on plans and proposals for redesigning its campus. In the old days, say a few months earlier, they probably would have sent each other lots of mass emails and attachments. Blog technology provided a more efficient way to communicate. Instead of dozens of emails with confusing trails and outdated attachments, all the facts and comments on each topic were neatly organized in a single location.
They did not even call it a blog, since many people associate that word with teenagers, web diaries and angst. Instead, they used terms like “knowledge managament system” and “transparent searchable archive.”
The biggest benefit became obvious at the end of the project when they had to write a final report. They now had a searchable archive of their entire work process, including all discussions and related documents. This increased the comprehensiveness and quality of the final report, and reduced the time it took to write it.
Blog search engine Technorati now tracks 22.3 million blogs with 1.7 billion links. According to their most recent report on “The State of the Blogosphere,” someone somewhere starts a new blog every second, and the total number of blogs is doubling every 5 months.
So you can be sure that this technology is in your future. You may or may not use a blog for marketing, and you may or may not call it a blog, but you will use the technology.
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