More blog marketing ignorance

RSS becoming a significant new marketing tool while blogs are a passing fad? C’mon Ross, you’re a legal marketing expert who I and other people in the industry have a lot of respect for.

I’m reading an article in this month’s American Bar Association’s Law Practice Management Magazine including quotes from Ross Fishman, who runs an excellent marketing consultancy. First he gets me pumped by endorsing blogs, in that blogs deliver RSS:

There’s a chance that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will turn into a significant new marketing vehicle because it’s wrapped into something genuinely useful—information that keeps executives informed in real-time. I particularly think RSS could turn into a powerful and cost-effective advertising vehicle.

Then I get the body blow that Ross thinks blogs are among technology products that may come and go.

Blogs? For the early adopters, small firms with niche practices or individual lawyers in larger firms with a specialty, a blog can be a remarkably powerful tool. However, doing one effectively requires an enormous time commitment, and that’s difficult for most lawyers. When it’s hard to get many lawyers to write one 500-word article every five years, it’s unrealistic to expect many to write twice a week or more and to sustain the needed pace over time. Unless they happen to be frustrated novelists.

Ross you’re among the best in legal marketing. But you don’t publish a blog. I got a call you on blogs being a passing fad.

• Lawyers and other professionals are publishing effective blogs, as measured by marketing success, without spending an enormous amount of time.
• Large firm practice groups publishing blogs are in fact saving time compared to other marketing mediums.
• Blog publishing takes much, much less time than writing articles. No comparison.
• Blogs are by far and away the easiest means of using RSS.
• The percentage of sites using RSS that are not blogs is a miniscule
• Dave Winer, who created RSS, could be considered the grandfather of blogging.
• Blog content coming via RSS allows law firm prospects – execs, in-house counsel or consumers to read more from who they want in less time.
• Lawyers sharing snippets of information in an area of speciality via a blog become intelligence agents for such prospects.
• Microsoft application development teams are now charged with making the use of blogs and RSS as easy to use as possible for the public. The upcoming release of Vista will do that.
• 21% of senior business executives already read at least one business blog a week.

Blogs are not going anywhere except up. Two reasons. Ease of publishing. Ease in accessing content via RSS.