Law blogs far from dead in this world of microblogging : Blogging is on the rise

New media author and consultant, Louis Gray, reporting from Blog World ’09, blogs that even in this age of microblogging (Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed), blogs are far from dead.

Even as the microblogging space seems to be white hot these days, the world of longer-form blogging is still seeing impressive growth, with all major blogging platforms showing greater than 20 to 40 percent growth year over year, and record users, blogs and total readers, according to Compete.com data and a presentation from Google’s Rick Klau, product manager for Blogger, who spoke at Blog World Expo this afternoon. Rick reported that his platform, Blogger, which I use, is now seeing nearly 300,000 words per minute, scaling to 417 million words per month, from more than 10 million content creators. (emphasis added)

I couldn’t agree more with Klau (also a lawyer) that “Microblogs are complementary, not competitive, [they are] a driver of attention and engagement back to the blog.”

As Klau reports is the case with his blog, Twitter has become the highest traffic generator for my blog outside of search. As is my practice, Klau suggested “Rather than trying to fight against the flow on microblogging, to embrace it, and make sure your content is available to these disparate networks, while remembering to engage where it lands.”

Microblogging allows you to engage your audience on subjects on which you’ve wrote at length on your blog. Klau explained by pulling your blog content into Facebook or Twitter, you need not force a conversation (comments) back onto your blog. If you try to drag people from where they are comfortable communicating, you may lose the opportunity to engage your target audience.

Your blog will continue to be your brand and home base, just adapt to this world of microblogging, as Gray advises, so as to complement your blog.

It makes sense to participate wherever the content lands and wherever your readers are, without pushing to centralize the conversation on your site, but there is no substitute for long-form conversations and being passionate.

I’d suggest any law blogger begin to use microblogging. There’s too much to gain through engaging your audience and further enhancing your reputation as a leader.

Though there will be some non-blogging lawyers microblogging, I think they’ll find it minimally effective for client development without a place to build their brand through longer insight and commentary that a blog allows for.