8 reasons LinkedIn publishing is not going to kill law blogs

I remember having a “mini heart attack” in 2006 when Google migrated the Blogger blog publishing service it had acquired onto Google’s servers and incorporated Blogger into Google’s main menu.

How were independent law blogs going to survive? Blogger blogs would appear higher in search. Blogger blogs would get more traffic. Blogger blogs were going to have free template designs from Dan Cederholm, one of the best Web standards designers and developers in the country.

Law blogs not only survived, but thrived, post Blogger and countless claims since that blogging was dead.

The latest scuttlebutt has it that LinkedIn publising is going to kill law blogs. Rather than being limited by the copy allowed in the LinkedIn status update, LinkedIn publishing allows long form publishing by users.

From Legal Business Development Consultant and Coach, Amy Knapp (@knappmarketing):

Publishing a very timely and relevant piece of legal content on LinkedIn’s publishing platform can get you more qualified business eyeballs than you dreamed possible, and more comments than you’ve ever seen on your blog in a month of Sundays.

With the entrance of LinkedIn to the content aggregation world, your blog might start to look like a ghost town. Publishing that blog post on LinkedIn generates views, shares and likes that have the power to outstrip what your blog delivers. This is where the people are, and they no longer have to click through on a shortened link – the article is right there on LinkedIn for them to review. If your goal is to have your content read by relevant audiences (and it has to be), then you must master publishing on LinkedIn, JDSupra, National Law Review and possibly Mondaq and Lexology. And by doing so, you might kill your own blog. Its either that or let that your content die of loneliness.

Strange commentary when Knapp, in co-authoring WestLaw’s LinkedIn and Blogs For Lawyers two years ago, wrote:

Some argue that blogs in particular are dead. They claim we are better off asking questions on Quora, discussing issues on the new Google+, and sharing via Twitter and LinkedIn groups. This past year has seen an explosion in blogging among the AmLaw 100.

……

Blogs are a home base for all your social media efforts. Twitter and LinkedIn are both instaneous, and old discussions are soon forgotten. Great content can live forever on your site and bring you continuous traffic from in the form of referrals from other sites.

Knapp is an experienced and widely respected marketing professional, but she’s off in her assessment of this one.

Here’s eight reasons LinkedIn publishing is not going to kill law blogs

1. Law firms need to own and control where their blog posts are archived and indexed for Google. Lawyers collectively at one firm can spend thousands of hours blogging in a year. What if LinkedIn turns this feature off and you lose your posts? It’s happened.
2. Law blogs are a publication. You don’t publish your book, magazine, or blog on someone else’s branded platform.
3. LexBlog Network members find their blogs and publications used for research and insight by government officials, business leaders, in-house counsel, and consumer groups. Don’t expect those folks to browse LinkedIn.
4. Strategic blogging is difficult or impossible on LinkedIn. How do you offer in-house counsel or a government official the opportunity to do a guest post at LinkedIn? How do reference an executive or company in a post knowing they will appreciate the shoutout by you and your firm? How do you engage national and local reporters for the mainstream and trade media? How do you engage influential bloggers?
5. Law blogs can get indexed on Google News. LinkedIn publishing cannot. Google News puts a blog on equal footing with traditional media and feeds your posts to individuals and software listening tools set up to monitor key words and phrases
6. Blogs include Google authorship, LinkedIn publishing does not. Google authorship is critical for lawyers to grow their influence as measured by Google. Such influence will increasingly effect how lawyers and their content are discovered online.
7. Blogs come in all shapes and sizes. Most online publications that may have been called blogs years ago no longer go by this label. Look at GigaOm, Mashable, and SB Nation. Look at the magazine and network sites published by law firms. We’ll continue to see such sites blossom.
8. LinkedIn does not see LinkedIn publishing as replacing blogs, it recognizes the difference. John Mayhall, senior sales manager for LinkedIn, when asked, told the audience at the BDI Social Media Summit last week exactly that.

Don’t get me wrong, LinkedIn publishing has it’s value in networking through the net. I have published a post or two over there which I did not post to my blog.

I got some comments, but not near as many as when I share my own blog posts in LinkedIn’s status update. Knapp did not draw significant traffic nor any comments in her post published on LinkedIn. I am aware of significant traffic and engagement in the case of posts by some folks in the legal profession.

I’d recommend experimenting with the LinkedIn publishing platform, especially if you do not blog. We’re already seeing LexBlog Network lawyers and firms doing so.

But do not buy into the fallacy that because Linked has a lot of relevant eyeballs law blogs are going to die.

Blogging and blogs represent something much more valuable than content marketing and traffic. Blogging lawyers and law firms know it.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Christie Yunhwa