Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

Bill Pollak, the CEO of American Lawyer Media (ALM), the leading provider of current legal news through national and regional publications, has an interesting piece this week in BtoB Media Business on why media leaders need to enter the social media waters.

Pollak explains he's not blogging, Tweeting, and using Facebook because he has nothing do. He often finds "social media to be tedious and frustrating." Pollak actively participates in social media because he's "convinced that these tools will be the future of b-to-b media."

Following Bill as a media company leader, one thing I've learned is that you lead by example. And it's no different with social media per Bill.

...[I]f people like me don't roll up our sleeves and begin to learn firsthand about the opportunities and challenges inherent in social media, our team members won't feel like they should experiment and begin using them.

Pollak offers media company executives who are sitting on the social media sidelines four thoughts to get started. The same thoughts apply to leaders throughout our legal profession, whether a managing partner, CMO, or bar association executive.

• Listen: Whether the market you serve revolves around torts or textiles, right now people are talking about your industry. Maybe in the old days (i.e., six years ago), those conversations would have occurred in the pages of your magazine or at your market-leading conference. Not anymore. Now those discussions occur 24/7/365 among bloggers you've never heard of and on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You should be listening to those discussions for new ideas, stories that your organization should be covering and for emerging experts who could become speakers at your events or guest contributors in your publications. Just because the writing isn't as polished as you would expect from your reporters and the thoughts sometimes come at you in 140 character bites, it doesn't mean those who blog or tweet don't have something important to teach you. Listen and learn from them.
• Monitor: Sorry to tell you this, but some of those discussions are about you--or about your company, your products and your services. You should be particularly attentive to those nuggets. If the buzz is positive, great. But when people post negative comments about your business, you have a chance to fix the problem quickly, or at least correct the record before those negatives get picked up by others and ricochet around the blogosphere. And I wouldn't dream of attending one of my company's trade shows or conferences without live-monitoring what people are posting on Twitter about it (and they will be posting). Not exactly scientific research, I know, but certainly helpful.
• Connect: Building a brand or protecting an established one is all about building trust and a relationship with customers. In the b-to-b media industry, those relationships increasingly include readers who want to be heard and to establish a dialogue with our team members, particularly our reporters and editors. Readers want to build deeper connections with our staff--to know more about them, perhaps, but also to find out 'the story behind the story.' I want to listen in on that discussion as much as I can, both to hear what kinds of questions customers are asking and to see how our journalists respond. The sum total of those discussions will be more important in establishing what the brand means to our customers than all the promotional ads and press releases we put out.
• Build community: The power in our brands traditionally came from the strength of the connection between our products and our audience. In the future, brand power will increasingly be derived from how well we help members of our audience connect with one another. We can use social media tools to do that, leveraging the power of LinkedIn, for instance, to help community members find clients, experts, jobs or whatever else they value. Those same tools will allow us to extend a three-day trade show into a yearlong dialogue, with our brands positioned as the host for those conversations. As executives, we should be looking for community-building successes and encouraging our teams to experiment with our own offerings.

Sure, if you're not in the media field you can blow these thoughts off as Pollak is directing them to media executives. But, as a leader in our legal profession if you can't extrapolate how listening, monitoring, connecting, and community building apply to your law firm or association, you're in trouble. And if you think social media is a fad allowing you to stick your head in the sand till the storm passes, you're in more trouble. As Pollak says, "Social media is here to stay."

If you're a leader in our legal professional looking for leaders to follow on social media, you could do a lot worse than following Bill Pollak. You can follow him via his blog and his Twitter feed.

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Bill Pollak, CEO of Incisive Media North America (parent to American Lawyer Media), and I have been exchanging thoughts on Twitter the last couple days about journalists leaving main stream media (MSM) to go solo. The discussion was precipitated by my views that legal publishing, like we've seen with newspapers, is going to see some upheaval.

I see opportunities for journalists who've lost their jobs or are at risk to do so to start their own online publications. Focusing on a niche provides an opportunity to earn close to or in excess of six figures. I have friends doing so in Seattle. Not only is the potential income greater than working in MSM, but the future is more secure. Being in control of your destiny beats the insecurity of not knowing when your publication will begin layoffs and looking for a new job.

Bill, coming from MSM and someone I have a lot of respect for, questions whether someone can do six figures from online publishing alone and sees a lot of risks.

This morning I ran across a News Entrepreneur Boot Camp being hosted by University of Southern California / Annenberg School for Communication in conjunction with Knight Digital Media. They're looking for digital entrepreneurs with great ideas for community news and information initiatives in the public interest.

Why are they conducting the camp? "Traditional news organizations are floundering as business models collapse and audiences are increasingly turning to alternative news and information sources."

Look at what they're going to cover. This is the stuff journalists need to know how to today.

• Identifying the best business model for sustained success.
• Developing a sustainable business plan.
• Marketing and audience development.
• Content production and management models.
• Legal and tax issues.
• Identifying capitalization sources.
• Developing and implementing revenue and advertising strategies.
• Successful social networking models.
• Selecting and implementing technical platforms.
• Understanding and using metrics.

Digital entrepreneurism is real. Sure there are risks. But everything we do is full of risks. Holding onto the past for as long as you can hoping you'll still have a job is risky.

Veteran journalists. Recent grads. There are tremendous opportunities in journalism today. They lie online and require an entrepreneurial bent. Because most people are afraid of change/risk and don't want to learn new things, the opportunities are even greater for those willing to be bold.

You may not see yourself as an entrepreneur, but if you wish to follow your dreams of a rewarding career in reporting and publishing, digital entrepreneurism is the way to go.

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Hot on the heels of yesterday's LexBlog Q & A with Mario Sundar of LinkedIn (which focused less on the law and more on social networking), we're shifting gears back to the legal realm. And who better to bring us back in style than Bill Pollak of ALM?

Bill, who has been with the company since it's formation and currently serves as their CEO, brings a unique understanding of legal publishing to the table. In our e-mail exchange, he offers his perspectives on the current state of legal publishing, the ALM's use of technology at their website, and how he thinks ALM will fare in a world where traditional publications are continuing to fall by the wayside. See the full text in it's usual location (after the jump).

1. Rob La Gatta: When you started with ALM (at a time the Internet was still quite young), did you ever imagine the web would have had as profound an impact on your business as it has thus far?

William Pollak: All of my 1998 assumptions about the web have turned out to be wrong. Of course we all knew that we were witnessing the start of a new medium, and that certain parts of our predominantly print franchises would be jeopardized by the web. But the idea of user-generated content in all its many forms, and the revolution that that would bring to the dissemination of information, was far from being on my radar 10 years ago.

The idea that we newspaper and magazine publishers would originate our content electronically before or instead of putting it into our print publications was also not foreseen by most of us. And the idea that this new medium would not only eat into our historical revenue base but also open up dramatic new opportunities—things like webinars and new kinds of directories and blog networks—well, we didn’t see those coming 10 years ago either.

That being said, I should say that I’m also amazed at how little the web has impacted other parts of our business. For instance, powerful print brands remain powerful even in the electronic world, and have not really been supplanted by web upstarts. And law firms, by and large, continue to market themselves in much the same way as they have always marketed themselves.

Individual lawyers may have launched blogs and other initiatives to market their own expertise, but few firms have figured out how to use the web to extend their brands, generate leads and build their businesses. And, to give a third example, information may be more available for free via Google and the web than ever before, but West and Lexis remain healthy and vibrant businesses, just as they were 10 years ago. So we need to be careful not to overstate the impact of this admittedly powerful medium.

2. Rob La Gatta: Can you provide some insight on when ALM decided to begin incorporating RSS feeds onto Law.com, and what prompted this addition? Any information about the number of subscribers?

William Pollak: We began to incorporate RSS feeds around 5 years ago, as we learned the value of pushing our content out to other websites and RSS readers. Although we have no good measure of the number of RSS subscribers, or the traffic they generate back to our sites, our sense is that they have become an important source of traffic for us.

3. Rob La Gatta: What must a blogger do to get their blog included in your Blog Network?

William Pollak: Blogs are selected for our Blog Network in much the same way that outside columnists are chosen for our newspapers.

We look, first and foremost, at the quality of what’s being posted, the frequency and seriousness with which the blogger seems to take their blog, and our judgment of the value being potentially provided to our readers. Given our current list of blogs, we look for new offerings which will fill niches and add to our overall coverage. Right now we are particularly focused on finding blogs which cover the international business and practice of law, for example. And, of course, we look at the traffic which a new blog would likely bring to our network and to our advertisers—generally speaking, more traffic is better than less.

4. Rob La Gatta: What do you think is in store for ALM's print publications, in a time so when many newspapers and magazines are fading away? Is ALM is equipped to weather the storm?

William Pollak: Our newspapers are thriving and, I suspect, will continue to do well in the years to come. We are in the process of reinventing what a legal newspaper should be, and increasingly recognize that they are less about “news” and have become much more important for the court and legal information which they provide. We continue to gather and publish, both in print and online, a wide array of decisions, decision summaries, verdicts, court rules, calendars and the like. And many readers tell us that print is still their preferred means of receiving that information even while more and more of it becomes available from us online.

Magazines are somewhat more challenged, since most lack the element of “must have” information that one finds in a legal newspaper. I believe our magazines need to do much more to build their brands online, and turn themselves from monthly providers of feature stories and surveys into daily providers of community news and information. That will not be an easy transition, but I think we are strong enough to see it through.

As you may know, ALM was acquired last summer by Incisive Media in London. Through that acquisition, we have gained access to dramatically improved web technology and a team of experienced business-to-business publishers who are well-ahead of us in their transition to online publishing. As we now upgrade to new content management tools and other capabilities, I think you will see that ALM has the resources needed to succeed in the electronic age.

5. Rob La Gatta: In your eyes, what has been the most valuable impact the Internet has had upon the legal profession so far, and why?

William Pollak: The biggest impact of the web in the publishing industry has been to level the field separating journalists from readers.

In the pre-web era the paradigm was simple—editors figured out what was important, presented it to the reader, and the reader took it in. Now, there is much more back-and-forth, and much more user participation in the process of news gathering and analysis. Journalists may still be subject-matter experts on various topics, and their voice may be one which readers still want to hear. But the journalist now has to listen and react to users in a more direct way, and can no longer assume that their word will be the last heard on a given topic.

That’s an important and, I think, welcome change. It expands dramatically the amount of content available to include in—or link to—a given story. And I think it has the potential to build a much tighter bond between publishers and readers.

Interested in hearing more? Recent LexBlog Q & A posts:

• Mario Sundar, community evangelist and blog editor for LinkedIn [4.24.08]
• Kevin Livingston & Dennis Pfaff, the editorial team behind Thelen's Climate Law Update [4.17.08]
• Anita Campbell, editor-in-chief of Small Business Trends [4.15.08]
• Steve Matthews of Stem Legal, discussing the state of the Canadian legal blogosphere [4.11.08]
• John Sirman, manager of TexasBar.com and technology editor for the Texas Bar Journal [4.10.08]

Or, see our full list of legal blog interviews.

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