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

For two years, Regan Zambri & Long attorney Catherine Bertram and office administrator Juanita Lawson tried everything they could to encourage the Washington, DC personal injury firm's attorneys to blog. They tried assigning topics and having the firm's law clerks write, but nothing seemed to work.

Almost out of ideas, they decided to try capitalizing on what they saw every day in the courtroom.

"Trial attorneys are really competitive," Lawson says.

The resulting plan: a 60-day, four-team contest to see which pair of attorneys could blog the most. At the end, the losing team takes everyone out for beer.

The rules are simple. Each pair of attorneys has to post at least once a week on each of the firm's two blogs, the DC Personal Injury Blog and the DC Metro Area Medical Malpractice Blog. Bonus points are rewarded for blog posts that have substantive analysis and linking, receive comments or get referenced in other blogs, including in LexBlog’s Daily Blogosphere.

Lawson sends out leaderboard updates (as in the image above) every Monday tracking the standings, and emails dispatches showing the blogs' statistics and hits.

The contest has been going on since April 20, and so far the reaction has been incredibly positive.

"The response has been overwhelming," Bertram says. "We made it fun and made it a competition. Just having that be part of it has really motivated people to take the time it takes, not that it takes a lot of time."

Now the blogs have an average of three posts per day. Already, the attorneys are seeing the benefits of blogging frequently, as their page views have increased and younger associates are seeing how blogging can give them exposure despite fewer years in practice.

The real test will be after the contest is over, to see if the attorneys will keep blogging without the incentive of competition. Lawson and Bertram are optimistic they will.

"It's just silly, but it's the motivating thing," Lawson says. "If it results in the attorneys seeing how powerful blogging is and makes it routine in their day to day," it will be successful, she added.

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Today's webinar on Creating Effective Blog Posts drew a large crowd of LexBlog clients with some great questions. If you weren't able to attend or would like to revisit this webinar, you can view Effective Blogging Webinar recording or download the Effective Blogging Power Point Presentation.

You can also view this and past Webinars on the LexBlog Support site.

LexBlog client webinars dedicated to best blogging practices and keeping LexBlog clients up to speed on effective ways to leverage their blogs occur monthly on Thursdays at 9am PT/12pm ET. Coming up:

• April 16: RSS: The Secret Sauce of Blogging
• May 14: Social Media
• June 18: Creating Effective Blog Posts

We'll post information on how to register shortly before each Webinar. Thanks to all who attended today - we hope to see these tips and suggestions applied in forthcoming blog posts.

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The next installment in our monthly Client Webinar Series is coming up in just a few days: Creating Effective Blog Posts.

The webinar - held exclusively for clients - will take place Thursday, March 12, at 9 a.m. PST/12 p.m. EST. Mark your calendars and register now. (For registration information, direct message Support on Twitter or contact Stacey.)

Don't get left behind when it comes to getting the best content on your blog as possible. We're expecting record attendance of this week's webinar, and we hope to see you there.

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Here's a head's up from the crew at LexBlog about the next installment in our monthly Client Webinar Series: Creating Effective Blog Posts.

The webinar - held exclusively for clients - will take place next Thursday, March 12, at 9 a.m. PST/12 p.m. EST. Mark your calendars and register now. (For registration information, direct message Support on Twitter or contact Stacey.)

There is no question that lawyers who blog effectively get better results from their blogs, and at this webinar we'll discuss how to create effective posts that get read, cited, and talked about. You'll learn what makes a good blog stand out.

The last webinar drew over 90 LexBlog clients for a LexBlog team presentation on how to use LinkedIn and Twitter. We hope to see even more attend next week's webinar, as everyone can stand to get some tips on blogging more effectively.

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For attendees, and for those who may wish to make sense of the presentation without being here, you may download the PowerPoint I'm using this morning in Toronto. The topic is 'Taking Full Advantage of the Blogosphere to Build your Firm Profile.' I'm covering, among other things:

• Risks of no action
• 6 steps to effective blogging
• Quantifiable results of blogging
• Entry into social media

I'm presenting on this panel on blogging with Doug Jasinksi of SkunkWorks Creative Group of Vancouver. The conference is The Canadian Institutes 2nd Annual Forum on Law Firm Management.

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Joshua Porter, editor of Bokardo, a site about social web design, shares '9 Lessons for Would-be Bloggers.'

I found these 7 particularly helpful and thought you, as a blogging lawyer, would too.

• Write follow-up posts. When you post something that resonates with folks, follow it up with another post citing their comments. Maybe do a series of posts on the topic.
• When you screw up, say so immediately. Admitting idiocy is one of the most important things a blogger can do. It completely diffuses a situation that could quickly turn ugly.
• Link back to your good stuff. Refer back to your good stuff via links in a new post or with a bulleted list of 'Related Posts' at the bottom of a new post.
• Reread to yourself. Blogs aren't books, poems, or even journalism. They're conversations, so they need to be conversational. Make them read like how you talk.
• Keep updating your best posts. If you take your posts seriously, and you treat them as an reference archive, then people will link to them and send traffic to them over time. So, if the post could use pruning, or additions, be sure to go back and add them. It's OK…this isn't paper we're publishing on. Just go back and change it, and maybe add a note that you've done so.
• Name things (e.g. The Del.icio.us Lesson, The Chanel No. 5 Lesson). Does not apply to every post but works well for popular posts people may keep repeating over and over. People like things that are easy to remember.
• Link to the quiet, unknown ones. Link to people who nobody has heard of, just to give them some exposure. They're just as smart as anybody else, they've got just as much to say. They just don't have the attention yet.

Good stuff Joshua. Thanks.

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