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

Google has made it a little easier to cross post across your social networks from one interface.

Posting to Google Plus tonight I noticed next to the 'Share' button for posting to Google Plus an option to cross post to Facebook, Twitter, and Plunk. See below for what I mean.

I am not a big fan of auto-posting across social networks, but like you I'm still figuring out how to use all of these social networks. So I gave it a whirl tonight cross posting to Facebook.

Plus getting to cross-post that the Yankees blew a lead in the 9th, on their way to losing in 10 innings, was pretty enjoyable. I am not a Red Sox fan, but I'm assuming, like me, if you're not a Yankees fan, you always cheer against them.

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Google's free blog service, Blogger, made the headlines this week when it shut down and deleted the blog content on six popular music blogs without warning.

The Guardian's Sean Michaels had a nice summary of what transpired in his story this past Thursday.

In what critics are calling "musicblogocide 2010", Google has deleted at least six popular music blogs that it claims violated copyright law. These sites, hosted by Google's Blogger and Blogspot services, received notices only after their sites - and years of archives - were wiped from the internet.

'We'd like to inform you that we've received another complaint regarding your blog,' begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It's a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music-blogs - sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. 'Upon review of your account, we've noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger's Terms of Service ... [and] we've been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding.'

As Michael reports, "Jolly as Google may be, none of the bloggers who received these notices are 'understanding' in the least." The reason being that bloggers such as Bill Lipold, the owner of one of the deleted blogs, I Rock Cleveland, had previously responded to Google support that despite complaints Google was getting, he was legally entitled to post the subject music.

'I assure you that everything I've posted for, let's say, the past two years, has either been provided by a promotional company, came directly from the record label, or came directly from the artist,' Lipold wrote to Google.

Google's response to the deleted blogs, via Rick Klau, lawyer and Blogger Product Manager, was that the blog owners did not file the appropriate response pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorised manner, we will remove the blog. [If] this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are 'official' ... it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question.

But following that process is easier said than done per Michaels.

The trouble with filing a formal, legal DMCA counter-claim is, that most bloggers don't know how. What's more, many of Blogger's DMCA notices allegedly omit the name of the offending song. Bloggers aren't even sure what they are denying.

Why is this story relevant to lawyers and law firms? It demonstrates the risk of using a free blog service such as Google's Blogger and Blogspot for your law blog.

I am not condoning any wrongful use of copyrighted material. But I would like to be in as much control of my blog's destiny as possible. If a dispute arose, I'd like to be able to communicate with the blog host by email and phone as business person to business person. I'd like to know my blog's being taken down was imminent. If my blog was taken down, I'd like to receive a copy of my blog's content, not have all the content deleted.

Google's customer service is not the best as demonstrated by customer service frustrations with the Google Nexus Phone. Here, apparently, blog owners felt compelled to respond to Google via Google's online support forum message board. Knowing Rick Klau like I do and knowing he's a good guy, I may have had the opportunity of engaging him to resolve the impending demise of blog if it were hosted at Google. But I doubt the average blogger could do so.

Don't make the mistake in blowing off these music bloggers as some fringe small time players as compared to your law firm. Per the Guardian story:

Although such sites once operated on the internet's fringes, almost exclusively posting songs without permission, many blogs are now wined, dined and even paid (via advertising) by record labels. After the success of blog-buzzy acts such as Arcade Fire, Lily Allen and Vampire Weekend, entire PR firms are dedicated to courting armchair DJs and amateur critics.

Perhaps the risks are minimal of such copyright or terms of service issues with Google on your law blog, but I am routinely asked by law firms about more minimal and less likely risks of blogging. Understandably we lawyers are risk adverse.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not calling out Google as 'Big Brother' and evil here. I'm just asking if you want to go your managing partner and let them know that despite your best efforts to get a hold of someone at Google to resolve a third-party copyright dispute or other terms of service issue, your firm's blog has been taken down and all content deleted.

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If you watch Google closely, one of the recent changes you've see is that when Google displays organizations and directories on the search results pages, it's allowing a search of the subject website without having to click to the website.

Look at the below example for the Super Lawyers lawyer directory.

Internet users would not need to go to the Super Lawyers website to search for a lawyer. If I'm looking for an environmental lawyer in New York who went to Harvard, I just enter 'environmental lawyer New York Harvard' in the 'search superlawyers.com' box at Google.

Here's the first three results displayed - right in the Google interface without going to Super Lawyers - and in a fraction of a second. When I click on the result I go directly to the lawyer's page in the directory, skipping the website home page and any interim search pages.

Expect the Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo, and FindLaw lawyer directories to be next in line for the Google treatment.

What's the implication? For Internet users, there may be advantages. No limited text fields or 'drop-downs' for search such as by practice area and location, the type of things Martindale-Hubbell requires.

Google's search will allow us to do a search for exactly what we want - like I just did for the Harvard environmental lawyer in New York. I could have added an association or two that I wanted the lawyer to belong to limiting my results further. I'm not sure searches at lawyer directory sites themselves would allow me to do that level of search.

For lawyers, it may be great. People can search for someone matching my background and find me immediately. That's impossible if I'm displayed in a Martindale-like directory as one of 165 lawyers in an area of practice in a locale.

For lawyer directories? I think they'll be uneasy allowing Internet users to search their data without going to the directory's website. No adds displayed. No fancy user interfaces with pictures and the like. No branding of the directory. Lots of confusion with lawyers asking directory salespeople questions.

Where do you see this headed? See advantages for people looking for lawyers? See advantages for lawyers?

For you readers employed at legal directories - Martindale-Hubbell, FindLaw, Avvo, & Super Lawyers - what do you think of the development?

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Google's transforming from just search to a destination website in the classic media sense posts Om Malik this morning.

Citing first comScore's report at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York.

Of some 1.2 billion search queries on Google during a one-week period in January 2008, universal results were presented about 17 percent of the time, according to research released by James Lamberti, comScore's SVP, search and media. 'The search result page is beginning to operate as a destination,' observed Lamberti. 'The consumers are a priority. Not the marketers.' Plus, Google sent nearly 400 million search referrals to their own multi-media properties, such as YouTube, over six months. That includes 148 million referrals to YouTube and 173 million to Google Images, the comScore data show.

And then search expert and author, John Battelle:

To pretend otherwise is to ignore the reality of YouTube, Google News, Google Maps, Google Local, the onebox interface, Knol, and everything else Google owns that represent the chance for them to make money the way every other media company in the world makes money - by competing for your attention and monetizing it with advertising.

Consumers, business exec's, in-house counsel, and reporters, all targets of your law firm's attention are spending time at Google. Every sort of digital marketing your firm conducts must take into account Google.

Points to keep in mind:

• Any legal directory, Martindale-Hubbell, Avvo, Martindale's lawyers.com, Super Lawyers or whomever, will need to do an effective job indexing at Google all lawyer bio's, firm profiles, and in the case of larger law firms, their practice groups.
• Question the value of a directory that's preaching we're a portal drawing large traffic, as opposed to showing how well your bio appears at Google on a search.
• Any law firm website or blog needs to be search engine optimized from the get go. Begins with the development of the site or blog, it's not an after the fact thing.
• Make sure your firm is registered in Google local search for ease of all clients who may be looking for you.
• Use YouTube for all of your video. Descriptions of videos and their tags are already indexed at Google. Expect consumer use of YouTube to grow to the point where people will begin to search it for subject matter video, as opposed to just for entertainment.
• Use Google Site Map technology and Google's Feedburner for effective indexing of content and RSS feeds.
• Any content, whether articles stored on a website or distributed in email newsletters or alerts needs to be published on software generating an RSS feed (blogs are the easiest way to generate RSS) in order to have the content indexed at Google Blog Search, where thought leaders and reporters subscribe to keyword feed searches.

Fortunately Google and its tools are free. Some expense will be incurred by law firms in hiring people who understand how Google works. But the greatest cost to a firm would be to continue down the present course not understanding the true impact of Google.

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1. Rob La Gatta: Do you remember when you were first exposed to RSS? What were your impressions of it at the time, and where did you expect it to go?

Rick Klau: I started a blog in December of 2001. Radio Userland (the product I used at the time) had an aggregator built in, and I started realizing that the ability to subscribe to sites I liked was fundamentally changing how I used the web. I was more consistently informed on subjects I cared about, and spent less time looking for information that mattered. Best of all, I was building relationships with people I hadn't met - based on the strength of their writing and our shared interests.

I don't think I gave it a lot of thought to try and actually predict where it would end up, but I do recall telling friends that RSS felt as significant to me as the browser felt when I first used Mosaic.

2. Rob La Gatta: In your opinion, has the world - and by that I mean the general, news-reading public - embraced RSS technology to the extent you would have expected when you started at FeedBurner?

Rick Klau: Absolutely.

Watching the growth curve of audience adoption was a very gratifying part of my time at FeedBurner. When I joined, aggregate subscribers to all the feeds we managed was measured in tens of thousands. Today that number is close to 100 million.

Perhaps best of all, many people who have "embraced" RSS have done so without really recognizing it. They just add headlines to iGoogle, or have their favorite blogs e-mailed to them, using FeedBurner's feed-to-e-mail service...they don't know that they're "using" RSS, and they shouldn't have to. (How many people using e-mail know that they're using SMTP or POP3? Not many, and that's how it should be.)

3. Rob La Gatta: What about the professional community: do you believe that businesses are utilizing RSS and blogging as much as they could/should be?

Rick Klau: There's always room for improvement. The last time I looked at a number of law firm websites, few were distributing information to clients via RSS. With the mass-market adoption of RSS and the ease with which firms can produce RSS feeds, they should see this as a simple way to embrace a convenient medium that gets them closer to their clients. Whether that's to distribute client alerts, podcasts (great for clients who commute!) or to summarize interesting and useful info found on the web, law firms can greatly increase their influence by embracing this medium.

4. Rob La Gatta: I saw you wrote about the Obama Facebook application, which is in many ways indicative of the way politics has taken on a new face for the digital age. How important do you see Internet-based tools in determining the outcome of the 2008 election?

Rick Klau: I'm not sure we're at the point where we can say conclusively that Internet-based tools are determining the outcome of the 2008 election. What they are doing is ensuring that more people can participate in the process - as volunteers, donors and even advisors. Savvy candidates are using the tools to more effectively organize their volunteers and leverage their input, which means that the tools are making the volunteers more effective.

Ultimately, the candidate still has to be able to sell people on their ideas. I was very involved in the Dean campaign, and watched as MeetUp and blogs emerged as tools that connected supporters offline as well as online. In this cycle, Facebook and even the campaign's own sites (my.barackobama.com is spectacular in this regard) are going further, giving me the ability to organize my precinct, recruit volunteers, and reach out to other voters by phone or by knocking on doors.

Back to your question - I don't think we want the technology to determine the outcome of the election. But if we can get more people involved and active in the process, we'll get the government we deserve. And that will be a good outcome all around. Particularly if Barack wins. :)

5. Rob La Gatta: Your blog is very personal. You have a disclaimer present, but some might still argue that you're walking a fine line (as we've all read about professionals whose personal blogs came back to bite them).

Do you have any concerns that being so personal out in the open could impact your professional reputation? Or do you think that developing a personality and a voice that people come to know - as you've done with your blog - is necessary for business professionals today?

Rick Klau: I've never worried that my blog would negatively impact my professional reputation, because what I write on the blog is what I say to friends, family members and co-workers. Writing on the blog is how I think, how I refine my opinions and how I challenge assumptions. I don't hide my personal opinions, but I also see the blog as a place to think out loud. It's not an outlet to take aim at others, and I don't think I've ever said something I'd be embarrassed by if a co-worker, competitor or friend were to read it.

Without any qualifications, the blog has had a dramatic, positive impact on my career. It's led directly to my last two jobs. Once I landed at Google, I met several senior people here who knew me because they'd read my blog in the past. It's produced speaking invitations at conferences as far away as Prague, resulted in inclusion in a number of high profile news publications, and opened doors with political campaigns where I've chosen to get involved. (It even got me a mention in Joe Trippi's book about the Dean campaign!) I've reconnected with classmates from high school, college and law school, and I've developed strong friendships with people I've never met personally - yet we exchange Christmas cards and chat frequently.

Do I have any concerns? Sure. I'm particularly sensitive to the fact that I'm now at Google, so I'm careful not to venture into territory where it might look like I'm speaking on behalf of Google. I stick to what I know, try to exercise common sense, and enjoy the process of writing about what I feel strongly about.

You talk about situations where a personal blog has come back to bite them - in most cases I've seen, that's been where the personal blog hasn't matched the professional appearance and it's caused embarrassment (or worse). My blog, as I mentioned above, *is* me. So far, it's working out pretty well.

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

• Dan Harris, Seattle international law lawyer & publisher of the China Law Blog [1.28.08]
• Daniel Schuman of the American Constitution Society's ACS Blog [1.25.08]
• Tim Titolo, Las Vegas personal injury lawyer & publisher of the Brain & Spine Injury Law Blog [1.24.08]
• Eugene Volokh, UCLA School of Law professor & founder of The Volokh Conspiracy [1.23.08]
• Dan Clement, New York family law attorney & publisher of the New York Divorce Report [1.22.08]

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There's only one lawyer directory that matters, and that's Google, says legal marketing expert, Larry Bodine.

Lawyers are repeatedly seduced and marketers are constantly aggravated to take space in law firm directories.' Which one to choose? How much to pay? Should you pay?' I can make the decision easy for you. There is only one directory you need to worry about: Google......Clients use Google to look up phone numbers and addresses, so law firms can cancel their yellow pages ads. When clients want to check out your firm, they are not going to call up to get your printed brochure, they will look you up online.

I have heard Larry speak and he's speaking of the importance of Google for all sized law firms, from solos to the very largest.

Other search engines aren't all that important for lawyers either. New research from Compete.com, indicates Google's share of Web searches in September 2007 was 67%, up from 54% in 2006. Yahoo is at 19%, down from 29% in 2006, with MSN at 9%.

I agree with Larry. Though it may still be worth my while, I never look at Yahoo or MSN when examining the search engine performance of my sites or LexBlog client blog sites.

As for directories such as FindLaw, Martindale-Hubbell, Super Lawyers, Avvo, and the like, the most important function they can play is getting the biographical information of your firm and its lawyers indexed at Google. The days of a lawyer directory portal site where Internet users go to look up lawyers are coming to an end.

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Yesterday Google began hosting stories and photographs distributed by the AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press. These licensing deals arose out of settlements resolving the news services' claims that Google had been infringing on their copyrights by displaying snippets as part of Google News.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. From Forbes today:

It could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies' Web sites where those stories and photos are also found - a development that could reduce those companies' revenue from online advertising.

Prior to this change, Google linked to AP news stories. When a user of Google News clicked on an AP story they were sent to one of the hundreds of news Web sites that had the right to post the same article on their online editions. As Forbes explains, "That helped drive more traffic to the Web sites of newspapers and broadcasters who pay annual fees to help finance the AP, a 161-year-old cooperative owned by news organizations."

Now, Google visitors interested in reading an AP story will remain on Google's Web site. Any advertisng would be displayed on Google. There's a real risk that this move will result in more traffic for Google and less traffic for the vast majority of AP's customers whose only area of increased revenues is online advertising.

I'm sure news services have other reasons for their action. But I see it as not wanting Google to index their content without Google paying for it. You know - we worked hard to produce our content and we're not giving it away.

As Jeff Jarvis says, these guys don't get it.

I think this all displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of Google in the new news architecture and the way to take advantage of that. Rather than getting Google to pay for and display full content, wouldn't it have been better for the industry -- and, by extension, original journalism -- to encourage it instead to find more ways to link to reporting at its source?

Same thing is going on with the LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell lawyer directory. Rather than making sure all of their customers' lawyer bios and law firm profiles are in a web architecture that Google can index for high search engine performance, Martindale appears to want to limit the indexing of their content.

Martindale appears to want those selecting a lawyer to come directly to their martindale.com site. Wouldn't it serve Martindale's customers better to get their information indexed at Google so Internet users would follow links at Google to the lawyer bios and firm profiles at martindale.com?

Like it or not, the business of news and publishing has changed. Links to your content are key. The more links, the more traffic, the more in advertising revenues. In Martindale's case, the more law firms will pay to be in their directory.

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Law firm marketing expert Larry Bodine is doing a presentation for various chapters of the Legal Marketing Association this summer highlighting the 10 hottest trends in marketing.

Saw his presentation in Seattle a couple weeks ago. And Larry was nice enough to buy dinner at Etta's.

Anyhow, Larry calls blogs among the hottest trends in marketing:

Blogs, of course. There are about 2,000 law-related blogs and it's still a wide-open field. Run a search on your state on www.Blawgsearch.com and find out who else has a blog online in your area. Blogs bring in new business and turn associates into partners.

I'll let you read the full post at Larry's blog to see the other 9. Will tell you that Larry takes a strong swing at legal directories like at Martindale-Hubbell, saying that the only directory that matters is Google.

Larry says a number of the AmLaw 100 have already bailed out of Martindale-Hubbell. While on the other hand Google is now the 'the first choice for business execs researching a purchase for their company -- including legal services.'

As way of full disclosure, Larry is on a LexBlog blog.

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The days when the majority of people went to the yellow pages and then over the past 6 or 7 years, Martindale's lawyers.com or Thomson's FindLaw are numbered. Google, like it dominates on other Internet search, will rule on local searches for lawyers.

Do a Google search for Austin divorce lawyer. Google provides names and a map with a listing of organic search results below it. The Lawyers.com and FindLaw directories are no where to be found.

Like Scoble, who was impressed with his Palo Alto Notary search, says "Google is so far ahead of the others it isn’t even funny."

As Google delivers better and better results, the number of people using Google is only going to increase. And do we really think my kids, who use Google to find everything (taught this in school), are going to look in the Yellow pages or lawyers.com when looking for a lawyer?

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