Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Blawgs, Law Firm Marketing

Getting bloggers to cover you, your law firm, or company is an art. It's not done by sending press releases and cold emails to bloggers.

I probably get 30 press releases or announcements a day from organizations looking for me to blog about them. Can't remember the last time such an an email from someone I didn't know caused me to blog about what they sent me.

Uber blogger Robert Scoble, recently of Fast Company, offers some sound advice on how to get good PR for yourself in the blogosphere.

Read Robert's whole post but here's the highlights.

• Go where the bloggers are. Create a list of few dozen bloggers and get to know them. If possible, go to events such bloggers are attending. Looking at Upcoming.org's event calendars frequently, you can figure out which events a preponderance of bloggers say they're attending and keep track of them.
• Read the blogs of the people you want to cover you. Send them a note within minutes of their posting, blog about their posts, link to their blogs from your own blog, and add public comments to posts. Not only does each blogger get to know you, but their readers do too.
• Send bloggers interesting stories -- especially about other people -- that you think they would be interested in. When you have something about your own business to announce, those bloggers will be more receptive to you than to some PR firm that only flacks for its clients.
• Start blogging. When a blogger hears an interesting story, they go to Google and start searching other blogs so they can read more about it. Tell your story on your own blog.
• Don't send press releases. The blog world is built on relationships.

Bloggers matter when it comes to PR. LexBlog's grown from the garage to a company with 14 people serving law firms across the country and internationally largely by my networking with other bloggers. Not once did I send out a press release.

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Naked Conversations celebrated it's second birthday this past Saturday.

For the unknowing, NC is a one of the seminal books on blogging. From wikipedia:

[Robert Scoble and Shel Israel] argue that almost every business can benefit from smart "naked" blogging, whether the company's a small-town plumbing operation or a multinational fashion house. "If you ignore the blogosphere... you won't know what people are saying about you," they write. "You can't learn from them, and they won't come to see you as a sincere human who cares about your business and its reputation." To bolster their argument, Scoble and Israel have assembled an enormous amount of information about blogging: from history and theory to comparisons among countries and industries. They also lay out the dos and don'ts of the medium and include extensive statistics, dozens of case studies and several interviews with famous bloggers.

If you're in a PR or business development position (aren't we all) trying to follow blogs and learn what blogs are all about, read it. If the concepts don't make sense, read it again. If you're already blogging effectively, read it. It gets the juices really going.

Shel's comments on the the two year anniversary are enlightening.

It's hard to believe it has only been two years since the book was introduced.  Sometimes it seems the writing of Naked Conversations happened a very long time ago.  Sometimes I think the stories we told are ancient. Yet the book is still selling moderately well, which please me almost as much as it surprises me.

Then I realize that the stories are old only if you have already heard them.  Blogging has, of course, become only a single tool in an enormous social media tool shed. It has also become fruitful and multiplied.  We wrote when there were about 14 million bloggers.  Now there are more than 100 million. There may be as many as a half-billion people involved in social media worldwide.

What has remained intact, I think, is our key point.  There is a revolution going on that is transforming the way businesses talk with customers. That revolution has a key attribute. It's about the conversation, not any one tool.

Thanks Robert and Shel.

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That's the title of a post from Robert Scoble last week. He was responding to Susan Mernit's report that Lane Hartwell was so pissed with people stealing her photographs that she decided to take her photos out of the public eye.

After offering up a way to watermark the photos and keep them online, Scoble says he's just the opposite.

I WANT YOU to steal my content. In fact, next year I'm going to do stuff to make all my content available via Creative Commons license so you can use it whereever and whenever, including my video shows. I'd like a credit, yes, but don't demand it. I'd rather just add to the human experience and if that means that other people make money off of my work, so be it.

I've found that the more I give away my content, the more magical stuff happens to me anyway and if that means my photos or writings or videos get used in some way that I don't really like, well, that's a risk I'm willing to take. Lane obviously is not.

Plus, today I have a little less competition from Lane, who was a great photographer but who's work will be hard to discover now.

I'm right there with Scoble. And you lawyers should be wanting people stealing your blog content. The more it's stolen by blockquote, reference and link, the easier for the world to discover you. And isn't that what's it all about, getting known for our expertise?

Want further evidence that you want people stealing your content? Scoble cites the New York Times whose traffic has taken off since removing its subscription pay wall in September.

As Scoble says, '...[W]hen you try to hold onto your content too tightly fewer people are able to find it.'

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