Blog growth is staggering, law firms should wake up
The growth of blogs is taking off in a way no one could have envisioned only a few months ago. Technorati, a blog search engine that accepts and tracks RSS feeds from blogs, tracked its 3 millionth blog yesterday. 15,000 new blogs are being created each business day.
As a lawyer or law firm marketing director you may ignore the growth of blogs thinking you’ll wait until you see lawyers all around you doing law blogs. Problem is that when the public adopts new technology, you need to be there with the public, not behind them. That’s unless you don’t care about keeping your clients or getting new ones.
It was not that long ago lawyers did not use email to communicate with folks or law firm Web sites to demonstrate their experience. I’m sure we can all name a lawyer or two not doing so today. But we’d all agree they would be viewed as way out of the main stream.
At best, such a lawyer would be difficult to communicate with if I were a client. If I’m a prospective client researching lawyers to hire, there ain’t no way I am selecting a lawyer that does not care enough about prospective clients to share information about themselves on the Internet or make themselves accessible by email.
Per Dave Sifrey’s blog – the founder of Technorati, there are 15,000 new blogs created a day, or a new blog every 5.8 seconds. When I started a blog in November, 9,000 blogs a day were being created. That’s a growth curve like a hockey stick – perhaps steeper than the growth of email and Web sites.
Also reported on Dave’s blog, even though abandonment rates are high – analyses show that about 45% of the weblogs they track have not had a post in over 3 months they are still tracking a significant population of people who are posting each day. They’re seeing over 275,000 individual posts every day. That means that on average, more than 3 blogs are updated every second.
If I am a lawyer or law firm marketing director, and I viewed myself as the least bit innovative, I’d start learning about blogs and perhaps test them in a practice area or two. Otherwise you are likely to end up behind the wild blog growth curve.