Rubel’s 4 steps to marketing & PR on the blogosphere : a must read for law marketing professionals

Steve Rubel, VP at NY PR firm CooperKatz and publisher of the oh so well known Micro Persuasion, recently blogged about Robert Scoble’s asking for advice on Robert’s meeting with Target about marketing on the blogosphere. Steve responded by covering his firm’s Micro Persuasion philoposphy of find, listen, engage and empower.

Without getting into the specifics of Rubel’s advice to Scoble, let’s review the 4 steps. I heard Steve run through them when we appeared together at LexBlog client Phillips Nizer’s recent program about business blogs. They should be applied by any law firm looking to do effective PR & marketing via the blogosphere.

1. Find: Identify your most influential online evangelists and vigilantes and potential evangelists and vigilantes. Use PubSub and Feedster as a start, but do not ignore Google too. Steve’s firm CooperKatz even scores each in-bound blog link/mention on a qualitative assessment scale from one to ten via a customized brand blog barometer.
2. Listen: Once you know who your influencers are, listen to them actively. You need to view each blog post as legitimate feedback. More importantly, you need to identify what are the most powerful currents of conversation in the blogosphere – e.g. the ones that are the most relevant to your company and its products/services. Rubel calls this a company’s ‘higher holy calling.‘ Only once you have completed find and listen, will you be ready to engage and empower.
3. Engage: Companies have lots of opportunities to launch blogs that will help them engage in a dialogue with their constituents. In the case of a law firm (and running with some of Steve’s ideas in the case of Target), each lawyer and practice group by its very nature is a goldmine of intellectual capital on a niche topic waiting to be leveraged. Content already being disseminated by email newsletters and alerts are better tailored for blogs. 2 to 3 sentences responding to often asked questions are perfect. Legal updates shared by email among a practice group can be cleaned up and published to a blog.

   Law firms are big on giving back to the community. Sections of blogs should chronicle how you help the community and, more importantly, starting conversations with the community on how they want to be helped.

4. Empower: At the highest level, you should use the blogosphere to empower people to tell stories. And what better people to empower than those you have helped through providing free legal information on your blog. Blogs on legal and tangental topics are springing to life every day. Write something of value, network with these blog publishers and people will write about you and your firm.

This is the essence of blogging and why it’s a different and perhaps more powerful means of marketing than traditional PR & communications work. Thanks Steve for being a true leader in every sense of the word.