Pew Survey offers insight for lawyers: blogs are at the forefront

Lee Rainie, Project Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, delivered earlier this spring a presentation (pdf) on the results from the latest Pew survey on United States internet usage. The survey data provides insight for attorneys seeking to tailor their marketing strategies towards the growing online audience.

Tim Stanley, co-founder of Findlaw and now founder of Justia pointed out the highlights of the survey and made a few comments in a post from last month at the Justia Legal SEO Blog.

• Blogs. How mainstream are blogs? The Pew survey revealed that 6-9 million people post messages on a blog daily. Surprisingly, blogging is even more ubiquitous than music or movie sharing on peer-to-peer networks. For lawyers, Stanley says “Blogs offer them a means to become reliable, helpful authorities on particular legal subject matters, such as trucking litigation.” Thanks Tim for citing LexBlog client Attorney Ken Shigley’s Atlanta Injury Law and Civil Litigation Blog as an example.
• Google. On a typical day, 41 million Americans use a search engine, of which 4 million will google someone they are about to meet. As Tim Stanley of Justia and my source for this post asked “If a prospective client attempts to google you, what will they find? If your law firm has a web site, hopefully that will be one of the first few search results that will be returned.” If not you ought to be asking your Web developer why not.
• Health Information. What type of information do people seek online? The survey reported that 9-10 million people will seek health information from the internet daily. As Stanley says “Lawyers can play an important role in disseminating health information online for a variety of medical problems with legal implications such as dangerous drug reactions or traumatic brain injuries.” Nice of Stanley to use LexBlog client Bruce Stern’s Traumatic Brain Injury Law Blog as an example on this one.

The Pew Foundation continues to be a wonderful source of information on the public’s use of the Internet. And Tim’s analysis ain’t chopped liver.