Legal Marketing Association : Seattle Chapter loves blogs & RSS

Spoke at a luncheon of the Legal Marketing Association – Seattle Chapter this afternoon. Stoel Rives‘ Seattle office hosted the event. Great group of legal marketing professionals that included Portland folks as well via a video hookup. I felt like I was on Larry King – I could see people in Portland on a large monitor and they could see me on a monitor down there.

We talked about about both Web sites and blogs but I was blown away by the interest in Blogs and RSS – real simple syndication. Peppered with questions on blogs & RSS and about half the attendees stayed an extra hour to learn more about blogs, RSS and RSS feed aggregators. We played with IceRocket so folks could see how to do a search for real time Internet discussion and have the results fed to an aggregator. We used web based Bloglines as the aggregator.

On the Web site side, there were two big take-aways. One was proper use of title tags on the internal pages of the Web site so pages were properly indexed by Google and the other search engines. The other was the necessity of XHTML – CSS/Standards design for all sites. Failure to incorporate such technology in a law firm Web site is going to make it out of date immediately.

Getting back to blogs, firms liked those because it was a fast and inexpensive to get their lawyers and practice groups seen on the search engines. Getting a Web site overhaul may be tough sledding. Doing blogs for key practice areas to gain immediate exposure on the search engines and with journalists using RSS would be much easier.

LexBlog should get geared up for an onslaught of work. These guys get blogs and RSS and they are looking for someone to serve it up in a soup to nuts solution.