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Lawyer blogs may not digg to get dugg

January 22, 2007

In a misguided belief that their blog will perform better on search engines and draw subscribers, many lawyer blogs place social bookmarking icons at the bottom of each of their posts.

However, just because gadget, technology, or social bloggers think it’s cool to get users to bookmark their blog posts at Digg or Reddit, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for lawyer blogs. It may even backfire.

Jennifer at Search Engine Guide, who doesn’t believe social bookmarking links are a good idea for everyone, shares the story of Kim at Cre8pc who doesn’t dugg being digged.

…that resource I showed my blog readers in the post I wrote has seen an enormous spike in their traffic. That might be good news for them, if it were not for the comments left at Digg about that resource. Diggers complained about everything from the site design of the site I wrote about, to how stupid I was to write about it at all.

In addition to the negative comments and free for all party over at Digg, I had to close the comments to my own blog post. I’ve never been forced to close comments here before. If you own a blog, you know what this is like. The worst in human behavior comes and sits on your front porch, begging for your attention.

Lawyers looking to further enhance their reputation as a reliable and trusted authority should do so by sharing good content and networking with their target audience via the lawyer’s blog. As Matt Linderman at 37signals says, ‘It’s the content, not the icons.’

If you’re looking for cheap thrills and potentially some undesired attention at your blog and in comments made about you at social bookmarking sites, go for the gimmicks. But I’ll not be advising good law firms to take that risk for what I see as little, if any, upside.

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