Stacey Merrick discusses LexBlog Newsfeed Reader

On Friday I sat down with Stacey Merrick, Director of Client Services here at LexBlog, to discuss a recent change to the blogging platform we use for training clients. Below, Stacey outlines this change and the impact it has had.

Rob La Gatta: LexBlog recently developed a new tool to help our clients’ learn the ins and outs of blogging. What was added?

Stacey Merrick:

The LexBlog Newsfeed Reader, which is a way to get information quickly from other blogs. It can be used instead of doing a search engine search (where you type in a keyword and say, ‘Oh, here’s this blog,’ and then you go to individual blogs directly). With your news feed reader, you have all the blogs and all the articles come to you; all that you have to do is make one click into the reader, and then you’ve got all that information there. You can use that information to get material for your blog…you can find out what the hot topics are, because you’ll see several different posts. If there’s a bunch on one issue, you’ll know that its something that might be worth blogging about. Today, for example, the big topic was the iPhone. Everybody’s blogging about the iPhone, so everything that I have in my news feed reader right now has to do with the iPhone. So that could be a good topic to blog about.

Clients can also use the reader to find other people who have similar interests and comment on their blogs. You can actually get your name out there by commenting on somebody else’s blog who might not have heard of you before.

Rob La Gatta:

Since the addition of the Newsfeed Reader, how many clients have you trained? How have they responded to it?

Stacey Merrick:

I’d say I’ve probably trained about 50 people so far.  That isn’t 50 different blogs, but several users on one blog. And every single person I’ve trained how to use the news feed reader loves it.

Rob La Gatta: Does it make the learning process easier for clients who may not have any past experience blogging?

Stacey Merrick:

Yes. It gives them an easy way to look at other blogs, to find other blogs and to find out exactly what other people are doing on their blogs.

Rob La Gatta: Do you have any other plans for the news feed reader?

Stacey Merrick:

Our goal is to make the LexBlog Newsfeed Reader an ideal tool for all lawyers who blog. The next step is to actually populate [the reader] with feeds so that when our clients go to it for the first time, it will already be populated with feeds of blogs that are blogging about their topic. So lets say we have a new client who’s an injury law attorney. When they go to their news feed reader, there will be feeds already there from other injury law blogs. That’s the next step, which we are working on this summer.