Best practices in law firm blogging

Mind Comet, in conjunction with Web Strategist Jeremiah Owyang, put together a list of best practices for business blogging. Pulling from portions of their list, here’s a list of best practices for law firm blogging.

• Law blogs should not originate with marketing and business development professionals. Sure, have marketing identify the appropriate blog solution, create protocols, ID potential lawyer and practice group candidates, and oversee blogs, but the publication of the content must lie with lawyers. Blogging is a conversation with blog posts referencing items lawyers read. Just as a lawyer must be on a panel at a conference, not a marketing professional, it’s the same with blogging. Plus this practice saves marketing’s time.
• Law blogging should serve a cross-functional client development role. Learn more about prospective clients and competitors from their blogs and monitoring their names, products, and services via RSS feeds from Google Blog Search and Google News while sharing your intellectual capital and philosophy.
• To keep customers interested in your blog be authentic.
• Blogging should be viewed as a conversation with other thought leaders. Read what others are writing in blogs, news websites, and the media via RSS feeds in your RSS newsreader. Reference what they’re writing providing your take. Not only is such blogging more fun and easier than ‘article writing,’ but others seeing you write about their content, will write about yours. Your message is now being amplified, citations of your content (a tacit reference) are being indexed at Google, and your network is growing exponentially.
• Avoid blog posts that sound like a press release. You’ll not only be ignored, but you will be embarrassing you and your law firm.
• Develop a protocol for moderating comments and responding to comments in a timely manner. This is easily accomplished as law blogs do not generate many comments.
• The blogosphere should be monitored frequently and used as a marketing intelligence tool via blog subscriptions and subscriptions to searches at Google Blog Search and Google News.
• Read blogs from leaders in both the the legal profession and other industries for advice and best practice tips. Most all of what I’ve learned and continue to learn comes from IT, journalism, social media, PR, communications, and business professionals outside the law.
• Blog on a subject on which you are passionate. If you’re not practicing in an area of law you have a passion for, start blogging in area of law which you do and grow your business in that area.

I’m sure there are best practices I am missing. Share your practices in a comment below.