Martindale-Hubbell blog : Good tool in wrong hands?

I‘ve held back on posting about the Martindale-Hubbell blog. I figured that despite the blog’s many shortcomings that others have blogged about, the company should be lauded for blogging. In addition, they just started blogging so I thought things would improve.

Then yesterday, Jonathan Lin, Martindle-Hubbell’s Director of Product Management, links to a spam blog in his post responding to my post asking ‘Will Google offer better search of lawyer directories than lawyer directory websites themselves?’

By spam blog, I mean a blog that just copies other people’s content (in this case, mine and other law bloggers) and republishes it. It’s done in hopes to generate a few bucks for law related Google adsense ads run on the spam blog.

Linking to spam blogs is as lame as it gets. I’d give Jonathan more credit if he was doing it to get my ire up. But I’m not sure that’s it. I don’t know if Martindale-Hubbell understands blogs and what it even means to blog.

Today, Jonathan, responding to others’ criticism of the blog concedes he just wanted to get the blog up quickly and would make needed improvements on the fly.

I made the call to get something out there quickly to begin 2008, even with known limitations, so we could at least start the conversation with you all and then make improvements as we go based on real-time feedback.

That’s the web 2.0 way right?

Ironically, I suspect that if we took the other route and did extensive research and development until we were comfortable that we got everything thing figured out, we would have ended up launching in December. And, I bet along the way, we would be equally criticized for being slow moving and “not getting it.

That slower method is how we used to do business, and it’s what we are trying to change.

That may be the ‘new Martindale-Hubbell’, but to me it’s nuts. Martindale-Hubbell is a legacy product that’s been around for 130 plus years. As a practicing lawyer for 17 years, the Martindale-Hubbell name meant a heck of a lot.

You hold yourself out as a first class company working with leading lawyers. If Martindale is going to get into something, it’s got to get it right. Or least get close. If you don’t know what you’re doing, get some help. Companies launch good blogs in weeks and months, not years.

To his credit, Jonathan did ask for suggestions today. Here’s my quick advice.

• The blog needs to be outside the Martindale website. Keeping it inside the website makes it look like advertising no matter what you do. You lack credibility using a medium that’s all about transparency and credibility. Your blog posts are also going to get cited very little, if at all, in blog discussion when you put something up in a very heavily branded website you call a blog.
• Create a proper user interface for the blog. You don’t get to the home page for any blog or website via a link that’s number four in a side navigation bar of 20 other links.
• Create a proper comments field. There is a reason you are not getting comments. You should not require registration. And in no case should you be attempting to collect demographic information of interest to sales people.
• Get rid of all the ads & links to your other products. There’s at least 25 links promoting various services of Martindale and LexisNexis. A blog is your mouth in a conversation, not a billboard.
• Set up proper management of your RSS feeds. Best I can tell your feeds are not getting indexed at Google Blog Search nor Technorati, the largest blog aggregators. No one can call when their name, their company’s name, or their url is mentioned in your blog. Until you do that, you are shouting in the middle of the forest, as opposed to engaging in a conversation.
• Create a proper software architecture for SEO. The present set up for title tags, headers, and more is not getting your content indexed properly at Google. Your posts will never be found on search.

You guys have other suggestions? Appears we have Martindale’s ear.