Blogging grows up : Good news for reluctant law firms

Blogging has entered the mainstream says an article from The Economist I’ve been meaning to share with you.

The article provides ammunition and hope for those of you getting law firm partners, managing partners, and executive committees to accept that you’re not nuts for advising your firm to start blogging.

The transition per the article:

…[O]ver a decade ago, blogging was the regular posting of text updates, and later photos and videos, about themselves and their thoughts to a few friends and family members. Today lots of internet users do this, only they may not think of it as blogging. Instead, they update their profile pages on Facebook, MySpace or other social networks.

And what of traditional blogs?

…[T]hese tend increasingly to belong to conventional media organisations. Nearly every newspaper, radio and television channel now runs blogs and updates them faster than any individual blogger ever could. Professional blogs such as HuffingtonPost.com for liberals (with 4.5m visitors in September) or FreeRepublic.com for conservatives (with 1m visitors in that month) have played a big role in America’s election season, according to comScore, an online-measurement firm.

It’s not just the media who have embraced blogs now that they have moved mainstream.

[C]ompanies far outside the media industry have embraced blogging as just another business tool. They are using blogs both to get corporate messages to the public and as an internal medium for staff.

And here’s why there’s hope you can get the fuddy-duddies in your firm to see that blogging for their ‘traditional law firm’ may be a good fit.

Gone… is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted… Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions.

To those who may think blogging is dying because it’s not the horse of today’s pioneers, realize that blogs are just becoming routine. I like The Economist’s analogy to the the death of PDA’s.

A decade ago, personal-digital assistants (PDAs) were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

Blogs may not be as ubiquitous as the PDA, but blogs have become routine enough in the media and traditional companies for them to be accepted by your law firm.