Single lawyer or group law blog? Benefits to each.

Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media, Inc., Lisa Barone, had a good post this week in which she weighed the plusses and minuses of single-author versus multi-author corporate blogs.

I’m always getting the question from law firms,  “Do we do a group blog or do we do single lawyer blog?” With lawyers in law firms often segmented into groups by areas of the law or the industries they serve, you can see why the question arises.

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to structure your firm’s blogs. Single or multi-author is something that you’ll need to decide on a case by case.

Here’s some factors Barone shares (with some paraphrasing by me) when doing a corporate blog that that you’ll want to consider in making the decision of going single lawyer or group blog.

Benefits of Single-Author Blogs

• Strong personal relationship with your audience: The power of the single-author blog comes from the strong personal connection the author is able to create with readers – and a law blog is all about accelerating relationships. When it’s a single voice people are hearing, they learn to trust it, to relate to it, and to recognize it. With a group blog, it becomes more focused on the knowledge of the group than the specific person. And while that’s not a bad thing (at all), it does cut out some of that personality and intimacy of forming a relationship with a single person. As a result, it may take longer for people to come to trust and feel connected to your blog.
• Unified voice: Where many company blogs fall on their face is in their inability to develop a unified voice. A voice that speaks for the company, but also speaks to readers. When there’s a single author on the blog and that person has been handpicked for their voice, you start to develop a presence that is recognizable to your audience. This is what will keep them coming back and what brands your blog.
• Total ownership: When there’s one person responsible for your blogs success, it helps keep them motivated and determined to make it a success. Because if the blog fails, then they failed. With multi-author blogs, it’s sometimes easy for to ignore that editorial calendar and start phoning in their efforts because no one feels responsible for the blog’s success.
• Stronger internal linking: You know when it’s really easy to reference or promote something that’s already been published on your blog or site? When you’re the person who wrote it. When you know that this piece of content actually exists. With many authors, sometimes you won’t know that there’s a post in your archives that perfectly explains what you’re trying to sum up. And that can lead to loss opportunities for exposure and/or ranking.

Benefits of Multi-Author/Group Blogs

• Build a team of experts: It doesn’t matter how skilled that one person is — they can’t possibly be an expert on everything.  That means your blog is going to be limited in the number of topics that you can authoritatively cover. With a team of bloggers dedicated to sharing their expertise, you’re able to cover a lot more ground and brand specific people as the go-to person for that topic. By their very nature lawyers in a group will each have unique interests and thus follow different sources and subjects, By engaging different sources sharing different information, the depth and breadth of a blog is greater.
• More people for readers to relate to: If your blogger is outspoken, a segment of your audience will dislike her and immediately declare her rude, arrogant and elitist. If your blogger is well-mannered and polite to everyone, a different segment of your audience will label him gutless and without opinion. With one person blogging, you can’t win. But by opening your blog to many authors, you can find different writing styles that will speak to different segments of your audience.
• More hands on deck: With just one person at the wheel, it’s impossible to think you’ll be able to keep up with the posting schedule of a multi-author blog. More writers means your blog doesn’t go silent just because someone got sick, got married, went on vacation, or are simply swamped in client matters. Instead of panicking or finding someone new to blog, you can just insert another writer who your audience is already familiar with.
• Get in Google News: If you want to be included in Google News results, one of the big sticking points is that you have multiple authors on your team to help you earn the needed street cred. One author? You’re probably not going to accepted for inclusion.

We have over 1,000 blogs and 7,000 lawyer authors on the LexBlog Network. Thus we have a lot of group blogs. Though group blogs may lose some of the ‘personal connection,’ I see a lot of practice area or industry specific group blogs doing a heck of a nice job.

The key to a group blog is not to make it feel like it’s just kicking in an article from each lawyer know and again so you lose the blog style of writing. A blog post is not an article and a blog is not a newsletter.

Key to a good group law blog is for each of the lawyers to learn what it means to blog versus just wring an article and emailing it an ‘editor’ and having them post it to the blog.

At the same time, the LexBlog Network has a wealth of single author blogs published by lawyers who have not felt it to burdensome to keep their blog current. They understand it’s quality over quantity.

Bottom line, you need to weigh the plusses and minuses and decide what’s best for you and the lawyers involved.