Investment in technology, lack of education holding firms back on blogging : Accenture report

80% of law firms consider blogs and other social media an important or extremely important part of their overall marketing strategy. 94% of large law firms ‘plan’ on using blogs as part of their marketing initiatives. This information per the LexisNexis Survey on the use of social media in legal services marketing.

With those numbers, you’d expect to see an explosion in the number of new law blogs. What’s holding some law firms and attorneys back?

An October Accenture report on Making Social Media Pay provides some answers.

While business-to-consumer companies are harnessing the power of social media to help drive performance, business-to-business companies have lagged. Per the Accenture report, the two biggest ‘perceived barriers’ to adoption of social media are the perceived need for investment in technology/tools and the needed skills to manage social media.

LexBlog has found the same perceived barriers to entry for law firm blogging. The flip side is that those barriers to entry are what have attracted so many firms to LexBlog (65 of the AmLaw 200).

Rather than make the additional investment in technology (solutions and people) and attempt to educate their people on proper and effective blogging, law firms have outsourced technology and education to LexBlog.

I’ll confess I did not have the benefit of the Accenture report or another study when I founded LexBlog and developed our business model in 2004. But it was my belief that rather make the investment in blog technology and know-how and try to figure things out on their own, I believed law firms would look to a reliable, cost-effective, and trustworthy partner which I saw as LexBlog.

Despite free blogging solutions and the feasibility of doing things in-house, I expect the trend of law firms outsourcing their blogging design, development, technology, and education to continue. It’s born out in Accenture’s report.

As law firms find and develop comfort with credible outsourced solutions, you can expect to see the number of attorneys and law firms blogging to grow significantly.