Back to the future : Facebook plus blog equals AOL

Feeling like it’s back to the future with my use of Facebook. I am archiving and expanding on my exchanges on Facebook and archiving them on my home base — my blog.

You see I discovered the net with AOL as a practicing lawyer back in 1996. I answered people’s questions on the message boards in the areas of law I practiced. I was a plaintiff’s trial lawyer so I knew a decent amount about injury, med mal, workers comp, and employment claims.

I was answering about 4 or 5 questions a day. The give and take was wonderful, no question people appreciated the help. They passed my answers around and AOL soon made me the community leader for legal.

But there was no where for people to browse or search my answers. There was no home base where people could see my care, passion, and experience in the area.

So I built a website whose primary purpose was to archive all of these Q & A’s. We (marketing intern from local university) built out a taxonomy by subject so people could browse for what they were looking for – liability, damages, source of collection, workers comp, sexual harassment etc.

People found my website by seeing my name out on AOL and presumably went there because they trusted me because of what I was doing to help folks at AOL. They also found me/us because sites like Excite, no Google then, indexed my site and made the content available on a search of their taxonomy.

Today, I too leave my website to network with people. I am using Facebook more and more for good exchanges, answering questions, and sharing long form thoughts like this.
But Facebook does not provide a search, nor does it provide me with a home base to store my ideas. Ideas I want to store so I can find them, so people can find them, and Google can index them and make them available on a Google search.

I also need a home base where people can go and assess who is this guy, O’Keefe? Is he a person of substance? Could I like him? Could I trust him? Do I like the way he talks? Is he knowledgeable, passionate, and experienced in the areas he talks about? Would I hire him and his company?

People cannot answer those questions by going to Facebook or LinkedIn. But they could answer those questions by looking at my blog.

So I will pull from discussions, ideas, engagement, questions, and thoughts from Facebook for blog posts. Not exactly like AOL Q & A archives but the same concept.
A nice benefit about adding content to your blog like this is that blog posts are fast. Facebook is free flowing and fast discussion. It’s also real, conversational, and sincere.

Go out and network online, whether at Facebook or elsewhere, to build trust, relationships, and word of mouth. Archive that activity at a home base (blog) to benefit you and others.

It’s the type of thing lawyers ought to be doing. Networking online to connect with the people we serve, whether consumers, small business people, executives, or in-house counsel.

Bringing that networking back to a blog and the networking itself may well be the most effective form of business dvelopment you can do.

PS – Though I am spending a lot of time on Facebook I still need to find time to use LInkedIn for networking and will continue to do true blogging at my blog.