Blogging Best Practices

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Next week, I have the pleasure of joining my fellow co-leaders for the Social Media Special Interest Group for the Legal Marketing Association in presenting a webinar on using social media to ramp up conferences and events. My part of the session will focus on blogging, so I thought I’d offer you a preview of my remarks here! LMA members can attend the webinar by registering here. 

You may be surprised to hear that blogging can be a valuable tool for ramping up your conferences and events, but it’s actually quite a valuable one, and one I use often (if you are a regular Zen reader, you’ll be familiar with my recaps).  There are two sides to this, the attendee side, and the organizer side, and I’ll cover both. 

Why Blogging?

Why use blogging? For attendees, it’s quite simple. Blogging before and after events helps to position you as a thought leader and can help to engage you with conference speakers as well as other attendees. 

For organizers, blogging either by someone in your organization, or an outside blogger writing about your event, can help you to grow your audience, expand the reach of your event, help you connect with those who can’t be there in person, and also leverage any high profile speakers that you have. Continue Reading Blogging for Enhancing Conferences & Events

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending LexBlog’s webinar "Daily Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers" with Kevin O’Keefe (@kevinokeefe). Kevin kicked off the session by saying that there is no perfect way to blog, but that over the past ten years, he’d develop some habits that work for him. 

The session covered: 

  • Essence of blogging
  • Listening tools
  • Posting
  • Complementary Social Media
  • Habits of LexBloggers

Continue Reading Daily Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers – A Webinar Recap

Despite being a long-time blogger and follower of Kevin O’Keefe on social media, I always learn something new when I attend one of his webinars.  Today, I was able to participate in "Blogging: Greater Returns with Less Effort," which was excellent and I’d like to share my recap with you. A full recording of the webinar will be available in the coming days on LexBlog’s YouTube channel.

Usual Starting Point

Kevin began at the beginning, so to speak, with the questions that he normally gets at the outset of a firm or attorney beginning their foray into blogging: 

  • How frequently should lawyers blog? 
  • Should we have a group blog to take the weight off of one person? 
  • Should we have an associate write the blog? 
  • Should we have a ghostwriter? 

Continue Reading Blogging: Greater Returns with Less Effort – A LexBlog Webinar

I’m full of the recaps lately, and I promise I’ve got some more original commentary coming up for you all as we get into fall. I’ve mentioned before that I love September, and the feeling of a fresh start that it gives me. For that reason, now is as good a time as ever to take a look at what you’re doing in your blogging – to see what’s been successful for you and what you can tweak. 

With that in mind, I bring you some excellent tips from LexBlog’s own Colin O’Keefe and Helen Pitlick – and I don’t say that just because they so kindly mentioned this blog. It was a great refresher for me, and whether you’re just thinking about getting into blogging, or you’ve been at it for a while, you’ll find something of value in their comments. Since there are a lot of great tips here, and I want  you to think about them a bit, I’m splitting this into two posts – the next one will follow after the holiday weekend here in the States.Continue Reading Blogging Best Practices for Lawyers – A LexBlog Webinar Recap Part I

In Monday’s post recapping Adrian Lurssen & John Hellerman’s recent webinar, we talked about their advice to see the world from your audience’s point of view. Today, we’ll look at their next point, to think like an editor.

Adrian kicked off this section with a quote from Barger & Wolen’s Heather Morse:

What are your competitors writing about? What new cases have been decided? What news articles are trending? What are the other bloggers saying? Any new legislative actions? I subscribe to numerous RSS feeds and have them all categorized so I can quickly scan to see what’s happening in our industry sectors. I can then relay story ideas to our team of bloggers.”

This is excellent, excellent advice. Heather is suggesting that you use various sources to stay on top of what’s happening in the marketplaces that your attorneys work in, and then filter through to them the story ideas that they can write about. You can then send them follow up topics.Continue Reading Think Like an Editor – A Webinar Recap