Featuring Content on Your Blog

WordPress has a plug-in for everything.  If you are an attorney who has written posts like “top ten tips in writing  a sales contract” and you want to make sure that your readers can easily find it, then you can install a plug-in such as, “featured post with thumbnails” and allow your visitors to always find it on the homepage.

Most popular posts

If you want to give your readers a chance to rate your best bests based on traffic, then there is a plug-in that allows you feature those posts on your side-bar as well.  I’m not sure I would install both though you can.  From a layout perspective, it might be confusing.

Blogs get a call-out in Supreme Ct. decision

In the controversial decision lifting restrictions on campaign spending, the Supreme Court discusses the role of blogs in the political landscape for the first time.  Justice Kennedy asserted that the government could soon restrict blogs written by corporations while Justice Stevens in his dissent disagreed.

Wow, blogging has hit the big time, like when a vaudville act got to play the Palace Theater in New York.  Now that’s a reference at least Justice Stevens would get.

Separating your website from your blog

Kevin O’Keefe in this recent post claims that blogs don’t belong “inside” a law firm website.  What does this mean?  Does this mean that the blog shouldn’t share the same url as the website?  That it shouldn’t look from the outside world as if it is part of the law firm website?  That it should be hosted by a proprietary firm that offers a specialized blog platform?  And is this “rule” applicable to small firms which specialize in a specific niche and could use to drive traffic to their website by utilizing a blog?

Most of his ten reasons have to do with two issues:

1.  Making sure the blog has a unique name and URL because that will build the blog’s brand.  If its seen as “law firm blog,” it will not have as much credibility.  That’s as easy as a re-direct URL and doesn’t require hosting a blog on a different platform. 

2. That the blog needs a unique look and feel from the website.  That can also be done from “within” the law firm website.  See Shepard Mullin which has a “blog” page on its website that links out to the individually branded blogs.  Now LexBlog hosts these blogs but the law firm could create these blogs itself with unique URLs and names and host the blogs as well.

Its too bad that many of Kevin’s excellent point get mushed into the vague concern about blogs being “inside” a law firm website.

Improving my blog posts (and maybe yours)

This article “7 Tips to Creat Better Blog Posts” practices what it preaches and made me more aware of my practices.  In my post on “e-circles” I tried to apply some of these tips to make it easy for visitors to scan the post.  Let me know how well I did!

Defamation suits double because of social media

“But I was just reading in the current National Law Journal that 258 defamation cases are currently being tracked. The primary driver was blog content. That’s 258, compared with 110 last year. On Twitter, people are limited to 140 characters. On a blog, you can go on and on. There’s a lot of ranting. I can’t tell you of a situation that directly led to someone’s home being burglarized. If people are going away and their teenage daughter has 200 friends on Facebook and she tells them all about the family’s vacation, are all those people really friends? The likelihood definitely exists that the information could be co-opted or misused. It all seems safe enough in that kind of virtual community, but there are bad actors out there and the bad actors are always going to be out there. People need to be vigilant.”

Article

81 Fortune 500 companies have “blogs”

A recent study by UMass found that 16% of the Fortune 500 have blogs but that figure rose to 31% with the Fortune 100 corporations.   More than 90% of these blogs allow for comments and 28% connect to Twitter accounts.

The study didn’t address the personal voice aspect of blogging.   The more interesting question to me isn’t whether these companies have blogs but whether a person; CEO, VP of Sales etc. serves as the face for the blog.  And this leads to an essential question about blogging; if the author(s) of the blog isn’t an identifiable person, it is really a blog?

Full report

Blogs courtesy of your federal government

The Bush administration viewed the Internet as a necessary evil, something that needed to be placated while the Obama adminstration sees the Internet as a key component to its success not only in getting out its message but interacting with citizens, providing accountability, building trust and delivering services.

To this end, I think this page of government blogs will seem antiquated pretty soon but its a start.  Could the government start leading again on Internet innovation now that we have a President who sees the web as a critical and ever-expanding component of our daily lives?

Thumbs down on corporate blogs

According to a new survey by Forrester, only 16% trust corporate blogs.  That seems like a different question than whether people read corporate blogs.  You might read them out of desperation because you bought a company’s product or service and need any information you can get about what you’ve bought.  You will read but you won’t necessarily trust.

The big takeaway is don’t blog to promote products or expect blogging to build your corporate voice.  Blog if you already have a strong individual identity like Jeff Bezos of Amazon or a strong brand like Apple.  My opinion is that blogging is conversational so you wouldn’t talk to a corporation, you’d talk to a person or persons at the company.

Buy Now! Blogs More Influential Than Social Networks

Guess I need to be hawking something soon…

http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3631303