TechnoLawyer: Law Firm Marketing/Publications/Web Sites

Because it has generated so much controversy, we have posted in full Joe Hartley's critique of legal blogs. This article ran earlier last week in our TechnoFeature newsletter.

Synopsis
Legal blogs have become the latest rage, but are they worth all the time and effort? In this article, Joe Hartley explores the role of blogs in a law firm's business plan — especially as compared to a traditional Web site. The results of his investigation, which consisted of a review of dozens of blogs and interviews with several legal bloggers, may surprise you.

On June 21st, we published a TechnoFeature by Joe Hartley that questioned the use of blogs as a legal marketing tool. As you might expect, several legal bloggers responded. The always insightful Bob Ambrogi penned the most detailed and fair-minded response in his article, Blogging's Contrarians.

My quick take on legal blogs as a marketing tool is that they can drive traffic to your site. In this respect, they can serve as a "search engine optimization" tool. But while you can pretty much get indexed in all the major blog search engines overnight, it will take some work to get indexed in the search engines that most people use to find lawyers — Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. Once your blog gets indexed by the major search engines, you'll need to figure out how to convert that traffic into "qualified leads." In short, blogs can work, but they require work (both pre- and post-launch).

I personally think blogs work better for publicity than for generating leads. In my experience (thus far), an online ad campaign with optimized landing pages performs much better at delivering qualified leads. Yes, ad campaigns cost money, but well-designed ad campaigns usually pay off — and, unlike writing a blog, law firms can outsource an ad campaign. As I've said many times, today's world requires a multi-channel approach to marketing — you cannot rely on just one marketing channel to grow your law firm's business.

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Coming June 21, 2005 to TechnoFeature: Legal blogs have become the latest rage, but are they worth all the time and effort? In this article, Joe Hartley explores the role of blogs in a law firm's business plan — especially as compared to a traditional Web site. The results of his investigation, which entailed reviewing dozens of blogs and interviewing several legal bloggers, may surprise you.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming June 14, 2005 to TechnoFeature: Tired of thanking your clients with a traditional holiday card at the end of the year? Expressing your gratitude in a unique way not only speaks volumes of your professional and personal demeanor, but also separates your firm from the rest. Let career expert Wendy Werner help your firm show its appreciation in a fresh and sincere way.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Tuesdays, TechnoFeature is a weekly newsletter that contains in-depth articles written by leading legal technology and practice management experts. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

Coming June 10, 2005 to Fat Friday: Todd Hill explains why Linux is not ready for use by law firms, Frank Tobolsky reviews Litera's Change-Pro document comparison software, Francis Mendez reviews FileCenter document management software, Kath Gilliam reviews an e-mail newsletter publishing tool with high deliverability rates, and Martin Dean explains how to transform a folder of documents into a PDF archive. Don't miss this issue.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Fridays, Fat Friday is a weekly newsletter that features a grab bag full of genuinely useful product reviews and tips on a wide variety of topics. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. Please subscribe now.

These days, many e-mail programs have a very annoying "feature" — they don't load remote images in HTML e-mail messages (images that load from a Web server, not those attached to a message). Instead, you must manually click to download the images in each such message. This "feature" supposedly protects you by preventing spammers from detecting that you've opened their messages. Fine, but many of us don't receive much spam, yet some e-mail programs don't allow us to turn this "feature" off.

Unfortunately, these programs also block remote cascading style sheets (CSS). Nowadays, many law firms and especially publishers use CSS when designing Web pages. Thanks to CSS, you need not place design elements in each Web page, but can instead simply refer to a file with all the design specifications, including font information.

All well and good, but if you refer to a remote CSS in your HTML e-mail newsletters, you risk not having your e-mail newsletters render properly thanks to the image-blocking feature noted above. To make matters worse, even embedding CSS in your newsletter carries a risk because some of the online e-mail services (such as Gmail) strip embedded CSS from e-mail newsletters.

For this reason, I recommend that you use <font> tags and other basic HTML formatting code within your HTML e-mail newsletters. Also, use <br> tags instead of <p> tags for line breaks as the former will preserve fonts. While using these tags will add to the complexity of your code, at least your newsletters will look as intended regardless of whether your recipients download images or not.

We have always used <font> tags and <br> tags in the HTML version of TechnoLawyer newsletters (most of our members elect to receive our newsletters in plain text though, not HTML).

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear first in TechnoGuide, and later here in TechnoLawyer Blog. TechnoGuide, which is free, also contains exclusive content. You can subscribe here.

Coming May 16, 2005 to TechnoGuide:

The Floating Law Firm; Legal Salaries; Interwoven &amp; Time Matters; Much More
In this issue of TechnoGuide, Neil Squillante ponders the offshore outsourcing of legal work, and provides a tip for law firms that publish e-mail newsletters. This issue also contains Quips about WordPerfect and PDF bates stamping, and Questions about legal salaries, Interwoven, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Time Matters, and Virtual PC.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Mondays, TechnoGuide is a biweekly newsletter that features Quips, TechnoEditorials, Industry News, Real-Life Questions submitted by your peers in the legal profession, and the Question of the Week. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. You can subscribe here.

Scratch a blog and you'll find an RSS feed (a.k.a. XML feed). An RSS feed enables you to monitor a blog or other RSS-enabled source without having to visit the Web site. Currently, most RSS feeds consist of raw text and links so when you use them, you miss out on the site's Web design.

Hence, my prediction — Web design will eventually find its way into RSS feeds, especially those of commercial publications. Many RSS purists don't like this idea, arguing that RSS should consist solely of content. To which I say: Isn't design an integral component of content? If design didn't matter, we wouldn't bother hiring Web designers, but we do. We all want to control the look and feel of our Web sites so why not our feeds as well? Shouldn't feed reading provide the same experience as Web browsing?

Just as the purists of an earlier era could not stop the commercialization of the Web or HTML in e-mail, they will not be able to stop what some call "CSS in RSS" (CSS stands for "cascading style sheets," which provide instructions to Web browsers about the design of a Web page).

If you would like a glimpse of the future, copy and paste the RSS feed for MarketingVox (an excellent online marketing news blog) into Thunderbird (select "Account Settings" under the Tools menu, and then add a new "RSS News & Blogs" account to get started). See below for a screenshot. Also, check out this Joi Ito blog post and the ensuing discussion.

What do you think about CSS in RSS?

About TechnoEditorials
A TechnoEditorial is the vehicle through which we opine and provide tips of interest to managing partners, law firm administrators, and others in the legal profession. TechnoEditorials appear here in TechnoLawyer Blog and also in our TechnoGuide newsletter, but they appear in TechnoGuide first. TechnoGuide also contains exclusive content.

Coming May 2, 2005 to TechnoGuide:

The Next Big Thing in Blogs; Maximize Your Google Searches; Much More
In this issue of TechnoGuide, Neil Squillante discusses the next big thing in blogs, and explains how to maximize your Google searches. This issue also contains Quips about the Department of Homeland Security, KKL Software's eZClean metadata removal utility, and uninterruptible power supplies. This issue's Questions from Your Peers seek advice on bates stamping, laser printers, PDA synchronization, Rainmaker, real estate software, and VoIP. All that plus the Question of the Week.

How to Receive this Newsletter
Published on Mondays, TechnoGuide is a biweekly newsletter that features Quips, TechnoEditorials, Industry News, Real-Life Questions submitted by your peers in the legal profession, and the Question of the Week. Like all of our newsletters, it's free. You can subscribe here.

TechnoLawyer publisher Neil Squillante participated in MarketingProfs' Thought Leaders Summit on E-Mail Marketing on April 18, 2005. Among the topics Neil addressed: the hidden gotchas of the CAN-SPAM Act, the CAN-SPAM Act's multi-list suppression loophole, the difference between a mediocre e-mail campaign and a remarkable one, his top three most effective e-mail marketing tactics, and the impact of RSS on e-mail marketing.

The other participants in this roundtable discussion included Chris Baggott of ExactTarget, Eric Kirby of DoubleClick, Rok Hrastnik of Studio Moderna, Chris Price of Permission Marketing, Jim Sterne of Target Marketing, and Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research. Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts moderated the event, and will soon publish an article summarizing the discussion.

Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, listened in and commented as follows in her weekly column:

"[On April 18th], I participated in the third MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit, and... well, WOW....

"My role in the summit was limited — in fact, I was there only to introduce moderator Stephan Spencer. But I found myself hanging around to listen to the discussion, completely awed by the panelists' level of knowledge.

"The concept behind our Thought Leaders Summit is this: several such leaders (in this case, seven of them) gather virtually to discuss an issue in roundtable format. Yesterday, leaders from organizations like Forrester and DoubleClick, along with those with names familiar to the MarketingProfs audience (Jim Sterne, Rok Hrastnik and Neil Squillante) debated the current and future state of email marketing.

"I had no idea what to expect from the Thought Leaders Summit. But these panelists knew their stuff, and their discussion was rich.... The transcript will be available in our Premium library soon.

Interested in E-Mail Marketing?
If you're a lawyer or law firm marketing manager, check out MarketingProfs. If you're a legal vendor, do the same and also download a copy of our Media Kit. TechnoLawyer pioneered permission e-mail marketing in the legal market, and remains the leader today.

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