LexBlog

Twitter--the hugely popular "microblogging" service that makes it easy to post quick, 140-character updates--can be more useful than you would think for law professionals. In addition to your blog, you can use Twitter to connect with people, network in your community and find clients. In our Twitter Webinar, LexBlog CEO Kevin O'Keefe talks about how Twitter can be useful, and you can find most of that information here.

How can Twitter be useful?

Brand building

• As a professional, you have your own "personal brand." For lawyers, your brand is everything. You get jobs based on your personal brand, and you get clients based on your personal brand. Twitter allows you to build that personal brand quickly and easily.

Relationship Building

• You can develop very intimate relationships with people via Twitter because of its immediacy. Any work that you do with people is based on relationships, especially in legal work. You get work and referrals because you build relationships with people.

Information Sharing

• Twitter helps you share information quickly. It's one of the fastest ways of spreading information, and you can also use it to ask questions and seek information. If I wanted to ask a question right now, I could get any number of answers in a couple of minutes simply by asking the question to my Twitter followers.
• News outlets use Twitter to post breaking news and provide up-to-the-minute coverage of any subject you can think of. Follow the right accounts and it's easy to stay informed about your practice area or the news in general.

How do you begin to use Twitter?

• First, sign up for a Twitter account. It's best to use your real name as your Twitter username, as it's harder to build your brand under a psuedonym. If you meet someone from Twitter in real life, is it going to be easier to connect if they know you by your real name, or if they know you only by "Virginia Personal Injury Lawyer 10?" We think the answer is obvious.
  • Another common question that arises is whether you should create separate personal and business accounts. Just because you're talking about different things when you're at work and when you're at home doesn't mean you're a different person. Just as you might talk about things other than business at a business meeting, it's OK to talk about your personal life as well as business on the same Twitter account. Our CEO regularly talks about sports and his personal life on his Twitter, as well as legal blogging and new media issues.

Who do I 'follow', and how do I get people to follow me?

• Twitter is based on people 'following' other people. When you follow someone, you can see their updates on your Twitter stream, and they recieve a notification that you are following them in case they want to follow you back.

• You can find people to follow using the Search box on Twitter's front page, LexTweet, Legal Birds, and by looking at who people you know are following. Follow people who are tweeting about your interests or practice area, and as you start tweeting and sharing information you will slowly gain followers who are interested in that information. It's very organic.
• You can gain followers by being listed on LexTweet. If you're part of the LexBlog network and would like your Twitter account to be part of LexTweet, e-mail Kevin O'Keefe. 

What should I tweet about?

• People like to follow people who keep up on things they're interested in. If you keep up on the news, tweet links to that news so your followers are informed and impressed by what you're sharing. If you're tweeting news about your practice area, your clients who may be following you will be impressed that you're an expert on the subject.
• Retweet. It's common on Twitter to "re-tweet," or post again, something that someone you're following has already posted and you're interested in. Not only does that provide that bit of useful information to your followers, it also shows the original poster that you're paying attention to them and interested in what they're saying, helping strengthen your relationship with them.
• Your personal life. you can connect with people with personal tweets too, about your interests, family, etc. Some people might find your personal tweets more interesting than your professional ones--this can help you connect with them. You don't have to post what you're doing all day every day, but if something interesting is happening in your life, feel free to share it. Don't think about quantity, think about QUALITY.

What SHOULDN'T I tweet about?

• Don't set up your Twitter to auto-Tweet new blog entries. Some people like to set up their Twitter to automatically update whenever they post a new blog and link to it, and there are lots of software solutions to do that. However, people don't like to see lots of entries from a robot, and "canned" tweets aren't very engaging. You're free to to tweet links to your blog posts, but try to put a personal face on them, don't just use the same title or headline as you already are using on your blog.

If you have any more questions about Twitter, feel free to contact our Client Services Team.

Video: "RSS In Plain English" from CommonCraft

RSS. You may have heard about it before, but do you know about how powerful of a tool it can be for engaging with information and people online? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and that's exactly what it is. Almost every modern news website and blog syndicates their content into RSS feeds, and it's easy for you to find the sources that you're interested in and see them all in one easy place.

The first step to engaging with RSS feeds is to sign up for Google Reader, one of the best online RSS "clients." If you have a Google account already, simply sign in with it at Google.com/reader. If you don't have an account, you can create one on that page by clicking the Create an account button: . Once you've created an account, follow along here to learn how to use it effectively. If you're having trouble with using Google Reader, they have excellent documentation available at their support page.

Using Google Reader to subscribe to feeds

• Google Reader and RSS in general are tools for making content you're interested in easier to find. If you find people, websites, and blogs whose information you want to read and you start to subscribe to those certain sources, it becomes easier to find all the information that you want. You don't need to browse all the way to different individual sites every day to keep up, instead all you have to do is get the RSS feed for the content you want and it will be automatically delivered to you.
• Almost every website with any sort of dynamic content now has a RSS button that lets you subscribe to that content. Most have multiple feeds, for example NYTimes.com has 24 separate feeds related solely to "sports."
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• The orange radio square symbol you see is the universal symbol for RSS.  Any time you see it it means you can click and subscribe to content. All you have to do is take the address the button gives you, copy it, and paste it into your Google Reader account. 
  • For example: If I wanted to subscribe to the College Football feed from the New York Times, I'd right click on the link next to the RSS icon and click Copy Link Location:
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  • Next, I'd simply paste that URL into the Add a Subscription page on Google Reader:.
• Once you've added subscriptions, they can be viewed in the lower left-hand corner of your Google Reader page in the subscriptions box.
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  • Simply click any of these subscriptions to see all of the content the feed is providing with quick summaries in an easily scrollable list. It's that easy to keep up.
• You can create subscriptions to almost anything, whether it be specific sources (Like the New York Times), Twitter feeds, or even general subjects. You can use Google News or Google Blogs to run a search for a topic that you're interested in (for example, "divorce law") and then use Google Reader to "subscribe" to that subject. After that, you'll get all the new information posted on that subject right in your Reader inbox.
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How to use RSS effectively

• Once you've subscribed to lots of feeds that you're interested in, what's the next step? RSS helps you "tune in" to anything that you're interested in. Getting into professional interests on RSS can help you stay on the top of your game as a lawyer--you can eliminate "static" and only engage with what you want to engage with. You can have an incredible amount of information at your fingertips and search through it with minimal effort.
• Our CEO, Kevin O'Keefe, learns by following RSS feeds, and adjusts his  feeds as interests come up. He doesn't necessarily read everything that comes in, but instead skims across everything to see if anything catches his interest. The information can go away if you want it to (just mark the post as "read"), RSS is not obtrusive, and you can skim or do as much or as little as you please.
• You can use RSS to build connections and engage with people. For example, you could find new content from RSS feeds and post it to your blog. After you do that, E-Mail the author of the news and let them know you re-posted their information with your analysis. Now you've made a connection with them, and they might reach out to you in the future. You've started to build a meaningful relationship, and perhaps now they'll come to you if they need an expert on your subject of law. You could get your name in a newspaper without ever having to deal with PR or Marketing people.
• RSS helps you find things to blog about. If you're having some writer's block but want to get a new blog posted, browse some RSS feeds about your blog's subject. See what other people are talking about, and you're sure to find some inspiration and sources to write a blog post of your own.

For information about how readers can subscribe to YOUR blog with RSS, see our RSS Userguide Page. If you need more help, feel free to contact our Client Services Team at support@lexblog.com

In Kevin O'Keefe's speaking, he talks of the two extremes of blogging. On one end of the spectrum, you have folks like him who share what they read online, adding a comment or two to a block quote from another post. We're intelligence agents on a niche topic.

180 degrees on the other side of the spectrum, there are those who post original content without referencing other blog posts as sources. You'll find most large law firm blogs in this group.

Greg Knauss on Kottke.org defines the two groups as referential and experiential bloggers.

The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.

The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.

Most bloggers are going to be a blend of both. They'll be citing other bloggers so as to network via the blogosphere while posting solely original content when appropriate.

From a marketing perspective, the referential style has some benefits. It gets you into the Internet discussion. By blogging about others' content, your content will get cited by them. That increases your exposure to your target audience.

Aaron Wall, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert and author of The SEO Book, offers 5 SEO tips that all bloggers should know and implement in an interview with Darren Rowse.

• Attribution is important. Linking to popular bloggers and other sources is a way of getting their attention. Its like saying: "Hey I just talked about you, come see what I said." Many will ignore you, but it only takes a couple good ones liking you for your blog to spread like a weed.
• Make sure your content is formatted such that it is easy to read. Use headings and sub-headers, bulleted lists, spread things out, etc. Ultimately you need people to read and trust your work for search engines to want to trust it. Search engines follow what people do.
• Make sure your page titles are unique on a per post level with the unique part of the title element at the far left of the page title. This helps improve rankings and makes people more likely to click on your listing when you do rank. Descriptive enticing headlines will pull more clicks than boring and bland ones.
• Don't ignore internal navigation. Where possible, allow some of your categories to drive your keyword strategy. Some of your categories should be well aligned with some of your keywords. Create a top hits or featured posts section that makes it easy to find your best content. Also link back to your older posts in some of your newer posts to alert new readers to the best related posts in your archives and help search engines understand which pages are most important.
• If many people are writing about the same thing you are, try to write about something else or try to write about it from a different perspective such that people want to keep paying attention to you. Don't be afraid of being yourself. Often times our flaws are more interesting than what we are allegedly good at.

With all the bum SEO advive given to law firms, Aaron here provides sound and straight forward advice. For those of you looking to learn more about SEO, Aaron's SEO book looks like a good one. Testimonials from a prof at Wharton and Seth Godin don't come liightly.