[cross-posted at Slaw.ca]

To date, LinkedIn has only offered a handful of sidebar applications that users can install.  They’ve been very picky, and only a few are aligned with vertical industries. Even then, it’s obvious that industry apps must have a broader application and be applicable to the general business community.  Late last night, the rollout began for Legal Updates on LinkedIn and it’s a huge win for my friends at JD Supra.

I’ve written about JD Supra before, so I won’t spell out their core offering for law firms.  They are, however, a company that’s been built around constructing web-based channels for content delivery.  With 70 million business members, the embedding of JD Supra functionality into LinkedIn – not sure how else to describe it, it’s quite seamless -  has to be their biggest win yet.  Looking at past partnering, and the LinkedIn effect for companies like Slideshare and Tripit, the future must seem limitless in San Francisco this morning!

I’m going to offer a bullet point summary below, but I’d like to point out Bob Ambrogi’s post this morning. It’s a thorough review, complete with screen shots.

Here’s my ‘reader’s digest’ summary, including some notes from the preview Jordan Furlong and I had on Monday:

• JD Supra and LinkedIn accounts are tethered – you can upload and distribute from either location.
• Without any promotion last night, signups were rolling in fast. This is going to be big.
• You can display your JD Supra collection on your LinkedIn profile for free.
• It’s also free to follow the content of others, and sharing your documents within your network’s homepage update stream.
• Distributing documents towards targeted professional groups across LinkedIn costs: $75/mo.  Account upgrades are possible in LinkedIn or on JD Supra.
• Current premium accounts at JD Supra will be grandfathered, and distribution included at current pricing.
• The Legal Updates application smartly uses the meta-data from both websites – so content is automatically matched to users by industry or profession.
• LinkedIn looks like it might target more vertical industries in future.
• It’s an exclusive arrangement. So this will be the only searchable, browsable repository of legal information on LI.
• With 70M LI users available, JD Supra is likely the largest legal content distribution network.

An article on A List Apart recently caught our attention here at Stem.  R. Stephen Gracey’s post Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs wonders whether FAQ sections on websites actually work. While he acknowledges their popularity, he’s got a beef with them because they rarely answer the questions he actually has.

Gracey’s post offers some solid advice for good FAQs, including:

• don’t patronize/talk down to the visitor.
• Don’t include FAQs just for the sake of including FAQs.
• Keep them short & sweet.
• And most importantly, use real FAQs: questions people actually ask.

The post also quotes Jakob Neilson, who says “Too many websites have FAQs that list questions the company wished users would ask.”  Gracey concludes that ideally, if there are in fact legitimate questions that your users frequently asked, you shouldn’t just default to dumping them into an FAQ:

“FAQs are ubiquitous and familiar and occasionally helpful. They have a place in your content strategy, but use them carefully: if your users are asking the same questions frequently, consider how you can improve your content before reaching for a FAQ.”

At Stem, we’ve helped several clients develop custom FAQ collections [see: Ron Chapman's Florida Criminal Records FAQ, or Jonathan Rosenfeld's Bed Sore FAQ], and we agree with the majority of Gracey’s advice.  It’s important not to view FAQ collections as thinly-veiled sales pitches;  but rather an opportunity for lawyers to establish themselves and their knowledge in a professional manner.

Gracey’s advice is also somewhat distinguishable: the FAQs he refers to are likely from companies selling products and services.  The legal industry also sells service, but it’s the intangible product, expertise, that the user is really after.  The fact that most complex questions can’t be fully articulated in an FAQ item, or a blog post for that matter, helps make it a formidable style of content marketing.  And like other forms of content, there is a challenge: you must deliver enough quality information within the FAQ items to draw follow-up email questions and inbound links. Failing to do so, by the same measure, won’t have the marketing impact that most desire.

Some of the tasks and suggestions we’ve ‘tested’ when developing legal FAQ collections have included:

• Asking lawyers to put themselves in the potential client’s shoes.  What issues keep them up at night? What key industry changes are on the horizon?
• To that end, we’ve often assembled question collections (answers redacted) from other FAQs on the same subject (including non-legal collections, which often prove very valuable) and presented those questions as a starting point.
• Asking lawyers what questions they find themselves answering again and again?
• And related, encouraging them to keep a running list for future updates to the collection.
• Encouraging lawyers to give away their knowledge on topics they could never justify billing for.  Even the most basic questions (coming from the right client) can require a time investment. Similar to forwarding an ‘introductory article’ on a topic, an on-point legal FAQ can describe an issue in short order.  The fact it serves as online marketing collateral means your content is multitasking.
• Finding non-lawyer experts to help formulate potential questions. These individuals are often available either in-house (especially with boutique firms), or by tapping into the lawyer’s industry-oriented business relationships.
• Execute keyword and other web-based research to find out what topics are being searched for by the target audience. We tend to run keyword volume reports for any online publishing initiative.

We also encourage lawyers to stay away from the types of questions Gracey and Neilson dislike: questions lawyers wish their clients would ask. These include strictly self-serving questions like “Why should I hire you as my lawyer?” and “What can your firm offer me that others can’t?”

Of course, we can’t forget the money question: Where’s the value? Going beyond FAQs as an opportunity to show off lawyer expertise,  FAQ collections are a solid tactic to publish in a meaningful way.  When a collection stands alone, it can become a valuable addition to the lawyer’s group of web properties.  It also helps the lawyer become better aligned with the subject matter they most want to become associated with.  Especially for lawyers with a niche or boutique practice, content depth online can’t be underestimated. From an SEO point of view, this depth not only addresses the long-tail type searches, but over time, will help create the authority and trust qualities that are so important for competitive search terms.

Finally, I’d like to address the strong relationship legal FAQ collections can have with law blogs.  Consider the interplay, and how FAQs can:

• serve as a starting point for a blog discussion, without re-hashing factual details,
• act as a ‘best of’ collection for a blogger’s most important posts or an important sub-topic collection, or
• help remove non-opinion based posts from a lawyer’s blog.

FAQ collections do require maintenance, and ideally, authors are adding new Q&A sets as part of their publishing routine.  For those who just can’t see themselves blogging,  FAQs might also prove a viable alternative.  The overall time commitment is about the same, but FAQs can be less opinion-driven, and don’t have constant issue of post currency.  Those issues aside, I can’t imagine not pairing an FAQ collection together with a lawyer blog – the combined value, IMO, is worth more than the solo publishing efforts.

Many thanks to my colleague Emma Durand-Wood who’s helped me hash through these issues and co-draft this post. We both think  Legal FAQ collections are a publishing tool with room to evolve.  In the future, we’ll explore this topic in more depth, along with tactics for publishing and distribution.

Heather Morrison of the CNW Group, formerly Canada News Wire, released a 11-pg report yesterday titled Canadian Law Firms and their Use of Social Media. I am quoted in it, so please excuse the vanity reference.

The report itself offers a nice overview of the benefits of social media investment. That’s important, but the part I appreciated most was the focus on relationship building. Great relationships are a key driver of success for any law firm (or lawyer’s) search strategy. The reason? Relationships not only improve our network of contacts, which alone is a worthy goal, but they form the basis of the link network behind most firm websites.

Links, remember, are ultimately a form of online currency and a driver of what many people refer to as ‘google juice’ – a measure of trust, and better search rankings.

At one point in the paper, I’m also quoted saying that firms ‘not skip steps‘. Let me explain that further. Broken down, I often consider these three components:

• content – eg. blogs, papers, newsletters;
• distribution channels – eg. twitter, email, RSS, JD Supra; and
• relationships - either mirroring & codifying one’s existing relationships with links, or driving new relationships with social media;

Most firms (not all) have content at least partially covered. They may be sending out paper or email newsletters (distribution) and connecting with existing clients. In the past, that’s what firms had to work with. Could they now have more forms of content? or distribute via more channels? Absolutely, but it’s hard to argue that having those basic pieces functioning (think: 80:20 rule, existing clients…) didn’t create some success.

But this 2/3 element scenario, also created a huge gap in search marketing. Without relationships driving links, firms weren’t creating any kind of an ‘after effect‘; where their published content continues to rank well in the search engines, and continues to drive new readers creating exposure. But with Social Media participation (I include blogger-to-blogger relationships here), and creating new relationships with the associated links, firms are often able to make their publishing work harder & longer. In the cases of extremely popular content, years after the date of publication.

As the years pass, and a firm’s volume of substantive publishing increases, so too does this ‘after effect‘.  And the driver in all this is pretty consistent. Having a solid network of ‘web friends’, who are also web publishers, is one tough combination.

There are lots of other benefits to social media usage, which are covered in the report. But that’s my take on the why SM participation reflects positively on search marketing.

If a blog post doesn’t receive any comments, does that mean you struck out?

Actually, it’s quite common for blog posts not to receive comments. In the legal industry, and especially with lawyer blogs, we see it all the time.  The truth is the majority of online readers are lurkers. It’s called the 90-9-1 Rule, where 90% of your readers won’t respond in any way, 9% will contribute and participate once in a while, and 1% will do the vast majority of digital interaction.

This can be a difficult phenomenon to explain, but it hardly means that you haven’t connected with your intended audience.  Remember: the more focused the subject, the smaller the target audience. Apply the  90-9-1 rule to most lawyer blog audiences, and it’s a recipe for a comment-free wasteland.  I also think it’s quite unfair to compare a lawyer’s blog comment numbers to the more news-y blogs out there. You can’t compare a lawyer’s substantive commentary to ATL or ABA Journal.

Two important points:

1. Some blog posts just don’t warrant a comment — case in point, see my last post on the sudden abundance of twitter experts our there. It’s received zero comments, but 41 retweets and 1500+ visitors. The post was a fun lark, but clearly not worth commenting on.  That doesn’t mean it didn’t strike a chord or find an audience.
2. There’s always a chance for commentary to connect with readers in the future — Another example: back in 2006 I wrote the Top 10 Uses of RSS in Law Firms.   Three weeks passed and it might have had 30 readers. It subsequently got picked up by Dave Winer, and took on a life of its own.  To this day, that post drives more visitors to my personal blog than anything I’ve written there since. … Side comment: This story is also one of the reasons I still believe in search marketing and the power of positioning content in front of audiences. Blog commentary & search exposure combined continue to have a long-term impact on my own content marketing.

Bottom line: Are comments nice?  Of course they are, but you have to see the big picture.  As most experienced bloggers will tell you, comments are only one form of feedback. Don’t forget to also watch:  site traffic (both post specific, and general trends),  social media mentions, email feedback, mentions on other blogs, and general increases in your profile (eg. offers for speaking engagements) & your personal network (eg. more industry-based friends & contacts).  You need to consider all the available metrics as a group.  Micro-measuring comment counts (or even counting interactions post-by-post…) isn’t going to cut it in face of the 90-9-1 rule.

An item just posted on the Stem news page: JD Supra announced its new law centers this morning; a feature that should add both context & browsablity to their community-driven collections.

The law centers are broken down into four core divisions: personal law, business law, government law, and law practice management; with each major area then divided into related sub-centers.

What I like generally about this addition, is that JD Supra seems much easier for the casual visitor. If you’re trying to track down an employment lawyer or personal injury lawyer, there’s now a single location I can point people to (or bookmark) that shows the latest postings, and who are leading contributors.

I also like the top-5 contributor list on each page’s sidebar, which is based on the publishing track record within the category. The top-10 contributor list on the homepage is great for larger groups or big contributors, but these top-5 lists are a great way to stand out with 20 to 50 documents.

And if I put my SEO hat on for a moment, the practice centers also offer a host of new landing page opportunities for topical searches from the search engines. Making legal content more accessibile is JD Supra’s goal, and the additional search exposure adds to that offering.  I expect the link value from the practice centers will distribute evenly across the site, and more importantly, into each of the content items. Both the contributor profile pages and the content pages should see an ongoing benefit.

But probably the biggest difference for me, is the balance JD Supra now has between search and browse. As many of my fellow law librarians can tell you, information seekers often vary in terms of their search-vs-browse orientation.  Not everyone is the same in that regard.  What JD Supra had been lacking, was the functionality to support the browsing style.  The practice centers, in my view, fill that gap and create a more complete service.

Congratulations to everyone at JD Supra!

This past Sunday I published my latest Web Law Connected column over at Slaw, titled “The Formal-to-Informal Rule of Lawyer Web Publishing“.

The title of month’s article is a bit of a misnomer, and my suggestion of a rule is a mental guideline more than anything. The basic premise is to be careful about taking raw unfiltered conversational exchanges online, and automating (RSS imports, Widgets) their re-publication to your business network. As stated in the article:

My formal-to-informal rule is simply that it’s always ok to route formal commentary to informal and conversational web tools; but that unfiltered, informal, or conversational tools should be considered a place of final destination.

For those who consistently stay on message, don’t mix their personal & business networks, or see little use for flippant or sarcastic comments, having a content routing strategy may make little difference. Unfortunately, I seem to fail those tests on a number of fronts. :)  But that’s ok. The important message here is self-reflection in an honest way, and recognizing when fail-safe measures are required.

As I said at the end of the article, I don’t know if everyone else needs a rule… but it makes sense to me. And if it raises awareness of potential problems with content routing, especially for those lawyers with more conservative clientele, then mission accomplished.

As an aside, I’ve altered my personal publishing routine, and will now try to coordinate new article releases to Stem’s JD Supra account. The rationale, for those interested, is two-fold. First, Canadian published content isn’t treated as nicely in the US search results (a.k.a. geo targeting), so I’m attempting to improve cross-border search exposure; and second, I want those JD Supra syndication partnerships to help increase content distribution.

TechCrunch published an important post yesterday about the amount of time we invest in Twitter. Using Robert Scoble as an example, this post demonstrates a valuable lesson for everyone. There’s a risk involved when we disproportionately web-publish to another company’s service. The cost is that we increasingly ignore our personal web-publishing efforts.

While this may seem strange coming from the guy who penned Lawyer Marketing with Twitter, the issue is not about twitter, facebook, linkedin or friendfeed. The issue is our ability to create a balanced approach.

Earlier this year, D’Arcy Norman wrote about social network sharecropping. The idea that we are dumping our thoughts, pictures, notable links and relationships into the hands of others. And let’s make no bones about it, that’s what’s happening. When we publish to servers that are not ours, we are giving away control. But at what price?

The issue as I see it, is not that we’re using these services. But rather, that we are participating in an unbalanced way. In the legal sphere, my big concern is for those lawyers are engaging these tools without first having a personal web presence. That’s right, a blog!

Using social networks and social media without a blog to tie these services together, is simply a bad move. Especially for lawyers, who may be starting late in the game, you cannot skip steps. Guess what Connie Crosby did last year when her twitter account was accidentally cancelled? She blogged about it, and more important, she got results! Not having a blog means you are not a player. If you lack that personal publishing presence, that means you don’t have a voice on the modern web. It’s a position of web marketing weakness.

The other problem I see is the ‘no follow’ trend of the big social networks. Most of these services, including Twitter, have cut off the outbound link value of their links, including individual profile pages. That means, while many believe they are contributing quality content to these services and getting a valuable link back to their firm or company website, this is increasingly not the case.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way the ‘nofollow’ attribute or link popularity was intended to work. Link popularity is supposed to reward quality content & the people who create it.  Similarly, the ‘no follow’ attribute was created to prevent blog comment spam. But now combined, these two features are used by the big social networks to create black holes of link value. Draw you’re own conclusions here, but either way, the loss of publishing control puts the content creator at a disadvantage. At the whim of a third party, who may delete your account at a moment’s notice, and without recourse.

Now what all this adds up to, is that web publishers should own their own land (ie. websites & blogs). This is an extremely important point for lawyers & law firms. You wouldn’t let an outside company own your firm domain name, right? You protect it! It’s the same lesson here.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t participate in these communities. You should participate! But in a balanced way, and not at the expense of establishing a personal blog. Frankly, twitter without a blog is just playing around. If you are using social media to participate and build a reputation, you need to back it up with some substance. And though some may disagree, my take is that substance frequently requires more that 140 characters.

I understand that blogs are hard work, and that twitter is easier. So what? If you’re going to put hours into this, the last thing you want to do is take the easy way out. As the TechCrunch post says, blogging  delivers those memorable pieces that you (and others!) will refer to for years to come.

It’s an easy equation really. Blog something of value first, and then go chat with your friends about it.

This month’s Texas Bar Journal inlcudes a republication of my article, It’s Not the Tool, It’s You! Many thanks to the TBJ’s technology editor, John Sirman, for picking it up from Slaw‘s RSS feed.

It’s also worth noting from a web-marketing perspective. The next time someone says blogging & RSS aren’t valuable marketing tactics, consider routing them over to this post.  This is the fourth article I’ve had published by the Texas Bar Journal, and each was picked up via personal web publishing. The State of Texas has been extremely kind to Stem on the client front too, introducing us to both McClanahan Myers Espey LLP and Hissey Kientz LLP.  Two top quality firms we’re looking forward to working with in 2009!

My point being … I don’t just talk the talk. The vast majority of Stem’s own marketing efforts involve web-publishing and content marketing.  If I slow down on the content flow, especially when things get busy as they are now, then Stem pays the price. Email inquiries slow, and the phone stops ringing.  Conversely, when I jump back into the fray, good business things happen.

It’s not always that simple. But lesson learned: sometimes it is.

I’ve come to the realization lately that a number of articles I’ve writen for my Web Law Connected column over at Slaw, don’t always get exposed well in the US market. Considering about 70% of Stem clients originate from south of the border, I’m going to call it for what it is – a  bit of a blunder on my part.

Fair enough, but this was also clearly a fixable situation. As a result, we spent some time yesterday trying to rectify things by uploading some of the backlog to the Stem JD Supra collection. And because of some nice comments from twitter friends, it seems worth capturing the titles & links to those articles in a blog post.

The five articles that went up yesterday were:

• Ethics & Legal Web Marketing: Never Lower Your Standards!
• Legal Web Marketing in a Web 2.0 World
• SEO for Law Firms: Why Adwords is Not the Solution
• Closed Networks and the Problem with Facebook
• Top Five Digital Landmines for Lawyers

Enjoy!

The content distribution channels just keep coming for legal documents sharing service JD Supra!

Just announced over on their JD Scoop blog, Stem client JD Supra has launched a new Facebook application to help users stream their content into their facebook profile.

There are two potential options during the install process. One is the mini feed, which will create a small summary of the last 3 documents the user has uploaded to JD Supra.

And the second option, which I think is the preferred path, will display the full feed of your documents, plus display a replicated copy of your JD Supra profile page.  Here’s a screen capture from Stem’s JD Supra profile:

And one of the document summary screen:

Another impressive addition to JD Supra’s vision for social legal documents! And, I might add, a very subtle way to insert one’s professional profile and credentials into their facebook experience.

Anyone who says the legal industry doesn’t get web 2.0 … better take a look at this! :)

Google has finally put their name to a guide for SEO practices. Announced on their webmaster central blog late last week, Google released a 22 page PDF titled, oddly enough, Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starters Guide.

To those looking for a top secret advantage or holy grail to a top ranking website… well, you might have to wait a little longer. This guide offers little more than an acknowledgement of what most would consider industry best practises. But for those looking for a brief introduction to the topic, especially when it comes to on-page optimization basics — this guide is good enough that I may make it my first stop for recommended reading.

And for those simply looking to avoid reading a 22-pg PDF report, I offer my own bullet point readers digest consolidation as follows:

• Make your title tags unique on every page of your site;
• Be sure to add a meta-description tag to each of your pages;
• Incorporate logical site architecture / information architecture principles;
  • ie. broad topic > specific category > finite subject
  • use breadcrumb trails, text based navigation structures
• Make content fresh, organized, unique, and relevant to the site’s subject;
• Keywords embedded in the url structure of pages are valuable additions;
• Write your content for the user, not the search engines;
• Optimize using ALT tags on in-line page images;
• Link with shorter descriptive anchor text – both internally and externally;
• Use header tags to differentiate headlines or scannable content;
• Make use of robots.txt files, sitemap files, webmaster central tools, and so on.

These types of on-page optimization factors are pretty much standard fare these days, especially within more competitive search markets. However, the fact that Google has put their name to, and indirectly endorsed, what most consider to be both ethical and standard industry practises — makes the SEO world a little easier to navigate, for everyone.

And that is an olive branch worth commending. Well done Google!

I have a new Web Law Connected column up over at Slaw, titled It’s Not the Tool! It’s YOU!

My message this month is to have faith in experimentation, and to be passionate in the way we select & embrace our web marketing tools. Please drop by and have a look!

Alyn-Weiss & Associates have just released a new survey that shows “the number of local and regional corporate, transactional and defense law firms using search engine optimization (SEO), and getting cases and referrals as a result, has tripled in the past 24 months”.

Also from the press release:

• “59 percent of firms used SEO over the past 24 months. That compares to 20 percent in the two years prior to then. In 2007-2008, 20 percent of firms said they got cases from SEO, compared to 8 percent in 2005-2006.”

While that’s great news for those of us with SEO services as part of our legal marketing repertoire, it does make for a tougher playing field overall.  Five years ago, on-page optimization factors were enough in many legal markets to create a competitive search presence. Now of course, this is simply par for the course.

Where there used to be two or three pages of optimized results for a competitive search phrase, in many markets that number can now span eight to ten pages. Which supports a point I’ve been making for a while now – good search positioning is at least 70% about a website’s incoming link network (and likely more).

Most firms should be asking:

• Do we know what websites are linking to us?
• Do we have a strategy to improve the quality (& to a lesser degree, quantity) of those links?
• How closely aligned, subject-wise, are those links with website content?

As more firms get onboard with SEO, competition is clearly going to be on the rise. Unless Google suddenly decides to change their default result to 20 or 100 listings on the first page. Which seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with competition. As reputations build and performances are graded, there should be some culling within the industry. Which is good. But unfortunately, I suspect more competition also means more shady tactics from some providers in the short term. And even more unfortunate, SEO services aren’t going to get any easier to evaluate for law firm marketers or practitioners.

Not saying that as a scare tactic. Just a troubling fact. And from my own perspective, I can see how the next couple years are going to be a challenge to differentiate Stem as an ethical SEO option; and related, whether to train out those standards, recruit for them, or both.

Interesting times ahead.

I was very fortunate to be involved in a webex session this morning with the crew over at Lexblog. The topic was predictably … legal seo.

Lexblog, as most readers will know, are one of the biggest builders of law blogs within our industry.  And the purpose of the session was simply to convey the basics, and to provide a few DIY tasks that lawyers can apply to their own web presence.

If you’re interested hearing what was said, Kevin will likely be posting a link to the archived session later today (or very soon…). However, in the mean time, Lexblog’s Rob LaGatta did some amazing live tweeting covering the session over on twitter. Click on that preceding link to see a recap of over 5 screens of Rob’s notes during the session.

Many thanks to Lexblog for having me this morning. If there are follow-up questions, please feel free to send them along to steve@stemlegal.com. I’ll do my best to respond in a timely manner.

Yesterday morning, Adrian Lurssen (aka @jdtwitt), Communications Director at legal document sharing website JD Supra, blogged a list of 145 lawyers and legal professionals he’s following on Twitter, with the goal of encouraging a some legal community matchmaking.

Thanks to a short description he provides for almost every person on the list, I’m willing to bet the legal Twitter-sphere is a friendlier, better-connected place today! The proof? Within hours, the list had grown from 145 to 180, and will probably grow more.

If you’re still not getting this Twitter stuff, please check out my introductory post on the lawyer marketing value of twitter; and if you’re simply on the fence on whether to join? Preview some of the legal community’s exchanges over at Stem’s legalvoices.com – which has had a bit of a renaisance since Adrian’s list went live. And do remember that the twitter conversation is much more casual than the legal blogosphere…

So what are you waiting for? Drop by, find some folks to follow, and enjoy making new Twitter connections!

Thanks Adrian, for the LV mention and shout-out to @legalvoices too.  My inbox is also full now, and I spent a fair bit of time yesterday adding legal industry types to my @stevematthews account. It’s fantastic to see the legal Twitter community grow like this. This was a wonderful initiative!