When Is A Legal Blog Not A Legal Blog

My space as blog-content critic has been usurped, at least temporarily, by Tom Biro of MWW Group, a public-relations firm.  Biro, along with Chris Thilk, also of MWW, is author of blog Openthedialogue.com.

In a recent post, Biro raises some questions about a number of issues related to how Seattle law firm Marler Clark formulates and puts out there its digital marketing communications.  One of those questions is about the content of the firm's blogs. 

Recently, since the firm specializes in food-borne diseases including E-coli, it has received extensive media coverage ranging from THE WALL STREET JOURNAL to my blog. My fascination with Marler Clark was what I saw to be its savvy application of the Chris Anderson's long-tail concept.

Anderson is head honcho at the hot pub WIRED and author of the 2006 book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More."  Anderson gave digital cache to the not-new notion that business seems to be moving towards niches. 

Way back in 1991, Robert E. Linneman and John L. Stanton published the book "Making Niche Marketing Work: How to Grow Bigger by Acting Smaller."  They cited the niche beverage Gatorade and Marriott's creation of niche brands such as Residence Inns and Courtyards.  Since then, of course, the marketplace has gotten everything from the blockbuster Hansen Natural Beverages to stores like Sephora which carry just one category.

What Anderson brings new to the party is the notion of how digital technology raises the power of niching to the nth level. For instance, non-hits in music or publishing are now possible to put out in the marketplace and could over time produce significant profits.  That's because digital technology allows them to be produced, distributed and promoted conveniently, easily and cheaply. 

For instance, I could publish a book on career comebacks (which I plan to do), released as a serial on Typepad, for 5 bucks a month. Oprah's soon-to-be-released diet book by a conventional publisher may be a mega hit, for a while.  Then sales could peter off to nothing or it could become a diet classic. Whatever.  But all that does not negate the possibility that, if I know what I'm doing with my book, eventually it could attract attention for decades and keep bringing in profits for me.  I can succeed as a writer w/o being in the Oprah celebrity space.

So, I was very interested when I read that Marler Clark not only dominated this niche of food-borne diseases, including the E-coli territory (spinach outbreak) but also attracted new clients and educated constituencies ranging from food services to government through its more than 30 bogs.  Each blog was focused on 1 of the many food-borne diseases.

I researched this and eventually contacted Bill Marler at the law firm for an interview. He gave me one. It didn't bother me that Marler Clark's blog format, style or content wouldn't win any communications awards.  Here's what did matter to me:

• In the relatively conservative legal profession, a practitioner, not a macro organization such as think tank Manhattan Institute, was blogging.

• The Marler Clark blogs seemed to be an effective medium for branding, developing new business and distributing information.

• Given the firm's success, elite law firms  as well as the conservative Fortune 500 might be more receptive to experimenting with blogging. My self-interest here was seeing less resistance in those lucrative top-end markets to social media, which is one of the services I offer.

Biro points out if we read the Marler Clark blogs, "you'll notice that little, if any effort, was put into writing an actual blog by this firm."  He cites examples of cut-and-paste jobs, including material from copyrighted sources w/o providing a link to the source or apparently obtaining the rights from those organizations. (This copyright issue I won't take up on this post but will later in another post.) Biro also provides an example of one of those self-serving testimonials on the blog.

Well, I had concerns about the content of the well-known blog NakedConversations.com.  One of its 2 authors Shel Israel, who is also the co-author of the book "Naked Conversations," had a long post about his disappointment over a canceled trip by airline (it was the time of the circumvented UK airline terrorist plan) to get interviews for his next book.  He also lamented that since the trip had been postponed, his consulting schedule had a hole in it.

The alert busy bee me, in Martin Luther righteous indignation, posted on my blog that such excessive personal content was inappropriate for a blog.  Did I ever learn a lesson, pronto. 

Internet users sent my blog, my email and NakedConversations.com passionate messages that a blog can have any format, style and content.  If Israel wants to wax personal, why not.  Israel posted on his own blog a notice to me to skip those parts of his blog that were not useful to me and my clients.  My gripe had been that his personal stuff and business affairs or the lack of them were not useful content for my continued learning about the blogosphere and my attempts to educate clients about how to use this tool.  Recently, Israel made a personal statement on his blog about the recent Jewish holiday Yom Kippur.  He started out the post with "Jane Genova ..."

The beauty of the blogosphere is the immediate and heated feedback.  We do learn, perhaps more efficiently than we would have in an MBA program or from an $125-an-hour executive coach.

So, my advice to the critics of certain blogs is to permit the blogosphere to be for the people - that is, those who write the blogs, those who read them, and those who take the time to leave comments. This medium seems to prevent anyone or any organization from establishing rules about what should be.  Also, blogging keeps morphing so rapidly that what once attracted/turned off readers no longer does.

Most to the point, the blogosphere, as I found out, tends to discipline miscreants in its own free-market way.  When my numbers go down, I know the blogosphere is sending me a clear and harsh message.