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A Lawyer's Blogging Lessons Learned
For Jones Day partner Mark Herrmann, the blogging light bulb went on the day the Wall Street Journal Law Blog mentioned his book, The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law. Within a day, it went from Amazon rank 47,369 to number 434. He understood then the power of blogs -- and that he was missing the boat. So, as he explains in an article published today on Law.com, "Blogging Lessons Learned," he teamed up with his friend James M. Beck to launch the blog Drug and Device Law, confident that he had enough "unpublished ideas kicking around in my head" to keep it fueled for awhile. Therein was his first lesson about blogging: Feeding the beast is hard work. His mental stockpile was not nearly sufficient. Blogging, he writes, "means investing time each week searching for content, analyzing issues and crafting a worthwhile post."
Other lessons he has learned after a year of blogging:
- It is personally satisfying. "A well-crafted post is not simply a pleasure unto itself; it also provides immediate gratification, when the post attracts attention in the blogosphere."
- Law firms are clueless about how to value blogs. Herrmann compares them to academic tenure committees that fret over whether blog posts count as scholarly publications.
Herrmann's final lesson is the one he already had a hint of going in: Blogging pays off. "By staking a claim to some online turf, you gradually come to dominate that turf and to become an insider on events in that field."
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on January 10, 2008 at 02:34 PM | Permalink
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