BIALL 2007 Conference talk - extra materials
Andrew Mills has created this page to support his talk on "Blogging: Lessons & Challenges" at the BIALL annual conference in Sheffield on 14 June 2007.
Here is my presentation.
And here are a bunch of links and useful stuff
ABOUT BLOGGING
- Wikipedia entry on blogging
- BBC's "Ask Bruce" instant answer
- Google Search for "Blogging"
- Real Lawyers :: Have Blogs
ABOUT COLLABORATION & STUFF
NETWORKING
INSTANT MESSAGING
- Skype
- MSN messenger - web version!
- Google Talk
- AOL Instant Messenger
- Jabber
BLOGGING TOOLS
E-PETITIONS
DOMAIN NAMES
STUFF ABOUT LINKS
RSS STUFF
STATS
MICRO-BLOGGING
PODCASTING & VIDEO
- Audacity - for recordings
- Nokia N-Series
- Google Video
- YouTube
- VideoEgg
ANDREW'S TALK - WRITTEN UP
Blogging:
Lessons & Challenges
Or
"The story of IMPACT(R)"
by Andrew
Mills of Freeth
Cartwright LLP
In the early part of 2006 I
had started playing around with blogs a bit. This was a natural thing to do for
a geek like me. I had been using instant-messaging tools like MSN and Skype for
a while already, and having video conversations with friends and clients in
other parts of the country.
I'm a relatively rare thing
for a lawyer - my background is in electronic engineering and I have a strong
interest in watching technological developments. It also fits well with my area
of practice - intellectual property.
By July 2006 I was
convinced that my team needed a better platform to deliver some of our messages
to the world. I was also convinced that a blog was the way forward.
Blogging is part of several
bigger trends. Firstly, people are finding more ways to communicate.
Face-to-face may be the most emotionally satisfying, but in today's busy
business world this just isn't always possible. Email is clogging up our
inboxes because of its sheer volume. Even using the phone involves quite a lot
of speaking to a voicemail system. Instant messaging services have been around
quite a while, but a huge number of people who can remember a time before
computers have no idea what they are. Many of you may be baffled and concerned
about your kids chatting to 10 mates on MSN whilst trying to do their homework.
Just think of it as a newer version of rock'n'roll or punk.
The second big thing that
is happening is collaboration and openness. Projects like wikipedia have
delivered a comprehensive online and searchable encyclopaedia in more than 10
languages with millions of articles. What is amazing about this is that it was
created by individuals like you and me without any overarching corporate
structure.
The idea of "open
source" in software is an established movement brought about by the desire
not to be dominated by huge global companies, but to have software that is
standard and available to all. You may not be aware of this but it's massive.
Huge technical bits of the web function because of underlying bits of open
source software.
One of my assistants, Alex
Newson, shares a passion for new "stuff" too, and the two of us
started looking around at what tools were out there and who was using them.
We wanted to have something
that looked professional and wasn't full of adverts. We needed a tool that gave
us the ability to customise what we were doing and have multiple contributors.
We weren't worried about paying for the service (if it wasn't too expensive)
but we definitely wanted something totally web-based to minimise the internal
IT issues.
It also became highly
apparent as I began talking to colleagues and looking at the whole blogging
world generally and in the law in particular that the legal profession, as a
whole, just doesn't get this. Nearly a year on, the situation is only a bit
different. This very fact cemented my conviction that we needed to get
something moving on this project.
Our research let us readily
to TypePad as the blogging tool for us. I signed us up to the Pro service for
US$149.99 a year. This gives us unlimited blogs and unlimited authors and a lot
of flexibility.
It took us about a month to
get it configured. Just getting to learn the system and exploring the help pages
takes a while but is fascinating. We had to play around with the colours and
the layout a lot to get something we were comfortable with.
We also thought long and
hard about what to name the blog and whether we should make it look & feel
like the firm's website.
We decided that for the
blog to work most effectively, and for the type of things we wanted to say,
that we wouldn't make it look or feel anything like the firm's site. We wanted
it to be a bit "edgy" and "underground".
We also wanted the blog to
clearly have its own identity and brand. The subject of branding is something
we're passionate about in my team. We figured it would be good if we ourselves
were to practise what we preach to our clients. About 10 years ago I'd come up
with the name IMPACT for the firm's then fledgling intellectual property
practice. We'd never quite made anything very satisfying of it save for the
titles on reports or the odd newsletter. Given the nature of my practice, I had
registered it as UK trade mark though. It was like it had been in waiting for
all that time for a blog to call home.
As part of that branding
element, we felt that the blog name, IMPACT, should be connected with the
firm's name in subtle ways. One of these is the blog's address, which is:
http://impact.freethcartwright.com
Because of a historical
quirk, and my technical interest, I had registered a whole bunch of domain
names for the firm many years ago. One of these was the .com version. Because of
this fact, I had access to the full settings for the domain name. So what I did
was create a "sub-domain" of "impact" to give us the full
address. Then, using the domain control settings and our account at TypePad, I
"mapped" the domain to the TypePad-allocated web address.
One of the great things
about being at Freeth Cartwright is that it's such a positive and encouraging
culture. For me, as a partner, I have a great deal of freedom about how to run
my team and so didn't have any internal issues to go through to launch this: I
just did it.
Of course, this very issue
is perhaps one of the factors holding up the use of public blogs by law firms:
lawyers can publish instantly. This is both refreshing compared to the hassle
of producing, say, a printed newsletter and a threat because it can by-pass the
"PR" process. I'm aware of one firm with a blog where all blog-posts
had to get multiple internal sign-offs. But a blog with a once-month posting
probably defeats the whole point of a blog in the first place!
Another driving factor for
us was the desire to try and engage with our clients and potential clients in a
different way. We wanted more interactivity and to show that we were positively
looking to do things differently.
One train of thought
quickly leads to another when you start looking around in the blogosphere. It
was pretty obvious to us immediately that newsfeeds ("RSS") was
really important.
For a consumer of
information on the web, RSS is just fantastic. At the moment, you might have
dozens of websites that you regularly view to keep abreast of developments.
Using RSS, you let your RSS reader go and collect the stream of new items from
those websites and bring them to you, all in one place so you can see the new
stuff readily. Its a massive time-save. There are web-based versions and
pc-based versions. Some are quite sophisticated and let you set up
"watches" for particular words or phrases appearing in your RSS
feeds. There are even tools that will create an RSS feed for you for other people's
sites that don't publish a feed themselves.
The TypePad service
automatically generates various types of RSS feeds automatically. However, this
alone doesn't provide any information about, say, the number of people
subscribing to our feed. TypePad has a good connection built-in to the
FeedBurner service. FeedBurner is a service that takes an RSS feed and lets you
"smarten" it up and then keep track of how many people are
subscribing. Recently, it introduced a new feature that lets people sign up to
daily email that sets out a digest of the previous day's entries on the blog.
At first I thought that such a service was just plain unnecessary. But, of
course, that was my geeky head thinking. Digging a little deeper reveals
that at the moment only about 20% of internet users are making use of RSS. You
need to offer this service to cater for the other 80%. We've got people
subscribing from City of London law firms, companies and international
intellectual property organisations.
Once we'd got the blog set
up we ran it for about a month on a password-restricted access basis. We
invited colleagues, friends and a few clients to have a look and give us
feedback. It was all positive and we took the password off quicker than we'd
expected.
We learnt a few early
lesson about writing items.
- We restricted the ability to post
entries and make them live immediately to me and Alex for the first few
weeks. It was still very new to our colleagues and we wanted them to have
the comfort of a second pair of eyes on their early posts. However, what
we were really concerned about was making sure that we all used the same
sort of formatting and styles rather than worrying about the actual
content of the posts. After a relatively short period of time we dropped
that entirely and now all our team members can write entries and they go
live immediately.
- If you are writing a long piece, save
it in draft as you are working on it! It’s deeply frustrating to lose a
post that you’ve spent ages writing. Also, in TypePad, you need to save an
item before you can preview it. Trying to preview without saving results
in loss of data! - Use of links and the means of creating
links take a while to get right but is simple. Given that we have the
Disability Discrimination Act now, it's actually not good enough to say,
for example: "to find out more click here" with the
hyperlink on the "click here" bit. This is because
accessing the web page through an audio browser (if you have difficulties
seeing) will be a bit meaningless if you hear a link read out as
"click here". It's better to say "there's a great story
on the BBC today about data protection" and hyperlink on the
whole phrase.
There have been some
benefits that we’ve noticed. We are much more “up-to-date” because we are
constantly looking for developments to report. Our old monthly know-how
meetings soon turned into less regular “blog-strategy” meetings.
We’ve also found that
printed publications, such as monthly or quarterly magazines, now seem very
out-of-date by the time we get them and get round to reading them. It really
makes me wonder about the future of legal publishing in the traditional sense.
Once you have the blog up
and running it is important to keep posting to it with reasonable regularity.
If you want your blog to be seen as a credible source of information then this
is important. You need to provide your readers and others with reasons to keep
visiting your site. A once-a-month post is going to attract little interest and
is unlikely to be topical. Of course, having multiple authors to spread the
burden helps a lot here. You also need to keep going – the average blog life is
288 days. The age of your blog, your posting frequency and the extent that
others link to you will all have an impact on how the various ranking sites
rate your blog.
As you gather readers, you
may want to think about what people can do with your content. I recommend the
Creative Commons approach to licensing your work. It’s easy to set up and tell
people what you are happy for them to do with your works. The CC website also
has some very informative pages and media that talk through how it operates. A
learning experience in multi-media presentation in itself!
Every now and again, you
will also need to spend time thinking about the direction and style of your
site. Is a visual refresh necessary? Are there new “add-ons” that might
complement your site (such as the “subscribe by email” tool)? Are your posts
too short or too detailed? What sort of comments are you getting? Are you
reviewing them and publishing them quickly? Are you responding to them?
Once you get to grips with
this lot, and that’s quite of lot of stuff to take on, then you might want to
have a play with podcasting or making a video. Free software such as Audacity
lets you edit audio recordings really well, and it’s surprisingly simple if you
have a microphone to plug into your PC. Similarly, with any recent camera phone
you can make videos and edit them very quickly. Using video hosting sites like
YouTube lets you embed video content directly into your blog. As ever, many
users have difficulty access this type of content through corporate firewalls –
not much you can do about this other than plead with your powers-that-be. A
decent mobile phone with an internet connection will also let you blog on the
go – mobile blogging. TypePad has a small bit of software that installs on many
types of phones for just this purpose.
You might also be
interested in know who’s looking at your blog. There are plenty of tools to let
you measure traffic (some basic features are built-in to TypePad), such as
Google Analytics, which is both free and sophisticated.
I have tried to set out a
lot of practical help and guidance in this article and I hope it encourages
readers to start blogging.
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