Law Firm marketing with weblogs. Here at our 40+ lawyer firm in New Orleans we are scratching our heads trying to figure out how to make one of the pages on our website into an effective marketing tool. We've managed to make our News & Events page into a weblog using Movable Type software. And we've even gotten into the irregular habit of posting news to that page.
But now we want to be more regular and more strategic in our posting. Brainstorming has produced some potentially good ideas. For example, we have assigned some young lawyers to cull news stories that might be of interest. We show them how to use sites like Daily Whirl to scan for news ideas in the blogosphere. Then they forward the post ideas to a central place (i.e. one person who sifts through the story ideas with an overview of which stories make the most sense and which ones will allow us to market a particular segment of the firm).
We don't have “categories” enabled on the News & Events page yet, but we're thinking that might be a good idea. Then we can make each firm practice area into a “category” and try to generate posts for each category on a somewhat regular basis. If we find a tax-related story then we try to find a way to get some input –or preferably, a quote– from our partner who has tax-expertise. The goal is to have each post assigned to at least one category (i.e. “practice area”). … [Ernie The Attorney]