Doug Cornelius .com

The delightful Connie Crosby of Crosby Group Consulting gave me this book on her recent trip to Boston. Matt Mason traces the current web 2.0 movement back to the 1970′s punk rock culture. He starts with focus on a quote from punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue with a diagram showing three finger positions on the neck of a guitar with the caption:

“Here’s one chord, here’s two more, now form your own band.”

In a 2.0 world, doing-it-yourself does not seem that radical anymore. Anyone can be published author on the web. You can jump onto Blogger and in a few minutes have a powerful web publishing platform up and running in a few minutes.

Mason looks to some early punk bands who played for themselves and your buddies. Then maybe a few friends come along. If other people come then great, but it does not matter that much because you are doing for yourself and few people close to you. Mason focuses mostly on music, but in the background I was thinking more about blogging and enterprise 2.0. It does not make much sense to put together and a print a book that only a few hundred people will read. That is a big deployment of capital with an improbable return on investment. With web 2.0 the capital for distribution and publishing is minimal. A blog with only a few hundred readers is successful.

It goes back to my post on Why Blog? It is about me capturing my ideas and sharing them with myself and sharing them with some friends and colleagues.

“Here’s one post, here’s two more, now form your own blog.”

I also see the pirates taking over knowledge management. Knowledge management was about capturing the best documents and the best practice, vetting them and packaging them for distribution. There is a big hierarchy of command and control over what information gets published and who gets to see it.

Enterprise 2.0 breaks down that hierarchy. Essentially, anyone can publish information, comment on information and link pieces of information together. The 2.0 movement goes a long way to one of the challenges of knowledge management by making it easier to turn tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. Turn it over to the pirates. Let them find, collect and distribute information inside the enterprise in the way that works best for them.

The knowledge management 2.0 movement is about reducing the “management” and enlarging the knowledge base. KM professionals should look to ways to reduce the hierarchy and the barriers to contribution. Hand KM over to the pirates.

You can read more of my take on the book at DougCornelius.com – Book Review: The Pirate’s Dilemma.

Mary Abraham of the Above and Beyond KM blog asked me: How do I decide how/what/when to blog?

To answer these questions, I need to go back to when I first started blogging. My former law firm had used Microsoft’s Sharepoint as the backbone of their intranet for years. The 2007 upgrade of Sharepoint included these things called blogs and wikis. I was not sure what they were, but they sounded interesting.

I quickly discovered that two people I knew had blogs: Ron Friedmann’s Strategic Legal Technology and Joy London’s Excited Utterances. I thought they were just websites. (Does it really matter anymore?)

I did a little research and decided to try it out. I would set aside an afternoon and set up a blog. Google claimed their Blogspot platform was easy to set up and free. It took all of ten minutes to set up of which five minutes was figuring out a name and four minutes was spent choosing colors. That left a lot of time that afternoon to think about the implications of what I had done. I also had to figure out what to do with it.

The name of this blog came from my split between knowledge management and real estate. (“KM” for knowledge management and “space” for real estate.) Initially, I thought the blog would be all-encompassing. But I quickly found the knowledge management posts and real estate posts were jarringly different.

Eventually, I spun off the real estate posts into a different blog: Real Estate Space. There I could organize my thoughts on real estate law. At this point I was also beginning to see the marketing value of a blog. I saw my blog posts coming back very high in Google search results. I even did some tests by publishing some of The Firm’s alerts in my blog and comparing search results. My blog posts consistently out-performed The Firm’s website.

I managed to convince my colleague David Hobbie to try out blogging. He set up Caselines to talk about litigation knowledge management.

Knowledge management had a lot more vibrant discussions happening than real estate, so KM Space was my focal point, with Real Estate Space as more of side project. Real estate law does not change very much. As a lawyer, it did not seem appropriate to write about the real estate market conditions.

For me, blogging was always about personal knowledge management. I put up posts to memorialize interesting things I find. I put up posts to help me focus my thoughts more coherently. Blogging is part of my learning process.

With my new position, I am using a blog as a learning tool. I set up a blog to help me capture the statues, regulations, articles and ideas that I need to learn about compliance. That translates into 143 posts over the past month. This blog is dark now, but I hope to bring it public in the future.

During my time off between positions, I set up a blog to chronicle my paddling adventures: Paddling Space. I wanted to keep track of my experiences and map my routes.

Along with knowledge management, blogs act as a lightweight content management tool. I recently converted DougCornelius.com into a WordPress blog. I have found it so much easier to use that using FrontPage and uploading files.

I think the common theme for all these blogs is using the blogging platform to put my thoughts and ideas into a searchable place. I happy that anyone takes the time to read any of my blogs, but I think I am the biggest consumer of my blog material.

To get back to Mary’s original questions…

HOW I blog is easy. I post from just about anywhere: the work computer, the home computer, my blackberry or my iPhone. The web-based publishing of my blog platforms make the how part very easy. Although KM Space and Real Estate Space use the Blogspot/Blogger platform, I have decided that I like the WordPress platform better. Paddling Space uses WordPress.com. DougCornelius.com uses the self-hosted version of WordPress. (It was very easy to set up and gives me great control over the look and feel.) Compliance Space is currently on WordPress.com, but I will migrate that to a self-hosted site before it goes public.

WHEN I blog is whenever the information hits me. I am a big fan of using a blog to capture my notes during a conference, webinar or presentation. Some presenters seem to be annoyed at the typing. They clearly have not been to a law school classroom lately.

I tend to pre-publish blog post lately to smooth out the flow. Any of the blog post you see with a 9:00 AM publish time (including this one) were pre-scheduled to publish.

HOW OFTEN I blog is related to WHEN. I am not a magazine publisher. I do not keep a schedule. When the information comes to me, I blog. I will often look at the blog and see that I have not posted lately and use that as indicator that I have not been thinking about my job or learning enough lately. Looking back at the number of blog posts over the past year, it looks like I have been learning a lot. KM Space 316 posts, Real Estate Space: 60 posts, and Compliance Space: 143 posts.

WHAT I blog about is helped by the separation of my thoughts into the different blogs. The other blogs are more repositories. This blog is also about having a conversation. Sure it tends to be more about yelling back and forth from mountaintops than a watercooler-like conversation. Twitter is a much more conversational platform.

I am also intrigued by Matt Simpson and Luis Suarez (also of ELSUA.net ) over at Sweettt.com with their podcast about the conversational side of social media. That truly is a conversation about the conversation.

This blog is about allowing me to communicate with other interested and interesting people. It allows a place to capture my thoughts and share them with you (and myself).

Being the first or one of just a few bloggers inside your organization can put you in an influential position. Scott Gavin put together five reasons why in his First Mover Advantage article:

1. Senior management will want to know who you are and what you are saying. Are you a threat or an innovative individual who’s willing to share his thoughts in a public forum?
2. The first blog is like a when a new kid starts school. People want to know who you are, what you are like and what you have to say. Whether they take to you after this is another matter and is up to you.
3. It can feel like a new era has dawned on your company. This is especially true if the blog originates outside of a technical IT line. Such a simple thing as a blog can make people feel like the company is moving with the times both culturally and technically.
4. You are doing something new that others wish they had the courage to do, so they’ll take notice and champion your efforts.
5. You’ll be seen as a risk talker and innovator. In many companies this is a good thing.

. . .
I’m not saying any old Joe can achieve great things just by blogging. However if you really are great, and have great ideas and interesting things to say, then step up and get noticed.

If your firm has an internal blogging platform, jump on board and start writing.  It is good for your career to think about your job for a few minutes a day and write down a few of those thoughts.

If your firm does not have an internal blogging platform, set up an external blog.  It only takes a minute to set one up using a hosted blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress. (Of course check to see if your firm has a blogging/internet/social media policy and make sure you comply with it.)

Wilmer Hale has launched four associate blogs as part of the firm’s Wilmer Hale Careers website.

• Julie Smolinski from the Palo Alto office and is a member of the Transactional Department, Corporate Practice Group
• Ross Firsenbaum from the New York office and is a member of the Litigation/Controversy Department.
• Anne McLaughlin from the Boston office and is a member of the Litigation/Controversy Department.
• Kevin Chambers from the Washington office and is a member of the Securities Department, Securities Litigation and Enforcement Practice Group.

Although Lisa van der Pool was dismissive of the blogs in the Boston Business Journal (Blog Fog subscribers only), I liked the use of blogs as a recruiting tool.  They give some insight into the lives of these associates and, by proxy, into the life of an associate at WilmerHale.  Sure it may be a sanitized view, showing everything is great. But it is still a view that will appeal to recruits. It certainly gives a recruit plenty to talk about if they get to interview with any of these four bloggers.

We had a great crowd at my presentation on Establishing the Digital Relationship, along with Tim Parker and Yuval Zukerman. It looks like some of the audience really understood the message. 

Bob Buday of The Bloom Group, who set up the presentation, ran off and set up his own blog the next day: Thought Leadership Space. Here are his posts so far:

• Why Display Ads Should Display Expertise
• Can You Give Away Too Many Thoughts? 
• Horse Before the Cart 
• The lightbulb goes on! 

In my previous rant post on Why are Legal Blogs Undervalued? I failed to show a few examples of the power of blogging when it comes to finding information on the internet.

My first example is a Google search for Interwoven express search. It returns two posts from KM Space in the top position. My posts are coming ahead of the Interwoven corporate site.

My second example is a Google search for bad boy guaranty. It returns two posts from my Real Estate Space blog on commercial real estate finance. (Bad boy guaranty is a commercial real estate finance term.)

My third example is a Google search for rule against perpetuities right of first refusal. It returns a post from my Real Estate Space blog in the second position. (The Rule Against Perpetuities is hated among law students.)

Those high search results are not based on any search engine optimization or link-trading. It just comes from writing about topics and joining the conversation about these topics on-line.

Also keep in mind that I do not post as often on Real Estate Space as I do here in KM Space. It also has less than 10% of the readership.

But still, with that small effort, my writings are appearing at the top of Google search results. Do you think your clients are not using a Google search to find information?

Over at the Drug and Device Law Blog one of the authors stirred the pot by posting: Why Are Blogs Undervalued? The post got picked up by the WSJ.com Law Blog: Law-Firm Blogs: Marketing Device or Mere Diversion? Since, the Drug and Device Law blog called him out, Bruce MacEwen of Adam Smith, Esq. also chimed in: The Marketing Value of Publishing: 1440 to 2008.

The first thing to think about with a blog is how is it different from the other publications from your firm.

Is a legal blog really all that different than the client alerts and updates sent out by law firms? At the core, there is no difference. Information is just published to a website, rather than producing a pdf file and sending it out by email. With a blog the information is generally sent out by RSS feed, but can be sent by email. As of this morning, 15% of my subscribers get my feed by email rather than RSS.

A blog allows easier publishing. If I find an interesting case or story, I can have a post up in minutes. The client alerts do not match that speed. Most publications do not match that speed.

I do not agree with Mr. Hermann’s fourth proposition that blogging is too much work for too little financial reward. It is nearly impossible for most big laws to justify that any particular marketing effort leads directly to new work (with the exception of an explicit client pitch). I never hear anyone saying that should not produce client alerts or substantive articles for public consumption because they do not generate enough business. Clients of big law firms expect to receive regular updates of changes in the law that affect their business.

Blogging, like any marketing or networking activity is about building your brand. With lawyers and other professionals that means showing your expertise, engaging in conversations about your expertise and publishing your expertise. Blogs allow all of these. And certainly do a better job than most firm’s rather static websites. Over at the Drug and Device Law, they measured 25,00o page views per month on their blog. They call that a “drop in the bucket.” But I would guess that number rivals the page views than their law firm website gets. And that is with zero assistance from their IT departments or marketing departments and zero out-of-pocket costs.

All of the dangers that people express are there because people can find the content. Blog posts get indexed by search engines and the linking and and cross-linking are the magic ingredients that makes your blog rise up in the search results ranking. People can find the bad content. But they can also find the good content. All that good content rises up and enhances your brand.

Teri G. Rasmussen of the Ohio Practical Business Law Counsel has a great post on Why Every Client Should Want an Attorney Who Blawgs.

Teri point out that her blawg gets twice as many hits as the website for her 30 person law firm.

This blog only generates about 15% as many site visits as my firm’s website. Of course my firm does have 850+ lawyers, dozens of marketing professionals and a professionally designed website. I just have me. Considering the resources on each side of the equation, I think my numbers are staggeringly high.

Teri’s reasons why lawyers should blog:

1. Knowledge Entreprenuer.
2. Communication 101.
3. Authenticity and “Real Voice”.
4. Quality and Competence.
5. Commitment to “the Law” Made Practical.

Thanks to Kevin O’Keefe of Real Lawyers Have Blogs for pointing this one out.

Bill Ives put together a list of business objectives for blogging and the types of business blog posts. All these seem applicable for objectives and types within an enterprise or inside a law firm.

An example of how to use blogs inside the enterprise?
From Geek and Poke