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Update: April 30, 2013
Warning: This is a “long, boring, and not even funny” rant about snark. You win some, you lose some. Maybe I’ll follow up at a later date with something else about snark. Probably I won’t. Read at your own peril.
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Of all the law blogs in this world, there’s only one ingredient found in the best of them—the kind of blawg that elevates lawyers and the legal profession the way we all want it to be elevated—that is, the ingredient of snark. (Did you see what I did there? Italic emphasis on the word “snark” really made it pop.) When it comes to snark, no one does it better than lawyers.
As a young lawyer who considers himself primarily a writer—an occasional lawyer when I’m not writing marketing copy or blogging, to be precise—I eat lots of snark. Sometimes I serve it up myself. But mostly I eat it. Snark, in my opinion (if I may voice my opinion on this matter), is what makes superstars out of blawgs. If you’re thinking of getting into the snark game yourself, use caution. You might be a lawyer, which makes you predisposed, but that doesn’t mean you can pull it off.
Here’s what it takes to inject snark into your blawg.
I am awesome. You know it, I know it, and Avvo knows it. That’s why there is a big, shiny 10 next to my smiling self on my Avvo profile.
Some lawyers have over-inflated egos. They have a reputation, but it is full of hot air. Avvo knows about them, too. Here are 7 of them, from Eric Holder to Abraham Lincoln, who don’t measure up to my lawyering prowess.
If you’re unfamiliar with rich snippets you might want to start here.
A previous study seemed to indicate that authorship in organic search results might be more effective in terms of attracting clicks than video snippets. At least for the search “car accident lawyer.”
I was curious whether the results would hold true for a more informational search. Here’s what they did and what they found. Keep Reading ⇒
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This is the text of the talk I gave this afternoon at the Lawyernomics marketing conference in sunny Las Vegas.
A lot of lawyers have blogs. A lot of those blogs suck.
I suppose I am partly to blame for this. For years, I told every lawyer who would listen that he or she ought to start a blog. I explained that a blog was a great way to get clients in the door, as if that would magically happen if you started posting something on your blog every few days. I neglected to explain how to write a blog that doesn’t suck.
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Website redesign projects often begin with phrases like “our website looks generic”, or “we hate our site, it looks like a template,” or “our website does not convey the image of our firm.” The answer to all of these problems is imagery. When your website uses generic images, your website looks generic. Maybe you have a fancy layout, or a tricky animated slideshow, or messaging and copywriting that you have slaved over, but none of these will survive the malignant tumor of horrible images.
Most of all, this is their big plan to raise the firm’s visibility? I suppose it’s working, if you want to be known as four guys who have a Facebook page where they post pictures of their Hawaiian shirts. I will say this for them: they look pretty genuine.
But yeah, somebody remind the Daily Herald to check in with the firm in 6 months to see if they have gotten any meaningful results from all this fluff. If they managed to build a practice on a Facebook page, that really would be news.
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I’m getting excited for my trip to Las Vegas on Thursday for Lawyernomics. Mostly I’m excited because it’s 20 degrees in Minneapolis and it’s been snowing for three weeks. From LXBN, here is a sneak peek at what I will be talking about on Friday in my presentation, “Why Your Blog Sucks, and What To Do About It.”
Job security is on the radar screens of most lawyers. Many lawyers, however, perceive that their jobs are very secure, when in reality they are not. Due to a false sense of security, these lawyers often neglect the networking they should be doing.
Three scenarios demonstrate this concept of a false sense of job security.
One commenter in particular (an appellate lawyer, natch) kept stubbornly insisting that it made sense to have his blog on his law firm website because he ranked #1 on Google for his target search terms. (If I had a dollar … )
![Nominate the Best Law Firm Websites (2013 Edition) [UPDATED]](http://lawyerist.com/lawyerist/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts/timthumb.php?src=http://lawyerist.com/lawyerist/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/best-law-firm-websites-nominations-2013.jpg&h=90&w=90)
