Last April, I had the pleasure of sitting down with about 40 of my firm’s lawyers for one-on-one strategy sessions on using LinkedIn. The most commonly asked question was “what can I do with it?” – often from lawyers who had amassed 200, 300, even 1000 connections apiece.
Wake up! It’s time to make the content!
LinkedIn began answering this question last March with LinkedIn Today – a branded newspaper-like application that provides news tailored to your industry, interests and connections. Since then, LinkedIn has launched many additional significant enhancements, including:
- iPad app – April 26
- Targeted company updates – June 19
- Homepage redesign – July 16
- Profile page redesign – August 20
- Notifications – September 5
- Company page redesign – September 6
- Endorsements – September 25
These enhancements address user experience, engagement, sharing, content consumption – even gamification (try to make just one endorsement – I dare you!) None of these enhancements, however, addressed publishing and content creation – until last week which saw LinkedIn launch a blogging platform built directly into the profile page.
Right now this feature is limited to about 150 thought leaders and influencers like Richard Branson and President Obama, but I fully expect it to be rolled out to all users eventually.
This is a real game changer for LinkedIn – for law firm web publishing.
First, I predict that this feature will make LinkedIn as engaging as any other social site – or news platform site (like Forbes.com or HBR.com) for that matter. While LinkedIn users currently spend an average of 18 minutes a month on the site (accepting connections requests and nothing more, like the lawyers in my firm), LinkedIn has no trouble generating revenue via its recruiting solutions. Imagine how much more they can sell (and charge) when people are even more engaged and spending time discovering content and following thought leaders.
Second, this new feature should cause a real shift in the way we marketers think about the lawyer-authors in our firms. Suddenly, all our blessed and branded publishing channels – blogs, microsites, the firm website and email alerts, especially – are competing with a site that has 175 million users, and on which every one of our lawyers probably already had a presence.
If a lawyer wants to publish content – and getting it done via marketing isn’t lightening fast and easy peasy – which do you think he or she is going to choose? What’s better – seamlessly delivering your thoughts to an audience of 500 qualified readers that you know personally, or following established firm protocol and procedure which can be byzantine and bureaucratic? One of these options looks like an easy button to me.
It seems likely that a blogging feature on LinkedIn could be yet another nail in the coffin of blogging as predicted by Adrian Lurssen. But could it also contribute to the end of the law firm website? After all, biographies are the center of the law firm web universe and LinkedIn has pretty much duplicated and improved every feature of the lawyer bio at this point. Maybe? Maybe not. But it’s an interesting question.
Regardless, if we are the smart digital marketers that I know we are, we will include LinkedIn among the channels that we must COPE with – Create Once, Publish Everywhere – so that our lawyers and our brands both can benefit from the efforts involved in creating great thought leadership content.
written by Molly Porter
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