Collaboration and social networking

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 frequently involves speaking to a voicemail system. Instant messaging services have been around for 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 to 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.

Blogging tools-TypePad

It also became highly apparent from talking to colleagues and looking at the blogging world in general, and at 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 led us readily to TypePad as the blogging tool for us. We signed 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 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 and 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, 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 felt it would be good if we 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, except for the titles on reports or the odd newsletter. Given the nature of my practice, I had registered it as a UK trade mark. It was as if it had been waiting 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, I had access to the full settings for the domain name. So I created 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-monthly posting probably defeats the whole point of a blog in the first place!

RSS feeds

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 planning 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”) were 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. It's a massive time-saver. 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 other sites which don't publish a feed themselves.

The TypePad service automatically generates various types of RSS feeds. 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, which 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 a 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 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 more quickly than we had expected.

Lessons learned

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 we dropped that requirement 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 takes a while to get right, but it 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. It really makes me wonder about the future of legal publishing in the traditional sense.

Updating is vital

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 frequency of posting, 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!

Conclusions and next steps

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 accessing 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 knowing 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.