A prevalent syndrome among attorneys who have dipped their toes into Internet marketing is the abandoned website or blog. Unfortunately, a great many attorneys (or law firms) have websites in which, if you click on the button that says "Upcoming Events" you find something from the year 2005. Visit their blogs (if they have one) and you might find the most recent post is from last summer.
And it's not just attorneys.
An article in the New York Times cleverly entitled "Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest" paints the picture:
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.” He added, “There’s a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one.”
According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
Some of the obvious conclusions to draw from this include the notion that one could give an attorney a column on the front page of the Wall Street Journal every day, but if he or she doesn't write anything, it's simply a wasted opportunity. Not posting on your blog also means that you have lost one of the main benefits of blogging, the boost one gets in search engine rankings from regularly adding fresh, valuable content to a website.
Some of the drop in blogging is attributed by the Times to the growing popularity of social media like Twitter and Facebook. But in the legal world, I fear, much of it has to do with attorneys who do not have the time or inclination to write blog posts. (There are solutions to that, as well.)
If a blog falls in an empty forest, does anyone hear it? I don't know the answer to that koan. On the other hand, if the blog doesn't fall at all, I can guarantee no one will hear it.
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