Five reasons to avoid outsourcing your Blog

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The professional blog is at the center of Web 2.0 networking.

For several years now, lawyers have used their blogs for instant marketing and making a name for themselves on the Web.

But in the busy, around-the-clock world of the modern attorney, some practitioners believe there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to produce quality blog content. The result has been a rise in popularity of “ghostwritten blogs.”

While arranging for someone to ghostwrite your blog can be a timesaver, some blogging experts contend that it’s better to do it yourself.
Here are five reasons why, if you want a blog done right, you should do it yourself:

Many ghostwriters aren’t lawyers.

They are generally writers or, at the most, former paralegals who might have a grasp on legal terminology. Depending on the content and tone, the resulting blog posts could be construed as legal advice coming from someone without much of a legal background.
“You should never allow [a ghostwriter] to publish anything unless you’ve read through it and make sure everything is okay,” said Grant Griffiths, a Clay Center, Kan. solo and author of the Home Office Lawyer blog.

Ghostwriters typically have other clients who are lawyers.

Professional ghostwriters take on a host of clients and if they are able to service one lawyer, the odds are that they will service several others as well.
This becomes a problem if two separate blogs tackle similar issues: Will the writing styles be the same? Will the content be the same? Imagine the embarrassment if another lawyer’s blog and your own appeared to be “plagiarizing” each other.

Blogging is more than just writing.

Blogging involves commenting on other blogs and seeking other blogs for information. It is not enough to simply have a blog for others to read; you have to be an active part of other attorneys’ blogs.

Janet Raasch, a Denver-based professional ghostwriter who has advocated against attorneys using ghostwritten blogs, suggests filling an aggregator, or reader, with interesting blogs and using them as a basis for ideas and feedback.

“To blog intelligently,” said Raasch, “you have to read a lot of blogs in your aggregator and skim them for ideas. That’s the only way to find out what people are interested in. Otherwise, you’re just reacting to the news.”

Having a ghostwritten blog violates the spirit of Web 2.0.

Blogging and social networking are predicated on the idea of entering into a give-and-take between writer and reader. With ghostwriting, an attorney’s personal Internet experience becomes tainted by bringing in an outside presence.

“You can’t bring a Web 1.0 mindset to a Web 2.0 tool,” said Raasch. “So many lawyers are stuck in this Web 1.0 mindset where they think of blogs like putting out a newsletter and e-mailing it.”

The other characteristic of Web 2.0 is instant communication. The whole spirit of blogs, tweets and other social networking interactions is the urgency with which information is spread. The cumbersome process of collaborating with a ghostwriter violates that.

“Let’s say I did a blog post on the Supreme Court decision in Wyeth v. Levine. By the time [the attorney] approved that, one hundred other people would have blogged about it. Now it’s lost its news value,” said Raasch.

Blog posts don’t take much of your time.

The cries of “I’m too busy” fall on deaf ears in the blogging community, where the most successful blogs eschew longer, more in-depth posts in favor of brief items that are two or three paragraphs long.

Griffiths suggests spending under 15 minutes per post, writing two or three posts per week. Focus each post on answering a single question you might be asked by someone walking into your office.

“You don’t need to write long blog posts every time you do a post,” he said. “If you’re writing to the public, Joe Law Service Consumer doesn’t want to read a long, drawn out post in legalese. He just wants an answer.”