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June 28, 2009

Virtual LegalTech

This past week I was in Los Angeles attending LegalTech West Coast. It was a great success--good crowds, an engaging and well-attended conference program, and happy exhibitors. As always, Henry Dicker and his team did a fantastic job organizing the show, and their attention to detail really paid off for our customers. The exhibitors with whom I spoke were an optimistic group. There was a sense on the show floor that law firms--particularly middle market law firms--are investing in technology for the future. While Amlaw 100 firms hunker down, lay off attorneys and wait for the financial markets to improve so that deal flow can return to prior levels, mid-market firms see an opportunity for growth. Those mid-market and regional...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 11:26 AM | | Comments (0)

June 27, 2009

Driving Traffic with LinkedIn

For those who run free or free with registration websites, where advertising is the primary revenue driver, the daily objective is to drive traffic from qualified readers. That is, we really don't want curious consumers--our advertisers don't value them and there's very little in our product line that we can sell to them. We want professionals who care about our content, will spend time on our site and return in the future, and may click through to learn more about our advertisers' products or our own. In earlier posts I have written about using Twitter and Facebook to build traffic, and there have been several interesting comments on those posts from our colleagues with success stories of their own. Jennifer...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 9:30 PM | | Comments (0)

June 24, 2009

Groundswell

One of my favorite business books over the past year was "Groundswell" by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. It is all about how companies are using social media to reach their customers and potential customers. That's important for us not just because we have customers and potential customers to reach, but also because our advertisers have the same challenge and we need to understand how they may view their marketing options. Charlene Li will be one of our keynote speakers at SES San Jose in August. In advance of that, our Interactive Marketing Group has announced that they will be holding a free webinar with Ms. Li discussing how to integrate social media into a business plan....

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 10:36 AM | | Comments (0)

June 23, 2009

Facebooking in Florida

I'm always interested to hear different ways in which our folks are marketing their brands around the country. Down in Miami, our colleagues at the Daily Business Review have created a Facebook page and are using it to try and connect in a different way with their audience. Here's a note I received from Annette Martinez, Classified Director, about what they are up to on Facebook. **** Chris Mobley assigned me to create the Daily Business Review Facebook page -- http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Daily-Business-Review/52340925364 -- and drive the efforts to grow its fan base. The page currently has 377 fans (of those about 20 are DBR employees). The objectives of the DBR Facebook page are 1) to interact with readers and build a...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 4:52 PM | | Comments (0)

June 19, 2009

Twitter Metrics and What They Tell Us

Some of you have noted from this blog that I am a fan of Twitter and have urged others at Incisive to sign-up and learn how to use it. In fact, my sense of Twitter has changed over the last few months. As an individual I find it a bit frustrating--there's too much spam and self-promotion for my taste. And increasingly I find that there's too little in the way of meaningful discussion. As more people join, it feels like the opportunity for relationship building has been strained, which I think is a real shame. And I am increasingly skeptical about the value of Twitter as a business development tool for law firms and other relationship-oriented businesses. Nonetheless, Twitter is...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 12:00 PM | | Comments (4)

June 16, 2009

Goin' Mobile

Following up on yesterday's post concerning the coming importance of mobile devices for accessing web-based information, here's a note from Jill Windwer about the work we are doing to make our email alerts more mobile friendly. Those email alerts are important traffic builders for our websites, so rendering them in a mobile accessible version is a key step in our progression towards improving availability of our information for on-the-go users. Any questions, feel free to contact Jill directly. *** We are making great progress in rolling out mobile versions of our email alerts. Here is a list of the emails that are currently available in a mobile version. Please note that when you open up the email on your mobile...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 7:05 AM | | Comments (0)

June 15, 2009

Twitter Scorecard--June Results

Quite a surge of activity among our Twitter users during the past month--enough to knock me down several spots on the list. Here's how our individual Twitterers look, ranked by number of followers as of June 12th: Martino Chiaviello (@mchiaviello) 3725 Matt McGowan (@Matt_McGowan) 2773 Marc Scibelli (@marc421) 2083 Monica Bay (@Commonscold) 1961 Kevin Newcomb (@kevinnewcomb) 1620 AnnaMaria Virzi (@annamariavirzi) 1340 Theodora Blanchfield (@tblanchfield) 1133 Bill Pollak (@wpollak) 981 Lee Feldman (@leecomms) 554 Aric Press (@aricpress) 512 Colleen McGushin (@colleenmcgushin) 360 Tim Smith (@TR_Smith) 313 Nicole Kramer (@NicoleKramer) 262 David Brown (@DavidLBrownJr) 226 Jill Windwer (@jwindwer) 199 Christian Georgeou (@cgeorgeou) 176 Ian Ritter (@iritterglobest) 175 Steve Salkin (@stevesalkin) 169 Pat France (@Pafrance) 161 Henry Dicker (@HenryDicker) 147 Ashley Eckel (@ashes54)...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 3:36 PM | | Comments (1)

The Coming Importance of Apps

Last week I found myself in conversations with a number of very bright, plugged in people from around the business media world. And, as sometimes happens, many of them wanted to talk about the same thing: the coming importance of smart phones and the applications written for them ("Apps" as people like to call them). The conversations generally went like this: 1. Apple's iPhone has now changed the way in which people will interact with the internet. In the future, more and more consumer and business information will be accessed on smart phone screens rather than via desktop or laptop computers. Small screens are our future. 2. And it's not just Apple. Palm just released its new "Pre" and Blackberry...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 9:20 AM | | Comments (6)

June 5, 2009

Cyclical vs. Structural Change

In my previous post, I talked about the requirement that we juggle short-term and long-term considerations as we manage our business. That means managing our short-term profitability by carefully watching our expenses and working vigilantly to cut unnecessary costs. And, at the same, it means identifying long-term growth opportunities and developing the products and services we will need in order to meet the future needs of the market. Another way to think about this is to ask, of the changes we are seeing in the markets we serve, which are "cyclical" and which are "structural"? That is, to what extent are these changes short-term in nature, driven primarily by the economic downturn? And to what extent are the changes longer-term...

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Posted by Bill Pollak at 12:03 PM | | Comments (2)

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