State Law

Blawging: The Ground Game

By Ryan

What we do on the internet echoes in life. - From The Movie Gladiator (not really)

If you are blogging in hopes of attracting business, search engine optimization is not enough. You need ground game.

What do I mean by ground game? I mean integrating traditional rain making activities with your blog. In my experience, this and not the cold call is where blogging can be of business value.

In a firm of 5 attorneys, I depend on people I know for business and more to the point, people knowing what I do.

Blogging will never displace being involved in the community, meeting people offline, and serving on local boards in terms of generating business.

My biggest marketing push this year is real old school. I’m planning and hosting my high school’s ten year reunion.  In part this is my obligation as class president but it’s also been a golden opportunity professionally.

Part of what I’ve done in terms of planning this reunion has been out of sheer necessity. You see, our 5 year reunion bankrupted class funds. I had zero dollars to start. What I did is created a website for the reunion, created event pages on facebook and myspace, and relied on email to advertise the event. I didn’t mail or advertise anything in a newspaper because I didn’t have the funds to do so.

Facebook has been invaluable in making this reunion happen. I “friended” people from my class and then invited them to the reunion. I then encouraged people that I invited to have their friends join facebook or at the very least inform them of the event.

The idea of grassroots marketing for the event has resulted in over double the attendance at this reunion than we had at our 5th reunion.

Having gone to high school in Connecticut, I found that many of my classmates have stayed in the Nutmeg State.  To make things easy on me, I had all checks sent to my office.

Now here’s where the very old school marketing of planning a reunion and the blawg intersect. I can embed posts from this blog on Facebook using the “Share” button that you see below this post. Doing this broadcasts the content to my facebook friends (classmates) which in turn increases traffic to this site.

In a nutshell, blogging as a marketing tool is like football, you have to be able to run the ball to win.

Tomorrow, I’ll share some more ideas on integrating a blawg with traditional marketing ideas.

Full post as published by A Connecticut Law Blog on November 19, 2008 (boomark / email).