Comparing Legal Blogging Platforms
July 7th, 2009 by Conrad Saam, Sr. Marketing Manager
There are numerous legal blogging platforms with a wide variety of functionality and pricing. In selecting a platform, it’s important to understand the capabilities, technical requirements and pricing among the different options. We launched Avvo Legal Blogs to provide lawyers with an affordable solution that has the functionality they want without the technical headaches.
Once you get set up, blogging is pretty easy. There are lots of ways to get started, from the free, ad-supported platform to the custom-tailored suit. Make the right decision for your firm and start blogging!
July 7th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Easy to add to website is an interesting column. Why not just have the blog as part of the website and have everything you need all in one place, a modern CMS can handle a blog and many other things all at once, and about for what Lexblog is charging. Ask a techie about DotNetNuke, Django, Plone or Drupal.
July 8th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Very dissapointing Conrad that you would not spend 10 minutes to find out what LexBlog charges and what we do.
You have reached out to me personally on a number of occasions and I met with you to answer your questions. I spent time on the phone with you to help you quite a few times.
Now you represent what LexBlog charges by saying we charge more than we do. You leave off a laundry list of things we do.
When Avvo came out with blog product I came to your offices to find out what you are doing. Sure, it was in large part because I have a dog in this hunt. But more importantly, I wanted to learn about your blog offering so I could answer questions of America’s lawyers and counsel lawyers as to their social media alternatives.
I do this because of my role as a leading lawyer in our profession and the responsibility that imposes on me to give lawyers my best. And to be a straight shooter all the way.
What you’ve done here draws a clear distinction between what I, personally, and LexBlog stands for and what you stand for. I wanted to be a lawyer since I was a little kid so I could help others. Having practiced for the better part of 20 years, I now help lawyers.
I remain willing to spend time with you and Mark Britton, your CEO, explaining what we do and to help lawyers using the Avvo directory.
July 8th, 2009 at 9:36 am
“Once you get set up, blogging is pretty easy.”
Quite the opposite. Setup is easy. Take it from me, a publisher — cranking out high-quality content daily or even weekly is difficult even for publishers let alone law firms. Don’t jump into blogging without serious strategic planning regarding your content.
July 8th, 2009 at 10:36 am
Neil – I couldn’t agree more that the good content can be hard. What we’ve found (and the reason we launched Avvo Legal Blogs) is that so many lawyers get tripped up on technical and cost issues, that they never even have a chance to generate good content.
-Conrad from Avvvo
July 8th, 2009 at 11:43 am
Kevin – Feel free to discuss the comprehensive services that you offer. If you are interested in a guest blog post on Avvoblog to detail your value added services, I’m more than happy to facilitate. The pricing information was gathered from 3 of your existing clients; if you feel these fees have been misrepresented, let me know and I will gladly update our information.
- Conrad
July 8th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Conrad, you call me when you want help for Avvo and you, as the PR person for Avvo, call when you want help on how to reach bloggers and do communications work on the blogosphere.
You never call to get our prices nor to ask what we do. Then you misrepresent our pricing and what we do. Sounds like when you want help, you have the time to meet and talk. Then when you want to do some PR blogging, you just wing it.
Let me see if I understand what’s transpired and what you are asking. Avvo launches a blog solution with a a June 8 blog post all about why very few lawyers would need a client development tool like LexBlog offers, Then you follow that up with this post which has both misleading information about our service and inflates our pricing.
You’ve gone out and made misrepresentations to lawyers about my company without knowing what you are talking about. Then you say ‘Oh, sorry I didn’t call or meet as I do when I want your help, please feel free to clean up my mess for me.’
This sad affair is why Avvo is ill equipped to help lawyers with blogs. I’m not sure you know what you’re doing, I’m not sure Avvo had the best interests of lawyers at heart in getting into blogs, and worse yet, I’m not sure I trust you.
Avvo has been lauded by some lawyers and belittled by others. I have been in your camp through out. But using me and my company like this, for whatever reason, is very poor judgment on your part – at least in my mind.
July 8th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
(Re-submitting, as the first attempt appears to have vanished. Apologies if this ends up a duplicate.)
Conrad, as a non-practicing lawyer and an avid supporter of lawyers embracing new technology, I’m thrilled to see you call attention to the benefits that blogging can have for a professional’s marketing efforts. I started a blog 8 years ago, and was one of the first lawyers to advocate for blogs as a marketing vehicle (both in my ABA column in LPM magazine as well as in the book I co-authored about marketing on the Internet, also published by the ABA).
However, I’m disappointed that you misrepresent almost every aspect of Blogger in your comparison. I’m the product manager for Blogger, and find your statements about its capabilities to be quite misleading.
For starters, Blogger is the most visited blogging platform in the world, and millions of users use Blogger to publish to their blogs every week – for free.
In addition to gadgets built specifically for the millions of users who rely on Blogger (http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/07/contribute-gadgets-to-blogger.html), our users can control every element of their page and embed Flash, javascript and any other interactive code provided third parties that they want, giving them complete control over the functionality of their blog.
Domain registration and configuration is built into the app itself – allowing users to easily register their domain and begin publishing within minutes. My own blog is hosted by Blogger at http://tins.rklau.com/ – for which I pay nothing other than the domain registration fee. See this page for more info including a simple how-to video:
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=76543.
Our Terms of Service explicitly establish that the user owns all content they create: “Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services.” Link:
http://www.blogger.com/terms.g
In addition to controlling their own design, users can choose from thousands of third-party designed templates for a completely unique presentation. See here for links to some of the more popular designers:
http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/06/spruce-up-your-blog.html
Blogger’s not for everyone, and I think there’s ample room in this space for solutions tailored to the needs of the professionals you’re catering to. But let’s trust our users to make fully-informed decisions based on accurate representations of each platform.
–Rick Klau
Product Manager, Blogger
rklau@google.com
http://tins.rklau.com/
July 8th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I ‘ll let you and Kevin fight out your differences with Avvo and Lexblog but I wanted to say, as a free Wordpress user, that the Wordpress column is sort of misrepresented here.
- There are 5,767 Wordpress plugins – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/
- They are easy to install.
- You can customize the code in Wordpress anywhere!
- Don’t understand why you would want to change your domain often, if at all?
- One plugin will add a Wordpress Blog to any website, thus easy.
- My Wordpress blog is Ad free.
I think the problem here is that this chart matrix uses unclear criteria and gives them either a “yes” or “no” when there is a lot of gray area. A slick marketing tool of a post but not entirely objective without much explanation of these criteria.
Any Blogger platform users out there?
July 8th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Conrad -
You left the self-hosted Wordpress blog off your comparison chart. This is the most widely used blogging solution for serious bloggers.
July 8th, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Rex – you aren’t using the totally free Wordpress, but instead the self-hosted Wordpress. As we discussed in email – you actually do have a monthly bill for this and yes, it provides everything you describe and more. Self-hosted Wordpress is extremely powerful and easy to use – which is exactly why we chose it as the platform for Avvo Legal Blogs to bring excellent tools to lawyers at a reasonable price. Doug Cornelius mentions this in his comment, describing self-hosted Wordpress as “the most widely used blogging solution for serious bloggers.” When you set up your blog, I’m sure you had to go through some technical machinations to get it registered, hosted and your (excellent) theme installed on your new domain. Avvo Legal Blogs makes this an easy, turn-key process to make it absolutley simple for lawyers to start blogging at a reasonable price point. -Conrad
July 8th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I’m awfully suspicious of that “most widely used” distinction.
WordPress, Blogger, MovableType and TypePad quite obviously host a number of blogs several orders of magnitude over what Avvo does.
If you’re going specifically for legal weblogs, then, well, as I understand it “Avvo Blog” is a whole month old. LexBlog is several years old, with hundreds of clients of which I am aware, including myself.
I highly doubt you had that good a month.
Like many other lawyers, I’ve kept my distance from Avvo since I’m not comfortable with the “rating” system and the erroneous perception of quality it gives clients, and, to be honest, this type of puffery (at best) and misrepresentation (at worst) isn’t helping.
July 8th, 2009 at 11:13 pm
I am a huge fan of Blogger and I think that you Blogger column is completely misrepresented, and as Doug suggested self-hosted wordpress is also missing.
Of course everyone is entitled to a little marketing spin now and again, but misrepresenting the facts will get you more than a little lash back from the users who know and love their blogging platforms (as you have now discovered).
July 9th, 2009 at 2:25 am
@Doug Cornelius – a review of the Avvo Legal Blog site indicates they are using Word Press as their platform. So that option is represented in the first column (and explains why the chart says the Avvo option runs on a “widely used platform”).
But my understanding is that LexBlog also runs on a widely used platform – SixApart’s Moveable Type – it’s just LexBlog customizes the platform for its clients. That seems to be exactly what Avvo will be doing for its clients with Word Press. No difference there, as I see it.
But I think the comparison to LexBlog is still apples-to-oranges. For $25/month, it sounds like Avvo is offering a service more akin to setting up a client on, say, Typepad, and then letting the client run their own show after the blog goes live (but presumably with tech support to address any bugs or errors that might arise). But I don’t expect clients would get nearly the same level of ongoing tactical support and strategic guidance as they would from a company like LexBlog (which, as I see it, is offering more of an “agency” model – the kind of model, incidentally, that eLawMarketing also offers).
So it really depends on whether a lawyer is comfortable with more of a self-service model (which Avvo seems to be), or is interested in the value-add of ongoing strategic and tactical support and guidance from an agency like LexBlog or eLawMarketing. For those interested in the latter, it’s natural that the option will cost more – in most cases in life, you get what you pay for.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:31 am
Rex,
I totally agree with you about Wordpress! If there was any objective analysis provided and it was open for votes to readers, I am convinced Wordpress would easily win! However, for beginners, I think Blogger is the easiest to use.
I would also add that, knowing what Kevin does, even if these were his prices, it is pocket change compared to the bang you’ll get for bucks! I have yet to see what Avvo will do for lawyers. Is there a free trial period available? If so, I am willing to try and comment.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:01 am
Avvo being “Most widely used” is clearly misleading. Avvo should had an * indicating that self-hosted Wordpress is most widely used, not Avvo blogs. Then you can explain that Avvo uses Wordpress to build its blogs. People don’t have to pay $300.00 to use Wordpress. They can use it on their own, which is why you are trying to blur the lines. I hate shady marketing.
July 17th, 2009 at 10:13 am
[...] Marketing Manager Conrad Saam recently produced a feature comparison table for the various legal blogging platforms. Unfortunately, the list included a number of inaccuracies, prompting responses from Kevin [...]
July 18th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
[...] Blog Software Showdown Avvo’s Marketing Manager Conrad Saam recently produced a feature comparison table for the various legal blogging platforms. Unfortunately, the list included a number of inaccuracies, prompting responses from Kevin [...]
July 28th, 2009 at 10:24 am
So a quick question for all: what are some of the plug-in examples specific to legal profession blogs that are most common and easily used?
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:11 am
Wordpress is the best platform for any type of blogging platform for applications like legal, medical and others because of its huge numbers of plugins, themes and community support.