Featured

Is Your Law Blog Accessible to People With Disabilities?

When I recently attended SOBCon, a blogging and social media conference in Chicago, my favorite presentation was given by my friend Glenda Watson Hyatt on the topic of blog accessibility for people with disabilities. Her presentation, which she has made available as a free ebook titled How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Accessibility, addressed the reasons why it’s important for us to make sure everyone can access our blogs and provided ways to improve our blogs’ accessibility.

If you don’t know Glenda, she is known by many as The Left Thumb Blogger. Glenda has cerebral palsy and types (with one thumb) better than I do. She is also a published author and a sought-after speaker on the topic of web accessibility. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow her @GlendaWH.

Glenda’s presentation at SOBCon gave me a lot to think about, both for my own blogs and for my clients’ blogs. I want my own blogs to be as accessible as possible for everyone. And do I think it is important for a lawyer’s blog to be accessed by people with disabilities? Of course! People with disabilities are surfing the web for personal research, educational purposes, and yes — maybe even to hire you. 

One of the most easy-to-implement bits we learned from Glenda’s presentation:

Alt tags are important. When we post images or links on our blogs, people with visual impairments rely on the “alt” tag to know what the photo is of or what link they’re clicking on. When posting an image on WordPress blogs, the “title” field becomes the “alt” tag. Although some SEO-savvy bloggers use alt tags as an opportunity to get their keywords in an extra time, the intended use for this field is to enter a truly valid description so someone who can’t see the image or link can have it read to them by the technology they use to access the web. 

For example, in the image I posted above the alt tag is “How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Accessibility by Glenda Watson Hyatt.” This way, those who can’t see the image will know what the picture is of. Because this image is also a link to Glenda’s ebook, the alt tag also lets folks know what they’ll get when they click.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use alt tags, pages 14-20 of Glenda’s ebook explain in detail, with screenshots, how to use alt tags. I highly recommend reading the whole ebook; it’s a fast read and will provide you with ways to make your blog more accessible starting with your next post.

A quick perusal of my own blog after learning from Glenda gave me a lot to think about.

• Is my font size too small?
• Should I change my code so that links are also underlined?
• Why am I not captioning, where possible, the third-party videos I post? Or providing transcripts where captioning third-party videos isn’t possible? (I have a hearing loss myself and have trouble hearing most videos, so I should really have this done.)
• Can people find what they’re looking for without having to click around too much?
• Am I using tags in the best way? (Probably not!)

I am very interested in getting the legal community’s perspective on the issue of web/blog accessibility for people with disabilities. As a person with fairly decent eyesight and no physical disabilities keeping me from browsing/scrolling etc, I find a lot of the blogs I visit to be hard to read and difficult to navigate. Do you give much thought or concern to how people with disabilities might navigate your blog? Are there things about your blog you would change if you knew how?

June 8, 2009 | 12 Comments

Getting Started

Law Blog vs Lawyer Website: What’s the Difference?

Lots of lawyers ask me why they should have a blog, or if they should have one. If they haven’t heard much about blogging, one of their first questions is often “What’s the difference between a blog and a website?” Here’s my response:

Your law firm website is the online version of a marketing kit. On your website, you talk about yourself, what you do, what you’ve done in the past. Maybe you post articles to answer frequently asked questions about the practice area(s) you cover. You optimize the site for search engines, set up a contact form, and hope clients will find you.

As a Blogger, You’re a Person

While both websites and blogs allow you to brand yourself as an expert and establish authority in your practice area, blogging allows you the opportunity to prove you’re human. On your blog, your writing will be less formal, your tone will be more casual, and your readers will leave feeling like they got to know you. Hopefully they’ll even want to come back!

Which Lawyer Would YOU Hire?

Pretend you’re an average guy surfing the net to hire a lawyer.

Scenario 1: You land at a lawyer’s website through a search engine. You find information similar to what you can find on other lawyer websites. You read for a minute, then hit the back button and read the next lawyer’s website. Unless that first guy is the only lawyer with a website in his practice area, chances are slim that you’re going to remember him as anything special. He’s not so different from the other guys.

Scenario 2: You land at a lawyer’s blog. From his posts, you immediately understand his passion. You learn what he stands for. You witness his reactions to what’s happening in the news and sees how much he cares about his cases. You get the impression that he’s the type of guy who never gives up, who never loses.

You’re an intelligent guy, but you need some help. You want to hire someone who you know will do right by you, who won’t back down till you win this thing.

Which lawyer would you call?

February 24, 2009 | 35 Comments

Community

Is Your Law Blog Accessible to People With Disabilities?

When I recently attended SOBCon, a blogging and social media conference in Chicago, my favorite presentation was given by my friend Glenda Watson Hyatt on the topic of blog accessibility for people with disabilities. Her presentation, which she has made available as a free ebook titled How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Accessibility, addressed the reasons why it’s important for us to make sure everyone can access our blogs and provided ways to improve our blogs’ accessibility.

If you don’t know Glenda, she is known by many as The Left Thumb Blogger. Glenda has cerebral palsy and types (with one thumb) better than I do. She is also a published author and a sought-after speaker on the topic of web accessibility. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow her @GlendaWH.

Glenda’s presentation at SOBCon gave me a lot to think about, both for my own blogs and for my clients’ blogs. I want my own blogs to be as accessible as possible for everyone. And do I think it is important for a lawyer’s blog to be accessed by people with disabilities? Of course! People with disabilities are surfing the web for personal research, educational purposes, and yes — maybe even to hire you. 

One of the most easy-to-implement bits we learned from Glenda’s presentation:

Alt tags are important. When we post images or links on our blogs, people with visual impairments rely on the “alt” tag to know what the photo is of or what link they’re clicking on. When posting an image on WordPress blogs, the “title” field becomes the “alt” tag. Although some SEO-savvy bloggers use alt tags as an opportunity to get their keywords in an extra time, the intended use for this field is to enter a truly valid description so someone who can’t see the image or link can have it read to them by the technology they use to access the web. 

For example, in the image I posted above the alt tag is “How POUR is Your Blog? Tips for Increasing Your Blog’s Accessibility by Glenda Watson Hyatt.” This way, those who can’t see the image will know what the picture is of. Because this image is also a link to Glenda’s ebook, the alt tag also lets folks know what they’ll get when they click.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use alt tags, pages 14-20 of Glenda’s ebook explain in detail, with screenshots, how to use alt tags. I highly recommend reading the whole ebook; it’s a fast read and will provide you with ways to make your blog more accessible starting with your next post.

A quick perusal of my own blog after learning from Glenda gave me a lot to think about.

• Is my font size too small?
• Should I change my code so that links are also underlined?
• Why am I not captioning, where possible, the third-party videos I post? Or providing transcripts where captioning third-party videos isn’t possible? (I have a hearing loss myself and have trouble hearing most videos, so I should really have this done.)
• Can people find what they’re looking for without having to click around too much?
• Am I using tags in the best way? (Probably not!)

I am very interested in getting the legal community’s perspective on the issue of web/blog accessibility for people with disabilities. As a person with fairly decent eyesight and no physical disabilities keeping me from browsing/scrolling etc, I find a lot of the blogs I visit to be hard to read and difficult to navigate. Do you give much thought or concern to how people with disabilities might navigate your blog? Are there things about your blog you would change if you knew how?

June 8, 2009 | 12 Comments

Social Media

Can We Honestly Measure the ROI of Online Relationships?

This weekend I attended SOBCon, a social media conference, in Chicago. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘the ROI of Relationships’ which, I must admit, stirred up my skeptical side a bit. How does one measure the return on investment of a relationship online? The cost/benefit of a relationship is difficult enough to weigh offline.

The concept of trying to measure the worth of a friend’s Retweet, blog comment, or Digg – quite frankly – seems like a waste of time to me, when so many of us are still wondering if there is any tangible value of being involved in social media in the first place. Sure, friendship is free (theoretically), but how much is our time worth?

Presenting on the ROI of relationships in social media was Katie Delahaye Paine, the CEO and founder of KDPaine & Partners LLC and author of Measuring Public Relationships. Sounds like a lady with some answers, eh?

(KD’s presentation slides are available online)

Katie talked common sense solutions to the tune of “Goals drive metrics. Metrics drive results.” The simple message was: figure out what it is you’re measuring in order to figure out how to measure it. If you’re measuring reputation and relationships, you’re measuring something different than the salesperson is.

If your goal is to measure reputation/relationships, you care about: relationship scores, recommendations, positioning, and engagement.

If your goal is to measure sales, you care about: engagement index, web analytics, sales, marketing mix modeling.

The latter includes selling a service, which is ultimately what lawyers/legal professionals are doing, but it’s not what most lawyers are using their blogs/social media to do directly since this solicitation practice is not ethical. This might apply more heavily to non-lawyer legal professionals (eg marketers selling their services to lawyers) or others trying to use social media  to ultimately sell a product or service to legal professionals via social media channels. Bottom line: in The Land of Legal, our lives are more complicated than hunting down a prospect, selling him our stuff, and calling it a day.

But KD brought up some basics which, I believe, do apply to lawyers using social media. (I believe this because I get so many calls/emails that go “Someone told me I should be blogging/Twittering/Facebooking, but I’m not sure why I should do it or if it’s worth my time.”)

KD asked:

• What’s the return you’re looking for?
• What’s the investment (time/money)?
• What’s your audience, and what’s your connection to making your audience do something?
• What are the specific metrics you’re trying to move?
• What are you comparing it to (benchmark)?
• Why are you doing social media? What is the purpose?

KD pointed out that 90% of the conversation out there is about the tools. “There’s a new tool born every minute, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about answering these other things first,” she said. I wholeheartedly agree with that!

KD said a lot of her clients say they’re in social media ‘to get their feet wet’ – which is a bad goal, or a non-goal, but it’s one that comes up way too often.

Further points/questions to ask yourself, according to KD:

• What would be different if you DIDN’T do this?
• Social media might be free, but how much is your time worth?
• How much did it cost you to do this in the old fashioned advertising way? How much does it cost you to do this the social media way?

Not only do you have to know who your audience is and how to reach them, but you have to know how to influence them.

KD gave the example of hospitals. Why do people choose a hospital? Quite often part of it’s because of recommendations. If a blogger is talking about “my doctor is the best cancer doctor in New England,” that’s going to influence other people who are searching, she said.

My question of “How do we accurately measure this?” remains.

Personal example: I can ask every potential client who calls me how they found out about me, and many say they found me via Twitter or LinkedIn or through my blog. Others say they were recommended by another client, who I know found me via social media. (I do keep track of this stuff.) But what about the client who can’t remember how he first heard about me? How do I measure that?

For my own business, using social media is clearly worth my time because I’m in the social media business. For lawyers who are using traditional marketing methods, who utilize PR and main stream media, as well as a standard website, blogs and social media – translation: all of my clients – how easy is it to measure the return on investment of a social media relationship? It may be possible to measure it somewhat, but I’m not sure how easy or possible it would be sit down at the end of the day and draw up a detailed report. (I suppose this is why KD is the ROI expert, and I am not.)

I was able to dig up some further reading on this topic, which I’m planning to read this evening with hopes to achieve enlightenment: How to Measure Social Media Relations: The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same by Katie Delahaye Paine CEO, KDPaine & Partners, LLC, published by the Institute for Public Relations April 2007

Do you (or your firm) have a social media campaign? How are you measuring the return on that investment?

May 5, 2009 | 8 Comments