When I speak about blawging, it’s usually in the context of an ethics lecture. Ethics and social media is a fairly hot topic, and when the alternatives are guys who make a living off of convincing lawyers that there is no such thing as ethics in social media, it makes me look good.
The one time Kevin O’Keefe made the foolish mistake of inviting me to join him on a panel about blogging at the New York City Bar. Aside from the fact that I’m not good for business, I’m also not good about people who only want to know a shortcut to the nuts and bolts of fabulous wealth and fame on in the interwebz. As one woman there demanded, she paid for the CLE (yes, it was a CLE) and damn well expected us to tell what she wanted to know. Ah, lawyers.
So when I was asked to speak to a diverse group of people this weekend about SJ, I saw it as an interesting experiment. I would speak to the good, bad and ugly of blawging, of which all existed in vast quantities, but it would not be a marketing pitch, as I had nothing to sell. It wasn’t about my own great glory, since I was well aware nobody cared, nor about some magic bullet that didn’t exist. It would be real. At least, that was my plan.
The audience had a few lawyers in it, but also people who neither were lawyers nor had any particular interest in lawyers. They were there for one reason only: what would I have to say that would enable them to either gain immediate and effortless fame and fortune in the blogosphere, or how they could package the magic and sell it at a profit.
They were not amused by my presentation. One person asked me what I wrote that captured people’s interest. Was I controversial? Was I topical? Did I rant or write lengthy explanations? Was I a curator? What was the secret?
There is no secret, I said. “Oh, puhleeeeze,” was the reaction, as if I was keeping the magic from the person so I wouldn’t have competition. When I said my posts were occasionally controversial, the person announced, “okay, so it has to be controversial.” No, I explained. Sometimes they were topical, while other times practice oriented, and occasionally wholly off-topic about law and just some tangential bit of life that struck my fancy. As I mentioned each possibility, she would proclaim, “so topical,” then “so practice oriented,” until I finally said, “you’re not hearing me: there is no one thing that it is.”
She then got up, mumbled something unpleasant, waved her hand in a “z” shape, and walked out. I failed to deliver what she wanted, a specific approach that would give her the magic with no fuss, muss or effort.
Then came another voice from the gallery, asking me the perpetual question: What’s the ROI? The voice was that of a marketer, who proved herself to be quite savvy earlier in that she was not at all shy about her efforts to manipulate her target audience to make purchases as irresponsibly as humanly possible. I have to admit, I was quite impressed with how she felt no qualms whatsoever about purposes.
“There is no ROI,” I told her. At least, no ROI in the sense you mean. Sure, there are tangential benefits, from being asked to speak at conferences, to getting calls from reporters and, if one was very lucky, having some influence on people’s views. No, no, no, she shook her head. “So you can be a thought leader,” she said. I could feel a sharp pain right behind my left eyeball. “Who cares? I want to know what your ROI is?”
“There is no ROI,” I reiterated. “I can’t give you one, because there is none.”
“There has to be an ROI,” she explained, as if talking to a particularly dense child. “Why else would you do this?”
I just stood there, empty and chastised by this marketing dynamo, for my abject failure to serve as a capitalist tool. It’s not that I have anything against capitalism, and I most assuredly do not, but that I failed to provide a meaningful response to the first and only thing that matters to a marketer.
As I tried to explain about my “highly scientific” study of one case that I would take from every 1000 phone calls that come in because of this blog, and how I mumbled about callers who demanded their free consultation because they “just wanted to ask a question,” and as I sought to urge her that there was no possibility of gaining through trickery, whether SEO or keyword spamming or backlink spamming or anything in the marketer’s bag of tricks, the sort of organic existence that comes from just writing a blog for the sake of writing a blog, I watched as she rose from her seat, turned and, with grace and aplomb, strode purposefully from the room.
Without an ROI, I was of no use to her whatsoever. You can’t package work, effort, patience and tenacity. There’s no profit to be had from telling people to work hard.
The rest of the audience sat there until I finished my presentation. Some stopped to speak with me. Others drifted out afterward. The diversion from the point of my presentation by the persistent effort to put me into the marketers’ paradigm didn’t please the ones I spoke with very much. They understood it couldn’t be reduced to a single thing, or quantified sufficiently to be repackaged and sold. I suspect they kinda like the idea that a bit of work for the right reasons ended up doing some good.
But I need to remember the next time I’m asked to speak about blawging that most people aren’t going to have any interest in hearing what I’m telling. It does them no good at all. Four out of five marketers agree, and the fifth marketer’s head exploded.
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I’m in awe of your restraint. But next time? Gesture inappropriately and just say: “Hey. You. I got an ROI for you right here”. Works for me.
I was trying to be nice. That didn’t work out well.
Grabbing your crotch and saying “Hey I got something _______ for you right here” is the New Nice. Three Pittsburgh women I know clued me in.
I clearly don’t spend enough time in Pittsburgh.
Baltimore!
You could pull it off in your tan blazer and become the Omar of the legal-blawg-o-sphere if you let your hair down and learned to relax a little.
Too bad I wasn’t east of the Mississippi I could have brought a kewl banner or two to hang over the balcony. I always thought the ROI was going to be the book. ; )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMm1Wih0kug
p.s. I got dibs on the URL.
The cheese stands alone. Just not in Baltimore this time.
If you passed around a registration sheet I happen to know a woman who knows a woman, who knows a guy, who knows a woman who has every Bill Hicks bootleg and officially recorded set out there.
Some of that audience might be interested. You could take a few pointers in stage presence and monologue delivery from Mr. Hicks as well before your next televised gig. You never know what questions you may be asked.
Why didn’t you show me this before my presentation?
LOL check your archives.
I never get tired of his stuff particularly that bit. In his top 25 for sure.
I think I have broken the rules with this clip here before.
Don’t worry I will not pay an intern to index all your archives once you semi retire to write a book or two and you sell your soul to the cheap seats to finance the book and graduate school for your rats. No way you are selling the car right?
Long live SJ!
RIP Mr. Hicks
P.S. You really could take a few pointers from Mr. Hicks for your live (especially televised) monolog gigs though. And WTF?! No heads up with your gigs here at SJ?
Don’t worry I doubt William will stalk you and I will teach Lawrence how to dance in the lobby when the book tour comes around to his town and I am going to steal the Wheeze’s boots out of principle one way or another.
I like to travel, I will join up for a half circuit or one of the regional tours just like back in the day following the Dead around. I might heckle with banners but more likely probably just hang out in the parking lots and tail gate while selling action figures (sorry, but I already sold the rights to the reality porn series).
Who knows I might even dress in full regalia cosplay (character yet to be determined) and read Fubar verse with Black Napkins and other classics playing in the back ground while handing out the business cards of your legal guild readers who cant pay the mortgage.
If your agent sends you to Nebraska (I think people read there) I will get the judge drunk in the WalMart parking lot in Omaha where you will be doing your book signing then take him downtown. I think I know a few characters who are familiar enough with that want-to- be-metropolis to show him the back doors to Jacob’s Ladder around those parts.
Best get a writing esteemed one. You wouldn’t want to be late for your own party! And just think of all the money you will make….
I can’t start writing those books as long as I have a family to feed. You know, they expect dinner every friggin’ night.
Next time a marketer wants to know about the ROI on content marketing, feel free to share the love and give them my email address. I’ll be happy to go to their location and drop some knowledge for a modest sum, which of course, itself comes with an ROI.
Don’t make me beat you to a bloody pulp. Just don’t make me.
Maybe next time you could just say: “My ROI is making my commenters cry.”
I like that. Sad commenter tears.
It’s interesting to me that my law partners, who probably have more reason than anyone else to care about my blogging ROI or lack of ROI, get the point that the marketer missed. When we have our sit-downs, folks say, “cool article about such-and-so.” Who says lawyers lack humanity?
Wait, this proves lawyers have humanity? That’s got to be worth something, right?
Yo, SHG,
If you ever refer to yourself (or anyone else) as a thought leader, I will do everything in my power (including, perhaps, calling in my NSA pals) to eradicate your existence from teh interwebz. After careful consideration and massive surveys, I have concluded that thought leader is the single most despicable phrase ever coined by, you, know, them.
Just sayin’
Trust me, if that ever happens, you won’t have to. I’ll do it myself.
In my semi-retirement I do an amount of guest lecturing and mentoring gratis. In a couple of hours I’ll be addressing some undergraduates at a well known east coast university via Internet video. Three guest lectures next week. What’s the ROI? Like for you, zero. But I have the satisfaction of passing on to students and rising professionals information I find useful in my work that does have an ROI. If I must have a reputation, I’d like it to be that I provide something useful for students, their professors, proteges, and employers. Success for me cannot be measured in currency or ROI. I suspect you are similar.
I am, though I wouldn’t complain if I got a cup of joe out of it once a week. Just sayin’.
Hey, I left that evening with a lawyer from Skadden as a client – no question in his or my mind that it was “Greenfield on blogging” that sold him.
ROI and thought-leader concepts are illusory at best. Lawyers who blog find their own rewards. For some it’s business, for others it’s meeting people – on and offline for learning etc, for others, it’s speaking invitations, and for other’s it’s the reading and learning that comes from blogging.
I may provide you no ROI, but I’ve enjoyed your blogging for years and have had the pleasure of dining with you on more than a few occasions as a result of meeting through blogging .
I know that lawyer from Skadden, and he’s a great guy. I met him through blogging as well. He’s never sent me a case (and for that matter, I’ve never sent him one either), but meeting him was its own reward. There are intangibles that have come from all this, but they came naturally, organically if you will, and can’t be processed and packaged by some formulaic methodology that can be taught and sold at a tidy profit.
And marketers hate that. And didn’t think well of me for saying so.
It’s not a secret, you capture people’s interest by interesting writing (whether it be by boring writing about interesting things, interesting writing about boring things, or ideally interesting writing about interesting things…). Of course, that would be a bit tautological in response to “One person asked me what I wrote that captured people’s interest.”
That was what I learned about playing drums from Buddy Rich; make the hard look easy and the easy look hard. More seriously, since boring and interesting are in the eyes of the beholder, it never concerns me. Readers have a broad array of preferences. I can’t please them all, so I please myself.
I just read some marketer who wrote about SJ, saying that the content was “writing about other blogs.” Go figure.