Optimizing bylined articles for business development: steps for using social media to generate inquires.

• Author: Freedman, David M.

Writing articles and getting them published is a time-honored business development strategy for lawyers. A series of articles under your lawyers' bylines, published in respected periodicals and online media, can build name recognition and show they are authoritative, credible and reliable.

For small firms, writing articles may serve as the cornerstone of practice development, while large firms should integrate it into a broader strategic marketing plan. Using this strategy successfully requires strong writing and public relations expertise, but modest capital investment. It involves three steps:

1. Publication

   Get a series of articles published under your lawyers' bylines.

2. Distribution

   Send reprints directly to clients, prospects and referral sources, and give them an incentive to contact those lawyers (e.g., more information, a white paper, a free phone consultation).

3. Web Optimization

   Post your lawyers' articles to the firm's Web site, and use search engine optimization (SEO) and social media optimization (SMO) to drive traffic to the articles, where readers will land inside your firm's Web domain.

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   SMO is a relatively new marketing strategy--mainly because social media itself is still new. the narrow objective of SMO is to spread the word through various online communities that your attorney's article has been posted, tell how it will benefit people who read it and provide a hyperlink to it.

   The New Prime Time

   Social media evolved from new Internet technology that made it not just possible, but easy and cheap (often free) for non-tech users to contribute content to various kinds of Web sites. Blogging sites, for example, let you post, comment and discuss with other bloggers and commenters. Social networks let members post profiles and all manner of personal and business-oriented content. Anyone can write and edit entries for Wikipedia or post book reviews on Amazon.com. Wikis and forums let groups collaborate on content creation. You can upload photos to Flickr and short videos to YouTube. You can rate, share, recommend, tag and socially bookmark the content that others create.

   In the early days of the World Wide Web, content flowed mainly one way: from Web sites to users. now content flows every which way and back again--it's a conversation. Around the middle of this decade, the new Internet became known variously as the user-generated Web, the social Web and Web 2.0.

   Mainstream news and entertainment media have...