Lawyer blogs can be a great way to add more content to your site and build a relationship with people on the web. Before starting a blog, though, its important to decide what tone, or voice, you want to project to the world.
Tone is a literary term referring to the writer’s attitude toward his or her subject and the intended audience of the work. A tone can be formal, informal, serious, funny, etc.
Before deciding a tone, here are a couple of questions to ask yourself:
- Who is doing the blogging – one person or multiple people?
- What is the subject and how does that impact what tone you should take?
Who’s blogging?
For a law firm blog, the regularity of posting is important. Not everyone has the time to devote to posting several blogs a week, so you might decide that a few attorneys will each write one blog a week to divide up the work. Or perhaps you’ll be writing on multiple subjects, such as different practice areas, and the various attorneys in those practice areas at your firm will each write regularly about their area of expertise.
In this case, you want to decide whether each blogger will decide his or her own tone or whether all bloggers should aim for an overall tone.
Tone and subject
The subject of your blog should absolutely influence the tone. In a blog about legal issues, for example, you would want to adopt a more formal tone. A blog about online marketing, such as I’m writing now, leaves room for a more informal tone.
Establishing the distance between blogger and reader will help project the tone of your blog. More distance denotes a more formal tone — avoid personal topics, focus on law firm business, services, news, events, etc.
Building a bond
For law firms, a blog can be a place to reach out, to establish a closer bond with readers and become an actual person, not just a faceless attorney or an anonymous web address.
To build a closer bond, talk about people in your law firm. Use words like “I” or “we,” and use a more informal, conversational style of writing. Casual is OK, but while writing, always keep in mind that you represent a law firm and balance is appropriate.
A comments feature on your blog also creates relationship between the blogger and readers. It tells your readers that you care about their input. It makes the blog a conversation between those who are interested and you, the expert.
Adding buttons for readers to click to your practice’s Twitter, Facebook or other social media pages can also help in this.
Being an authority figure
One more thing to consider as you decide on the tone of your blog: how to establish yourself as an authority in your areas of legal specialty.
- Qualifications – It’s not unseemly to mention your qualifications to help readers understand why they should listen to your thoughts on a subject.
- Be professional, but not pompous – Use professional legal terms, but explain things that might not be apparent to your readers. Don’t assume they know everything you do; if they did, they wouldn’t need to read your blog.
If you need help determining the right tone for your attorney blog and creating content that conveys that voice, contact us today.
