The following are my notes from our legal panel of Phil Mann, Buzz Bruggeman and Kevin O’Keefe at Day One of the Blog Business Summit.
- What do you do when you get the letter from the lawyer? Phil says, not to contact the other side. Tf you call the other side or call the other lawyer, everything you say may be written down or taken out of context. The intention may be a letter to scare you, or they may be deadly serious. You don’t know which.
- It’s best never to send a cease and desist letter to a blogger if you’re not prepared to back it up with legal action, and especially if you don’t have a case. It could seriously backfire on you. Kevin used the Warren Kremer Paino case as an example of a time when threatened lawsuits backfire. The bloggers went crazy and the lawsuit couldn’t be dismissed fast enough. It’s always better to try to communicate. The bottom line is: the best thing is to try to communicate with the blogger rather than sending them a cease and desist letter as a first step.
- If you stick to facts, it’s hard for anyone to win a defamation action.
- The laywers link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s overview of legal liability issues for bloggers.
- What about getting fired for being a blogger? Buzz has looked through all the cases where people have been fired for blogging and never found a case where people were fired for simply blogging. He says they got fired for being stupid and disclosing inappropriate information about salary, proprietary information, etc. “You’re not smart enough to realize that you got fired for being stupid.” You get fired for being stupid, not for blogging.
- Smart business follow simple practices: hire smart people, give them good guidance, motivate them, give them good tools and get out of the way.
- Good corporate blogging policies help define protocols that help employees to avoid pitfalls of overlap between personal and professional life in the blogosphere.
- How are lawyers blogging vis a vis their business? There are a number of examples: Rethink (information about intellectual property), LegalMojo (employment opportunities for lawyers), This Week in Law
- One particularly great example of Web marketing is a bankruptcy attorney who found her audience where they live. She created a MySpace account because her primary audience was between 20-30 years old. She got lots of clients and her innovation got her radio interviews, and an article in Pittsburgh newspaper. Soon, her story was all over the blogosphere and she had more business than she knew what to do with.
- Buzz uses the s*** word from the podium…
- If you want to create controversy on your blog, great. But measure it and write about what you know.
- Phil says he has recieved more business as a result of his blog in the last two years than he did in 20 years of traditional marketing strategies.
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