Michael Ferguson

A year ago this week, I blogged that legal tech companies and their founders and executives didn’t understand how to use technology and the Internet to market and sell. Unfortunately, nothing much has changed for legal tech companies marketing at this week’s Legalweek/Legaltech in New York City. Applies equally to most of the PR and marketing agencies they use to engage reporters, bloggers and potential customers attending the show. Sure, there are exceptions, such as  Ed Walters , the CEO of Fastcase, but they are few and far between. Ed can do more from his office in D.C. to market and engage customers, prospective customers, partners and influencers of those three (reporters, bloggers, leading media influencers) at Legalweek than CEO’s and marketers can do while being there.   Twenty years ago,   Doc Searls  and  Dave Weinberger  wrote in the widely read business book, Cluetrain Manifesto , that with the advent of the Internet  markets are conversations . On the Internet, mark

Jason Fried , the co-founder and CEO of Basecamp and widely respected business commenter blogged this on Friday. SILICON VALLEY HAS BECOME ESPECIALLY GOOD AT TURNING SOFTWARE, THE HIGHEST MARGIN PRODUCT EVER, INTO MANY OF THE WORST PERFORMING BUSINESSES IMAGINABLE. WITH FEW EXCEPTIONS, THE AMOUNT OF MONEY BEING LOST BY THE LEADERS OF THE NEW SCHOOL IS ABSOLUTELY STAGGERING. That’s it, and in all caps. This sounds early similar to the the year 2000 when the rug was pulled out from under Internet companies, including many in the legal industry, chasing page views and market share, as opposed to revenue and profits, as a measure of valuation. The corrections in valuation in 2000 weren’t 30 or 60 percent. Valuations of venture backed Internet companies dropped 90 to 100 percent. Venture capitalists which had committed to put in millions of dollars in traunches of money over time wouldn’t put in another dime – unless it was to bridge a sale.  Harvard Business School senior lecturer 

Yesterday brought word of mass layoffs at Buzzfeed and HuffPost. Today brought news that Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, is slashing jobs across the country.  Investors are likely looking to reign in losses at the first two and it’s possible Gannett is looking to get more profitable asap now that a hedge fund known to be the death of journalism for its previous acquisitions is looking to acquire them. No matter how you slice it though, there will be more a thousand more unemployed journalists by the end of the week. And you can add them to the thousands of journalists who have already lost their jobs. Some are calling this the realization that the business of digital content doesn’t work. I don’t buy it, people want quality journalism. As a society we require it.  Buzzfeed and HuffPost are getting slapped a bit by relying on SEO too much.  Packing keywords in the story and in title tags in an effort to game Google and rank high in search diminishes the con

WordPress.com announced last week its partnership with Google on the launch of Newspack by WordPress.com , a new publishing solution for small and medium sized news organizations.  With many local news organizations struggling to find sustainable models for journalism, we’re seeing a need for an inexpensive platform that provides the technology and support that lets news organizations build their businesses and focus on what they do best — providing critical reporting for their communities. Our hope with Newspack is to give them a platform where they can continue to focus on what they do best, while we focus on providing world-class technology and support across their editorial and business operations. As WordPress.com shared, a consortium of organizations are backing the project, with WordPress.com contributing the development efforts. Google, through the  Google News Initiative , is taking the lead in backing the project and has committed $1.2 million. Other funders include  The

The news that one of the most widely read blogs in the design, development, and digital publishing business, if not the net as a whole, is leaving Medium as its publishing platform should serve as a wakeup call to lawyers and law firms that blogging on Medium may not be in their best interests. David Heinemeier Hansson , Creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp, shared  the news last week that Basecamp’s twenty year old blog, Signal v Noise , is leaving Medium for WordPress. Medium made good sense for Basecamp when they first moved there. Three years ago  we embraced  an exciting new publishing platform called Medium. It felt like a new start for a writing community, and we benefited immensely from the boost in reach and readership those early days brought. But alas it was not to last. When we moved over, Medium was all about attracting big blogs and other publishers. This was going to be a new space for a new time where publishers could find a home. And it was. For

All lawyers and law firms use the Internet for marketing and business development. Websites, SEO (search engine optimization), directories, ratings, content marketing, email newsletters and more. Lawyers spend a lot of money and, in most cases, a lot of time, here. But do lawyers know how these forms of Internet marketing work? Do they know if these forms of Internet marketing work at all for lawyers like them? Most lawyers marketing on the Internet focus on the easy to measure (traffic, clicks, views, likes and subscribers). Rather than measuring the easy, widely respected author, speaker and blogger, Seth Godin suggests a different focus. What is it that you hope to accomplish? Not what you hope to measure as a result of this social media strategy/launch, but to actually change, create or build? Focus on the real goal – where do you want to be at the end of the day. An easy but inaccurate measurement will only distract you. It might be easy to calibrate, arbitrary and do-abl

At the end of each year Bill Gates takes stock of his life and his work. This year, Gates shared his thoughts with us on his blog, Gates Notes . Every Christmas when I was a kid, my parents would send out a card with an update on what the family was up to. Dad’s law firm is growing, Mom’s volunteer work is going strong, the girls are doing well in school, Bill is a handful . Some people think it is corny, but I like the tradition. These days, at the end of each year, I still enjoy taking stock of my work and personal life. What was I excited about? What could I have done better? I thought I would share a few of these thoughts as 2018 concludes. One thing that occurs to me is that the questions I am asking myself at age 63 are very different from the ones I would have asked when I was in my 20s. Back then, an end-of-year assessment would amount to just one question: Is Microsoft software making the personal-computing dream come true? Today of course I still assess the quality o