For one brief, bright, shining moment in the history of mass human communication, everyone had the ability to talk to everyone else and no corporate gatekeeper was not in control. In that moment — after the mass media no longer decided whose message would get through and before the social networks truly took over — you could hear and choose to listen to anyone who had something real to say.

It might be time to say goodbye to all that. But that goodbye comes in the form of a great opportunity for you to distribute your legal content to a huge business audience. LinkedIn has become a content aggregator, one that boasts the power of 275 million business people. LinkedIn is a social network where two-thirds of corporate general counsel go to gather business information on an at least weekly basis. Publishing a very timely and relevant piece of legal content on LinkedIn’s publishing platform can get you more qualified business eyeballs than you dreamed possible, and more comments than you’ve ever seen on your blog in a month of Sundays.

With the entrance of LinkedIn to the content aggregation world, your blog might start to look like a ghost town. Publishing that blog post on LinkedIn generates views, shares and likes that have the power to outstrip what your blog delivers. This is where the people are, and they no longer have to click through on a shortened link – the article is right there on LinkedIn for them to review.  If your goal is to have your content read by relevant audiences (and it has to be), then you must master publishing on LinkedIn, National Law Review, JDSupra, and possibly Mondaq and Lexology. And by doing so, you might kill your own blog. Its either that or let that your content die of loneliness.

This trend has more implications than I can explore in a single blog post, the most important of which are:

1. What does this mean for your Google juice? Blog posts done right mean that you are providing an answer to the most pressing questions your potential clients are asking of search engines. Now, will the answer to those pressing questions lead those potential clients to your articles on LinkedIn rather than to your blog?
2. If your article, published on LinkedIn, shows up in Google or Bing search results, will potential clients find the information they need to choose you as a lawyer on LinkedIn? Will your LinkedIn profile be what it should be? How’s your LinkedIn company page? Because those two things just got a lot more important!

I loved it when a law blog was a destination, but I’m a modern girl, and I think this is the next wave. What was originally called blogging has recently been re-named content creation because it is about the writing, not about publishing it to your blog. So I suggest you get onto the content aggregators and join me in a lament for the brief moment that was all about blawgs. We loved them, but it’s time to expand our thinking.

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