I have been following the debate going on within the Internet-cop set regarding “Ghost Blawging”.  Ghost Blawing is just what it sounds like.  Hiring someone to do what you are unable or unwilling to do for yourself-string together coherent sentences in written form.  Following it up by hiding from your audience the fact that the brilliant legal prose and  cutting edge opinions are not really yours.

I am frankly stunned that there are attorneys who hire people to write their blawgs, manage their Facebook pages, Tweet for them.  I am stunned and I laugh out loud. We pay tens of thousands of dollars for a higher education that is supposed to take our thought process to a higher level and teach us how to write. We then show how little we have learned, thinking we are being smart lawyers because smart lawyers know how to delegate the irrelevant things regardless of how much more relevant we want to be.

While I know I will get irate lawyers writing me about theirs busy practices and millions made in their “Rainmaker” seminars, here it is.  For the record. If  you are an attorney and are paying someone to write your blawg, manage your Twitter account or Facebook page then you know so little about social media and business in general that you could not possibly be having any current success as an attorney.  If you were killing it under the old guard of no one reviewing your bill at 350 an hour, times have changed my friend.  You actually have to put in some real effort using your real time to get clients.

People who might be willing to do business based on a social media contact are no different than the person walking through your office door. They want a personal connection. They want a personal connection and you are sending your P.R. rep to the waiting room to talk to them.  Complete idiocy.

It is a humorous, vicious cycle.  Attorneys who know zilch about social media and have lagging practices hire ghost blawggers and P.R people to do their social media dirty work. No business results and the remedy is to engage in even more social media antics that don’t work.

In the end ghost blawgging is just out and out unethical and indicative of an overall intent to deceive that carries into other areas of your practice.  It’s like taking a case that may get tried and and never telling your client you have never tried a case.

Take my advice.  Fire your ghost blawgger today.  Right now.  This minute.  Now sit down and write something, anything.  Don’t think, just write. Proof-it,  Post it.  You’re on your way…