Companies in Conversation on Twitter

Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog, whose company works with IP.com in the design and development of our company weblog, Securing Innovation, has shown us how to incorporate new social media like Twitter into the company's digital communications.

Tonight, following Kevin O'Keefe on Twitter, we see him pointing to an interesting article in U.S. News and World Report about how companies use social media to be a part of the conversation.

The onslaught of blogs, discussion forums and user-generated media has changed the flow of information about people, products and brands forever. Anyone with a computer, a video camera or even a cell phone can post information, reviews and comments about you and your brand on dozens of highly visited online destinations.

It's no longer enough to create a website and assume that prospects will learn about your company solely from there. In today's online social media world, businesses of all shapes and sizes must actively participate in online reputation management.

Of course, the best way to manage your online reputation from a business standpoint is to put out great products, provide excellent customer service and honor all your commitments. That's certainly a great start, but you may still need to monitor and respond to what's being said about your organization.

In the end, writes John Jantsch, the only way to control what people say about your company is to be part of the conversation. We might add, even when the conversation isn't about your company but about another company with a very similar name.

News Flash! LexBlog Launches LexMonitor

LexMonitor is a free daily review of law blogs and journals highlighting prominent legal discussion as well as the lawyers and other professionals participating in this conversation.

"Pulling from nearly 2,000 sources and 5,000 authors, LexMonitor will hopefully shine a light on the ongoing conversation among thought leaders in the law for the benefit of the legal profession and the public at large," says Kevin O'Keefe of LexBlog, whose team of weblog specialists has developed this innovative law blog news aggregator.

Those of us who appreciate IP Newsflash will want to tune in and browse the Intellectual Property Law Channel on LexMonitor as well.

We Love What Kevin @ LexBlog Has Done

One of the challenges we faced at IP.com Inc., as we thought about how best to get into blogging at work about business matters of interest to our clients and colleagues managing  intellectual property, was how we'd be able to design a blog  that matched the quality of of our corporate website at www.ip.com. A lot of time and attention had gone into the redesign of our company website, and we wanted a weblog that would be an effective corporate communications channel to open up new business opportunities with good clients like these.

For us, and the people we do business with, our company website is an important part of our corporate communications media, and we knew that blogging would bring even more attention to what we do for our clients. So our blog would have to be professional. Getting a blog started using Blogger, Movable Type, or WordPress is so easy anyone can be blogging in minutes using one of those familiar templates. We wanted something more professional, something designed just for us. Our own corporate blog.

We looked at a lot of blogs that focus on intellectual property, our business, and really liked the professional blogs developed by LexBlog for these lawyers:

When we were asked which of LexBlog's designs was, perhaps, the best example of what we were looking for in style and presentation, we thought their own company blog was about as good as it gets. We love what Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog has done with his own company blog, Real Lawyers Have Blogs. We think his blog is an excellent example of corporate branding, using the company blog to show how effective blogging can be for lawyers and companies. LexBlog Has Corporate Blogs might be the new mantra, if Securing Innovation and the other company weblogs in the growing LexBlog portfolio are a good indication of more to come.

Did we forget anyone? ;-) We think that the folks at LexBlog have really outdone themselves lately with innovative corporate blogs, not to mention all the professional law blogs in the LexBlog portfolio.

On our Securing Innovation blog, here, in particular, we love using the Quick Links feature to share with our readers, and our employees at IP.com, lots of links to other blogs and articles of interest to those in our business, which we find when reading their blogs in our feed reader. Speaking of which, if you want to pick up our Quick Links selections in your feed reader, there's a separate RSS feed for that column, in addition to our regular blog feed. How cool is that?

We hope you like what we're doing here on our new corporate blog, with the help of the team of professional weblog developers at LexBlog. We really owe them one. Did we mention they're fun to work with? Ask anyone who has.