Enter Outlook, Google and LinkedIn. We no longer need micro-billboards to help contacts log, organize and retrieve our contact information.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Although they no longer command attention and respect, we still need business cards for utilitarian purposes like:

1. Demonstrating you are prepared.
2. Quickly and easily passing along basic contact information.
3. Helping participants in large meetings keep track of who’s who.
4. Conducting business in Asia.
5. Placing in fish bowls at restaurant host stations for a chance at a free meal.

1. They make you look professional – Having a business card isn’t rare or special anymore. With online services like Moo and Vistaprint, anyone can get a veritable lifetime’s supply of high-quality, customized, color-image, double-sided business cards for less than the cost of a business lunch.
2. They are necessary for a good first impression – If someone asks for your business card, you’ve already made a good impression. And if you haven’t noticed, it’s now rare for anyone to do more than glance at a business card before putting it in a pocket or handbag. Just being prepared and having a business card readily available makes a strong first impression. The craftsmanship and composition of the card is mostly irrelevant.
3. Adding a QR code to a business card makes you look techno-savvy, and it will drive traffic to the linked landing page, webpage, microsite, etc. – Ugly, cryptic, space-eating, pixelated squares are just as likely to look gimmicky on a professional card. Indeed, other than novelty, there’s no compelling reason for recipients to access the code’s content on a mobile device when they have the information they need in their hand already.

• Google+ Business Page : The First 5 Things You Should Do with It | WindMill Networking
• 3 New Apps to Manage Your Social Networks | Social Media Examiner
• How to Build Better Client Personas to Drive Killer Content | HubSpot
• 3 Key Ways To Turn Your Blog Into A Super-Resource | The Content Strategist
•  How to Share Content More Efficiently by Integrating Google Reader and Buffer | Social Media Explorer
• Client Intake Resources | Lawyerist 
• How to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress | wpbeginner

The editors of Socially Aware, Morrison & Foerster’s blog on the law and business of social media, recently published an infographic timeline of legal milestones that have shaped the course of social media’s evolution — for good or ill.

Any landmark cases you’d like to add?

• 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic (Updated 2012) | SEOmoz
• Content Marketing Must Have Checklist | Heidi Cohen
•  Multi-Author Blogging 101 – Getting Started | For Bloggers By Bloggers
• 10 principles of social media content marketing | Firebrand
• Guy Kawasaki: 8 Tips on The Art of Branding | TentBlogger
•  How to Optimize Your Business’ Google Plus Profile by Vertical Measures
• 50 Ways To Win at YouTube | Smart Online Success

• How To Create A Triple-Threat Content Strategy With Twitter, Tumblr, and Your Content | The Content Strategist
• How to Add Google Fonts in WordPress Post Editor | wpbeginner
• 5 Questions to Streamline Your Keyword Research | Search Engine Land
• 15 Tenets of Proper Email Marketing Etiquette | HubSpot 
• 31 Ways to Make Your Blog Stand Out | Heidi Cohen
• 8 Cool Plugins for Managing Categories in WordPress | WordPress Jedi
• Using Social Media Releases to Spark Online Engagement | Vertical Measures

Ken Molay of Webinar Success created a comprehensive tutorial on webinar best practices that reminds:

• It is vital to consider the audience’s perspective at every stage of your planning, preparation, presentation, and follow-through. Encourage your audience to take each desired action by emphasizing the value and benefit to them of doing so.
• Work on ways to build registration and attendance for your webinar by setting up processes that simplify required actions and reinforce value.
• Webinar presenters need to prepare their physical environment and their presentation planning to facilitate a successful delivery.
• Rehearsals are critical in achieving comfort and confidence in the presentation, while backup planning can help avoid cancellation of an event when things go wrong.
• Presentation style needs to continually refocus the audience’s attention and enthusiasm for the subject material.
• Find ways to connect with and stimulate your attendees through vocal delivery and careful selection of content.
• After your presentation, act quickly to take advantage of the trust and goodwill you have built with your audience. Don’t forget registrants who did not attend, because they are excellent prospects for viewing recordings or signing up for future webinars.

“Dyson set out to invent a more effective vacuum cleaner. He noticed that vacuums lose suction as the bag fills, because the pores in the bag get clogged. Most people who tried to fix this issue in the past attempted to solve the “bag problem” by crafting a more effective vacuum cleaner bag.

“Instead, Dyson realized a vacuum takes in a combination of dust and air and needs to separate the dust from the air. Once he thought about the problem in this way, he was able to recall his own knowledge about the industrial cyclones used in sawmills. Industrial cyclones use centrifugal force to separate particles from air rather than a filter. He then designed a small industrial cyclone into a vacuum and created a highly successful business.”

The same can be said of content marketing for lawyers. You can wait two or three years for your reputation and new business leads to gestate on your blog, or you can mobilize the full depth and breadth of your content resources through third-party distribution channels like JD Supra. In a recent e-mail exchange, co-founder Adrian Lurssen provided a very helpful summary of JD Supra content types beyond repurposed blog posts:

1. Favorable court filings – Lurssen notes that intellectual property attorney Ron Coleman’s repository of documents is comprised almost entirely of his own filings —  decisions, pleadings,  motions, memoranda and related work.
2. Legal analysis – Multi-specialty law firm Lane Powell uses JD Supra to aggregate newsletters, articles, and alerts covering developments in sectors as wide-ranging as transportation, securities, environment and energy, immigration, labor and employment.
3. Legal forms – Instead of ceding the “forms” business to LegalZoom, templates and samples of complex instruments like a family trust can surface your content in search engines, and help build reputation.
4. Legal documents of interest (content curation) – In addition to posting his own writing on social networking and Web 2.0 in the legal space, attorney Doug Cornelius  uses his JD Supra portfolio to collect legal documents not written by him but either related to his practice field or of interest to readers of his blog.
5. Q&A site responses — Versions of responses written for sites like Quora and LegalOnramp also find their way into JD Supra portfolios.

“We are a bridge between two worlds: lawyers, and the people lawyers serve,” Lurssen concluded. “Any content that makes sense, somehow, of the legal implications (business, consumer, other) of our lives —  that’s good content on JD Supra.”

• 6 Ways to “Thicken” Your Content | Vertical Measures
• The 5 Golden Rules of Content Marketing | The Next Web
• Download Our Free Guide to the Genesis Design Framework for WordPress | Copyblogger
• Tweet late, email early, and don’t forget about Saturday: Using data to develop a social media strategy | Nieman
• Four Tips for Improving Your SEO | Freelance Switch 
• Setting Content Marketing Guidelines: 5 Templates | Content Marketing Institute
•  How to Add the Pinterest “Pin It” Button to WordPress | WordPress Jedi

In this latest hair-raising episode, the otherwise trusting worldview of  blog readers and the ethical foundations of the entire legal profession hang in the balance as legal blogs are infiltrated by an insidious, creeping menace: ghostwriting.

Spoiler Alert: Just like exposure to earth’s atmosphere defeated the alien invaders in The War of the Worlds, the organic rise of content curation, guest posts and multi-author law blogs will choke off ghostwriting. Simple attributions will convert anonymous authors into authoritative bylined contributors, and transparency and meritocracy will be restored.

Why Using Ghost Bloggers Is More Sad and Counterproductive Than Insidious

1. No one believes one person can produce that much content on his/her own AND be an effective lawyer. Which activity would you rather be known for?
2. Mindful curation makes you look smart, and smart trumps prolific.
3. You have to pay ghostwriters. However, there are plenty of  highly qualified and well-known contributors who would be satisfied with a byline and inbound links from your blog. As a result, you won’t have to buy as many posts, and the prevailing rate will drop as high-quality free content floods the market.

Can we get back to genuine and important marketing issues now?