Many of today’s lawyers took Advanced Placement English in high school or participated in their schools’ speech and debate programs. The brainstorming exercises you did in those contexts in high school probably seemed silly at the time but turned out to be useful later on. It was no fun to draw a cluster of interconnected balloons (this exercise later came to be called a mind map), or a list of incomplete sentences with multiple layers of subheadings and turn it in for a grade, but you probably do some kind of outlining when you write anything more complex than a one-paragraph email. Brainstorming is beautiful, but brainstorming on command, performative brainstorming, is counterproductive, not to mention painfully embarrassing. There must be some way for lawyers to strategize collaboratively with their colleagues in order to generate ideas for legal blog content for their law firm’s website.
The Less Structure, the Better the Brainstorm
Some industries try to sell the dream of a democratic workplace where employees sit around a whiteboard and write down their unfiltered ideas for marketing strategy using brightly colored markers and responding to each other’s contributions with enthusiasm. This model fails to consider that it is more work to produce an enthusiastic response to every colleague’s every marketing idea than it is simply to write down your thoughts. Meanwhile, it is productive to share ideas.
Of the 13 brainstorming techniques that Darren Dematas of Content Marketing Institute recommends, the two that work best enable the ideas to flow on their own, and one of them even allows employees to share ideas on their own terms. One successful strategy is to schedule brainstorming meetings which are really brainstorm-sharing meetings. Each individual writes down their ideas over a period of weeks before the meeting. At the meeting, the employees discuss their ideas in pairs, each getting feedback from their partner before presenting the results of the pair discussions to the larger group.
In the other scenario, both the writing down of ideas and the responding to them take place asynchronously. The content marketing team creates a Google Doc or similar shared online document. Each person writes ideas on the document as the ideas occur to them. When you open the document to write your ideas, you can also see your colleagues’ ideas and respond to them. When everything takes place at the pace of writing instead of the pace of face-to-face interaction, it is easier to resist the temptation to shoot down each other ideas or to take offense to constructive criticism. You can read people’s responses to your ideas when you are in the frame of mind to receive feedback.
Just Because You Brainstorm, It Doesn’t Mean You Have to Write Blog Posts
Brainstorming marketing content is time-consuming enough; writing it is even more time-consuming. The legal content writers at Law Blog Writers will create high-performing legal blog content based on your brainstorms, or if you prefer, will brainstorm it and write it from scratch.