When Kevin LaCroix left law to enter the insurance industry, he began blogging to bide his time. After eight years, his daily posts are a trusted resource that helped build his profession.
“That was a pretty big career jump, and I was in a field where in order to make revenue, you have to have clients. I didn’t have any clients. The phone wasn’t ringing so I knew I had to do something to keep myself occupied and keep myself sharp,” said LaCroix. “It was really just one step lead to the next step lead to the next step, and pretty soon it was something that I was working with on a regular basis and investing a lot of time it in. It just sort of developed.”
With thousands of almost-daily posts, LaCroix’s The D&O Diary allowed him to create visibility and credibility in management liability. He sees the blog as not only giving him a platform to interpret developments in D&O insurance, but a way to build a symbiotic relationships the with the clients, lawyers and academics who are his readers. Just as his readers depend on him for well-formed opinions about Supreme Court rulings and what the SEC is working on, LaCroix relies on his readers to shape his next posts.
“The great thing about the always on nature of the Internet is that it provides instant feedback. Almost everyday I get emails from readers with questions or comments,” he said. “… [R]eaders feel like they have a stake in the blog, and they recognize that they can use the blog to communicate to others in the industry. Sometimes people send me [post ideas] because they’re just interested in knowing what I think. It gives me the feeling that I’m in an interaction process with my readers and that we’re exchanging ideas and information. It definitely makes the blog a better blog because somewhere between a third and a half of the posts have as their origin something that a reader sent me.”
The benefit for LaCroix is that his readers help him through the catch-22 that plagues single-author blogs: generating post ideas.
“The hardest part of about having a blog is coming up with new ideas and it can be kind of a daunting process. As soon as you hit publish on today’s blog post, the process of finding the topic of tomorrow’s blog post begins. … You have to constantly be thinking about what your next blog topic is,” he said. “I often wish I had one or more other people to write with me to have other people to share the burden of having new topics. At the same time, because I’m so committed to it and have so much personal stake, I do the hard work of constantly finding new topics. It can be stressful and difficult at times, but that’s how I grow the readership.”
LaCroix is certainly creative when it comes to blog topics and has strayed from keeping things just online. Somehow, a New Yorker article about business journalist Henry Blodget and how he retains readers transformed into Mugshots.
“It’s just one of those crazy ideas that worked out well. The essence of the idea was that if I offered to give free mugs to the readers and get them to send back pictures of themselves with mug, then they’ll feel connected to the blog and that they’re part of the blog. The places that people took their mugs to come up with a creative or funny picture was just amazing,” he said.
LaCroix sent out 288 free mugs and received photos from the Wailing Wall in Israel, various baseball parks, the US Senate Chamber and even a veterinary artificial insemination clinic in Texas as a procedure was going on in the background. His wife eventually ended the feature after shipping out mugs was taking too much of her time.
While Mugshots only live on in the blog’s archives, LaCroix has no intention to stop his daily publication anytime soon because of how much influence it has on his career.
“It has certainly enhanced my standing in the D&O insurance community. It has lead to invitations to speak and to write for other industry forums and publications,” said LaCroix, who has even received international speaking invitations.
He’s a realist about the blog’s influence on his business development. He clarified that while reader engagement doesn’t always lead to new clients, the about of visibility that gained for him and his firm far outweighs any extra work that blogging add. He advises that anyone who’s serious about blogging needs to realize how much of time it takes.
“If you’re not willing to invest that much time, you might want to think about doing some other marketing effort. I think that the only way to have a blog that’s successful is to have complete commitment to have new content regularly. That’s what keeps it alive.”