Attorney Connects the Digital Dots

 Joseph Blanner is a bit of a pioneer in the St. Louis construction industry. While some people in the industry still struggle with email or web sites, Blanner is successfully using internet social networking tools to get business.

Blanner, a construction attorney at St. Louis law firm Behr, McCarter & Potter, P.C., launched the St. Louis Contractor Referral Network on the LinkedIn social network in December 2009. The network now has more than 1,250 members.

A year ago, "I had about 70 connections on LinkedIn. Now I have about 800 and a couple of hundred of those I've gotten to know on a face-to-face basis," Blanner said. "My personal exposure in the industry has expanded tremendously and I've gotten several pieces of business out of it," he said.

"I view this as something long-term for my firm, but it is not just about my firm. The goal is to provide people with valuable information and help them form relationships," he said. "I know numerous people who have connected to others in the group....I'm not trying to sell anything with my articles; I'm just trying to provide information," he added.

In order to keep the network useful, Blanner tries to keep spam and politics out of it.

"I am a member of other groups where there is very little useful content and a lot of spam, but we haven't had that. Our content is pretty much about the business," he said.

Blanner said that as the founder of the group he gets email notification of every single comment anyone posts and he looks at every one of them. "I have deleted things that were overtly political and didn't have much to do with construction and a couple of times I deleted things that are too promotional, but I try to allow people liberty to say what they want about business and construction," he said. "Where I police things is in who I let into the group," he said.

Could Blanner's networking serve as a model for others?

"I don't think that anyone else could successfully launch another similar group in St. Louis. I think there is a benefit to being the first," he said. Certainly, other people have used the St. Louis Contractor Referral Network to gain business, but it helps to be the first one with a service. If more and more lawyers were to start posting articles on the network, for example, "I suppose there would be diminishing returns to the exposure any one gets," he said.

But the same model can work in other places, he said.

"I have been contacted by people in other cities, and I helped another attorney start a group in the Springfield, MO, area that is growing rapidly. It can be repeated in other places without diminishing returns," he said.

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