Writing to Grow a Brand and Reach a Global Audience — Q&A with Top Thought Leader Thomas Fox
[ The latest in our ongoing series of discussions on successful thought leadership with recipients of JD Supra’s 2021 Readers’ Choice awards: ]
After he retired at 50 from a general counsel position, compliance lawyer Tom Fox started racing bicycles. Then a serious accident left him looking for something to do as he recovered.
He turned first to blogging, using Twitter, LinkedIn, and JD Supra to build his brand and what is the largest social media presence of any lawyer practicing compliance law. A few years ago, he began podcasting. Today, through his writing and podcasting, Tom Fox has developed a worldwide compliance practice literally out of his home office.
Walk us through how you started publishing.
I started blogging in 2010 – the third blogger in my area of the law – to get my name out there. I hooked up with JD Supra very early in the process (for both of us: I think I was a beta tester on the site).
I began my podcasts in 2013, and today have 30 different podcasts. Again, JD Supra has been essential in getting my work in front of a global audience and generating organic growth.
What is your editorial process?
The first year I blogged, I published three days a week. In the second year, I decided that if I was going to commit to this, I had to do it every day. That actually made it easier because it just became part of my workday: I set aside an hour or so to write a blog post and developed a discipline around it. Sometimes I wrote at 9:00 pm, sometimes in the morning, but I made it a part of my day.
Podcasting is a little bit different. I’m almost full-time podcasting now: I record podcasts every day, and post four to six every day. Each requires different preparation: one is the Daily Compliance News, where it’s only me talking, and another is a round table with a panel of speakers.
I also have a Star Trek podcast where I go through all 79 episodes of the original series to extract compliance and leadership lessons. Most of the rest are interviews I do.
How do you pick your topics?
There’s generally always something to write about. If there are breaking events or current news in my space, I certainly cover that. In addition, although in compliance law there are very few court cases, there are lots of regulatory or enforcement actions. When one of those happen, I’ll usually take a deep dive into it with a multi-part blog post series.
Finally, because I focus on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of compliance, there is a bullpen of topics to choose from: regulators have established 11 steps to compliance, and I regularly go back and revisit these steps. I talk to regulators a fair amount, and they consistently ask me to just tell people how to do compliance, because they want that information out there. So that’s what I try to do. Why do you […]
