Reports on the death of blogging are greatly exaggerated. While I am distracted, fascinated, and constantly learning from my daily involvement with Twitter and Facebook, among other business/social networks, I am not about to give up daily blogging. And at the C-level, a lot of companies are finally accepting blogging. Blogging has legs, and here’s where I think it’s headed…
o Twitter is ephemeral.
Its immediacy and community are addicting, but Twitter has no permanance.
You can’t search it; you can’t categorize the posts. You can’t illustrate a point with a photo or artwork. You can’t post a video. It’s as fleeting as any conversation.
o Limiting your network leaves you preaching to the choir.
It’s extremely interesting and valuable to share information with your peers. But if you want to expand your business, you need a global reach.
Where blogging is headed:
Blogging is evolving and maturing. Bloggers who have a real passion for writing and who have developed an audience will keep the conversation going in this platform. But the format of blogs is changing, as well as the content of the ones that are starting now.
For me, and I think for a lot of other serious business bloggers, a blog is a storefront and, once it gains a big enough audience, a global micro-brand. You don’t just walk away from a successful blog that took blood, sweat and tears to build because a shiny new object came along.
o C-level executives are just getting comfortable with blogging – and are becoming more open about discussing issues that previously would have been vetted or banned by legal.
Take a look, for example at the new JNJ BTW, which promises a three-dimensional view of Johnson & Johnson. There’s a discussion of J&J’s lawsuit against the Red Cross – something you would never have seen even two years ago. “Everyone else is talking about our company, so why can’t we?” says the “About.”
o Businesses have finally become much more open to launching blogs built on substantive and strategic premises.
And hopefully most have learned that unless they are genuine and transparent in their approach, they will not have an audience.
o Blogs will become more communal.
You’ll see more multiple-author blogs like the Clutter Control Freak that I just launched for Stacks and Stacks. It is difficult, as any long-term, serious blogger can tell you, to keep a blog lively, interesting, and frequently updated with just one writer.
I see blogs becoming more like magazines than journals, and less likely to pretend to be objective. Because objectivity is not the point of blogging. This new medium is about opinions, and transparency. And it’s here to stay as long as people who feel passionately about broadcasting their opinions can maintain and grow an audience.
And, since we’re social creatures who like to talk to people who share our interests, as we can on Twitter and Facebook, micro-media and socnets are here to stay too.
See, we can all just get along. We just need to keep adding new features to keep things interesting.
I started to post about this myself, but I don’t think it’s coincidence that the people yammering the loudest about how blogs are slowing down/dying, are the bloggers formerly known as the ‘A-Listers’. A couple of years ago, they were still the few big fish in a small pond. Now there are many big fish in the ocean that is the blogosphere. The influence and reach of the A-listers has become diluted, and fragmented. They are still very influential, but they are no longer the only game in town.
So I’m not sure that it isn’t the A-List BLOGGER that’s slowing down/dying, not blogging itself.
Finally! Now blogging may cease to be considered the end-all be-all strategy for every one and every company.
Despite being lauded as the magic bullet – It is and always has been just one of many tactics in our marketing tool box.
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Like most product life cycles, the hip who first used MySpace moved to Facebook… Now that we’re all Facebooking, they are moving to something hipper.
Although it’s true that marketing has trends just as any other discipline, I’m not sure I totally agree with Paul. I understand that human nature means that some of us will always be looking for the next “big thing” but it doesn’t rule out the tried-and-trues. As social networks evolve and improve, I would think that regulars will benefit even more by sticking around.
I do agree with Paul that blogging is one component of the marketing mix, and depending on one’s target markets, can be an amazing way to build a following globally. As you say, BL:
“But if you want to expand your business, you need a global reach.” The Internet has certainly shrunken the planet. Now, if we could all just get along….
You raise some particularly interesting points concerning business blogging.
I’d agree with the comments above that blogging should be seen as yet another means of corporate communication, another tool in the belt if you will. But an important one I think, that allows the enterprise to adopt a human face and a human dialogue.
The J&J blog post on the Red Cross lawsuit is indeed a case in point: instead of the cold dead language of another press release, we get first-person point of view from a J&J spokesman. Subjective, reasonably transparent, and using language that is relatively relaxed and emotive.
Topic picked up at: http://shoppingbasket.wordpress.com/2007/08/13/jnj-crisis-management-turns-to-blogging/
They were still the few big fish in a small pond. Now there are many big fish in the ocean that is the blogosphere.
healthfood – building an audience for a blog is no small job. You have to have the desire, the stamina, and, most of all, the talent and sticktoitiveness. Very few fish have that. :>)
Shopping Basket – i think it’s great that J&J is blogging, but rather sad that they are using the blog as a bully pulpit for an ill-advised lawsuit.
I haven’t been blogging that long but I am hooked, I certainly don’t think it’s dead, like everything it goes through it’s phases. However I don’t think its even gone through any bad phases yet.
By the way to people who truly enjoy blogging, it will never die!