Blogging is NOT dead

OK, I’ve had enough. No more articles proclaiming that blogging is dead and that the rapid growth of Facebook and Twitter and increasing shorter attention spans of digital content consumer is making blogging obsolete , please.

While we go through changes in the way we create, distribute & consume content online blogging for me continues to be one of the most effective ways to establish and maintain my permanent presence digitally. As such, I would never consider abandoning it in favor of snack-sized content publishing platforms. What I do instead is to look for ways channels can complement one another and work in concerts as part of a well maintained digital hub.

One of my favorite corporate blogging gurus Debbie Weil recently gave a talk as part of the Blogging Success Summit 2011. The topic of her presentation was “Leveraging Your Blog as a Social Media Hub” . According to Debbie (and I agree with her POV), your blog is your digital “castle”, your permanent digital space where you control the content and where you set your own rules. The rest of the social media ecosystem is “borrowed territory” where content exchanges might be more frequent and more real-time, but where they are harder to find and consume overtime.

The trick to your social media publishing success is not to eliminate any one of your digital channels in favor of the other, but to use them in concert leveraging the best features each one has to offer. While your blog continues to be your thought leadership content repository, it only works when others can find it. That’s where other social media channels come in that make it easy for you to draw attention to your blog (e.g. Twitter) and to engage in near-real-time conversation with your digital tribe (e.g. LinkedIn groups).

So enough already with the eminent death of blogging. As far as I see it we are just now getting started.

If you are interested in reading 32 experts’ (incl. Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, David Meerman Scott along with corporate bloggers and blog managers, including yours truly 🙂 responses to the question “Why Your Blog is Your Social Media Hub” see Debbie Weil’s free ebook.

Debbie Weil's eBook titled: "Why Your Blog Is Your Social Media Hub."

Access Debbie Weil’s “Why Your Blog is Your Social Media Hub” eBook (PDF)