In Monday’s epic post I mentioned the UM Dartmouth study on the death of blogging. Here’s the response I should have written if I were as smart as Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks…
When I speak to CEO organizations, I typically run through a series of quick slides that show where technology is right at this moment.
For instance: There were 107 trillion emails sent last year, Facebook is at more than 900 million users, Pinterest is closing in on 15 million users, and there are three billion videos streamed on YouTube every day.
I do this to show how many people are using the web, to preempt the “My customer doesn’t use the Internet” conversation (yes, I still hear that).
But the stat I want to talk about today is the number of blogs on the Internet. According to Technorati, there are 158 million blogs floating around, which is partly why I’m so surprised to keep reading that blogging is dead.
I get it. It’s not an easy think to keep up. My guess is many people or companies say, “Let’s start a blog!” and then do nothing with it after a month or two because it’s so labor intense.
So, let’s say for argument’s sake, half of those blogs never see the light of day, either because they’re abandoned or no one reads them because they’re too self-promotional. That leaves us with 79 million blogs, which isn’t a small number.
USA Today reported this morning that more companies are abandoning their blogs in favor of Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.
Add to that, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth released a study earlier this year that says the percentage of companies that maintain blogs fell to 37% in 2011 from 50% in 2010, based on its survey of 500 fast-growing companies listed by Inc. magazine. Only 23% of Fortune 500 companies maintained a blog in 2011, flat from a year ago after rising for several years.
So, I see. Based on Wall Street and fast-growth companies, blogging is down, and now it’s time to claim the whole blogosphere is dead.
Here’s the thing, though. Those companies aren’t blogging because it’s hard. It’s hard to generate good content even once a week. It’s hard to cultivate a community. It’s hard to grow traffic. It’s a thankless job most days. So people throw something up there that talks about how great the company is, if only to check off “blog today” from their check list.
And the blog fails.” Full story at: Is Blogging Dead or Are Companies Not Trying Hard Enough? | Spin Sucks
Go to the source if you want the rest of Gini’s perspective…
Thanks, Gini, for connecting the dots in a way that makes sense. Me? I always tell my clients that blogging is one of those things that takes more time than money and the organic Search Engine Optimization [SEO] is better than paying for Search Engine Marketing [SEM]. Gini, however, did a much better job deconstructing the UM Dartmouth study…
Related articles
- Corporate Blogging Hits the Skids (marketingpilgrim.com)
- Corporate Blogging Declines As Twitter, Facebook Take Over [STUDY] (mediabistro.com)
- Reasons why big companies should be blogging (adigaskell.org)
Todd Lohenry 
Ha! This made me laugh out loud! It’s definitely not an easy thing to do – this blogging thing. Bu when I get pushback from business leaders, I always ask them how much time they spend cold calling. And then I ask about the effectiveness. Then I point to a few studies (and our own case studies) that show your leads increase by 77% if you blog. And you can replace cold calling with blogging. That usually gets them.
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Gini, I’m honored that you’d stop by and comment on my curation of your article. I teach my clients and students that in many ways, they are already blogging but are using the wrong tools if what they are looking for is exposure. For example, many emails that are sent to an audience of one could be tweaked to become a blog post with a potential audience of two billion. In many respects, posts are just emails to the world or a ‘to whom it may concern’ message. Frequently I’ll use a good question that someone asks as the impetus for a blog post and then turn around and send them a link to the post as an answer; If I only answer them, the benefit of my perspective is limited but if I turn an answer into a post, I may benefit MORE than one person and expose my thought leadership position to Google search as well…
By the way, I totally agree with you on the cold calling perspective as well — blogging may eliminate some leads but the ones it brings you are prequalified and much warmer than a cold call…Thanks for your body of work and all you do for social media!
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Oh, and one more thing? It’s not a question of either/or but both/and. Microblogging is not a replacement for blogging, but rather blogging can be used to drive microblogging by connecting the blog to microblogs like Twitter and Facebook. The advantage of this approach is that if you first curate the content you’d like to share to your blog and THEN post it to a microblog you’ll drive people to YOUR site instead of someone elses. That’s exactly the way I used the content I curated from your site; I used your excellent content to drive people to me instead of you while giving you all the credit at the same time…
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