Last month, Rick Mahn wrote a great post about the shift of online conversations from blogs to social media.
There is definitely a shift occurring but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that blogging is dead, as some are claiming. I think conversations are dispersing to the most appropriate venues and audiences.
Before Twitter, for example, a lot of simple thoughts or observations that I would’ve liked to store but did not deserve a blog post simply were forgotten. Now, with Twitter, I have a place to share and store them and retrieve them if I want.
The practice of multichannel marketing gets increasingly important with the establishment of new online venues. But as new channels gain traction, think hard about abandoning your existing, established channels.
Neuromarketing points to the role that habit plays in online behavior; abandoning or changing an existing channel risks breaking long-established habit, thereby losing that connection with your audience.
A case in point for me is Steve Rubel‘s Micropersuasion blog. Even if he didn’t blog daily, Rubel used to be a daily check for me; if he’d posted something, I’d read it but I visited the blog or checked the feed every day.
Since he became obsessed with Twitter and then FriendFeed, however, he scaled back on the blog posts and devoted more time to those venues. Now, I subscribe to Rubel’s Twitter and FriendFeed channels, but now I rarely visit his blog. What’s more, because of the volume of my Twitter and FriendFeed subscriptions, I often miss what Rubel has to say in those venues.
My Rubel habit has been broken: Out of sight, out of mind.
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