The Future Buzz | Media, Marketing, PR

I like Chris Brogan. I’ve even referenced him among social media power users I recommend this community connect with. With that said, I don’t agree with everything he says and have disagreed with him in the past. I’m going to disagree with him again today.

I’m a fan of Rebecca Thorman, career/lifestyle blogger and PR pro for start-up Alice.com. Her thoughts are usually spot on. However her post last week: bloggers are not writers, gets enough wrong it’s worth dissecting.

Even if you don’t read the rest of this post, consider her point is inherently flawed since to blog, you need to write. The quality of any writing isn’t the point here. It’s no different than if the typewriter were just invented and someone proclaimed typists were not writers. Tools or platforms have nothing to do with product. Past formats – purely from a content perspective – are no more or less valid than current (or future) and vice-versa.

(Note from Adam: this is a guest post from my blog designer – Michael Martin at Pro Blog Design. If you’re reading through email or RSS, you’ll walk to click through to the site to read today’s post and check out the new look.)

You’ve hopefully already noticed that The Future Buzz is looking a little bit different these days (And even more hopefully, you might even think it looks a little better these days!).

Peter Kim recently shared 5 thoughts on blogging after a break from posting. I found his comments worth dissecting – let’s have a look:

1. Once momentum is lost, it’s a lot easier for the blog to remain at rest.

This is true, and is the unfortunate reality most blogs succumb to. The companies or people behind a majority of blogs never last long enough to see results (consider only .06% of blogs have a Technorati ranking of 50 or higher, as just one KPI).

The annual state of the blogosphere report provided by Technorati always provides a ton of interesting information for bloggers, marketers and PR pros to use and reuse. My only issue with it is they make us read through pages upon pages of content to get at the good bits, and don’t provide a list of just the stats as a resource.

A few weeks ago, I shared 50 blogging lessons to help out those who are new. It sparked quite a few discussions external of this blog – and one particularly interesting thread by book review blogger Jackie Bailey.

Something popular web publishers have latched onto – that differentiates from many (but not all) traditional reporters – is the power of understanding your audience.

I’m not talking a shallow understanding of the genres your audience is interested in. I’m talking about an innate understanding of the content archetypes readers react to, the motivations behind readers as individuals interacting with media, and the steps necessary to develop an interested, activated community.

As participation by companies and individuals explodes, social media is fast losing shiny new object syndrome. Even those who ignore the social web probably realize that at this point social media is not new.

The advantage of being early is probably gone for most industries. Yet, if you’ve got the right strategy which plays into the fact that many are now participating, you don’t need to be first. More people participating means more potential conversations, more potential subscribers, and more potential paths to set your brand on fire.

At Online Marketing blog, I explained why subscribers are a vital element of your site’s growth strategy. The reasons listed in that post include:

Peter Kim recently wrote on the plague of plagiarism. I don’t really see it as a plague, having your work copied is merely a byproduct of producing digital content. Many fight it. I’ve put it to work for my music and I do the same for the words I write.

Steal this blog post. I’m not joking. Copy-paste this post onto your own blog or site. You can credit me if you want to (this blog is registered under a creative commons license meaning you’re encouraged to do this) but if you don’t want to, that’s just fine.