Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

My friend Steve Farnsworth recently shared a link to some tips from Matt Ceniceros at Applied Materials about how to encourage blog posts from team members who hate blogging.

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.

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.

Looks like some of the early adopter crowd are waking up from their Twitter-induced dreams.

There are several conversations around the web about it this week, but I’ll sum the reasons you should blog and not just Tweet simply: microblogging (or any social platform where you don’t control the rules) doesn’t replace the power of an independent web publishing platform where you control the vertical and the horizontal. Rather, if used properly it actually makes your independent outlet that much more powerful.

You’ll notice that unlike most bloggers, I don’t regularly write stand-alone link posts to external blogs at The Future Buzz. Instead, for most posts I incorporate a “related links” section at the bottom, (with three links to related posts here and three links to related posts around the web) in essence making every post a link post. I’ve been doing this for quite some time, and have noticed a few of my readers even adopted the same strategy on their own sites.

Unscientific observation: most bloggers use Twitter, but many Twitter users do not blog.

Twitter is popular because it is easy. It is easy to setup, easy to copy-paste links into, and easy to write 140 character bits. But, having your own blog remains the strongest platform if you’re serious about sharing ideas and having a continued dialog with the world. Blogging is the antithesis of easy, however it is far more rewarding.