Death of the blog or rebirth what do you think?

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New research by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth reveals that corporate blogging is in decline as corporations turn to social media to keep consumers up-to-date and engaged.

http://www.bizreport.com/2012/04/study-blogging-in-decline-as-social-media-takes-over.html

 

GCAI saw this post circulating the web, so we wanted to get the take of one cool content guy, our pal Tim Cigelski, a Senior Communication Specialist at Marquette University.  As usual, Tim’s insight is brilliant and he takes the discussion down a completely different path!

 

“I’m definitely not surprised. I’ve seen similar studies about blogging being in ‘decline’ for a number of years now. But I’d venture to say that it’s declining in quantity only and increasing in quality. Before Facebook and Twitter, more businesses blogged because that was one of the only social media tools available to them. Now quicker and easier social media tools are weeding out the blogs that previously only posted updates that were purely promotional and not very in-depth. Today, most consistent bloggers that remain are the ones that use the format for in-depth articles or personal stories that can’t be confined to a 140-character update.

A good example is Marquette’s Educator blog, which includes reflections on teaching and education: http://marquetteeducator.wordpress.com/. And in that case, social media compliments the blog by helping promote links and find a broader audience to drive people back to the blog. So they don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  Also newer platforms like Tumblr are actually blurring the lines between blogging and “social media.” It’s not exactly WordPress nor is it Twitter – it kind of marries the best of both worlds. And a lot of businesses are jumping on that rapidly growing bandwagon, which is quasi-blogging. So I’m not sure how that changes or impacts the findings of the study, if you consider Tumblr part of the blogging world.   ”

Note: Tim can also be found at:  http://draftmag.com/new/beer-runner/