diarRHETORICS.com - stream of conscious

Thursday, October 23, 2008
Why Blogging Isn’t Going Anywhere Soon
Despite recent stories to the contrary both in online and offline publications, the popularity of blogging shows no sign of abating anytime soon. From its early days as an outlet for bedroom writers to share their personal thoughts to the power it holds today as a business tool, blogging’s popularity is, if anything, increasing.

A recent report from Technorati confirms that blogging is growing at a phenomenal rate. Hailed as the Blogger’s Bible, Technorati measures not only how popular blogs are individually, but also how many are currently being written worldwide. In their State of the Blogosphere Report 2008, Technorati shares some impressive figures:

As of March 2008, there were 184 million blogs worldwide

Blogs in the US enjoyed 77.7 million unique visitors, compared to 41 million visitors to Facebook and 75.1 million to MySpace

77% of all active Internet users read blogs

Apart from confirming that blogging as a pastime continues to find new fans, these figures from Technorati also act as a wake-up call for any businesses yet to have a corporate blog.

The Numbers Game

According to recent statistics, over half of all businesses in North America don’t have a blog, which means that just under half of all businesses do. If your business is in the half that doesn’t have a blog, you’re offering your competitors a major advantage over you – access to your target audience.

One of the reasons that blogs are so popular is that they offer an instant voice, both from the blogger and the reader. A personal blog can share the latest news or pictures of a newborn baby to family and friends in a different part of the world. A business blog works on the same premise.

Working on just some of the figures that Technorati provides, it’s easy to see why blogging should be a part of every business’s marketing or PR strategy:

46% of all bloggers are professional bloggers. This may mean that they’re writing a corporate blog, or simply writing about the industry that their company is in, while not necessarily mentioning their company at all.

This equates to just over 84.5 million bloggers that are, in essence, business bloggers. If your company doesn’t have some kind of blog presence, that’s potentially 84.5 million businesses ahead of you when it comes to reaching your target audience.

Online sales in 2007 totaled $260 billion. Blogs are known to increase awareness of new products and offers from companies. Less than half are utilizing this, which means that 1 out of 2 companies are losing a large part of $260 billion dollars of online income.

As the economy continues to waver and businesses tighten their belts, not using every tool at your disposal is akin to commercial suicide. The popularity of blogging and blog readers should be seen as one of the most cost-effective and essential business tools available.

hi jeff interesting point - i believe social media is a social sculpture that is learning how to walk and is like the frog in boiling water metaphor - put a frog in slow boiling water and it will boil to death put a frog in boiling water and it will jump out fast - the point in reference is that social media has an incredible potential to change the world and the way we inter-act and how we approach being “we” and communicate but its so subtle and encompassing that we don’t even know what we don’t know nor what it is or what is really happening too - one thought that percolates to the top is “god” we think we know what it/he/she/god is or isn’t and every body has their own interpretation - we have similar analogy with social media - so maybe instead of “is social media an industry” the question should be “is social media the new god” well that some food for the imagination - and i am sure the god of social media would have something to say if we could only find him and if he would stand up and reveal himself - anyway my point here is that its not technology that changes the world it’s the way people use it that revolutionized the future and that social media is unique in that it has no gods no leaders and most of all not driven by our traditional model of top down management by fear that we keep repeating since before forever and recorded time and why it just might save us from our leaders and ourselves too - so what will the future say about us i ask myself in you

geo

commentary: on Jeff pulver blog “Thoughts when asked: “What do YOU do?”

when people ask me what do i do it seems that lately what falls out of my mouth and mind is that i am a dreamer - i use to tell people i was a recovering artist but they looked at me somewhat strangely and lately i find myself in a state between dreaming and thinking and thinking i am dreaming and dreaming i am thinking and dreaming i am dreaming and thinking i am i think and then again sometimes i find that i am just thinking about the world and things and at other times i find myself dreaming about what a wonderful world it could be and then i wake up to find it was all too real and i go back to dreaming - hmmm row row row your boat life i but a dream

commentary: shelly palmer end of broadcast tv

hmmm shelly - i think we have to ask ourselves also who is wearing the emperor’s new clothes? - i think the traditional media - tv broadcasting world and governements and biz included have been believing in their own propaganda for so long they can’t believe it ain’t reality and now with the internet and broadband they don’t know what to do - today i read the outrageous amounts the media is getting from the election process its not a bottom line affair - we are re-inventing ourselves and we the people are taking back the future and what i think Thoreau said “we need to learn what we need to teach” and what i believe we need to learn from the so called social sculpture - social media movement is that the we vs them is fractured and that we are them and them are we and social media resonates with “we” as in we the people - the traditional goal keepers, gatekeepers goal is control while the “we” goal is engagement being involved, we the people get this intuitively - and so it’s not only the end of broadcast tv its traditional top down management by fear that is threatened

Winston Churchill once said, “The farther you look back, the further you can see into the future.”

“ We are to guard against ourselves; not against ourselves as we are, but as we may be; for who can imagine what we may become under circumstances not now imaginable - Thomas Jefferson to Jedidiah Morse 1822 ”

geo