Is Blogging Dead? Building Your Content Home on Rented Land

Wondering what the future is for blogs?

Is blogging dead?

To discover what the future holds for blogging, I interview Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Mitch Joel and Mark Schaefer. Mitch is the president of Mirum, author of CTRL ALT Delete, host of the Six Pixels of Separation podcast and a blogger at TwistImage.com. Mark Schaefer is a marketing consultant, author of The Content Code, co-host of The Marketing Companion podcast and a blogger at businessesGROW.com.

Mitch and Mark discuss the premise that blogging as we know it is dead.

You'll explore the future of publishing your content on social networks and beyond.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
The Future of Blogging
Blogging's evolution

Mitch recalls that when blogging first came to be, there wasn't much else. Technology didn't empower us to do things like shoot and post videos immediately, stream online or do podcasts. Back then, even sharing images was pretty difficult.

He shares that for him, blogging started to evolve when social media platforms for smaller forms of text-based publishing turned up, like Twitter. Then images and video became easier to publish and share.

Mitch says things became very different with Twitter and Facebook status updates. The updates gave people who were writing long-form articles the ability to publish stream of consciousness–style instead. He talks about how this change created a space for platforms like Huffington Post to progress and become more popular with people who wanted to write.

While Mitch still looks at his blog as a place for a writer to write, he says it's no longer the primary place for his content. He talks about putting content in places such as Medium, LinkedIn Publisher, Facebook Notes and Harvard Business Review where it might find different audiences. He explains why he'd rather publish directly on these other sites and use them as his distribution platform.

Mark thinks blogging will be dead when reading is dead and that there will always be a place for long-form content. He explains why things like podcasts and streaming video are taking some readership away and how smartphones play into that.

Mark says that Mitch is onto something in saying what's changing most drastically is not what we're doing, but where. He points out that there are cataclysmic changes in how content is published and consumed and offers the example of Facebook Notes, which encourages people to blog on Facebook.

Mark talks about the difference in publishing on Facebook, LinkedIn or other platforms and says the magnet for inbound leads isn't on your website anymore.

When discussing the question of what is and isn't a blog, Mitch shares why he's moving away from using that terminology and using words such as article, writer or journalist instead.

It's semantics, Mark says, and shares an insight from Tom Webster, his partner on the Marketing Companion podcast. Tom works for Edison Research where they study podcasting a lot. One of the things they found was that people don't know what the word podcast means.

Listen to the show to discover what Mark says will happen with storytelling and content marketing in a few years.

Building on "rented" land

Mitch says it used to be that publishing on social networks was like building your house on rented land, and explains why he doesn't believe it's that way anymore. He shares that it's no longer a sense of rented versus owned; it's a combination that creates a holistic platform.