Your Brain on Facebook and Why Blogging is Going by the Wayside

Our ADD culture now shuns corporate blogging, favoring less time-consuming Facebook postings and that’s a shame. Paralysis by no analysis.

At 138 characters, the above opening to this piece would work as an effective tweet. It would also work as a brief Facebook shout out. Talk about the irony in blogging about how corporate blogging is going by the wayside.

Last month, USA Today reported that businesses who blog fell to 37% in 2011, down from 50% in 2010. The reason most commonly given for the blog blackout: blogging takes too much effort and (it does, I should know!), it’s not where customers are – they’re on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. 

So to answer my own question that frames this blog post – Facebook and Twitter aren’t killing bloggers.

Our need for instant gratification, insane levels of information overloaded, and our anywhere and everywhere mobile connected lifestyle is.

It’s incredulous to think of blogging as an antiquated medium already. But at the speed at which technology changes these days, it’s easy to see the blog as barely a step above traditional email. Just another thing to read, to add to the burdensome pile of daily to-dos…

Like I said, blogging does take effort. More than just aggregating other’s works or simply “curating,” successful blogging takes aggregation one step further, providing analysis and commentary – two functions that come right from the world of traditional print media. To a large extent, blogging takes the best of old school media and combines it with the zero production costs of web publishing and the ethic of instant and transparent content updating.

Does that mean every company should blog? No. It doesn’t. But for the ones that do, modern blogging should be viewed as an essential compliment to the faster and shorter paced world of Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Consider these mediums as “headline grabbers,” or teasers – ways to hook and link your audience back to your company’s website.

Considering that ThinkInk is among the 37% of companies that maintains their blog as both commentary and reaction to the ever-changing world of communications, our bias is unavoidable. And I’ll readily concede that blogging, tweeting and Facebook posting can all exist as un-tethered mediums, serving their own benefits. In fact, with brevity as the backdrop to this blog post, the 138-character opener served as an effective way to condense, trim and consolidate my thoughts, making for clean, crisp writing.

But sometimes, even in our mobile-enable, digital-frenzied world, people need to sit down, read a long newspaper article (in whatever medium) digest complicated, thought-provoking material and let the revelations that those works generate percolate and permeate their neurons.

Corporate blogging is hard work. So is going to the gym.

Brains, like our bodies, need constant workouts for them to remain in top shape and a steady diet of only social media probably isn’t the best for either.

Now was this 466-word article so damn hard to read?