Last week, we were talking about one of the reasons business blogging growth is slowing.

Part of the reason growth is slowing is that the instant fame model of blogging is proving to be hollow. You can’t be an instant success blogger. It just doesn’t happen.

It may look like this blogger was an overnight success or that company got instant social media attention. But there’s always a huge amount of work coupled with a huge amount of work behind it.

And yet. There is a way that business blogging can greatly enhance your visibility day after day, if you’re willing to forgo the Hyper-Viral model.

What if I told you that there is a way to get the same overall effects and the same amount of traffic as being on the front page of Digg, with better results? Would you want to know how to do that?

What if you saw the results over a couple of weeks or months, instead of days — BUT you could make it keep happening over and over again with a regularity that you just can’t guarantee with Digg?

Some people are saying yes, what’s the difference when I get the traffic and publicity as long as I get it? Especially if I can repeat it?

But some people are thinking, no, I want a big burst of success.

So I’ll present another part of the reality. Let’s say you have a choice between these two scenarios.

I can get you on front page result with Digg, and in time and labor, it would cost you $4000, but I could only pull it off once a year. In that one time, you still have to pay me whether you’re on the page for five minutes or 15 hours. And I can’t sell you votes or any of that stuff — you have to do the work involved, and know that after many, many times, it will eventually happen, but not be sure when, and not really be able to control it.

OR.

I can get you the same amount of traffic, the same amount of links, from the same number of weeks or months of work but over the time you’ll be working.

In other words, that traffic will be spread out over several weeks or months, starting in a few weeks.

Your internal time and labor costs are around $1000., then there’s $2000 in set up and fees. BUT. Once you learn how to do it this one time, you can do it over and again, as often as you like.

Now. It’s front page of Digg, one time shot, take whatever results you get for $4000. Or spend $3000 and get the same results, but over, say, a month’s time, then repeat that result as many times as you like for free after that.

Option Two looks better now, doesn’t it? In the days to come, we’ll be talking about letting go of that shortcut mentality of getting one quick Digg front page vs spreading your traffic — and risk — out over multiple social media properties, including your own blog.

If the growth of business blogging is slowing, and Twitter becomes old news, what will be be talking about next in social media?

We’re already audio blogging a bit, and video is getting to be a more feasible option. I don’t know that it will get to the point where just to be seen you need to have video, not any time soon.

Not the way it is with blogging.

What I wish the next great thing would be is topical social networks. But I doubt it.

One reason is that until you can port your identity around on the web, or sites can recognize one standard profile, no one is gong to want to constantly have to create and update a new profile every time they log on.

Since the early web, the mainstream user seems to want to come online, visit a few standard places (email, social, news, search), and a few favorites, then go home.

Our job, if we want to push constant content to them, is to convince them why we should be allowed into their current favorite online destinations (such as their Inbox, via emailed newsletter sign-ups), or why they should add our site as a new favorite.

There’s always a point of “too many”, so we’re constantly fighting for a limited amount of attention.

Even if that attention grows it is scattered among more things.

For example, there was a point at which people didn’t want to view video online, because they would have to wait for it to stream into the browser enough that they could consume it.

Now that it’s faster, they’ve got YouTube. And while it’s great if your video is ON YouTube, the problem is that you’re competing with all the other people on YouTube.

Even if you can get them to view video directly from you (via podcast for example), you’re competing for time in the day.

If we assume they are awake for 17 hours a day, and work, eat, and are in transit from one place to another for ten hours, there’s still only 7 hours left of leisure, which they’ll split among other activities. Your target consumer may only be on the web a couple of hours a day.

If your video is ten minutes long, what will convince them to watch it? If your social network takes ten minutes to register and confirm, what will convince them it’s worth joining?

Not only do we need to compete for attention and time, when someone decides they have time for us, we have to convince them over the hurdle of creating yet another profile, for yet another site.

Yes, I can log into your site with Facebook.

But Facebook won’t pull in the link to my own website. It can’t tell you which email address I prefer to get reminder in, if at all. And it currently can’t push your email newsletter to my Facebook private messages.

There are similar problems with other ways of authenticating.

Until there is one ID system that knows

• how you like to be contacted without being spammed
• what your homepage is
• what geographical location you want to be associated with (which isn’t always where you physically are, so GPS is out)
• your date of birth
• who your existing friends on the new network are

and the other types of data you want to take with you, asking people to join your social network, instead of following your blog, may not be the answer.

Not to mention the fact that you’re asking for a bigger social commitment.

Reading a blog every day or so, commenting when you feel like it, that’s like a casual dating situation.

Joining a social network is much more like asking your readers to be in a serious on-going relationship. What good social network doesn’t require the commitment to participate?

Is your audience ready for that kind of commitment?

Are you?

If you’re not, Ning may be the answer, at least for now.

Yes, I said “may”. And also “for now”.

With Ning, you can create a topical social network on a networking site many people already belong to. You can even map the subdomain they give you to your domain name, for a monthly fee.

To explain why I say it MAY be the answer, let’s do an exercise.

Let’s say you do set up a site on Ning. Here are the questions you now need the answers to, mostly in the affirmative, for your idea to have a prayer of working.

Is your audience big enough that the small percentage of them who will post to the forums and start their own blogs will be enough?

Expect about 10% of your current RSS Subscribers, and 1 — 10% of email subscribers to join. Only half of them will bother to do more than register unless you nudge them.

Given that, think about it again.

Do you have time to create content and spark discussion?

And provide video content?

Or moderate out spam content?

Or the money to pay someone else to do it?

Even if you do, your data is still tied to Ning. If you ever want to create your own, separate from Ning, who is going to export that data? And how?

And if you have a community now, who’s going to port all username/password information into Ning?

Maybe one day, Ning will let you subscribe to a service that lets you completely white-label its service.

You will still have to have a hot enough topic to keep it from being a ghost town.

Indeed, will your site topic ever be hot enough to get its own topical social networking site, forsaking all others — like Facebook, for instance?

Or do you need to be content with the option to have a Facebook presence rather than your own network?

Not every interest group can support their own social network, and of those that can, the first mover may be the one that prevails. There were at one time, thousands of forums about internet marketing.

But only the few best ones, and the special niche versions, survived.

And if you are the first mover, you have to really think about how you’ll create, maintain and push forward community.

No matter whether the custom social network is the answer, or whether it’s some other sub-section of social media that becomes our next obsession, it’s coming from the innovators.

So, social networking may be the next big thing in social media, or it may not. If it is, you have o make sure you’re ready for it.

I think that there are so few companies that can support that type of evolution, that while social networking will become more popular, it won’t be what business massive adopts the way we did we did with RSS, blogging, social bookmarking and other social media tools.

I believe the next big thing in social media is some existing invention we’re not aware of yet, or something that may have already been invented recently but is still on the fringes.

I had just finished writing about how great business blogging was when I waded knee deep into social media.

Now that social media sites like Twitter are spreading into widespread adoption, the people who alerted you to social media are already on the next boat.

The question for you to think of is, what is that next boat? The only hint I can give you right now is, watch the innovators and the early adopters who told us about RSS, blogging, social bookmarking, social networking and all the other new media.

As for me, I’ve got something cooking that I believe will change our relationship with online video forever, IF it can be pulled off, or is even technologically possible.

My idea, though immensely shareable, is also easily copied. If it’s not the right idea, launched at the right time, it may also only be effective in the short term.

So for right now, I’m just raising the question to encourage you to find your answer. So what is it? What are you going to do next in social media? What’s left to tackle? What do you think the next big thing will be?

In an upcoming post, I’m going to discuss what I believe the change in strategy should be, as far as small and local businesses, for blogging. Then this coming week, we’ll be talking about “what ifs” for the social media horizon.

There used to be four distinct reasons that people would ask me to help them with blogging.

1– A person had an idea or a story and wanted to be heard. It isn’t always about money or business — see the political blogger, and the personal blog.

2– A person wanted to make extra money blogging. This doesn’t happen as much, at least not on a full-time income level. But to some, even $5 — 20 a day is a huge help.

3– A person, (especially an entrepreneur) or a larger company wanted more visibility. If you want to be seen, and to have multiple opportunities to be seen again, you blog, and you keep blogging.

4– Better search engine results or traffic. I would get a letter from someone who had X amount of traffic that would bring them Y conversions. And all they wanted was more of each.

Search engine traffic is an excellent fall-back reason to keep blogging. I’ve always maintained that it shouldn’t be the only reason one blogs, but that it also doesn’t make sense to ignore its powers in that area.

Did you notice it?

The one over-arching reason is exposure.

And who can blame them. Who hasn’t dreamed of being the star of a story picked up by Digg, or Mashable or the Associated Press? I’ve been lucky enough to choreograph or witness all three circumstances in my career, and as long as success isn’t expected overnight, it is attainable.

But more often than not, following success, I’m left in the irritating position of having to say “I told you so.”

Don’t get me wrong, being on the front page of Digg, or at the top of Tweetmeme, getting thousands of visitors from Reddit, your server rocked by StumbleUpon, and especially being written up on Mashable is every bit of an exhilarating feeling as you think. It doesn’t matter whether you’re just submitting someone else’s story, in the background orchestrating exposure, or part of the team being covered, it’s fantastic.

For a little while.

When the ride is over, it’s back to reality. You can scream “again! again!” as many times as you like, but you learn that it’s the convergence of the story, the timing and the barometer of Rome’s mob that determines if and when you’ll be on top again.

Most bloggers never make it. And yet, the majority of the bloggers I talk to are blogging because they were sold that dream at some point.

“Become a blogger, and you’ll get on Digg and then your problems are over!”

Not so fast cupcake.

One of the things that struck me when listening to Kevin Kelly’s talk about the next 5000 days of the web (thanks @salemonz), is his summary of the Laws of Media.

In this presentation on the next 5000 days of the Web, given in December 2007, Kelly said:

And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now — TV, film, video — that basically becomes one media platform. And while there’s many differences in some senses, they will share more and more in common with each other.

So that the laws of media, such as: the fact that copies have no value. The value’s in the uncopiable things. The immediacy, the authentication, the personalization — the media wants to be liquid; the reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them, not so that they are “free” as in “beer,” but “free” as in “freedom.”

And the network effects rule — meaning that the more you have, the more you get.

The first fax machine — the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist, recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable. Those are the effects that we’re going to see. Attention is the currency.

As you can see, I’ve emphasized about the idea that the copy is not valuable, and that the value is in the uncopyable.

This is the ultimate doom or boom of the ebook, the magic or mess of article marketing, the victory or vacuousness of video and the evolution or extinction of the blog.

Because the ultimate raspy gasp of the blog echoes here: the easiest way for you to get attention is by producing ideas and concepts that other people will share.

Then you want people to unite around the ideas that come from that share — that’s how thought leadership can turn into profit, by using your brilliance as an anchor for creating your Tribe.

It is then, therefore essential that you create original enough discourse that in both style (what you said, how you understand and convey it) and in formats (a link, an embed) that are easily traced back to you. The most surefire way to do that is to inject your essence, which can’t truly be copied.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but perhaps no one can say it the way you do, or make it as understandable, or duplicate your complex perspective.

And so we want to be both copied and share, for fame, for profit, for fun, for recognition.

If they copy but don’t share, they may throw the “you” part of it out. Great for contributing to society, not so much for any business that is uplifted from having one’s innovation recognized.

If they share, you can’t always track the sharing, but if it’s shared in a complete format, do you really care?

Especially if you know that this is where you can really see a return in value, you probably won’t. it’s more important that 500k people saw your YouTube video than being able to name each person, when they saw it and whether it was a Tuesday. So you “share to gain”, as Kelly says in the same presentation. Much better situation for you, whether you can track it or not.

So much so that so for many, blogging becomes a game of wanting to share something as close to uncopyable as possible that is also extraordinarily shareable.

We want the hyper-viral effect without having our intellectual property ripped off.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to strike that balance?

We’re going to talk about that next, and take a closer look at the mega-viral or hyper-viral model — that’s really a pipe dream — in social media.

As to the question in the title?

Yes, I think the hype of mega-viral success has killed the very valuable reality of what is a quite impressive set of tools between blogging and social media. Can we revive it?

Bear with me for a few more posts. I have an answer for that too.

Okay, we were talking about what is going to succeed social media and blogging. And it may be something that already exists.

Let’s look into what’s potentially happening for Blogs first.

Jigga Wha?

1– Widespread Business Adoption of Lifestreaming?

Possibly. To us it may seem like everyone already “gets” blogging, but I meet people every day who either ask me “What is a blog?” or “Why should businesses blog?”

The vast majority of people offline are not as plugged into the web as we are. It’s a fact — if you’re reading this, the vast majority of the population is less web savvy than you are. Much less if you’ve written something like this.

That means if we progress to business streaming, we’ll have to present a compelling reason why consumers should wade in our stream as opposed to, say, Facebook’s.

Or meet them there.

That means that to capture the minds of that set, lifestream for business will have to be something more than aggregation. A one-stop shop for everything “your company/product/service”? That’s not big enough, or exciting, or enough of a benefit yet to people who aren’t fans already.

But make it incorporate and organize everything that happens in a mirco-niche of your industry, making you the authority?

Perhaps. But then what? And why can’t that be accomplished from a blogging platform like WordPress anyway?

Aggregation isn’t a progression. It’s just… aggregation. It’s the “spare” part of heir and the spare. Nothing near useless, but not a replacement either.

2– App-etizing.

Again, maybe.

There’s some part of your business that can be made into an application for the web, the phone or the desktop. Which is it, or is it all of the above? And are you doing it for marketing or for the sake of the app itself? And isn’t your site more than what it can do? What about the conversation?

Is it the internal or external conversation that converts browsers to buyers?

Plus that’s not a successor to blogging and social media, it’s a companion.

3– Moblogs– Special Blogs Created for Mobile marketing.

You’ve got to give folks phone content, which crosses with apps. But how much does that cost and how does the average small or local business make this option cost-effective? What if the audience wants more than the mobile version of your blog –suppose they want to go from subscription to content to purchase without putting down their Blackberry?

We’ll have to come back to that. Because this is a great complement, but it’s not evolution.

An evolved progression would have to provide a Web-based answer, not just a mobile-based one.

4– Audio Blogging (Also known as podcasting)

Seems like the next natural step, at least as far as text blogging is concerned.

And it’s already here, sort of. If iTunes, Pandora, last.fm, the old Napster and the new Rhapsody haven’t convinced you of that, grab some food to take back to your bomb shelter while you’re topside.

The thing about audio though, is that it’s not a replacement for text blogging, necessarily. You’ll still have people who prefer to consume by reading — it’s hard to “skim” an audio.

Yet, the more mainstream your audience, the less this is a problem.

But it’s an idea. Try blogging via audio all next week and measure the results. It might surprise you how easy it is to do and how much your audience likes it.

Will it replace blogging by text completely? No. It’s not skimmable, it’s harder to share snippets of, which makes it more challenging as a marketing tool.

Seems to be much more addictive though — and you get more focused, undivided attention. Not to mention that if you make them downloadable, they can travel into other parts of your audience’s lives via iPod and the like.

Of course, there’s then the fact that you can’t link from within one part of an audio to within, say, another part of a video. Blogs can be configured to “know” me. Audio on a blogging platform can — audio AS the blog? There’s the hole.

5– Video blogging.

Some folks are doing video on some level — screencasting, slidecasting that becomes video, actual video. But we’re nowhere near saturation, despite what YouTube looks like. If you looked at Steve’s MindMap, you’ll see that some are speculating that blogs will become TV channels, or at least shows, and video blogging would plug right into this idea.

Video blogging is easier to adopt, even if you’ve got a camera shy face — screencasting and slidecasting may make more sense for you. It’s shareable via embed, but not in a way that ties the content permanently to its creator, and yet is still freely floating on the web.

Which I’m working on. But if I told you more about it, I’d have to kill you.

Ahem. Maybe we’ll talk about that another day.

For now, let’s move on to why social media and blogging even NEEDS an evolutionary next step. And one problem with blogs merging into social networks.

I’ve got a meeting this  afternoon but I may be back after, or it may be tomorrow morning. Best way to get the next post is to subscribe, or follow me on Twitter, where I’ll post the next link. See you then.