The Beast is Hungry and Bored: What Happens After Business Blogging?

by Tinu

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.

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.