Relevance of Blogging-My talk at LIBA

Gave a talk yesterday after a long gap (earlier talks were at Manipal Institute of Communication, Manipal and MSRIT, Bangalore (details). During the Mashable Meetup at LIBA (Loyola Institute of Business Administration) got an opportunity to talk about the Relevance of Blogging.

Are blogs still relevant in the days of twitter, facebook, foursquare and the likes? This was the main agenda of the talk and I also touched upon my experience as Official Blogger for Tata Nano Superdrive and Corporate Blogging in general.

When I asked the audience if they thought whether or not blogging is still relevant, more than 50% of the audience stated that they think blogging is still relevant. Only one gentleman said its not relevant anymore as people have no time to write lengthy blog posts and are moving to twitter and facebook. Rest of the audience were in Don’t know/Can’t say mode.

In my talk I shared an opinion that blogging is still relevant, based on following observations:

• Blogging is getting accepted at par with media. Most of the companies and PR agencies have started to invite bloggers for their press meets, product launches or events.
• For twitter, facebook and foursquare, you’re its inventory and not customer. Every minute you spend (or waste) on facebook, facebook makes money. Blogging platform in turn gives you complete control over the content, design and monetization.
• Facebook updates are not searchable by search engines and twitter updates seldom appear in search results. Blogs continue to derive good volume of traffic from search engines
• Twitter and FB has very short attention span. Unless an update goes viral (through retweets etc) its easily lost in the flood of new updates on your timeline.
• Few years ago blogging was a fashion and everyone jumped into the bandwagon. At present, I feel not so serious players have moved away from blogging (to twitter n FB) while serious writers continue to run their blogs as effectively as earlier. All  popular bloggers are also active on twitter and fb and are using these platforms effectively to promote their blogs. Building an effective blog takes time and efforts but pays off well in long run.
• Companies continue to invest in their corporate blogs

Below are a few questions asked by audience and my answers:

Q: Should companies publish negative comments received at their blog? As long as the comment is genuine and legitimate, it should be published along with a resolution to the concern raised. This gives rest of the visitors a confidence that this company will actively work on their mistakes/customer complaints. Trying to suppress a customer concern will do no good, as users have several other mediums to air their concerns.

Q: Why should students start blogging? Its a great way to build one’s identity online. Having a blog related to your field of interest/expertise heavily increases your chances of landing a job, if HR folks decide to google you out. Even otherwise, its a good way to hone your language skills, network with like minded bloggers.

Q: When can I take blogging full time? About 1 out of 100 bloggers manage to earn enough money from blogging to make a living out of it. For others, a blog can complement whatever they do/specialize in.

Q: How to market one’s blog? This is another detailed topic altogether, but in brief, good content, basic SEO, networking with like minded bloggers, reading and commenting at other blogs and consistency should pay off.

There were a few more questions I’m not able to recall now. To your left is the first available picture of me talking, shared by Arun Sag.

Ppt I used for the talk is embedded below.

Thanks to Sorav Jain of Echovme for inviting me for the talk.

After my talk Mr. Faheem Ahmed, founder, CEO, BYT Social shared a case study of how Basics Life is using facebook for its online marketing. It was a very good session. Demographics and strategies he shared were very interesting.

November 2010 update: Do read my post about "tips for live blogging an event" and advantages of live blogging  *

Read about my MSRIT talk * Official Blogger for Tata Nano Superdrive * SEO Basics * Social Media for SMEs * a Social media case study- what not to expect from blogging *