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Blogging Vs. Printing: Don't Jump Ship Just Yet
July 13, 2007

Ain’t it the truth? Richard’s July 5, 2007, post on the growing importance of blogging as a marketing vehicle is highly relevant to small and mid-sized businesses. The way that consumers seek, process, and assimilate information is changing. Blogging is one of those fundamental changes that marketers need to stay on top of.

Of course, keeping your new media marketing strategies current, whether capitalizing on blogging, cell phone marketing, or anything else, can be daunting. Kind of like trying to catch a piece of dandelion fluff blowing in the wind. Marketers must figure out how to keep up with consumers’ always-changing communications habits and split their marketing budgets between them, all the while keeping an eye out for the next big thing.  

The irony is, immediately before logging on to read Richard’s blog about blogging, I was having a conversation with another industry expert about the importance of blogging, too. He commented on the plethora of B2B industry blogs and their use to disseminate opinions and news, a role that trade magazines used to play (but that is increasingly being marginalized). This left him to wonder: What is the difference between a B2B magazine and a blog anymore? Is there even a meaningful difference?

At least until now, blogs have been perceived as, among other things, being a purer and hence, to some extent, more reliable source of information. Meanwhile, many magazines (B2B, in particular) are struggling with their image as pandering to the interests of advertisers and having content filtered through the bias of the publisher. This gives blogs a real appeal, since they hold the perception that they give the real, unvarnished story.

Not that blogs are unbiased (who could accuse “The Drudge Report” of being unbiased?), but at least, with blogging, you know what you are getting. People rely on blogs because they know their favorite bloggers’ perspectives and trust them. There isn’t the pretense of objectivity, and as long as bloggers aren’t claiming to be unbiased, they don’t need to be.

But for how long will blogs maintain their status as purist information sources? If eyeballs are leaving magazines for blogs, how long before the advertiser influence follows? Advertising, itself, has already migrated to blogs (witness the advertisement for the Hoodia diet patch on “The Lede” newsblog on the New York Times blog site today), but how long before these advertisers start to demand some kind of influence over content, too? Then readers will have to find another purist information source.

The point is, today’s new media (of which blogging is only one) provide real marketing muscle but there is a transience to them, too. There is a reason that of creatives’ top five sales opportunities, four relate directly or indirectly to print: cross-media campaigns (of all kinds), collateral print projects, Web page design, cross-media campaigns that involve print, and direct mail (The Industry Measure Design & Production #23).

Print has been a staple of communication for half a millennium for a reason.

So, yes—watch new communications tools like blogging and incorporate them into your marketing mix as appropriate, but don’t abandon traditional media as you do. For some niche audiences, the Internet will be your most effective marketing vehicle. For others, print is still the powerhouse. If not the primary vehicle, it is the foundation on which the e-strategy is built.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on July 13, 2007 | Comments (0)