Today marks exactly one year from my last post on Deckermarketing. I started blogging in September 2003, and have written many posts on eBusiness, marketing, leadership and life…until May 4, 2009. After that day, I didn’t write another blog post until now.
This wasn’t by design. Things just "slipped away". One month turned into two months, and that turned into a year. This must happen to others, right? Even John Porcaro – an exec previously at Microsoft who inspired me to blog in 2003 when I was at Dell — has not blogged in nearly a year, and he’s now a social media consultant!
I thought this one year anniversary of “no posts” is a good opportunity to give a summary of how or why I orphaned my blog for so long.
First, Bazaarvoice has been more than a full time job as we’ve grown from 6 of us in January 2006 to over 550 employees, 9 products, serving 800 brands. In terms of writing (which takes a lot of time) I’ve felt more obligated to blog on Bazaarblog, write articles (such as my ClickZ column), and helping my team produce videos. And then I had other commitments taking time, such as co-founding Capital Factory, launching a web-based chore application, serving on boards, and spending as much time as I can with my family!
A big factor is my Twitter activity took away from blogging. If I had an idea, I tried to put it in 140 characters and tried to live by a “less is more” mantra. And if the idea deserved more writing, and it was about marketing or social commerce, I ended up putting it on Bazaarblog.
Despite the lapse in content, Deckermarketing blog traffic hasn’t gone down. I still get 100 to 200 visits a day, largely from Google search results. I didn’t expect that.
Now what? I’m still super busy, however I don’t want to let the investment in this blog go to waste. I'm going to start to post again, at least once a month in depth, and more frequently with a simple post of a paragraph or less. But with so many outlets, it's hard to focus on one. What do you think? Is the same thing happening to you?
There was an excellent session about this at SXSWi this year- blogger burnout. The question was asked how do the bloggers who do it for a living keep it up? Each panelist had a different take:
– guilt or obligation to readers was one answer
– passion for the topic was another
– nothing wrong with taking a time-out on a blog was a third answer – because we’re people and we’re not obligated to do anything and sometimes our passion takes us in a different direction for a while.
Welcome back to blogging!
Missed your blog, like your Twitter, good post for consideration. I’ve experienced similar directions. Twitter has undermined part of the reason for blogging – connection, share info, marketing, brand prominence, etc. – but there’s a place for both. Returns just aren’t in yet on whether blogs will earn a space of prominence in this expanding communications environment.
Bert
Great to see you back, we’ve all missed your posts
http://proarticlesdaily.com