Firstly, hello and welcome back to New Media Mogul after a brief break in transmission there. Don’t ever let it be said that it is easy to maintain a blog. I’ve found that with other pressures on me, and deadlines due, the blog is the first thing that suffers.
It’s interesting, because the question of ‘Why blog?’ or more broadly ‘Why create social media?’ is one of the questions I am attempting to answer in my research. Reflecting on the creation of New Media Mogul, it came about because I wanted a focal point to force me to write on a regular basis and keep my skills sharp as I spent a number of years researching social media.
Lately I’ve been writing for other purposes, mainly working on a paper I’m going to present at the ANZCA conference in Wellington, New Zealand next week so I haven’t needed to turn to the blog to keep the flow of ideas happening.
But people create social media for a variety of reasons and although I’d (somewhat naively) like to think that it’s because they have a great interest in the subject of their media, I don’t think this is always the case.
There are people like me who blog because it is part of their professional practices – they want to be able to write regularly, network with other like-minded bloggers and build up a reputation.
There are people with stories to tell, although with these types, commercial interests often take over. These people will usually end up being freelance writers who will wind up working on a professional blog, or appearing in a newspaper column or else their blog will be turned into a book (I can think of a few times that this last scenario has occured).
There are people who do it for the attention and fame that comes with it, and obviously for the associated dollars too (Just think of celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who I’ve noticed recently has started doing a segment on the Nova radio network).
Then there are people who don’t seem to derive a lot of fame from creating citizen media. So what is the deal with these people? Are they just the unlucky ones whose creations haven’t been quirky or interesting enough to achieve the fame of someone like Perez Hilton, or whose writing or presentation style or other media skills isn’t good enough to do this in a professional sense?
Blog because it’s your passion! Anything else, and you won’t last long!