I want to thank a couple of fellow bloggers whose responses to my recent post about blog abandonment have encouraged me to keep on blogging.
I was feeling especially stuck when I wrote that post. Still emerging from a kind of social media hibernation that lasted through February, I had started to dip my toes back into the waters of Twitter and Facebook, but I hadn’t yet taken the plunge back into the deep end of the pool that is blogging.
In that post, I asked my fellow higher ed bloggers what motivates them to continue blogging, especially in the face of all the other social media outlets and tools that continue to demand so much of our time.
One of the first to respond was Kyle James, the guy behind the influential higher ed Internet marketing blog .eduGuru and the CEO of nuCloud. Kyle has been blogging consistently since January 2008, so he’s no Johnny-Come-Lately to this pursuit. One thing Kyle said in his comment really hit home with me:
To answer your question, what motivates me to blog is because I know how important it is in it’s deepest form! I don’t know how to explain it but at some point all this crazy social media stuff will go away but blogging will still remain. Quality writing will always have a purpose.
I’m not sure I agree that “all this crazy social media stuff” will pass, and I’m not sure all of it should. After all, blogging is morphing, or has morphed, into micro-blogging (a la Twitter), and people can blog on other social media platforms, such as Facebook. So other platforms allow for blogging to happen.
But I do agree with Kyle that blogging in important. Even if you’re blogging for no one other than yourself, if it serves a purpose — cathartic or otherwise — then it is a valuable pursuit.
Which brings me to my second source of inspiration, Chris Syme. Chris is another terrific and prolific blogger whom I respect (despite her love of the Kansas Jayhawks). Check out her blog at CKSyme.org. You’ll find lots of good stuff there. Like Kyle, Chris is no longer employed by a higher ed institution. So, again like Kyle, her purposes for blogging are tied to marketing her consulting services.
Still, her comment resonates with my inner blogger.
Remember that scene in “Singing in the Rain” where Gene Kelly does a long number about a young hoofer coming to Broadway called, “Gotta Dance”? Well, I guess I “Gotta Write.”
I think I’m in the same boat as Chris.
Gotta write.
Gotta blog.
So, blog I shall.
How frequently I’ll be blogging remains to be seen. Another veteran blogger, Karine Joly, commenting on my coming-out-of-hibernation post, reminds me that “you [dont] have to post 10 times a week, but I’m sure you can manage 1 post every other week.” I’ll do my best, Karine. Thanks, too, for that encouragement.
P.S. – Ron Bronson also weighed in with a comment, then with an excellent post of his own. Any time you can work a Portlandia skit into your post, as Ron does with this one, you know it’s going to be good stuff.
Image courtesy of alamodestuff on Flickr.
Higher Ed Marketing 
Glad to see you’re back!
Thankful to know I may still get to read Friday Five.
Blogging is writing…it will never really go out of style, nor with the need for the skill diminish. I too have struggled with output on my blog like I used to…my IHE blog gets most of my “juice” these days. Sending another encouraging nudge your way!
Andrew, let me add my voice of encouragement. I get great insight from your posts, as well as a greater awareness of how things look from just outside the bubble around alumni events, volunteers, and fundraising. As for why I blog, it’s to generate discussion, to get people talking, agreeing, disagreeing, questioning, and saying…”What if….?” Doesn’t always work, but when it does, it makes thinking about our work more interesting and (sometimes) makes doing our work even more rewarding.
Andy I think you know exactly what I mean about the “crazy social media stuff going away”. You just said yourself at the beginning of the post that you took Feb. off from social media. :)
A few years ago all this stuff was a new shiny toy that was fun to play with. Now that we have kind of figured it out most of us have moved onto the newer shiny things like mobile and geo-location based things. I guess what I’m really saying is that hyperactive time of social media and keeping up with profiles on 10 different sites is over. The market has matured. I’ll be honest I don’t use twitter (or facebook) anything like I did 2-4 years ago and I bet you don’t either? That is all I’m really saying. We aren’t tweeting 10 times a day and consumed reading our feed all day. We might post a couple of updates and check our feed a couple of times a day.
What I’ve really notice change about blogging in the last four years is that people don’t leave comments anymore. People would rather share the post on facebook/twitter and this has in many ways replaced a comment. I feel like that is a loss that we probably won’t get back and I do miss that.
Thanks for the extra encouragement, folks!
Kyle – You’re correct about the demise of commenting on blogs. I’m as guilty of it as the next person. For me, the change is somewhat due to where I read blogs — meaning, on what device. I skim blogs and RSS feeds on the phone or iPad more and more these days, and trying to post a comment on blogs using those tools is more of a challenge for me. In the days when I read mostly on a PC (as I’m doing now), commenting was easier. Still, I, like you, miss the interaction of comments. I’m glad you (all of you) took the time to post your comments on this one. Thanks!