The analysts at Gartner have made their predictions for 2007 and they say that blogging will peak next year and all the hype will fizzle out.
One of their top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide. The reason: most people who would ever dabble with web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have got bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.
“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Plummer said. “Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”
Well, that certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons!
It got a flood of media coverage and many bloggers weighed in too. Does this mean blogging will suddenly die and go away. No, the Gartner gurus say it will level off and the rapid growth we’ve seen with the blogosphere doubling every 6 months will go away.
There may well be 200 million ex-bloggers, but dedicated bloggers with a real voice and an audience will continue to keep the conversation alive. And many of them are business bloggers. C level execs are only just getting comfortable with blogs and blogging. They’ve seen the success of business bloggers like Jonathan Schwartz of Sun.
“The trend is, I think, irreversible at this point,” said Shel Holtz in the USAToday article. “You’re having businesses that are showing some substantive results with well-thought-out, strategically planned corporate blogs.”
And that’s what businesses are after – substantive results.
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Gartner’s prediction leaves a lot to be desired. First, how many of those 100 million are business blogs? Not the majority to be sure. Second, and I’ll make a little prediction of my own based on my observations of what I’ve seen in the real estate industry, blogging has gone wide, but in 2007 it will go deep.
I mention the real estate industry because that’s where I hang my hat these days. Realtors are just now catching on to blogging, and one visit to a site like ActiveRain.com, a real estate blog network comprised of approx. 10K bloggers, is alive and kicking! These people are excited about blogging and the numbers in that network alone continue to rise.
One piece of evidence is the “Five Things You Don’t Know About Me” meme that recently made its way around the blogosphere. I introduced it to a well-known real estate blogger who introduced it to others in the industry and the thing went wild! You’d think they never saw anything like that before. Truth is, they probably hadn’t. We’ve been a part of memes before. It’s no big deal to us. To them, it was.
That leads me to a second prediction. I believe the kinds of trends we’ve already seen take place in more established areas of the blogosphere (the tech industry for example) will be repeated in burgeoning industries like real estate. Those bloggers will go through the same gyrations the rest of us have already been through.
That’s good news for those of us who make our living doing blog consulting. We’ve already been where they’re headed. We know where they’re going and we can help them get there.
My advice is look for verticals that are really just waking up to blogging (and let me throw social media in there as well) and become a fixture there. That’s what my real estate blogger friend did. Mary is not a Realtor (she runs a blogging company in fact), but she has become the “high priestess” of the Active Rain network. Realtors look to her for advice on how to blog, and express their appreciation and devotion by leaving scores of comments.
What Mary has done the rest of us can do, and should if we’re smart.
Comment by Paul Chaney — December 19, 2006 @ 8:39 am
[…] Sally Falkow posted over at Business Blog Consulting, asking the question of whether Gartner is correct in their assertion that blogging will reach its apex in 2007, then begin to wane. […]
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