I recently read Wendy Montes de Oca’s blog over at Target Marketing entitled, Is Blogging the Online Dinosaur? Before I could even imagine what she was thinking my eyes read down to the short third paragraph that said, “I beg to differ.”

Phew!

The argument for the dinosaur comment really couldn’t be further from the truth… “that with the increasing popularity of social marketing, as well as the inundation of free ezines (or free e-magazines), blogs have become the online dinosaur?”

Wendy makes some great points… especially about the importance of PULL marketing, but I wanted to add a few points and statistics that support blogging.

First… with all the changes that Google has made in their search algorithm, the importance of dynamic, well-written content is huge. How huge? HiveFire, a Cambridge, Mass based internet company surveyed 400 marketing professionals and found that 82 percent of B2B companies now employ content marketing as a strategy. Add to this fact that 91 percent of email users have unsubscribed from an email they previously opted into and 84 percent of 25 to 34 year olds have left a favorite website because of intrusive or irrelevant advertising, and suddenly well-written content like corporate blogs become very relevant!

Second… with Google’s added importance on dynamic content, the SEO value inherent in well-optimized blogs is huge. They need to be well-written… of course, but adding smart, SEO tactics to that nicely written blog will help drive not only blog rankings, but your corporate site’s rankings as well.

Third… I would argue that blogs are very much a part of social media. Social media (at least as far as I’m concerned) is about communication across networks comprised of people and businesses of interest to each other. Sharing custom content, ideas, and thoughts – what a blog should be – is the very heart of social media.

What do you think?