Several weeks ago the New York Times wrote that blogging among young people was on the decline, according to research from the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project. Later, more thoughtful commentaries appeared, noting that blogging isn’t dead; it is just evolving.

The observation I found most pertinent is from GigaOm:

Blogging… has evolved into much more of a continuum of publishing

My experience, although far from scientific, is that blogging and tweeting have become part of a continuum of conversation. People choose the means of expression that is most comfortable, perhaps most convenient at the moment — the means that best suits what they want to say — and to whom.

With both my personal blog and my professional blog, I’ve been surprised by the number of comments that arrive via email rather than as comments posted directly in the blog. It takes an extra step or two for someone to contact me by email, rather than WordPress’ built-in comment forms. This suggests something about the person’s motivation.

The more thoughtful the comment, or the more it pertains to the writer’s specific business issues, the more likely it is to arrive in my email in-box, rather than appear as a public comment on my blog. More than once I’ve found myself encouraging the comment’s author to share it from within the blog, because I believed it would resonate with others.

I also recognize that, at times, people’s only recourse is to communicate with me via email, because the opportunity to comment on a post has expired.

Sadly, I’ve been forced to stop accepting blog comments within a month or so of posting a new entry, to avoid incessant spamming by the Eastern European link farms. Somehow I just haven’t been able to swallow the need to add a Captcha form, the automated alternative to fending off the spammers.

The fact that spammers have become so active says that there’s continuing value in blogs.

And then there was the message on 2/26 from prolific tweeter Jeremiah Owyang:

Tweet more than 20 times a day? You should blog. Pay yourself first.

No, blogging isn’t dead: it’s just part of a continuum of conversation options.

Much of the hyperbole comes from agencies and consultants who have seized upon social media as the next wave; their motivation is self-serving, of course. Promoting their credentials as social media experts enables them to attract clients, launch new projects and grow revenues. Still more hyperbole comes from pundits seeking to grow their audience for blogs, speaking engagements, books they’ve authored, podcasts, etc. (You know who I mean.) These are all classic examples of early hype cycles.

So much of the rationale on why this matters still comes back to audience size (expressed in terms of new social media metrics that replace the old-fashioned “eyeballs” and page views of the early Internet days). Here’s a great example of this argument:

But all this attention on numbers makes it all too seductive for marketers to do the same old things in a new way. Where’s the conversation?

I Love the Concept – Now Engage in Conversation

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of conversational marketing between brands and customers – I just haven’t seen much evidence of it.

Outside of email or phone, I’ve not yet had a single “digital conversation” with any service provider to my business or any brand whose products I buy. Most of what I receive from vendors is predominantly email marketing (this is true in both my personal and business life).

Most of the activity I observe in the social media world today is the result of people who earn their living via social media and who actively promote it as the next new platform for marketing or company-customer-brand interaction.

Today’s Practice Is Rarely Conversational, With a Few Exceptions

In the B2B world webinars are often effective conversation starters. The Q&A that follows webinars is a good example of conversation, one that’s triggered by a digitally hosted event that’s happening in real time. But these conversations are heavily dependent on human voices engaging in dialog.

I see lots of examples on Twitter of employees talking up their company’s products or services – especially when something new is being launched. For example: You should have seen the noise in the Seattle area as the Windows 7 launch neared! It was obvious Microsoft’s PR team had initiated a concerted effort to galvanize the employees to talk up the launch. Local tweet-ups abounded…

But on a day-to-day basis Twitter is loaded with examples of self-promotional messages or personal brand building. (I have engaged in this myself.) Who really cares what I’m cooking for dinner, or that my high-tech cats know how to turn on my Mac?

When I’ve found tweets to be most useful is when someone points out a helpful resource they’ve found on Slideshare or someone’s website. This is what I call the “signpost” form of tweet… It’s rarely conversation.

The Medium Limits the Message

As for conversation, the 140-character constraint on tweets means that at best each message is a quip or a retort. Maybe it serves as a conversation starter, but I’m still looking for evidence of real conversation happening in the Twitter world.

There are a few highly talented people who’ve mastered this medium, but in general what you see on your Tweetdeck sounds more like cacophony.

Blogs Still Rule

The best examples of online conversation take place in good-old-fashioned blogs: when someone writes a provocative post, and lots of people respond with interesting commentary or alternative points of view.

Conversation occurs when someone speaks, people listen, the speaker responds, and multiple parties engage. Yes, conversation of a sort takes place when lots of people speak all at once, but it’s ineffective if no one is listening. Or if so many people are talking that they drown out each other’s voice.

Blogs are the best online vehicle I’ve seen for asynchronous online conversations. They also offer the benefit of allowing late arrivers to benefit from the conversation after it has taken place.

Late arrivers’ role is generally limited to listening because the active conversationalists have moved on… Archived webinars can perform a similar function, but are often closed to the general public or to nonpaying subscribers.

Social Networks?

I also see occasional signs of conversation within LinkedIn’s network, sometimes sparked via Q&A; more often by the conversations that take place privately when LinkedIn enables former colleagues to find each other and reconnect over email and then phone.

Plaxo seems less effective at this – perhaps because of its hybrid mission as address book updater and personal news flash publisher. (I’m finding Plaxo more and more annoying, and have had to turn it off because it causes  Outlook to crash on a daily basis.)

Facebook fans rave about the conversations they have there. Due to social media fatigue and too many other demands on my time, I haven’t yet found the time to invest in building a Facebook presence. So I don’t have enough personal experience with Facebook to comment.

Conversations with the People Who Matter

Perhaps due to our New England upbringing, my family has found more value in a “gated community” we’ve established for private conversations and memory sharing using 37Signals’ Basecamp. It has proven to be a wonderful  platform for re-uniting a distributed family and enabling very thoughtful or even tearful conversations. This has been a true cross-generational conversation – but it’s not conversational marketing, as no brands are involved. There’s no opportunity for anyone to monetize what’s taking place.

And as for my real friends: we talk in person or by phone; occasionally by email, but always as a prelude to a real-world conversation or get-together.

So, yes, call me a Baby Boomer. Even though I’ve been using computers and email for literally decades, my conversations still tend to take place “off the grid” and face to face.

But I’ll be happy to engage in a dialog with my favorite brands, once they have mastered the art of conversation.

Their book is an in-depth discussion of their manifesto for “a New PR” — to reinvent the practice of PR given the onslaught of social media, new forms of peer-to-peer engagement, and the emergence of conversational marketing. There’s a lot to like in what they’re advocating, even though it threatens to turn the traditional practice of marketing inside out.

But — I’ve struggled for a week now to get my thoughts in order before writing the review, as requested by their publisher. (For my creative procrastination, see this post.)

Much as I agree with the ideas and approaches advocated by the co-authors, I have mixed feelings about the book itself. The book is chock full of great ideas, but it suffers from insufficient editing. It reads as if the publisher has conflated the blog postings of two prominent thinkers without investing sufficient time, energy (or political capital?) to edit out the redundancies.

The book would have been more powerful at half the length. I read it from start to finish but found it slow going due to the repetitious material. To be honest, if I hadn’t been asked to review it, I might have stopped reading midway through the book. But I’d made a promise, so I had to follow through.

Some infographics would have helped to illustrate the authors’ key ideas, and break up the monotony of the long running text. The page design was prosaic, which didn’t help.

In retrospect I’m not quite clear on the intended audience. Practicing PR professionals who have not yet tipped their toes into the waters of social media? Are there any left? It definitely felt like a primer for at least the first half of the book.

I think the authors’ blogs are actually more compelling: Brian Solis’ blog and Deirdre Breakenridge’s blog – both focused on PR 2.0.

In reading this book I learned a dirty secret: PR pros have problems with self-esteem. The authors believe that those who embrace “the New PR” will deliver true value to their clients – and society – and will thereby regain respect for themselves and their profession.

In no particular order here are some thought nuggets that I enjoyed, and wrote down in my notebook (quotes from the book):

• a new set of accidental influencers
• the magic middle
• participant observation
• the art and science of marketing without marketing
• social network fatigue
• the ability to listen and engage in conversations without speaking in messages
• the shift of PR from a broadcast machine to community participation

Disclosure: I don’t know the authors and have never been a PR professional; however, as a high tech marketer I’ve worked with PR pros for years. Like all Apple marketers I was taught the Regis McKenna model for high tech marketing. This approach was also the conceptual grounding for high tech marketing guru Geoff Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and other groundbreaking business books. He worked for Regis McKenna before branching out on his own.

And I fully recognize that the adoption of “the New PR” means that marketers have to change their ways too.

Here are ideas sparked by the handwritten notes I took while reading Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR, by Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge:

For those who haven’t yet played with Wordle The tool scans a text stream (Atom feed, RSS, etc.) and then applies some magic algorithm to the selection and placement of words that appear in the visualization. You can influence (but not control) the font, color palette, and a few of the layout elements.

Wordle lets you influence what appears, without allowing you to control the message or its placement. I chose this playful approach for my review because it seems singularly appropriate for the subject matter of the book, which is all about storytelling, influencing the influentials, and the burning need to reinvent and transform the practice of public relations in the face of the social media revolution.

I do recommend the book for PR professionals, although not for leading edge PR pros who have been immersed in conversational marketing, active listening strategies, or “the new PR.” For pioneers like you, this book would be too basic.