Recently, I spoke to a group of high schoolers. I asked them to raise their hands if they read blogs.

Zero hands went up.

I felt like I had asked them if they used the yellow pages. I even made a joke about it saying, “I wish I had a sign in my front yard that said ‘I know about Google’ so they didn’t deliver the yellow pages.” One girl raised her hand and asked me what the yellow pages are.

Make no mistake though, the high schoolers are online. They love pinterest and twitter and Instagram. They listed countless youtube channels they subscribe to. But blogs? They acted like that was the equivalent of internet whittling.

Will some of them start reading blogs as they get older? Definitely. That’s likely to happen. Did some of them not raise their hands when the rest of the room didn’t? Probably. But if you’re a blogger you should at least be a little bit worried about this.

Actually, forget worried, be active.

The next generation isn’t tired of your ideas, they are tired of your delivery system. They still want to learn and laugh and have fun, but just not in the way other people used to. Want an easy way to test this theory? If you’ve been blogging longer than three years, use Google Analytics to see how long people spent on your site when it started. Now see how long they spent on it last month. The majority of you are going to experience what I’ve experienced, the average visit time is getting shorter.

The bad news is that the invitations to be irrelevant are multiplying everyday. The good news is, so are the opportunities to reinvent what you do.

Stay fresh today or be dead tomorrow. Social media waits for no man.

Question:
What ways are you working to keep your platform current?