Is an influential blogger’s life finite? Does using bloggers as influencers have a use by date?

Social media is in its prime. There’s even a well established formula for activation and it includes finding influential bloggers within the selected category or topic of interest and then engaging said blogger to pimp your wares.
It’s so formulated that whilst writing this post I heard the news that a talent agency has been set up for Mummy bloggers. It’s great to have a filtering system but, and there are a few big buts:

There are only so many influential bloggers that you can use.
Only a few rise to the top and only a few become like the “Arianna Huffington” within their sphere of influence. If you’re outside the US, making sure your blogger hits your geographic target is another headache which limits the pool


That handful of bloggers is going to get stale.
Say there are 10 competitors in your category and there are only 6 blogs from which you can really choose to engage with- 6 that you really get a decent ROI from. Those 6 blogs are going to be tapped out for marketing endorsements pretty quick. And once you do one campaign what happens next? The idea of new media is to foster and grow relationships, but campaign based efforts don’t really cater to that. Plus, bloggers will continue to chase that dollar, they don’t care about establishing relationships with marketers over a long period of time, they want the cash that allows them to give up their day job.


As certain blogs grow in popularity, will it allow for new competitor bloggers to enter that same space?
This is tricky, but I think only a few new entrants will gain a spot in the top rankings. First to market and Google rankings in the digital era are pretty tough to beat. Liken blogs to the magazine industry and it’s very hard to find holes that new magazines can fill. The trick here will be for blogs to continually innovate and find new ways of presenting what they have to say. This will be the only way for new entrants to take some of the shine away from the bigger, more established blogs.



We’re facing an inherent problem and it’s going to get worse. We’re increasingly seeing consumers get bored of whatever it is that’s on offer in a new media sense. They just want to see the new thing and it has to be quick. Think about how quickly you get tired of failblog or damnyouautocorrect. Unless readers have an ongoing, invested relationships with their bloggers of interest, their revisits will eventually begin to wane.


So the question I ask is what happens next? Because I know I’m already sick of the whole blogger endorsement thing, various blogs only hold my interest for so long and we’re already seeing Facebook numbers decreasing, and they already came from a now defunct mySpace, which indicates jumping the shark is a given in new media.