After four great years, it's time to pull the plug on Catch Up Lady - which many of you will have noticed has been dying a slow and painful death over the last six months.
In talking to others about my predicament, I found myself listing off all the reasons why I felt compelled to end it. This lead to a joke about creating an Advanced Directive for any blog you start - basically a list of situations in which you are obligated to pull the plug. Here are a few of mine, got any to add?
- You Lose Your Strategic Filter: When I started blogging about social media back in 2006 (on FRIENDSTER!), "social media" was a perfectly appropriate filter - it was new, and almost anything a brand did was news in the space. Fast forward 5 years and social media is its own industry - brands have moved beyond experimentation to full integration with their marcom efforts. And, there's a site that blogs about "social media" in its entirity, it's called Mashable, and they have a few more hands on deck then I do...I needed a more specific POV.
- Blogging Becomes a Chore: About six months ago my blog started to feel like a weight on my shoulders. I suffered from major "blog guilt" for not blogging and feared that protective services was going to come take my blog away from me. Unlike times past, nothing I saw compelled me to blog...I stopped thinking like a blogger and being excited to post.
- You Stop Caring: Finally I hit a point where the blog guilt went away, and I just didn't care anymore... It was time to move on.
So, move on I will - and I hope you move with me, over to Social Sweat, my new blog focused on the intersection of social media and sports marketing.
Thanks to all of you who read, linked, commented, sent ideas, and supported the Catch Up Lady. And special thanks to those fellow bloggers who I came to know through this project. I'm proud that many of you are now my friends "IRL" - that alone is worth every minute I spent on this blog.