Start with your goals. Then decide your medium.

You have to be impressed with this: I'm was a pig roast on Saturday, which means I've had one or two (or six) beers/fruity girly drinks/whatever by the time I got back to my friend's house and  log onto twitter to see this post by Christopher Schmitt.

And, even being as inebriated as I was, I started waxing philosophical to myself about work while the rest of my crew was watching Child's Play (and we'll ignore, for a moment, the fact that I'm logging onto twitter while I should have been having fun...yes, I know I have a problem).  Here is what I remember of my thoughts that night:  

The web is a marketing tool.  I think its easy to forget that.  You're either marketing yourself or something that you want to sell.  When people think marketing, they tend to jump right to the communications aspect of it, completely skipping over the parts where you plan (set goals) and evaluate (weigh your results against your original goals to determine if you were successful).  

The medium(s) you choose depend on what you want to achieve.  For some things, a blog alone may be perfectly appropriate for your goals.  Same with a website.  For some, a combination of the two is your best bet.  

• My website is a blog.  I don't need (or want) it to be any more to achieve my goal of having a place to write down my thoughts and share them with my community.  I've thought about doing a full-blown site but if I did, the content outside the blog would be superfluous at best.   My measure of success is that people comment, whether they agree or disagree.  If I get feedback of any form, I know I'm provoking thought. 

• If I was selling a product, I might think differently.  With a tangible product, you basically need to provide your customer a way to review the product and (more importantly) and easy way to make a purchase before they have time to second guess themselves.  That's your primary measure of success - a purchase. In this case, the blog could be a distraction from the customer making that purchase.  We could debate things like customer loyalty, building your brand, etc...but at the end of the day, your goal as a business is to show a profit. 

• A service is even more tricky, since it's the most intangible product you can sell.  Your measure of success is still a purchase, but in this case I think it takes a bit more for people to get there.  In this case, a website and a blog may be the most appropriate tools because you need a way to shape the service in the eyes of your customer, which blogging is great for. This is why blogs on higher ed sites are successful - they tell the story of your institution in a way that can illustrate outcomes. 

It's things like this that prove to me that twitter will not be the death of blogging, as some people  have predicted.  There are too many cases when you need more than 140 characters to expound on something. Easy answer: do both. But it gets a bit more tricky when you get into the intricacies of what you want your audience to do and, in those cases, 140 characters just won't do to explain it.