Are Your Owning or Renting Your Social Media Presences?

The last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about this.  It seems a lot of the free social media tools that we are ‘renting’ have come under fire, or disappeared.

Google Reader went away, disrupting how readers subscribe to and receive our posts.

Twitter suddenly changed its API rules or some such for 3rd party sites that many of us were using to follow Twitter chats such as TweetChat and TweetDeck.

Rumors are that Feedburner will go away soon.

It’s more important now than ever before to make sure that you are creating and distributing content via tools that you own versus rent.  This is a big reason why I have always preferred a self-hosted blog over Facebook or even Twitter.  Because you have control over what happens on your blog far more than you do on other social media sites.

For example, for the past few days, the #Blogchat hashtag on Twitter has been overrun with spammers.  My only option really is to ask Twitter to please do something about it.  Which I have, and still the problem persists.  Because it’s a problem that’s happening on a site that I don’t control.  I’ve already started thinking about ways that I can bring more of the #Blogchat conversation here, where I have more control over it.

With Google Reader going away and Feedburner likely following soon, I’ve shifted my focus away from trying to get subscribers of this blog, but instead to building my newsletter list.  I can own that list and have control over it.

So when you start using social media, especially as a channel to create content, think about the tradeoffs you are potentially making between reach, and ownership of that content.  It’s always a good idea to have your ‘homebase’ for your content be a space that you control, such as a self-hosted blog.

For the rest of you, what changes have you made in light of recent changes to Twitter and Google Reader going away?  Has it made you re-think where you invest your time with blogging and social media?