As we continue to help clients in their social media outreach strategies, I’m starting to notice that more and more people are turning away from blogs and blogger engagement to focus instead on social networking sites. Which begs an interesting question: does blogger engagement still matter?

After all, if you can generate good word of mouth and drive sales from efforts in sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace, why bother to court the hard-to-reach and often hard-to-impress blogerati like Scoble, Arrington, or Om?

Here’s why: because they’re hard to reach, and hard to impress, and everybody knows it. These bloggers have spent time building up a brand, and that carries value when they talk about your products or your messages.

Harnessing this trust, this existing relationship, is why it still matters to work with bloggers who have a name and a following, instead of simply trusting in the effectiveness of blind, stranger-to-stranger word-of-digital-mouth marketing.