Eric Kintz of HP recently ended a thoughtful post about extending the social media network with this thought:
”what will it take to transform this emerging community into a viral marketing network beyond the blogosphere?”
Which created some interesting discussion about the need to branch out of the blogosphere as to avoid “talking to ourselves”. I especially like how Ann Handley puts it:
“One of the reasons why many people -- marketers or otherwise -- might not read blogs is that the blogosphere has functioned in its own little orbit. From where I sit -- one foot in the so-called blogosphere and one foot not -- I see that changing in a big way every day, even for those real working professionals. "Blogging," after all, is nothing more than a way of delivering content...but the advantage to it is that it allows us to listen, as well.”
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the manstream media. Boston.com (The Boston Globe) picks up the Tipping Point graphic that I created (via Futurelab). Total coincidence. Then, Mack and Ann get a shout out for Marketing Profs and Mack’s Top 25 lists. There was even a reference to Mark Hurst’s Good Experience.
So what’s going on here? Make no bones about it. We in the blogoshpere are not alone. Intelligent forms of life are watching us and reading our words (listening to podcats and watching vlogs). We can either thumb our noses, or embrace and encourage more of this. To me—it’s a no-brainer. The mainstream still holds the key to the mass influencers we would all love to reach. It’s time to “walk with them” as Mack Collier would say.
