This blog turns one year old this week. I've already celebrated the occasion–back in January, on the one-year anniversary of its conception, with an article Seven Lessons from a Blogging Year, that ran in the MarketingProfs newsletter. But since then,I've noticed a whole bunch of birthday posts or mentions on other blogs popping up like spring robins in the nest.


Mack Collier's The Viral Garden turned one yesterday. Also celebrating this month (or close to it) are Eric Kintz's Marketing Excellence blog, Mario Sundar's Marketing Nirvana, Mike Sansone's Converstations and Tom Vander Well's QAQnA call center blog... a handful of the many marketing blogs launched in early 2006. (A bunch more -- including CK's Blog, Servant of Chaos, Hee-Haw Marketing, and bizsolutionsplus -- hatched last summer.)
Which makes me think that 2006 was the blogging equivalent of the Baby Boom–the Blogger Boom?–at least in our space. I've said before that a blogging year is like a dog year. And given last year's explosion of marketing blogs, it seems the marketing blogger equivalent of the whole 18-year Baby Boom. I know the math doesn't quite add up, but you get the idea.
Last year's boom is yet another indication that blogs have gone mainstream, probably more so than many other social media platforms. And as blogs gain readers, bloggers themselves are taking stock and starting to wonder what else they can accomplish with their blogs, and how they might improve them or take them to the next level. As Mack Collier wrote yesterday, "So starting tomorrow I get to work on making Year Two even better. There will be some changes immediately, some later. And in the coming days I'll have some 'lessons learned' posts from Year One."
The "next level" is a theme marketers are thinking of more generally these days, too. As one of my favorite Blogging Boomers, David Armano, whose own Logic + Emotion blog turned one year old in February, says about his upcoming seminar for MarketingProfs, "It's 2007. Your Mom has a blog, your kid is uploading videos to YouTube and your boss just added 'must create something viral' to your performance goals. On top of all this, you've still got a website that looks like something from an 80s music video and is barely usable. What's a marketer to do?"
David's Thursday seminar, Blogs, Tubes, Twitters, and More: Emerging Media's Impact on the Customer Experience, will offer up a romp through some of the social media tools marketers are now using, with an eye toward helping them separate the cool tools from the fool's tools.
Among other things, David will look at why some social media efforts succeed while others fail, explain how you can be smarter about choosing your next emerging media tactic, and show how teams should work together in this relatively new space. And (best of all) how creativity–and common sense–can take your digital efforts to the next level.
Sounds fun, huh? I hope you can attend, especially since I'm hosting the party. But even if you can't, check out the slide deck from the presentation, which David has shared here. And by the way, I'll be stumping him with some really tough questions at the end of this presentation. So if you have anything you need answered, let me know during the seminar, or drop me a note below.