The Tipping Point

This is my first post on this blog!

What took me so long? I feel (for once) like I am a very late adopter. A lot of people around me – friends and colleagues – have had blogs for months, if not years.

The first person who I came across who had a “web diary” (I don’t think the term “weblog” had not even been coined back then) was Chris Worth, a very gifted writer and storyteller who was way ahead of his time. Chris was an archetypal early adopter – like all those people who may feel they have paid too much for their iPhones. Chris’ blog was started back in 1998 or 1997 and was hand-coded in HTML at the time. Chris moved to a “professional” blog platform a couple of years ago – not sure where all the fascinating stories from the previous years reside now

Are we past the tipping point for blogs? It depends on your definition of the market for blogs. We are probably way past the tipping point for blogs as personal diaries – but we are potentially only seeing the beginning of blogs as an information exchange tool, especially in a professional context.

In my case I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog for months. I had two main concerns, and certainly very unoriginal ones. How to commit the time to writing new posts regularly? How to keep coming up with relevant and interesting stuff?

A couple of weeks ago, my former colleague Idris Mootee invited me to write a piece to be published on his blog. It made me revisit my initial concerns, and I came to the realization that there was in fact a lot to talk about! I will try to prioritize quality over quantity: expect a weekly post or so.

I welcome any feedback you can give on the posts. Blogs are a way to start dialogs with others in spite of time and distance, and those who see blogs only as a one-way publishing channel are missing on the real potential. This reflects the direction where marketing is headed: brands should increasingly engage in conversations with consumers. Brands need to forget about the old mass media paradigm – pushing intrusive messages that consumers have learnt to filter out or whose relevance is sometimes questionable.

To finish this first post, I’d like to give you an idea of the things I (or rather, we) will be discussing here. This is also reflected in the “about the blog” section. Expect to see comments on business and marketing news, data, articles, blog postings, pictures, books and of course web sites of interest.

Topics that I am passionate about:

• business, technology and marketing innovation
• consumer trends, market research, data analysis
• creativity, design, advertising, brands, communication, digital experiences
• word of mouth, social networks, online communities, virtual worlds

Voila – I am very much looking forward to sharing stuff with all of you out there, and I hope that this will be a mutually rewarding experiment!