The Tipping Blog

filed under Blogging · 1 comment in the original

I checking in at the ViralMarketingBlog and found a link to an old article written by John Hiler of MicroContentNews titled "The Tipping Blog - How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic". Anyone who actually knows me can tell you how important Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" has been to me and how interested I am in the subject matter In addition to dealing with issues from "The Tipping Point", the article also talks a good deal about another favorite of mine, Seth Godin's "Unleashing the Ideavirus". Indeed, this was a treasure to find.

The article tries to dissect the explosive circulation of an article written by the author. By using server logs and a little bit of common sense, the author traces through the event and locates the different characters that were critical to the boost. There's too many good tidbits to try and quote here, so I can only recommend that you go read it yourself!

The subject matter is particularly interesting to some ideas I have been mulling over. Since I started this blog, it's been growing steadily over the past couple of months and certainly has posed and imposed a new challenge for me. In this same time, I have come to recommend and evangelize the use of the medium to an ever-increasing group of self-starters and entrepreneurs. Despite the initial excitement, however, things never seem to progress. I think this is largely a matter of motivation and confusion. Starting a blog with purpose, as opposed to as a personal journal, can be daunting as blogging is changing at all times and there is a great deal of work perceived from the outside. I am curious how much of a market their is for assisting people in using web logs and other related technology to accomplish a variety of goals.

Could this be a new service? What would a service like this look like? I've been thinking about a model like this:

Introduction - the ins and outs of the blogging world
Research - getting "into" the space and understanding your potential contribution
Implementation - selection of the right tool for your needs
Strategy - advice on how to "work" the system
Managing and Measuring Expectations - understand what you can expect, coping with growth (or lack thereof) and measuring it effectively

I'm certainly not an expert on the space, but I'm very interested in digging in a bit more. If anyone is interested, I'm willing to try something like this as an experiment. For anyone looking for immediate how-to type material from a marketer, you might want to check out Debbie Weil's blog as I think she offers a seminar on the subject.