No Man’s Blog

A very interesting conversation has started this week by Eric Kintz of HP who kindly reminded us that, to some extant, we (still) live in a bubble. He rightly observes that while the viral marketing community bustles and churns, fact of the matter is that 99% of all marketers are still in the ‘real world’. As Mack writes in reply, "The ‘real’ world that has never heard of Doc Searls, or Robert Scoble, or Jason Calacanis (99.9% of the country really have no idea who these people are)".

This is a fine example of the false concensus effect, a social psychology mini-theory that describes how people readily guess their own opinions, beliefs and predilections as being more prevalent in the general public than they really are. The bias is commonly present in group settings, since the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it; they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way. Put simply, we tend to be biased in thinking that more people think and behave like us. (I still can’t believe there are only 300,000 people reading the guardian - it doesn’t make sense!)

Indeed for those of us reading 50 blogs on a daily basis, ranting and rambling our humble opinions on our own blogs and commenting on others it is quite easy to forget that we’re (still) swimming in a tiny puddle…

And Eric go on to ask the big question: "So what do you think? What will it take to spread the “epidemic” to the other 99% marketers?"

My answer to that is time, patience and more people like Eric, Mack, Dino, Karl, David and Brian (to name but a few), involved in more blogversations. Mind you, Logic+Emotion is only 5 months old, and the Viral Garden is a month younger (some great pioneers started blogging as early as 1997!!! and the blogosphere has kicked off around 2003 - imagine how they feel reading us baby evangelists….). As Ann rightly proclaims, "the truth is that we are the converted, and the rest of the potential readership of this blog and other blogs is only now beginning to drink from the font and see the depth of the potential that exists here"…

Revolutions take time. A couple of months ago there was a must-read new media survey at The Economist, in which Andreas Kluth brilliantly compares a technological innovation dated back to 1448 which, as the argument goes, turbo-charged an information age called the Renaissance with the 2001 invention that sparked the blogsphere. 

This brilliant survey has argued that society is in the early phases of what appears to be a media revolution on the scale of that launched by Gutenberg in 1448:

"This invites comparisons. There are Jacobins and monarchs to be found in both revolutions. In the first, the Jacobins were, by turns, printers, publishers, Protestants and writers; in today’s revolution, the Jacobins tend to be those bloggers, vloggers and podcasters that bay for the blood of the odious “MSM” (mainstream media). As to monarchs, the first revolution had popes, monasteries and the real thing; today’s revolution has, well, the MSM."

But what will happen when the other 99% will start blogging? Can you imagine 100,000 more marketing blogs? Uri, a marketing consultant and web 2.0 savvy (which unfortunately does not blog very often) has a very interesting take on that, which you can read here.

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