One thing you notice if you’ve been blogging a number of years- there are a lot of marketing bloggers out there. Tons of them. And they’re all very, very interested in the blogging medium.
Why is this the case? Blogs are cool, sure, but it’s not like they cure cancer or anything. It’s not like they’re going to soon replace Superbowl ads or anything.
I think Seth said it pretty well to me the other day: “The web is a giant compiler for marketers. You can experiment here for less money, in less time, than anywhere else. If Al Gore hadn’t invented it, I’d be seriously bummed out.”
Yesterday, while Johnnie Moore, Mark Earls and I were recording a podcast, Johnnie came up with a wonderful metaphor to describe this phenomenon.
He told Mark and me about being 12 years old in science class. To demonstrate that yes, indeed, a stick of celery is full of capillaries, even if you couldn’t see them with the naked eye, the science teacher dipped the end of a stick of celery into a beaker of blue ink. An lo and behold, the kids watched in amazement as the ink traveled up the celery capillaries, turning the rest of the green celery stalk into blue.
Suddenly that which could not be seen before, could now clearly be seen. Glaringly so.
I think that’s why we like blogs. We get to actually see stuff working, for real, here and now, on the “Live Web”. We get to watch the metaphorical marketing ink travel through the capillaries. Which is very unlike the murky, vague, advertising-centric marketing world a lot of us grew up with. So of course we’re excited. Kudos to Johnnie for explaining it so well.
[Update: Johnnie posted the podcast here.]
