About two months ago a dear friend who is a senior trainer for a group that does personal transformational work started her own blog. It’s called Life As It Is, written by Ann McMaster, and it’s at www.AnnMcMaster.com. 

After the first month, I sent her a note that in about four weeks’ time she had gotten more than 4,000 visits. I was curious what she thought of this because I was excited for her. This is quite an achievement, though not too surprising given that she’s known around the world for the depth of her work over the last 25 years.

Her response was priceless. She said, “It’s easier for me to think about when I hold it that I’m just speaking to my friends … otherwise, I’d be more embarrassed.”

My reply was, “And that is the best way to thinking about blogging - as having a conversation with your friends. You’ve hit upon the magic that makes blogging so unique and popular.”

Kudos to Ann. Do check out her blog when you have a moment. You’ll find your life enriched with the experience of sharing her insights.

Tom

So here I am, sitting at the keyboard, wondering just what will be of value to others to incorporate into a blog about markets of conversation. My, has the evolution of the Internet been speeding along in so many marvelous ways. At times I’m frustrated knowing this, worrying that some clients just don’t seem to find the thread of opportunity at their feet, especially with the last four years of social media, social networking, blogging, user-generated content and all the things I’m sure you know if you’re reading this blog.  My goal here, as with my business, is to help business owners be more successful on the Internet by leveraging social marketing strategies to grow and prosper their businesses in new ways.

It seems like I’ve been around the Internet a very long time now. I started with Symbolics in 1983, which was a spinoff from MIT. There I had an opportunity to learn about ftp, email, editors, routers and all sorts of then-new terms that are old hat now. I’ll always remember Bill Gooch so patiently trying to show me how to use PINE and EMACS and a command-line-based program for mail called MAIL on Unix. In fact, what I remember the most about the 1980s, during all my Symbolics experiences, was how much people helped each other learn about these new software concepts, programming ideas and hardware devices. The group had spun off from the MIT AI (artificial intelligence group), and they were just brimming with new ideas and technology to transform the world.

Back in those days Symbolics introduced the first commercial workstation for programmers that used bit-mapped screens with windows and a mouse and a multi-tasking operating system. That’s what you get now for $399 from Walmart that can run on battieres, but in those days it was more like $80,000 and the machine required a 220v connection. What I liked was how communal it felt with regard to the willingness to teach and share with everyone what we were learning. The early days of the Internet were like that because the Internet (well, ARPANET back then) made it so easy to share ideas quickly. Sharing is an intoxicating experience.

It took another 10 years (into the ’90s) before the Internet started catching on commercially and then another 10 years (early 2000) before the social aspects of the Internet started to really show potential. The market for growth was largely hardware in the 1980s and ’90s, with a gradual evolution of more and better software for PCs that were like the original Symbolics: bit-mapped screens (versus character-oriented screens).

And now, hardware is a commodity, basically. Old and new businesses realize how important it is to focus more on how you engage with your clients on the Internet in a two-way fashion versus using the Internet for spray-and-pray advertisements in hopes that someone will see them. I’ll be sharing with you more in this blog about the emerging ‘markets’ of conversation that are the new ways we will work on the Internet.

Tom