The Purpose of This Blog

Hi. Welcome to my blog - one which I probably should have started a while ago, unfortunately I was too preoccupied with reading other peoples.

I've always had a big interest in social networks, and communication - I was an avid user of Faceparty, and was constantly on MSN messenger when I was younger. I was also a big player of Ultimate Online through some of my teenage years (before they ruined it, in my opinion, by trying to make it easier for new players). Unfortunately I don't have time for game playing anymore, although I did have a mess around on World of Warcraft for a few weeks, and I keep a close watch on other Virtual Worlds, like Second Life.

Whist at Durham University, I was involved with an attempt to create a whole new social network. Facebook had spread fast through the University and had become part of our daily life, and MySpace was well known, but none of the networks about had even started to have a viable business model. We were looking to change that by working out a way to allow local businesses to connect and provide information to users easily, with geo-targeting. 

The project never quite came to fruition, but as social networks began to open up to companies more in an effort to create a viable revenue stream, I saw a huge opportunity to start helping big brands to do this in an effective, engaging way - engagement marketing, rather than interruption marketing (thank you to Marcia Kadanoff for this term). With the opening up of the social web to interactive applications, there is a bright new future of engagement marketing, one which is still at the earliest of stages. We're now working with brands to interact with users through these applications.

I've started this blog so that we can have a discussion about this future, and to catalogue it as it unfolds. We're all still at an experimental stage, and it's very hard to predict what will work and what won't. By sharing and discussing, however, we can all benefit from each other's successes and mistakes. I'll be using this blog to post general comments and thoughts on social marketing strategy, reviewing what other companies and people are doing in this space, and adding thought and comments on other posts, comments and blogs. 

If you're in this space, let me know, link back to your own blogs or websites, add me on Facebook and let the discussion begin!