My own viral community

At both BMA and Viral Garden, Mack Collier has what I feel is among the strongest ideas I’ve seen in years in terms of blogging. He has built a Viral Community of sites that all talk to each other and about each other. I link to him, he links to someone else and we all flesh out ideas and add our own two cents to them. He truly has tapped into the power of community not to build a commercial brand but to build all our own personal brands. Mack is kind of the center of this, the mayor of the community if you will.

I wanted to take a minute and highlight some of the people in my own sub-division of that community. These are people I’ve talked to online and link to often. I enjoy their blogs, they read M3 and we all link to each other. I got the idea from this post. So I turn the microphone over to people I read everyday and whom you should start reading if you aren’t already.

One more thing: I left the formatting exactly as these people sent them to me. I’m far too lazy to do things like bold words and other stuff.

Name: Mack Collier
Day job: Professional Blogger (!)
Blog name: The Viral Garden. I also contribute to Beyond Madison Avenue,
and Marketing Profs: Daily Fix
Blog description: The Viral Garden: We talk about all things marketing,
especially how companies are using, and can use social media, CGM, blogs,
etc, to better market to their communities. BMA is a sort of
Advertising/Marketing mish-mash, where they talk about advertising, I talk
about marketing and Jewel. Daily Fix is where I get to run around and tell
everyone that ‘Heh heh! I am on the same blog with Jaffe and Seth!’.
Length of time blogging: Since September of 2005.
Location: North Alabama
Sentence or two about myself: I’ve always lived in Alabama, and have
experience in production, retail, and online marketing. Interestingly, or
sadly, I’ve learned much more about marketing, especially online marketing,
in the last 9 months than I did in the previous 9 years.

Me: Alan Lopuszynski

Day job: Web Content Editor, fishersci.com

My blog: http://burbanked.com

Description: Movie news, commentary and snark from a former showbiz insider. A view of Hollywood without the view.

Been blogging since: December 05 – a newbie!

Location: Pittsburgh PA

About me:

I never felt the driving compulsion to write that writers are supposed to feel. That craving need, that 30-mile-runner’s-high you’re supposed to get. Never – until I started blogging.

I spent nearly a decade in L.A. as a movie producer’s development lackey, an assistant at many different levels of indignities, a screenwriter and – briefly – as an amateur cow wrangler. In exactly none of those assignments – particularly as a cow wrangler – did I ever feel driven to write every day. I’d do it as a kind of perfunctory duty; my inevitable due-paying toward meeting predetermined screenwriting goals, and I did accomplish respectable success.

But not personal success. Absolutely not financial success. And, tragically enough, not Charlie Kaufman-, Cameron Crowe-, Coen-like success.

That was a bunch of years and at least one burgeoning family ago. Now I’m in a job that pays the bills and engages my mind, but which rarely scratches the surface of the creative skin that I can’t seem to shake off. That’s where my blogging began – about movies, of course – and now I am completely, deliriously, sleep-deprivingly, miserably-in-a-great-way obsessed with writing Burbanked as often as possible.

Alan Lopuszynski
http://burbanked.com
http://alanlopuszynski.com

Name – Clyde Smith
day job – This is what I do but it involves related projects plus some
activities with Mobile Lingo. Unfortunately, I may soon have to bite
the bullet and get a day job.
blog name – ProHipHop
blog description – started as a hip hop business news and now focuses
mostly on hip hop marketing.
length of time blogging – began in 2002 with Hip Hop Logic.
location – Raleigh, NC.

Name: Tim Nudd
Day job: Freelance writer/editor
Blog name: AdFreak
Blog description: Adweek’s advertising blog. I edit it and write most of the entries. Adweek’s reporters help me out. Despite the corporate parent (VNU), I have all the editorial freedom I could want.
Length of time blogging: 19 months (since November 2004)
Location: NYC
Paragraph or two about myself: I worked at Adweek proper for many years, where (among other things) I wrote the back-page column, Shoptalk, a roundup of offbeat ad stories. Shoptalk took a bunch of steroids and became AdFreak. I left Adweek last year and now take care of AdFreak as a freelancer. The blog takes up about 1/4 of my work week. I sort of love advertising, and I sort of hate it. I prefer soccer.

Name: Jordan Behan
Day job: Owner of my own online marketing company: www.telltenfriends.com
Blog name: Tell Ten Friends
Blog description: I riff and rant about marketing and advertising ideas, and all things web 2.0
Length of time blogging: 8 months (rookie!)
Location: Vancouver, BC Canada
Paragraph or two about myself: I used to work in newspaper, as a reporter. Then I worked in radio for a bit. Next was tv, and I stayed there a while, but soon I became a publicist and online marketer. Then, I decided to start my own company. These days, things couldnâ€™t be better, and Iâ€™m no longer a slave to the shockingly low wages in Canadian media. I like beer, hockey and everything else Canadian, and some people say I say â€œaboutâ€ funny. Eastern Canadians say â€œabootâ€ but on the West Coast we say â€œaboat.â€

I subscribe to the belief that people like to know about whom theyâ€™re doing business with, so I have my blog, a myspace page, a squidoo lens, a flickr account and probably a lot more that Iâ€™m forgetting about; essentially I have no secrets. I live half of my life online anyway, so it just makes sense. Oh, and I also believe that you should never be afraid to ask for the business, so here goes: In my signature below is a link to my RSS feed. You know what to do.

Name: J.D. Matthews
Day Job: trust me, you don’t want to know
Location: Memphis TN
Blog: Musical Ramblings at jdmatthews.blogspot.com, and have done so since
September ’05
Description: a mish-mash of music, radio, and reality TV news. Basically,
it’s whatever I feel like writing about from day to day. I do have some
fairly cool interviews posted, though! I’m semi-funny depending on the
phase of the moon. If you happen to enjoy American Idol, you’ll like me. I
think.

Name: Tricia Mangan
Day Job: Desperately seeking one
Blog Name: Studio UES (www.studioues.blogspot.com)
Blog Description: Music Industry news with a heavy focus on interactive marketing and digital music distribution
Length of time blogging: I take the cake as newbie blogger, having officially launched on 5/1/06
Location: NYC
About me: I recently decided to make a huge career change and have been trying to transition into a new field (difficult to do anywhere – in NYC, just plain stupid). My previous work has been in research & behavioral/mental health care and I was working on my Ph.D. in Clinical Psych until September of last year when I reached the point of absolute DISGUST with academia and decided to leave with my Master’s degree and what was left of my sanity. Anyway, seeing this as my window of opportunity, I decided I ought to spend the rest of my life doing something I actually enjoy (novel idea). I’m looking to get involved in interactive music marketing but am also really loving writing and am hoping to find a way to incorporate that into my future career in some capacity.