Alrighty then, let’s get the viral party started. A few weeks ago, the Marketing Viral Community had an active discussion precipitated by Eric Kintz’s post on taking blogs mainstream. Yesterday Eric did a great job of summarizing the various reactions to his post. Here are links to responses from the Viral Community – David, Toby, Mack, Chris, and Peter!

Here’s my 3-point take updated – Theory, Practice, and Contribution:

Theory:

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I believe the best next step would be to reach out to corporate marketers before making the jump to mainstream. Why? Because once we effectively preach to the “marketing choir”, each corporate marketer would in turn evangelize to the rest of their target audiences and carry the message forward. Premise based on my theory of customer evangelism.

Practice:

So how would we, marketing blog early-adopters, kick-start the process of conversion?

In 3 simple steps:

1. Formation of corporate blog communities:
2. The Rise of “Marketing Scobles”
3. Inter-networking between the “Marketing Scobles” and the “mavens”

Explanation of above points in my earlier post.

Contribution:

Recently, via Toby Bloomberg‘s exceptional Diva Marketing blog I unearthed a Jupiter Research Report that claimed that:

35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006

Irrespective of the furore over the veracity and methods behind the forecast, I think we can safely assume that corporate blogging is moving to the fast lane pretty soon. Right in time for the introspection unleashed on the viral community by Eric. Thanks, Eric.

Secondly, I realized that C-level executives would love to see where they stand in the fast evolving corporate blogging scenario. Proof: The tremendous response that my Top 10 CEO Blogs Post received. Encouragement from Jason Calacanis, Craig Newmark and of course Eric Kintz truly helped solidify my thought-process.

I’d been wrestling with conceptual realization of the above-dream of connecting with corporate marketers. But after the response, I decided that the best next-step would be track-and-post such a transformation within the corporate blogging community.

So as announced earlier, starting August 2006, I’ll launch my monthly corporate blog rankings (w/ Alexa or Technorati support) the following:

– Top 10 CEO blogs
– Top 10 Corporate blogs

and I’m even contemplating a special surprise listing. So, stay tuned and keep reading!

I’ll be back!!