Let the third week of February 2006 go down in history as the week that Malcolm Gladwell started blogging, an event that's been noted by pretty much everyone in the marketing blogosphere (now, includng us). Wonder how fast *his* Technorati rankings will climb?!

In his first post, Malcolm said he was starting his blog to "elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written....start posting reader comments for everything I write...[and] there are also times when I think I’ve made mistakes, or oversights, and I’d like to use this space to explain myself and set things right."

So, he's using his blog to interact with his readership and to promote his other writings. This pretty much puts him squarely into the center of what Susan Getgood has been writing about the changing nature of blogs and why companies use them. Elizabeth Albrycht has written on this as well, and also was interviewed last week for a podcast on the importance of blogging in business and marketing communications.

Jennifer Rice continued her series on Maslow's hierarchy of human needs with an essay on one that Maslow missed but that is critical in our time: the need for control. She said,

"When you give customers control over the brand experience, they feel a sense of ownership... which of course leads to greater loyalty. ... In what ways can you help your customers gain greater control... over their lives, their jobs, or your carefully crafted brand experience?"

Grant McCracken posted two excellent "emperor has no clothes" reviews of popular business books Blue Ocean Strategy and Lovemarks. While he fussed at the "exclamatory style" of Lovemarks, he found that beneath the exclamation points there was a gem of insight:

"But, in the last decade or so, branding (and the creativity and innovation it represents) has become too important to be left to the agency alone. That's why, not incidentally, the God-like A.G. Lafley consented to write the introduction to this book. Creativity, once the special preserve of the agency, was now everyone's concern. What [Lovemarks author Kevin] Roberts spotted is that the madness of the agency must now migrate into the larger corporate world."

"I have too often seen a dynamite marketing campaign undermined by employees who didn’t buy into the message or understand the vision. Conversely, I believe engaged employees can overcome the worst marketing."

To go back to how we began, consider the situation of Malcolm Gladwell. Here's an author to whom blogging would be downright unnatural and certainly limiting -- where's the space, the editors, the circulation, the necessary *time* to write, the traditional distance from the reader?! Plus, he's attained a status beyond guru -- more like a writing god who spawned an entire style of business writing.

In starting a blog he acknowledges that it's a good thing to take advantage of the opportunity to interact with his readers and to offer them more of an opportunity to interact with him and his writing than they can get via his regular publishing channels -- books and the New Yorker. He's acknowledging the limits of these traditional publications and opening a new way to interact with his customers. May the brand of Malcolm Gladwell prosper in the blogosphere!

As I started to herd last week's cats, I found them uncommonly aligned in a celebration of the ever-growing power of "people like me." Christopher Carfi started it off by quoting this stunning bit of data from Edelman: "The most credible source of information about a company is now 'a person like me,' which has risen dramatically to surpass doctors and academic experts for the first time."

Grant McCracken applauded a new branding effort by Aquafina, which is sponsoring a website that will show short films submitted by the "people like me." What will this do for Aquafina? According to Grant, "Media Lab builds a shunt into the brand through which the most contemporary of contemporary culture can run like a river."

Johnnie Moore, meanwhile, talked about the need for a brand to dance, presumably, with some of these same "people like me": Preferable to "top-down creativity" is "empowering individual employees to tell the brand story their way."

Olivier Blanchard explained why the ability to sell their content directly to "people like me" is shifting the balance of power from advertisers to the TV networks: "TV networks can actually generate more money from the sale of these individual episodes via broadband than they currently do from selling advertising."

And John Winsor wrote two more posts (here and here) about the need for companies to listen to "people like me": "It’s always amazing to watch as a company has a conversation with its customers but doesn’t respect their time or opinions."

Finally, Elizabeth Albrycht posted an article on wikis that she wrote for New Communications Review, that underscored the power wikis offer to "people like me": "what makes the wiki so interesting...is that it is the most radically open of all tools, enabling anyone to change anyone else's content in mere seconds."