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!

Everybody's up and running fast after the holiday weekend we had here in the U.S. I'll herd a few cats as a mid-week update:

Mary Schmidt and Neville Hobson have both recently debuted beautifully redesigned blogs.

Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson have announced they'll produce a podcast series leading up to the June IABC conference. Shel has also fired up an IABC-sponsored Communication Commons interactive "blog community" site for business communicators.

We welcome Evelyn Rodriguez back from a two-month trip to Asia as part of a citizen journalism project.

Susan Getgood is working on material for a workshop on the changing nature of blogs; she's posted links to the things she's been reading as she prepares, and it's a post worth checking out.

Toby Bloomberg posted another in her Biz Blog Profile Series, "a behind the scene look at how corporations, non profits, higher education institutions and arts organizations are using blogs to support their marketing goals." This one's an interview with Tim Jackson, Brand Manager of Masi Bicycles.