Proselytize

Camilo Ramirez

We know about blogs and their characteristics. We know about techniques and properties, AJAX, Flickr, feeds and Technorati. It is time to acknowledge our proselytizing.

In any community, we push the tools that define us, and the more people that share common beliefs with us, the more powerful we are. That's part of our social behavior, where we seek strength in numbers.

We, the group of people that develop their social networks through online means, formerly known as the blogosphere, are intent on proving that our little piece of pie is the best: we become de facto advocates of Movable Type or Wordpress, we praise Atom, we connect professionally through LinkedIn or openBC, and we tell our acquaintances to post their pictures on Flickr.

This is not about marketing: in all of these instances, we are defining our online identity and, in doing so, recruiting others to our line of thinking. True, those lines now have brands, but we know that, regardless of the brand, the strength lies in the number of users: if I can boast 3000 contacts in any place, I am supported by minds that experience the same problems as I do, and that may have some answers. But it goes farther than that.

In the book "Virus of the mind", Charles Brodie argues that we can always identify the most successful memes by special characteristics:

• We try to recruit others
• We frown upon dissenters
• We frame any discussion within our reality model

Does that sound like anybody you know? It is not an accident that successful marketers are known as evangelizers, not only defending their own brand of thought, but most importantly, recruiting others to their way of life, and expecting others to interact with us through that medium, the connected computer:

Nothing gives me more pleasure than being surrounded by geek speak and in front of an online connected laptop. What I'm saying is that things are going to get interesting as more and more people migrate online.

We test and validate of opinions through our online social networking, which at the same time provides us with all the information that we need to push these ideas onto others. We chain ourselves to our laptops, and in doing that, we become the messengers for our networks.