Being a really old dog myself, I love stories about aging rovers who master new tricks. Although he's considerably younger than me (almost everyone is), David Terrar, our Blogger of the Week, has been around the playground a few times. But, here, let David tell the story:
"We started D2C back in 2004 because we were bored with implementing traditional, on premise ERP and finance systems, which we'd been doing for 30 years. Our company only works with Software as a Service based solutions, although maybe we should be calling it cloud computing these days. We didn't think that SaaS solutions would completely displace on premise software, but we knew that it would become a significant share of the market. We could see that the implementation and consulting around online solutions needs to be significantly more lightweight and agile compared to the approach of most consulting outfits, and so we decided to specialize. We started with content and collaboration solutions, but then we were asked to launch an online accounting product in the UK, called Twinfield, and that's what led me in to starting a blog.
"Back in 2005 we were test marketing the new product with a campaign through AccountingWEB, an online magazine for accountants in the UK, and one of the respondents was Dennis Howlett. After 5 and a half hours of demo (phew!) he went off and wrote a piece about us on his blog, which gave us a glowing report (thank heavens!). I got interested in the rising power of the blogs, became great friends with Dennis, and he subsequently talked me in to starting my own blog. I called it Business Two Zero to mix up web 2.0 applied to business with an homage to Bravo Two Zero, the best known book about the SAS (Special Air Service) - as well as writing about these technologies applied to business, I cover guerrilla marketing, SAS and special forces tactics applied to business.
"Writing the blog got me interested in using and recommending wikis and other web 2.0 tools in business around the more traditional, though still SaaS based, solutions we were selling. It started more like a hobby, but steadily became a larger and larger part of the collaboration solutions we recommended. Then I got involved in using the WordFrame enterprise 2.0 platform, first as a user here and with the Enterprise Irregulars. Eventually D2C became a solutions partner for them as a number of our projects were a perfect fit for the platform, and then during this year I joined the WordFrame team and became a shareholder in the company as it become a larger and larger part of what we do.
"I think it's interesting that the new world of social media and permission based marketing isn't just for generation-X or generation-Y. Obviously the new generation are growing up using IM and Facebook, and only use email when they need to communicate with older people, but I don't believe it is purely generational. My own history in IT goes back to the time of mainframes, before thin film disc technology ($35,100 for 571Mb of Disk storage in 1979!) and before the release of the IBM PC. I've always been geeky enough to want to use the latest gadgets and software tools, but I have plenty of friends with greying hair who are blogging or in my twitter community. You either get it or you don't.
"I still meet people in their 20s who may be in tune with Facebook, but still haven't realized that the worlds of media and marketing have changed completely - I send them off to read Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae, and to get cluetrained up. These days, if you haven't got social media as a dimension of your brand strategy, you are going to be in serious difficulty, because all of your competitors will."