There have been several times when we at Blue Mango were about to launch a blog. Initiatives were started in every corner of the company. Data Scientists tried it. The development department tried it. I wouldn’t be surprised if the girls from HR even gave it a shot. None of those initiatives ever took off. This is because blogs have one criterium: you have to fill ‘m with posts. And writing takes time. Time we usually never have.

Just a few weeks ago I was watching a session on Pluralsight. I’m not sure what the subject of the talk was, but at one point the presenter spoke these words:

When you’re writing an email longer than one paragraph, you should consider blogging about it.

That was the moment it hit me. We write emails all the time, explain things, share new ideas and talk about how we’ve solved certain issues. All this knowledge disappears in our inboxes. The thing is, this way of sharing knowledge and ideas takes time too. So why not share the things you write in your emails with the rest of the world?

People tend to think blogs are long posts that take hours to write, and even more hours to get everyone’s approval. I believe this is one of the main reasons why all of the attempts of my colleagues failed. No one was writing for those blogs, because we set the bar too high for ourselves. When we are writing for the outside world, everything needs to be nothing short of perfect.

Not for The Marketing Technologist (TMT). We want to write to the outside world as if you are our colleagues. If we think a few lines on a subject is interesting enough for a colleague, it might also be for you. That’s the essence of TMT. I’m not suggesting writing a blog takes as little time as an email — I mean, you want to make sure everything is at least comprehensive and without embarrassing spelling mistakes — but by spending less time polishing every word, the time investment will easily pay off.

When I asked people if they’d like to write on TMT, some people told me they didn’t have a clue what to write about. Then I asked them these simple questions:

What problem did you solve last week? What new cool stuff did you find out about? What have you been wondering about lately?

All the sudden those people came up with tons of ideas. Ideas for blogs. Those are exactly the blogs I’d like to see on TMT in the future. I truly believe that if you can’t answer any of those questions, you should question yourself. Everyone should challenge themselves every day, and share what these challenges brought them.

We are tech geeks and we want to write for other tech geeks. Every post falls in either one or more of these categories: code, analytics, marketing and data science. We might have backend developers writing about hardcore coding techniques, but we might also see a guy or girl from analytics share a cool new feature in Google Analytics. One of our data scientists might eventually show you some fancy tricks in R. The length of posts doesn’t matter — it may vary between only one paragraph and multi-part tutorials.

About Blue Mango

Blue Mango is an innovative Dutch online media agency, active for an exclusive group of major advertisers. Blue Mango is part of Greenhouse Group. Based on knowledge, skills, and measurability, Blue Mango supports leading customers in their online strategy, creation and media procurement. We want to surpass ourselves every day. It’s in our nature and it’s what gets us up in the morning. We make choices on scientific evidence, not by gut feeling. Data is everything.

The opinions on this blog belong to the individual writers. They don’t belong to Blue Mango, Greenhouse Group or the any of any other companies mentioned in this blog, unless otherwise specified.

Conclusion

TMT is a blog from the tech geeks of Blue Mango. We want to share thoughts, stories and ideas on code, analytics, marketing and data science. We expect to publish at least one blog a week, but we’re hoping for more. We’d like to hear from you, so please let us know what you think.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading our posts here at TMT, geek!