Max Gladwell

Our three-month birthday calls for a bit of reflection and self-analysis.

It was on April 1st, 2008, that we decided to give life to Max Gladwell. The blog launched two days later with the Primo post:

Used properly and effectively, social media and green living are ways that we can improve our quality of life. We can stay better connected with our friends and family; we can reduce our environmental impact and live healthier lives; we can stay better informed about any issue we care about; we can support organizations or brands that we like and make our opinions heard about those we don’t; we can tailor the media to suit our needs and make discoveries about our planet and ourselves in the process; we can learn from the wisdom of the crowd and leverage the power of the long tail in this ever-flattening world.

The mission of Max Gladwell will become more clear as we explore these issues through this social media channel of choice.

The mission has, indeed, become more clear. The true “nexus of social media and green living” is embodied in our company profiles and entrepreneur interviews. This is our core space, and we love it. But they’d be pointless without the broader context of the issues, technologies, tips, and trends that define social media and green living. That’s the balance we seek to achieve.

In terms of our approach, Max Gladwell is not a breaking news blog like our friends at TechCrunch, Mashable, TreeHugger and EcoGeek. Our approach is analysis, insight, and filtration. The goal is to provide the most reasonable points of view by drawing from top sources and trying to make as much sense as possible. Rather than break news, we collect it and then boil it down. Because news doesn’t happen in a vacuum. That’s why we’re such big fans of The Economist. The most important aspect of a story is its context and relevance. What does it mean for me and you? We don’t mean that every post will have the same depth, but those that do form the backbone of Max Gladwell.

Though we don’t write about everything in the green or social media universe, we do our best to link the right headlines. This is one way we function as a filter. Toward the top of the left column, you’ll find “MG’s Shared Items.” These are hand-picked headlines, served from our Google Reader, that we’ve chosen to highlight. At last count, we had 45 different feeds generating hundreds of stories each day. The few that end up here are pretty relevant.

Below this is the top Digg stories for the environment. The social news site filters by user-generated voting, so you know that these are popular stories with good conversational content in the form of comment threads. In addition, there are green feeds from The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Net, net, net: Max Gladwell can be a pretty thorough, one-stop resource.

At the top of the right column, we prominently feature the submission box for our email newsletter, which provides news not available on the blog. The RSS Feed is above that, and we hope you’ll subscribe to both.

Below it is our important links. The most important ones can be found in the “The MG Network”. These provide direct access to the numerous Max Gladwell networks, such as Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Twitter, FriendFeed, Ning, and Technorati to name a few. We encourage you to join us, as the MG conversation takes place in many venues.

As entrepreneurs and marketing professionals, we also offer social media, sustainability, and management consulting for startups, established companies, and nonprofits alike. Please forgive the shameless plug.

In three months, Max Gladwell has achieved an Alexa ranking of 172K. And our Compete ranking is 235K (see graph below). These aren’t entirely accurate but offer a general snapshot. We’ve done no paid advertising, PR, or SEO. Our success is purely a function of content and social media optimization (SMO). And by “our” we mean Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed.

Update: The second we posted this, our Alexa ranking jumped to 165K.

Related Posts

• 10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
• SEO White Paper: The Do-It-Yourself Options
• Green Blogs, New Media, and Social Change
• Marketing Firm Publishes Worthless Report on Green Social Networks
• Ten Ways to Change the World Through Social Media