Johnnie Moore is a marketing consultant and facilitator based in London. As well as 20 years of marketing experience he's trained in psychotherapy, NLP and Improv. Find out more at his blog.
Andrew Lark's more than 18 years experience of all facets of marketing, branding, sales and communications spans technology, Internet, telecommunications and consumer sectors. There he has led award-winning programs and teams for brands such as Dell, Sony, SBC, IDSoftware, Nortel, Microsoft and Sun. He is a thought leader and innovator on the convergence of brands, communications and social networking technologies. Find out more at his blog.
Jennifer Rice is a strategist and evangelist for relationship-centric brands. She brings 15 years experience in brand strategy, customer insight and marketing communications, and has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Verizon, Alcatel and Corning. Her current passion is exploring how brands are being impacted by blogs and other social technologies. Her company blog is What's Your Brand Mantra?
John Winsor is the author of Beyond the Brand: Why Listening to the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business and the Founder/CEO of Radar Communications, a consumer-centric consultancy. You can find out more about him at Beyond the Brand.
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Just Released the 2008 Tribalization of Business study - an in-depth look at how 140+ organizations are managing and measuring online communities
Very good article by Jay Rosen, about media coverage of the appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice in the US. He suggests that two sides are preparing to do battle in a way that seems to be about activists battering away at each other without noticing that they're not likely to achieve much. Here's a snippet:
Reaching for her cliché gun, Robin Toner can say "nothing less than a national political campaign had begun," but she has no idea how it's supposed to work, either. Everyone parades around as if this mobilization of opposing armies makes perfect political sense, when in fact "all the time and money spent on campaigns may have little influence on the outcome."
Why does this go on? One reason is that activist groups, by opposing each other, use each other for mutual self-definition. They too don't know how their e-mail blasts and TV ads are supposed to work. Like spammers, they just send the stuff out. What they know is that the other side will be sending e-mail blasts and running TV ads. Spam must meet spam.
I don't want to dwell on US politics in this blog, but I think what Rosen sees here is a kind of folly that marketing folks often get trapped by: obsessing with positioning and defining themselves against their perceived competitors, rather than focussing on expressing their own views or (heaven help us) thinking whether any of these campaigns really touch the customer.
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
