BrandingWire – A New Power Plant Coming On-line!

Along with 11 others, I have an exciting announcement for this morning’s post! We’ve been working on something behind the scenes, and now it’s time to take the wraps off!

Next Monday will be the official launch of BrandingWire, which will provide a monthly jolt of powerful branding creativity to the marketing community. Read on to learn more…

What is BrandingWire? It’s a collaboration of high-profile branding and marketing pundits, who are banding together to tackle branding challenges and topics on a regular basis. We’ll take on one theme per month, and apply our combined creative energy to showcase how great branding gets done. We want to put forth Branding That Works!

How did BrandingWire come about? After the tremendous collaborative effort to create the Age of Conversation eBook, spearheaded by Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton, it was obvious that there was a lot of great energy around working together, as marketers, on common goals. The thought occurred to me – if we could do this for a one-time project, how about something ongoing? And so the concept leading up to BrandingWire was born.

Who is BrandingWire? The team of marketing experts making up the charter membership of BrandingWire includes:

Olivier Blanchard
Becky Carroll
Derrick Daye
Kevin Dugan
Lewis Green
Ann Handley
Gavin Heaton
Martin Jelsema
Valeria Maltoni
Drew McLellan
Patrick Schaber
Steve Woodruff

As time goes on, we may invite other pundits to join our posse. It’s like herding cats just getting the “dazzling dozen” above on the same page! Just joking – there has been a sweet sense of unity of purpose and mutual deference, even in the midst of spirited discussion and (at times) diverging opinions. Exactly what you’d expect from a great group of collaborators, who are no slouches at their craft!

In fact, our first branding challenge was BrandingWire itself – developing the name, purpose statement, tagline, graphics, site design, workflow process…and we accomplished it all electronically (we never did end up having that conference call, did we?). All of which proves the point – a “virtual community” of creative marketers can, in fact, do branding.

Why BrandingWire? It’s simple – there’s a lot of bad branding out there, and it’s got to stop! Seriously, many of us see – and comment about on our individual blogs – examples of poorly-executed branding (we also commend the good stuff!). But now we want to showcase our talents and creativity by tackling challenges as a group – focusing our beams together – and try to promote better branding practices. Of course, we won’t hide the fact that for many of us, we hope that a spillover from BrandingWire will be new or increased business.

Allow me to dream for a few moments here. The old model of work, which our parents’ generation once knew, is dead. It’s no longer the case that you’re going to set down your roots in one company for decades, and that organization is going to “take care of you” for the long haul. No, the new model will increasingly move toward teams – even virtual teams – drawn together for projects demanding specific skill sets. And as we build our community and learn to work together, I can foresee that someone will call Lewis Green, and he feels confident that he can do 60% of the work – but Valeria Maltoni is the perfect resource for the other 40%. Or Chip Heath finishes one of his stellar talks, and an attendee comes up to him with a business challenge. He quickly concludes that this sounds like a combination of CK and Matt Dickman. And so it goes – the Collaborative Community supports each other, interlinks on projects, watches each others’ backs. Can we evolve to that? Why not?

OK, you had me at “Hello.” Where’s BrandingWire? Well, of course – BrandingWire.com. In the early part of each month, we will post our contributions on our individual blogs, with a “stub” and a link on the main site. Except this month, of course. To see the inaugural posting, you have to make a note to yourself to go to the site on our official launch date, Monday, June 11th. Also, for ease of viewing, there is a Pageflakes BrandingWire portal, where you’ll be able to see the participant blogs all in one view.

And, we welcome your feedback and comments. BrandingWire is designed to be an evolving work-in-progress, and your part of the conversation will help us focus our energies better. Heck – we may even upgrade our own (rather rapidly-developed) branding as the months go by!

Hopefully, this is enough to whet your appetite for the creative voltage that will begin to flow next week. I can’t tell you what the inaugural posting will be about, but perhaps just a hint…

(Image credit: Flickr)