I’ve finally started contributing to Brandshift… the new branding blog over at Corante. Sorry for the delay guys… My thanks to Stowe and Hylton for the encouragement. I’m zeroed-in on the intersection between branding, communications and social networking technologies. So, lots more to come.

My First post extends some of the thinking here on FryGate where I try to make the point that:-

This new medium – these new communities and conversations – are set to reshape branding. Brand marketers have been stuck on transmit for decades. The smart ones who looked to have the very act of marketing become a conversation were quickly isolated as guerilla or viral marketers. The Blogsphere changes that. Use it to simply transmit, or purely for stunts, and you miss its enormous potential.

Susan Getgood makes some great points and hits on the transparency issue I touch-on at Brandshift:

On the other hand…. we need to figure out how to tell a blog that has the reporting or opinions of a true live person (whether we think they are a wing nut or not) from a blog that is an invented piece of fiction (funny or sad, effective or lame, it doesn’t matter). Why? Because we rely on blogs to be the voices of real people, people like us with whom we will agree some of the time, and disagree others. People we can respect and trust.

Any successful brand is built on trust. Trust is granted where transparency exists.