Changing of the Guard

Once again, our team has spent the week working ala carte. That’s okay – it’s all a part of the URBAN CAMPING lifestyle. This time we were spread out across the Eastern seaboard – FK in grand NYC, myself in our nation’s capital and historic Colonial Williamsburg; and CK holding down the fort in ATL. You definitely become adept at working collaboratively using multiple communication channels at your disposal – cell phone, IM, e-mail and the occasional Pony Express (J/K)…UPS (www.ups.com) and FedEx (www.fedex.com) , you know we really love you!

So, it’s been a quiet heads down week focusing on various promotional campaign planning for third and fourth quarter, pitches, etc. blah, blah, blah and then we woke up this morning and discovered that Al Zarqawi was no longer. No longer to leverage the medium and post his blogs among other things. I heard earlier this year that he was a big proponent of the Internet and other new media to communicate and recruit for his organization (see archive clip from NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5229467) . Al Zarqawi was definitely an URBAN CAMPER of the not so-nice species (ala seriouspolis terroristasoris), but he sure was an enterprising soul – using all kinds of distribution channels to get his brand and product into market – with highly effective and efficient means – wonder what kind of ROI he was making?! His example shows that anyone can put together lean and effective campaigns in the online media and achieve great results. He had THOUSANDS people using PayPal to fund his operation for goodness sake! The NPR piece describes how Al Zarqawi’s “Gen Xer” approach to using blogs and other innovative technologies contrasts to the old guard approach of “Baby Boomer” Osama Bin Laden to recruit, train, raise finances and any other objective they want to carry out.

Now, the world waits to see who will take Zarqawi’s place…I’m placing my bets on an upstart Gen Yer…with a wicked MySpace profile sporting links to nasty bio-chemical weapons du jour, Madonna’s latest album and a promotional microsite offering a $10 giftcard to Amazon with each al Qaeda annual membership.