With the announcement yesterday by Ketchum of its Personalized Media Service, Internet Prophet and Micro-Marketing Pioneer Christopher Locke officially narrowed the number of years he is "ahead of his time" by one year, shrinking the gap from five years down to four.
Published in 2001, and noted among Amazon's "Best of 2001" books, Locke's Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices foretold of strategies that would tap into "micromarkets," where people (the artists formerly known as consumers) gather around areas of interest (the antidote to segmentation devices formerly known as demographics, psychographics, buying habits, etc.). Among these online conversation conduits, Locke discussed blogs, blogging, bloggers, and other traditional BigPR Agency Fresh Meat of the future.
"The Internet has always demanded that business read between the lines. Weblogs raise the bar. Now the challenge is to read between the sites."
Or
"Within a few years, many thousands of quality news, entertainment, and information sources will spring up on the Internet to serve highly-specific communities of interest."
--christopher locke, 2001
Having predicted that weblogs and interest-related, bottom-up media would become a threat to the mainstream broadcast model, Locke lent further proof to the well-known adage among Internetziens that Chris Locke is five years ahead of his time.
Unfortunately for Locke, showing up to the party with noise makers and sparklers five years before the pizza gets there can leave a guy kind of hungry.
"Chris has no idea that he's steering all of us in his intended direction--I mean the whole net simultaneously--but he is," Co-Clutrain Author Doc Searls might have said.
"He thinks he's just writing about interesting topics, which right now focus mainly on religion, race relations, the curse of The New Age, Jung v Freud v Alice Miller, and of course some gratuitous sex and violence," David Weinbergermight have said. "But what he's really doing is changing the course of business and humanity--and where we'll be five years, I mean four years, from now. Which is pretty amazing considering he hasn't changed his jeans in six days."
What does Locke say about narrowing the "ahead of his time" gap to four years?
"I felt something happening with the time-space continuum when I let the cat out this morning. Now it all makes sense."
For more information on enlisting the services of Mr. Locke to set your personal media strategy on fire, contact Chris Locke at clocke@panix.com.
