Chris Grams

1699 points

Raleigh, NC

Chris Grams is the Head of Marketing at Tidelift and author of The Ad-Free Brand: Secrets to Building Successful Brands in a Digital World.

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Email: chris(at)tidelift.com

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Authored Content

OpenIDEO: a new experiment in open innovation

This week, those smart folks over at IDEO launched a new project they are calling OpenIDEO. If you aren't familiar with IDEO yet, you should be—they are the poster children…

Is your culture made of gold or fool's gold?

When I hear people talk about how awesome their organizational culture is, I often find myself wondering what sort of “great” culture it is. For me, great cultures fall into…

A person holding on to clouds that look like balloons

Managing clouds and the death of formality in business

I've been toying around with a new hypothesis. Here it is: Formality in business is dying. Now I am not talking about Blue Jeans Friday and Bring Your Pet to Work Day all of…

MIX: Gary Hamel's experiment in reinventing management the open source way

Of all of the people talking or writing about the future of business right now, no one has more street cred than Gary Hamel. I've written about him many times before, and his…

Two different business organization charts

Do you aspire to build a brand community or a community brand?

In my day job at New Kind, I spend quite a bit of my time working on brand-related assignments, particularly for organizations interested in community-based approaches to…

The open source way: designed for managing complexity?

This week I finally got a chance to sit down and digest IBM's latest Global CEO Study, newly published last month and entitled Capitalizing on Complexity. This marks the…

Authored Comments

cgrams

12 Dec 2010

Does WikiLeaks damage the brand image of wikis?

Thanks Gary, for pointing this out. I've made a change to the first paragraph that should correct the error.

cgrams

8 Dec 2010

Does WikiLeaks damage the brand image of wikis?

Hi Grizzly!

My thought is that there are two potential impacts here:

1) brands with the term "wiki" embedded in their name might see some issues from people assuming they are connected to WikiLeaks (even if the only connection is the word "wiki"). Here's a good list on Wikipedia of Wiki-based brands that may see some impact:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

2) organizations considering collaboration or sharing initiatives may hesitate to move forward based on fear of stolen secrets caused by what they've seen play out with WikiLeaks. Elliott Massie does a nice job articulating this risk in the quote I've pulled out above.

Wikis within organizations that aren't branded publicly as wiki-based probably will see less trouble, unless risk-averse executives notice that this technology makes sharing/transparency easier and eradicate them because of reason #2.