Christopher Locke

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Christopher Locke (born November 12, 1947) is an American business analyst, consultant, journalist, author and speaker. He is known as a coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and other publications on marketing in the Internet era. In a Financial Times Group survey from 2001, he was named as one of the fifty leading business thinkers in the world.[1]

Career

In the late 1970s, Christopher Locke was working as a construction contractor[2] and cabinet maker, but was forced out of business in the housing downturn of the early 1980s.[3]

His interest in artificial intelligence secured him a number of jobs in Tokyo between 1983 and 1985: He was working as a documentation editor for Fujitsu[2] and the Ricoh Software Research Center,[4] and as a technical editor at the Japanese government's Fifth Generation Computer Systems project.[5]

In 1986, Locke was working in the marketing department of Carnegie Group, an artificial intelligence firm in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,[5] where he became vice president of corporate communications,[6] a position he also held at Intelligent Technology, another AI firm in Pittsburgh.

He was director of industrial relations for the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University before joining Cimlinc in a similar capacity in 1991.[4]

In 1993, Locke founded Internet Business Report, an industry newsletter owned by CMP Publications. Serving as the publication's chief editor, he argued for the commercial use of the Internet.[7] His emphasis on respecting the norms of the "Internet community" provoked a disagreement over editorial direction with the publisher and led to his departure.[8]

In 1994 he initiated and oversaw the development and launch of MecklerWeb, an ambitious project that sought to introduce commerce to the Internet[8] and garnered much attention in the business press.[3] Locke's e-commerce concept was abandoned two weeks after the launch by the site owner, who chose to turn MecklerWeb's into a conventional product catalog.[9][10]

Locke subsequently worked as editor and publisher of the Net Editors segment on internetMCI,[11] and as Program Director for Online Community Development at IBM.[11]

After leaving IBM, in 1996 and 1997, Locke served as vice president of business development for Displaytech in Longmont, Colorado.[12] In 1997, he set up as an internet consultant under the name Entropy Web Consulting[3] in Boulder, Colorado,[9][13] practising an alternative to mass marketing he named 'gonzo marketing' after Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo journalism.[9][14][15] Gonzo marketing asserts that companies are ineffective in their use of the Internet as a marketing tool when they insist on lecturing instead of conversing,[16] and that companies need to improve their communications with customers to improve the quality of their products and services.[17]

In 2004 Locke accepted a job as consultant and Chief Blogging Officer for HighBeam Research.[18][19]

Works

Locke's first publications in print were introductory articles on Lisp and natural language processing.[2] He has since written for Wired, Release 1.0, The Industry Standard, Harvard Business Review and many other publications. Since 2005, he has been writing the Mystic Bourgeoisie blog.[20]

In 1996, he launched Entropy Gradient Reversals,[9] a "strange webzine"[21] that specialized in "dissecting transparently clueless corporate Internet strategies"[14] and introduced RageBoy, Locke's intemperate alter ego who has a penchant for ranting against business orthodoxy.[9] As of April 1999, the publication counted nearly 3,000 subscribers.[3]

Locke is a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a tract that admonishes businesses to join the "networked conversations" of the Internet. The Manifesto was first posted to the Web in March 1999[22] and became a business bestseller in an extended book version the next year.[23] In 2009 the book was re-issued as a tenth anniversary edition[24] with a new chapter from each of the original co-authors and commentaries by three new contributors. Locke's new chapter, "Obedient Poodles for God and Country," offers a scathing critique of the fake spirituality the author deems pervasive in contemporary American culture.

Locke is also the author of Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, a book that expands on the Cluetrain Manifesto's themes,[25] and of The Bombast Transcripts: Rants and Screeds of RageBoy, a compilation of Entropy Gradient Reversals pieces.[9]

Locke has been praised by The Economist for the "wisdom of RageBoy."[26] In a Financial Times Group survey, he was named as one of the fifty leading business thinkers in the world.[1]

References

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External links

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