No brand manual has prepared brands for what is taking place online, where global brands can be assassinated by one blogger and new products are launched without any marketing budget or campaign, just through world of mouth. Global brand guru Martin Lindstrom should be required reading and viewing (through his weekly podcasts) for every CEO and MD. What he talks about is revolutionary for our brands, even more so now as Web 2.0 has made those ideas mainstream - yet many of the so-called 'leaders' of our real-time corporate worlds do not understand how their own email works, let alone what the blogosphere is doing to the brands that pay their salaries and the hundreds of thousands of workers they purport to represent. Lindstrom, the author of Brand Sense, counts Disney, McDonalds and Mattel as clients, so he definitely has a strong platform and brand history to launch his revolution from. The key learning from his presentation at the African Experiential Summit hosted by Exp. Marketing last week is that the consumer is now the broadcaster and you need to impress them in a "human" way with your brand's attributes if you want a recommendation. Because the consumer does not trust your communication much anymore - the consumer takes advice from peers, friends and family in this new cyber world where much of what we learnt in communications or marketing school is irrelevant, unless you entered the industry in the last two or three years. How are you going to protect your brand or your customer's brand online when you don't even blog? It's the wild wild west out there and your computer is the new frontier. Go explore! Happy Googling! Louise Marsland, editor: editor@bizcommunity.co