Career spent helping small technology based businesses brand and sell their products to the Fortune 500. My latest adventure is as CMO of MotiveQuest LLC.
I am a long-time newsgroup and forum junkie (thousands of posts to rec.windsurfing and several car forums over the years) and first came across the data mining technology at the core of our process working with Bryan Goodman at Ford Research Labs about 5 years ago. Bryan had been asked to monitor the newsgroups for Ford, and showed me the results. My first question was “have you shown this to marketing”?
Bryan said that he had, but they didn’t understand it! Well, he wanted them to know how it worked, they wanted to know what to do. So I called my friend David Rabjohns – then SVP Planning at Leo Burnett in Chicago and showed it to him. Within a month we had a business plan put together that became MotiveQuest LLC. David took it on full time and I joined (much later) as CMO.
MotiveQuest has been rated as one of the top 3 online research companies by Forrester – and they called us the most service and strategy focused – which got it just right.
Anyway I hope you enjoy the blog – feel free to contact me.
TO’B
Tom O’Brien
CMO – MotiveQuest LLC
tobrien A T motivequest D O T com
May 1, 2008 at 9:46 am |
Hi Tom, Enjoyed your book review on Grondswell and am ordering it today. I’ve be reading a lot on social marketing and am looking forward to new insight.
July 10, 2008 at 2:04 am |
Tom! Consider your rss feed added. I’m loving the insight. And thanks for the comment.. I’m new to the blogging world so the encouragement is greatly appreciated.
-Ant
July 13, 2008 at 3:11 pm |
Tom, I hope it’s OK if I use your Mini case study for my Brand Imaging class. Will read your company bio and anything else you’d like me to say. They are definitely your customers. As a longterm marketer, I found your research fascinating and will enjoy investigating further once I get my prep done for my classes this week. Thank you! Pat
November 19, 2008 at 11:03 pm |
this is a neat story. Love it. congrats
November 20, 2008 at 5:11 pm |
I second my buddy Al’s comment… damn, he beat me to it again!
just saw him this morning at our Social Media Breakfast — but I found this page of yours all on my own 
am about to tweet a link to a recent blog post of yours, too
give us a heads-up whenever you’re coming to the Twin Cities!
cheers,
Graeme
December 2, 2008 at 9:19 am |
This is an About Me page that works. I am now thoroughly intrigued and want to find out more about what you do and how you do it. I’ll be in touch.
September 22, 2009 at 10:47 pm |
[...] expect to succeed. The good news is that companies are run by people who can speak in a sincere human voice that resonates with other humans. A company’s employees can offer insights in ways traditional [...]
October 13, 2009 at 8:49 am |
Love the symbiosis between data and human behavior. Aggregate numbers are the beauty behind the art of marketing. It’s a rare person who can see this pattern and a rarer one still who can interpret, distill and utilize the data.
Kudos and looking forward to learning more.
Best,
M.