There are forces out there and in here that are reshaping the business world. And we believe they are making conventional business marketing and communications about as relevant as Bob Dylan’s tuning fork.

So we’ve developed this site—an interactive book, if you will—in hopes that it will help business marketers, communicators, brand builders and change agents, as well as ourselves, better define these revolutionary paradigm shifts and explore ways to take advantage of them.

Virtually virtual
What makes the book uniquely virtual is that you can interact with it through diagnostic tools and quizzes, that offer suggestions of places in the book to check out. You can find chapters that relate specifically to your business communication problems with the Virtual Tour Guide. But most of all, it’s virtual because you can contribute your thoughts any time you see this symbol:

Here’s the chapter-by-chapter lowdown on Mobium 1.0, the virtual book on integrated business branding.

Section 1: Change
Each chapter in this section identifies and explores specific paradigm shifts that are reshaping business communications.
Whole lot of shiftin’ goin’ on
Why what used to work doesn’t anymore
Disintegrating messages and brands
Products are bought, not sold
The Web changes everything, the Web changes nothing
Who owns the customer?
Prodvices and servducts
Value shift

Section 2: Five Ways
Five strategies, complete with methodologies and processes, for turning these paradigm shifts into competitive advantage for your business.
Increase your brandwidth
Hug your customers
Architect your information
Integrate your communications
Interactivate your messages

Section 3: The Work
Real-world examples that illustrate the five strategies at work.
Integrated Business Branding
Integrated Communications
Information Architecture
Interactive Marketing
Relationship Marketing

Mobium lunatics
Beyond the virtual book you can be the first on your block to know what a mobium is, what it does and what it can do for you. If you’re really brave there’s also a place in the site to meet the lunatics that put all of this together.

We all hope this site will become an open forum to exchange ideas and knowledge. To rant, rave, challenge one another and have a little good-hearted fun doing it.

So come on in. Join the conversation. Wander around a little. Get lost. Don’t ask for directions. Let your loved ones get mad at you for not stopping and asking for help at the Shell station. Loosen up, for goodness sake. Explore. Be brave.

But most of all, let us know what you think
We’d like to know what you’ve tried. What’s worked and what hasn’t. We’d like to get your opinion about what you experience here. What questions are on your mind and what you’d like to get off your chest. What makes you feel good about what you do, and what makes you wonder why you ever got into business communications in the first place.

In fact, every time you see one of these voice balloons, just click on it to give us a quick piece of your mind. They’re all over the place and they’ll send your opinion directly to us. We’ll get back to you and add your ideas to the dialogue.

Join the conversation
Once we’ve collected enough of your views to get an idea of the topics you’d like to explore, we’ll add some interactive surveys and quick polls and begin to aggregate the info to create Mobium 2.0.

Next, in Mobium 3.0, we’ll report what we find back to the community. This version will be a synthesis of your input, our thoughts and maybe even an opinionated guru or two. Together we hope to create the business marketing community’s first truly interactive portal on communications change and how to take advantage of it.

So, welcome to the revolution. Stay tuned. You’re part of the experiment now, Sparky. And we’d like to hear from you. In the meantime, may the forces blow you in the right direction.

The technical details
After a rigorous assessment of available tools and techniques, we chose to use dynamically generated .asp pages running off a database to enable easier updating and more flexible site management. Programming was largely accomplished with a pro version of Macromedia Dreamweaver running on Macintosh and Windows machines. Custom DHTML and Java scripts were hand-coded to provide greater interactivity, browser-specific versioning and best possible user experience. The site is hosted on high-powered Sun and NT servers somewhere near Omaha with a redundant backup system standing ready in a converted salt mine in Salunga, Pennsylvania.

As if anyone except our own beloved tech weenies gives a flying crappola about all this anyway. Good grief.