Hi everyone. I am blogging live from the lobby of the Hilton San Francisco today, and the good news is that the Wi-Fi here is as spectacular as the home-made curry I just had across the street. (Hey, you know that information is going to come in handy one of these days. Just you wait!)

Of all of the Corante Marketing Hub posts of the last couple of days, this the one I thought would be most interesting to bring to your collective attention on this fine workday:

John Winsor points us to this article published this week in the NY Times, which takes a cursory look at customer engagement, co-creation, and what Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at the MIT, calls "lead-user innovation.". Here are some of the most telling bits of commentary from some of the company leaders interviewed for the piece:

"It's getting cheaper and cheaper for users to innovate on their own," Professor von Hippel said. "This is not traditional market research — asking customers what they want. This is identifying what your most advanced users are already doing and understanding what their innovations mean for the future of your business." - Eric Von Hippel, MIT.

"Customers want to express themselves, to be involved with the brand. For so long, people would hand me a drawing of their personal design for a shoe or ask if I had considered an idea they liked. This program is a natural outgrowth of that desire for connection." - John Fuevlog, John Fuevlog Shoes - on open source footwear.

"So what is Jones? Are we a soda company? Are we an Internet company? Are we a social networking company? We're all of that. Our goal is to keep creating more ways for customers to exercise ownership of the brand. (...) We started this company with the philosophy that the world does not need another soda. That forced us to look at things differently: How could we create a new kind of connection with customers, let them play with the brand, let them take ownership of it? Everything at this company is about sharing ownership of the brand with our customers. This is not my brand. This is not our soda. It belongs to our customers." - Peter van Stolk, founder and CEO of Jones Soda.

"WE'VE got four rules we follow: We let the community create the content. We let the community build itself — no advertising. We let the community help with the business; we add features based on user feedback. And we reward members of the community for participating." - Jacob DeHart, co-founder of Threadless.com.

Also worth a read today:

Chris Carfi's "WWW - The World Wide WE."

Johnnie Moore's "Diagrams."

Neville Hobson's "Branding Your Memory", "Why No one trusts politicians and CEOs" and "The legacy of Bill Gates."

The BrandBuilder's "Enter The Code Breakers."

Susan Getgood's "No More 2.0."

Special Mention: Definitely do read Tom Asacker's "Truth Three - From Capture to Attract." It's a gem of a post. (The kind you will want to bookmark so you can read it again in a few weeks... or better yet, email to some of your colleagues.)

Whew! That ought to do it for today. Have a great Tuesday, everyone. :)