Chris Aarons Leaving AMD, Starting Word of Mouth Marketing Firm

I imagine that just about all our readers might be a bit puzzled at the headline, or why it is relevant. This post is more of a behind-the-scenes look at something we deal with on a daily basis here at Gear Live. You see, we get multiple inquiries, phone calls, and emails per day from marketing and PR firms who want our attention. The thing is, most don’t know how to approach us in a way that makes us want to give them our attention. Chris Aarons of AMD is one of the people who “gets it.”

A few weeks ago, we talked about how PR and marketing has changed in the new technology culture, and that firms that get stuck focusing on traditional methods of marketing were going to be dead in the water. Then we figured, hey, maybe they won’t believe us. So we got friends like Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Steve Broback, and Teresa Valdez Klein - some of the smartest minds when it comes to this medium - to join in on the conversation.

Know who sparked the idea? Chris Aarons. Chris was also behind the recent video series we have been doing featuring a

tour of AMD. We were originally scheduled to fly down to cover the AMD Vanishing Point chip winner, and Chris asked if there was anything else we wanted to cover while down in Austin, TX. Well, we figured we would get as much as we could, and Chris managed to hook up every request we had - including going behind closed doors into the

AMD Performance Lab. I guarantee that we are the only outlet that has that much coverage from their lab, and there was no holding back, no questions we weren’t allowed to ask, and no answers that sounded like “We haven’t made any announcements, so I really can’t comment on that at this time”, which is par for the course at several other large organizations. Heck, a couple of their main execs even gave out their corporate email addresses right in our videos, inviting viewers to email them.

This is because Chris understands what we and our friends preached, and he was able to get people inside AMD to sit up and take notice, while Intel isn’t making much headway at all in the space.

So, now Chris is leaving AMD, but I think it is for the best. You see, he is leaving to start his own word of mouth marketing company. HE GETS IT!!! My advice to AMD? Become his first official client, because you don’t want to lose this guy (any more than you already have, that is.)

For all you manufacturers, corporations, PR firms, and marketers who read Gear Live - you might want to keep abreast of what Chris is going to be doing over at Buzz Corps. Maybe you can hire his firm to show you how to generate a lot more positive press and buzz about a product outside of mass-spamming your press releases to as many inboxes as possible.

We weren’t the only ones impressed with Chris, check out this HardwareGeeks article on Chris’ AMD departure.