Few of those engaged in electronic discovery could have missed Tom Fishburne’s  Case in Point cartoons on the CaseCentral site, with their apparently infinite capacity to identify the weak points and have fun at their expense.

I had not realised that Tom has a parallel strand called Brand Camp which brings to the business of marketing the same sharp eye as he brings to ediscovery. My thanks, therefore, to Legal Aware, the blog of the BPP Legal Awareness Society, for drawing my attention to Tom Fishburne’s comment on the way marketing departments can kill spontaneity and creativity. We have some revisions to your “Tweet” and We’ve now missed the event by a week sum it all up very nicely.

Marketing is a difficult profession, and becoming more so as modern media methods allow far and fast distribution. If that means that your triumphs can reach a wide audience very quickly, the same is true of your failures, and more marketing material misses its target than hits it. In my article Twitter, Bribery and 37 Corporate Counsel in a Big Virtual Bar, I explored the conflict between (on the one hand) the immediacy and democratisation of marketing as its tools lie ever more readily to the hand of every amateur and (on the other) the risks which come with that. It is hard to reconcile that immediacy with the comfort of knowing that the business is being presented in line with the corporate ethos. There is no room for disclaimers in a tweet.

Whilst you can say a great deal in 140 characters, you can say very much more in a precisely-targeted cartoon. Every marketing department should have a few of Tom Fishburne’s works stuck up on the wall as a substitute for the thousands of words of marketing theory which drives so much of marketing practice – not always to its advantage.

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