Well it seems that Howard Schulz, founder of Starbucks, made public an email he sent out to CEO Jim Donald and other staff. He warns of making Starbucks no longer special, but just another commodity, just another cup of coffee and an increasingly bad one at that.

So radical a move this was that John Moore, blogger of Brand Autopsy and former Starbucks marketer, doubted the authenticity of the email. He later acknowledged that it was real and apologized to the webmaster that he accused of falling down on the job of maintaining credible content at the site.

Email can be found here:
http://starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2007/02/starbucks_chair_2.html

Wal-Mart closes their Social Networking website.

It looks like Wal-Mart clearly did not read the August 23rd post at "What's Your Brand Mantra."

I honestly thought that they canned this earlier but no.

What were they thinking? Teens can be naive and stupid but not all the time. They saw a marketing harvester and acted accordingly.

The article can be found here.