It used to be just about your customers. Now any company without authentic care for staff, community or planet will soon be wondering what happened.

Thanks to the deep web, brands must operate ethically. With every online conversation and interaction now recorded and searchable, what is said about your business can no longer be controlled.

And that’s a good thing.

In the past, when a product or did not live up to expectations, people quietly stopped buying. Now they vent on Twitter or Facebook and their networks take you to one degree of separation from everyone else on the planet.

When a multi million dollar campaign is upended by a single influential blogger; when a viral video of someone dancing like a numpty can be seen by more people in a day than have been born in Australia and when a server can crash under traffic from a single tweet; well it’s time to rethink the way we communicate.

But wait, let’s add, mobile everything, location aware applications, crowdsourcing and social networking. Suddenly we’re adrift in a rising sea of infoporn and algorithms have become just as important as imagination.

And why would you be hearing this from the founder of an old school advertising agency?

The full story is here, suffice to say, he noticed these trends as they emerged and has taken them very seriously.

You’re astute. You know experienced, multi-disciplined communication professionals are rare. But you wouldn’t want to deal with someone until you had some decent background.

So, who is this Ben Hale?

He is a writer first and foremost. He knows that this page is way overwritten for online and less than 10% of you who started this column are still reading (congrats on being in the top ten by the way).

He made the transition from writer to business owner in the early nineties, starting Adpower, a mainstream advertising agency that operated in Cairns until late 2007 and is now based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.

The Cairns operation was regional Australia’s largest with 29 full time staff and clients in every mainland state of Australia. An online division, Adpower Interactive opened in 2003 and a sister mainstream media buying agency, Mediapower was launched in 2004.

Combined, the companies billed just over $7 million in FY 2007.

A industry paradigm shift was on the way and Ben declined to re-pitch for a major client’s business, scaled down Adpower, sold his share in Mediapower, and took a kitesurfing tour of the East coast from Cairns to Melbourne before relocating permanently to the Sunshine Coast.

Here, he re-established Adpower in a new format designed for the interconnected, always on social sharing, 24 hour opinion cycle, crazy world we’re all immersed in.

He is skilled in strategic marketing planning, agency/client contract negotiations, staff performance management, campaign planning, and change management, but to be honest, that’s not what gets him really excited.

He does love running teams and creating great communications for forward thinking, aware companies.

If you think he can make a contribution to your program, browse through the CV look at some of the TV or Radio work, and if you like it, email or call to chat?