Author of ‘Citizen Marketers’ to lecture at NIU

Best-selling author and marketing guru Jackie Huba will visit NIU to deliver the annual Albert Walker/Arthur W. Page Society Distinguished Ambassador Lecture.

The lecture will be held at 7 p.m. Monday, April 2, in the Altgeld Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Huba will lecture on “Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message.” She and Ben McConnell have co-authored a new book with the same title, examining the early history of social media and why it has taken root so quickly.

A solitary citizen today with a broadband connection and a few inexpensive tools has a substantially better chance of influencing the public perceptions of billion-dollar corporations than ever before. Huba will discuss the various types of citizen marketers, their motivations, how to work with them and how they are influencing purchase decisions for products, brands and companies.

Huba also is the author of “Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force,” which the New York Times called “the new mantra for entrepreneurial success.” The book has been translated into six languages and the term “customer evangelism” has become a talking point and focus for countless worldwide companies since the book’s release in 2002.

As a speaker and business adviser, Huba has worked with Whirlpool, Discovery, Yahoo and American Express as well as thousands of small and medium businesses at association conferences. She also spent more than a decade leading business-to-business marketing efforts in the software division of IBM.

Her work in researching passionate customer loyalty has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, Business Week, U.S. News & World Report, the Financial Times and several thousand blogs.

The Third Annual Al Walker/Page Lecture is sponsored by College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the College of Business and the departments of communication and marketing.

For more information, contact Walter Atkinson in the Department of Communication at (815) 753-7009.

3-26-07