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Tom Farmer combines more than a decade of corporate media experience with the perspective of an award-winning network television journalist. At Solid State he leads customer and audience research, designing inquiries to test marketing ideas, aid product development or improve the usability of electronic interfaces. He also helps companies distill unique, competitive market positions and brand personalities and develops key message systems to guide consistent communication. Tom has worked recently with Riverside Publishing, the Houghton Mifflin division devoted to standardized educational tests; National Geographic Channel; AllRecipes.com; Cardiac Strategies; and numerous professional service firms and technology providers. Prior to founding Solid State in 2003 Tom directed strategy at ZAAZ, a Seattle website design firm, and worked on initiatives for Converse, Microsoft, Tommy Bahama, Weyerhaeuser, the Seattle Public Library and top consumer financial institutions. As a senior creative director at Caribiner International, the largest global marketing communications firm of the 1990s, he designed interactive data displays for AT&T and corporate presentations for Intel. He also worked as creative director of Futureworks New Media and lead writer at Watts-Silverstein & Associates of Seattle. Tom's marketing and corporate media career was preceded by fifteen years in broadcast news. He was a producer and editorial supervisor for CNN, rising to the position of executive producer of Larry King Live, for which he shared two CableACE awards and a George Foster Peabody Award. Tom was also an anchorman and on-air reporter in New England, where he won Associated Press awards. Tom admits to authoring Yours is a Very Bad Hotel, the notorious globally-circulated 2001 Internet "PowerPoint complaint" that became a fixture of business school and customer training curricula and the basis for a comprehensive university study of spontaneous online message diffusion patterns. More about Yours is a Very Bad Hotel here. Tom is a frequent guest lecturer in the University of Washington's Digital Media Program and at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts. He advises the Television Studies Program at Lyndon State College in Vermont. He holds a degree in government from Dartmouth College. | 