In 1996, Erika Jolly Brookes and a group of MindSpring colleagues lined up for Atlanta’s Peachtree Road Race wearing cotton company T-shirts. Performance fabric had not yet colonized the recreational runner’s drawer. Their internet company was still an upstart, selling dial-up access along the East Coast. As the group covered 6.2 miles toward Piedmont Park, people recognized the shirts and asked support questions. The employees answered while running. At the finish, Brookes later wrote, they drank more beer than water.
It is difficult to invent a tidier opening scene for her two long careers. One unfolded in technology marketing, where she has spent 30 years translating unfamiliar products for ordinary people. The other unfolded on the road, where no amount of messaging will move the finish line closer. Both reward pace, resilience and company. Both began, more or less, with MindSpring.
Brookes calls her high-school track-and-field record mediocre. The Peachtree showed her something more useful than early distinction: she liked training, she liked finishing and she liked belonging to the crowd that did the same. Running became a constant. She entered weekend races, stretched toward longer distances and packed running shoes for work trips. Companies, titles and technologies changed. The shoes kept making the journey.
A career measured in changing clocks
Her professional timeline reads like a compact history of the commercial internet. At MindSpring, Brookes worked in product marketing and played a role in the company’s initial public offering and its merger with EarthLink. She went on to hold executive marketing positions at EarthLink, part of a combined business that reached a reported $1.5 billion. A senior role at Rackspace followed, then Vitrue, the Atlanta social-media management company.
At Vitrue, the new medium was social. In 2011, Brookes argued that brands had to listen, learn and respond because social networks created a two-way relationship with customers. The idea sounds obvious now because yesterday’s heresies make excellent onboarding slides. At the time, brands were still learning that a Facebook page was not a small electronic billboard. When Facebook introduced Timeline pages for brands in 2012, Brookes described the format as a more expressive way for them to tell a story.
Oracle acquired Vitrue that year. Brookes moved into product strategy and marketing for Oracle Social Cloud, carrying work born in a fast-growing specialist company into a global software organization. In 2015 she became chief marketing officer of Springbot, an ecommerce marketing platform for smaller retailers. In 2021 she took the same title at Higher Logic, where online community was the product and also the thesis.
At EnergyCAP, which she joined as CMO in 2025, the raw material is less glamorous and more elemental: bills, meters, rates, buildings, power and water. Organizations can have hundreds or thousands of sites, each producing records that arrive after the energy has already been consumed. Brookes’s job is to make the cost and consequence legible. Her favorite bit of foreshadowing is suitably gnomic: “A meter is not just a meter, and a rate is not just a rate.”
Three minutes, with a human asterisk
Brookes identifies speed as the hardest problem in marketing today. Buyers change, channels change and the tools for reaching them change. Experienced marketers face a peculiar hazard: their expertise was built inside processes that new technology is busy rearranging. Speed can punish the settled. It can also reward the curious.
Soon after arriving at EnergyCAP, she needed to learn the market quickly. She downloaded transcripts from roughly 10 to 15 recorded customer and sales calls, selected across roles and industries, and loaded them into the company’s internal AI environment. She asked it to synthesize pain points, desired solutions and the ways those buyers were measured. In about three minutes, she said, it produced a buyer-persona framework that once might have taken three months.
Brookes’s customer-research time comparison
Then came the important qualification: she still intended to conduct customer interviews. The output accelerated orientation; it did not absolve her from listening. This is where Brookes’s public ideas about marketing become more interesting than a familiar hymn to velocity. She wants the fast answer, but she also wants the live voice, the niche community and the awkward detail that a neat research summary might sand away.
“You have to be vulnerable, you have to trust and you have to seek to understand.”Erika Jolly Brookes on building teams
Her philosophy gives marketing a wider remit than awareness. The work begins before a buyer can name the solution, continues through purchase and reaches into the moment when a customer finally experiences value. Happy customers become advocates. Marketing, sales, product and customer success therefore share the outcome, whether or not the organization chart has placed them in separate rectangles.
Community is the mechanism that ties those rectangles together. At Higher Logic, she rejected the idea that marketing or customer success could own community alone. At EnergyCAP, she described a customer group called EnergyCAP Heroes, where customers could learn from one another while product, success and marketing teams heard questions closer to their source. Surveys capture a moment. A living community keeps talking.
The question that changed the route
Running had given Brookes a community long before “community-led growth” acquired its hyphen. In 2013, her friend Hilary Silverboard, a fellow marketer and Atlanta Track Club board member, asked a question with better targeting than most campaigns: “What is your give-back strategy?” Brookes sheepishly admitted she did not have one, adding that she should have known she needed one.
She volunteered on two committees and was asked to join the board. Her board service ran from 2016 through 2024 and included a term as chair. The organization’s work during those years ranged well beyond its famous July 4 race. Brookes highlighted youth programs, access for push-assist athletes, prize-money parity for elite wheelchair racers, the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials and the Wingfoot XC Classic.
She also supplied numbers, carefully placing credit with 32 full-time staff members and thousands of volunteers. Atlanta Track Club membership grew from 27,000 in 2015 to 37,000 in 2024. Kilometer Kids engaged more than 6,000 young people across 90 chapters. Atlanta Public Schools’ cross-country championships grew from 200 finishers in 2023 to 530 a year later. These are institutional accomplishments, not personal trophies, and Brookes wrote about them like a trustee: as proof of what coordinated people can make available to others.
Today she serves on the Atlanta Track Club Foundation Board and on the advisory board of Southern Pipe & Supply. In 2025, twelve days before the London Marathon, a podcast host praised her endurance. Brookes replied that people might instead question her life choices. The joke contained the runner’s usual bargain: considerable effort voluntarily undertaken, followed by a medal that cannot explain why.
Fast systems, patient people
Brookes’s approach to teams is slower than her approach to software. At an EnergyCAP offsite, her group spent hours discussing personality frameworks and the points of friction between different styles. A conceptual thinker and a detail-minded colleague can be powerful together once each understands what the other is doing. Difference stops looking like obstruction and begins to look like coverage.
The purpose was not to manufacture harmony. It was to increase trust and decrease mistrust by making working preferences discussable. Brookes named vulnerability, trust and a desire to understand as the foundation. There is nothing especially futuristic about those ingredients. That may be why they survive every product cycle.
Her career has passed through dial-up, enterprise social software, ecommerce automation, online communities and generative AI. Each technology compressed some distance between a company and a customer. Each also created fresh opportunities to confuse contact with comprehension. Brookes keeps returning to the corrective: hear people sooner, show value sooner and let customers speak to one another.
Running supplies the counterweight. Its clock is indifferent to positioning. The miles do not become shorter because the presentation is persuasive. Training accumulates quietly, then exposes itself all at once. Marketing now moves at three-minute speed; trust and endurance continue to keep their own time.
Brookes ended her reflection on Atlanta Track Club with a long-distance runner’s mantra: “We did not come this far to only come this far.” It works for a technology career, too. After 30 years, the useful posture is neither nostalgia nor breathless novelty. It is forward motion with enough memory to know why the work matters, and enough company to make the distance worth covering.