The same day, the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office determined that “jailbreaking” the iPhone – a process that allows users to access apps not available in Apple’s App Store – does not violate copyright laws. Apple contends that jailbreaking can harm the phone’s user experience, and leave it vulnerable to viruses; the company voids warranties of jailbroken phones. The Copyright Office, however, said in its ruling that jailbreaking is “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”

Regardless of your opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the ethics of leaking sensitive information to the public, or the use of products in ways that weren’t intended, these examples serve to illustrate one principle of the changing information economy: You are not in control.

Media critic Jay Rosen encapsulates this perfectly in reacting to an editor’s note that accompanied the New York Times’ coverage of the Wikileaks documents:

From an editor’s note: “At the request of the White House, The Times also urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.”

There’s the new balance of power, right there. In the revised picture we find the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent their release; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them; and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms of legitimacy between these two actors.

Indeed. And that new balance of power applies just as much to corporate marketers as it does governments and militaries. Power has shifted to end users; they’ll take your messages and your products and do what they want with them, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

So while you can’t control, you can listen and learn. MLC counsels our members to optimize their social experiences to listening and sustained engagement, rather than a top-down, “we say, you do” atmosphere. But engendering this connection with your customers is tough – here’s what we suggest:

1) Focus on service. Organize your efforts in social media not to blast messages at your customers, but rather to be in service to them as they interact with each other and with you. Communication cannot be primarily about the brand – customers will almost certainly detect that and react negatively.

2) Embrace the power of the medium. If you’re treating social as yet another channel in an otherwise top-down marcomm mix, rather than an engine for creating and strengthening relationships, you’re not taking advantage of the unique opportunities that social media engagement provides brands. When done right – i.e., with a focus on service – engagement on social platforms can lead to better connections between brands and customers, as well as connections between customers with the brand as the focal point.

Taking advantage of those unique opportunities requires broad cross-functional alignment and silo-busting, and in our 2010 study on social media, MLC argues that active executive leadership is essential to produce results in the space.

3) Prepare for (but don’t expect) the worst. Social media has obvious upsides, but just-as-obvious downsides. If you’re active in the space, you should absolutely have policies in place to protect essential information (intellectual property, for example), establish guardrails that limit downside risk, and have contingency plans in place for when information gets out in a way that’s not intended.

But, by the same token, don’t expect bad behavior from your customers – they can smell a suspicious brand from a mile away.

MLC members, for examples of how your peers have created dynamic and collaborative social experiences for their users, please visit our Social Media Showcase.

5. Customer Jobs Touchpoint Assesment (Texas Instruments)

Learn how marketers at Texas Instruments use customer workflow to identify the most relevant touchpoints for experience investments, honing in on opportunities currently underserved by major competitors.

4. Making the Most of Voice of the Customer

Join Tom Robson, Voice of the Customer Program Manager at Qwest Communications, as he walks through his award-winning innovations in the use of customer testimonials. In this replay, Tom discusses how Qwest created an online database of video and audio testimonial clips and integrated targeted testimonials into both the sales cycle and broader marcomm mix, leading to an average sales cycle reduction of 4 days and a saving of approximately 20 FTEs per year.

3. Targeting Pricing to Meet Corporate and Customer Needs: Case Studies

This issue brief examines companies’ methodologies for developing effective pricing models, as well as customer perceptions of these diverse pricing tactics. Specifically, companies focusing on customer pricing preferences while simultaneously striving to increase profitability may create value-added services, simplify their billing approaches, or tailor pricing strategies to specific segment preferences. Profiled companies include Georgia Power, UPS and Virgin Mobile USA.

2. Social Media Strategy Builder

The Social Media Strategy Builder is a toolkit that will help you and your social media working group construct a world-class experimentation strategy. The primary output is a presentation that provides a coherent rationale for your strategy, which you can use to inform, evangelize, and make the case for resources.

1. Vista’s Corporate-Strategy Marketing Dashboard

Learn how Vista analyzes desired marketing contribution to firm strategy, drives selection of activities and provides transparency into marketing performance.

Also, here’s our most popular studies featuring travel and leisure industry members:

• How Southwest Airlines Uses Social Media
• Frontline Employee Empowerment Protocols (Southwest Airlines)
• Brand Leverage Protocols (Disney)
• Stewarding the Brand’s Voice (Marriott)
• Strategic Marketing Dashboard (British Airways)
• Outcomes-Driven Value Propositions (Aramark)
• The Ties That Bind | Loyalty Program Design Process (Amtrak)
• The Ties That Bind | Loyalty Program Dashboard (Marriott)
• Loyalty Program Toolkit

Iconoculture recently reported on an unsettling trend in consumer travel—as airline innovation fails to keep pace with consumer demands, consumers are either rewarding smaller players like Suite Arrival (who delivers TSA-friendly personal items from popular brands directly to travelers’ hotel room) or inventing their own “DIY” approaches to make travel less frustrating.

The news isn’t all bad—Iconoculture spotted a few noteworthy exceptions as big brands made progress in the long march to improve travel.  Noteworthy innovators winning travelers’ endorsements include:

• Southwest Airlines “Bags Fly Free” Policy: takes one painful and expensive worry out of travel, and translates into clear, benefit-driven marketing messages.
• JetBlue’s Customer Bill of Rights: reimburses customers for the most aggravating travel missteps, including vouchers and refunds when flights are cancelled and delayed.
• Clear: the growing fly-through-security service enjoys over 75% favorability in online mentions.

For more winners—and a few losers—MLC members can check out Iconoculture’s full trend analysis.

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”.

The videos have been a smash hit, with PCWorld calling them “the most brilliant viral ad campaign of its time”.  Total views on Old Spice’s YouTube channel are over 100 million, while Google Trends reports a huge spike in searches for Old Spice:

Click Image to Enlarge

At MLC, we never counsel members to shoot for virality in their online campaigns. What we’ve learned from discussions with countless B2C marketers is that you can check all the “viral” boxes and still have a campaign that flops. There are simply too many variables in what achieves currency on the web for any marketer to accurately predict that a campaign will go viral.

But, the subset of campaigns that do go viral do have a few of these things in common:

1) Cash. Someone may have told you that online campaigns are supposed to be cheap. Cheaper than TV, maybe, but Old Spice is spending some fairly serious money on this initiative. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was a sponsored trend on Twitter and the company is paying to get its branding on its YouTube channel – not to mention paying Mustafa and the video crew for long days of shooting.

2) Ego. By aiming most of the videos squarely at online influencers like Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as blogs like Gizmodo, Old Spice ensured that they’d have ample access to the huge network of followers commanded by those celebrities and outlets. But they didn’t stop at focusing on big names – they shot videos for all kinds of social networking users. They also engaged the ego of communities – canvassing Reddit and the notorious 4-Chan (absolutely not safe for work) for potential questions well before shooting.

3) Anticipation. Old Spice built anticipation into the campaign in a few ways – first, the quick turnaround of the videos meant was a carrot for repeat visitors; second, there was no pattern to the responses, so a reply to Ashton Kutcher might be followed by one to WebLover222; and third, the videos themselves were so wacky that users couldn’t wait to see what would come next.

4) Paradigm Shift. The campaign challenges the way people think about several things, in the process changing the way people think about the Old Spice brand. Everything from the absurd monologues to the production-line nature of the shoot to the idea of responding to random web users leads people to think differently about Old Spice.

Like I said above – you can hit all these marks and still have a flop on your hands; the vagaries of the digital market are still too much for marketers to reliably understand. But its good to know that there are some common threads – and at least a little predictability – in what makes a campaign viral.

Starting with polycentric innovation, in a recent special report on innovation in emerging markets, The Economist described how companies like Cisco and IBM are building innovation centers in emerging markets.  These aren’t just laboratory outposts—these are major innovation centers on par with those in developed markets. These emerging market innovation centers act as a sort of crucible—an intensely pressured, constrained environment that accelerates innovation, and potentially leads to discontinuous solutions that you simply wouldn’t get in other contexts.

This crucible effect came through loud and clear in this fascinating read on how Danone is using crucible markets like Senegal to develop radically different yogurt offerings.  In this case, the kinds of constraints forced by wafer-thin consumer budgets and a very underdeveloped distribution infrastructure forces unconventional thinking, along with fast failure and correction cycles.

A similar kind of crucible effect surfaced recently in conversations with some top CMOs in the MLC membership.  As the group discussed marketing talent development, there was this realization that some geographic markets can serve as “marketing discipline” crucibles. For example, the Chinese market is far in front in using social media to launch new products. One approach to marketing talent development we discussed was to rotate talent into these crucible marketplaces for 6-12 months to develop expertise very rapidly.  Some of these CMOs came away from the conversation with the action item of formalizing a network of global talent development crucibles.  They would prioritize markets that could act as crucibles for the key marketing disciplines that would separate winning marketers from laggards in the next 3-7 years (e.g., mobile marketing, social media).

For more discussion on crucibles in the context of innovation, join us at one of MLC’s upcoming breakfast meetings, hosted by world-class innovators of W.L. Gore (July 22), 3M (September 22) and Guardian Life (November 30).  Register here.

(photo by Flickr user John LeGear)

One of the sharpest subversive ads of the year (a humble opinion) is available at http://www.tubgin.com/, and click on “A short, short story”.

These brands offer just a few examples of a broader trend in tapping directly into the edgier, snarkier sentiments of today’s consumer (Whitney had to tell me what snarky means).

Iconoculture—MLC’s new partner for bringing real-time consumer insights to our members—has picked up on this trend in its most recent research on “Subversive Branding.”  Iconoculture’s findings point marketers in an interesting direction: while subversive branding can breathe new life into our marketing messages, it also runs the risk of alienating consumers.

Iconoculture offers a few simple factors to consider before integrating subversion into your brand strategy:

• Category Norms: Is subversion common in your category? Is it rare? If you’re the only subversive brand in the category, that may offer an incredible opportunity to reach a niche, but it also may be a warning sign—anyone raising their hand to be the first “angry” life insurance provider?
• Target Audience: Will subversive marketing be novel or familiar to your target audience?  Will it connect with their values and attitudes? Will it pull in more consumers than it turns off?
• Consumer Involvement: Are consumers already doing subversive things with your brand? Can you embrace or build on what’s happening?  If so, it may be a sign that consumers are ready to see your brand’s dark side.

For more on subversive branding strategies, and the consumer values that are opening the door for marketers to show their dark side, MLC Members can tune into our upcoming webinar on subversive branding hosted by Iconoculture’s consumer strategist team.

John posted a thought-provoking interesting survey a few weeks back, asking pharma marketers what they thought the most important elements of a social media implementation plan were, particularly in the event of a crisis. 

Here are the results (image from the Pharma Marketing Blog). Since the activities are truncated on the graph, a key is below: 

The activities: 

• Unblock corporate access to social media so employees can monitor and use applications such as Facebook while at work
• Have a sustained vision/goal
• Become a dialogue company – learn how to listen and respond, not just push messages out
• Get everyone – including marketing, regulatory people, corporate communications, C-level execs – on board
• Develop guideposts, internal and external standard operating procedures
• Train people who will be interacting directly with consumers
• Develop a moderation strategy
• Marshall necessary resources – use the best tools available
• Create a social media “Tsar” position to oversee all the company’s SM projects to assure compliance with guideline

It’s interesting that these activities all fall into two broad categories – what I’ll call “tools” and “behaviors”. Unblocking access to social media sites, training, moderation strategy, and marshaling resources – those are “tools”. But sustained  goals, becoming a “dialogue company” and breaking down functional silos – those are “behaviors”. It’s clear that the marketers who answered this survey know how to use those tools; they place much less weight on them than they do the behaviors. But not everyone can set organizational priorities and move different functions to act more cooperatively – it’s clear that respondents to John’s survey have the tools, but are looking for leadership. 

In our 2010 study for B2C marketers, Close the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media, we argue that what’s standing between marketing teams and social media success is often a lack of executive leadership. According to our data, CMO involvement in social efforts is a strong predictor of how well companies do in the space: 

For pharma and other risk-averse industries, the message is clear: if you want to mitigate downside risk while using social media to reshape the brand-to-consumer relationship, active CMO leadership is essential. 

MLC members, learn how you can more effectively lead your organization’s social media efforts at one of our upcoming Annual Executive Retreats, or attend our July 14 webinar, Building a Socially Intelligent Enterprise: Closing the CMO Leadership Gap in Social Media.

That changed recently when I spent time visiting with marketers at Ingersoll-Rand, makers of Hussmann refrigerated cases.  In this day and age, I couldn’t imagine there was a lot of innovation in the design of refrigerated cases.  Their job is pretty simple – keep stuff cold while maximizing shelf space and minimizing energy use – and people have been building them for decades.  I mean really, what’s left to do with commercial refrigerators?!?  Apparently a ton.

As I talk to marketers across industries and categories, most would do cartwheels to have the right insights that result in a handful of commercially-viable innovations.  Yet filling the top of the innovation funnel and then knowing how to filter those ideas is proving far more difficult.

Working with Strategyn and using one of the Council’s favorite frameworks, jobs and outcomes, Hussman identified fistfuls of under-served customer opportunities for their products.  In other words, among the dozens and dozens of potential innovation plays, Hussman found more than enough actionable opportunities where the customer has low satisfaction for a highly important job. 

Members, if you’d like to learn more about Ingersoll-Rand’s approach, consider joining Manlio Valdes, Vice President of Global Product Management for the Industrial Technologies Division at Ingersoll-Rand at our next Innovation Summit on July 22.  The session is hosted by W.L. Gore and includes a tour of their world-class Innovation Center.

Video: Social Media on a Shoestring

Slidedeck: Social Media on a Shoestring

“Sharpie Susan’s” goal was increase brand loyalty by leveraging brand advocates they termed “bold expressionmakers,” who are Sharpie uber-users that gravitate toward new media.  To achieve this objective, Sharpie decided to showcase content from these “bold expressionmakers” that demonstrated creative ways to use Sharpie pens in daily life.

Investment:

• $1,000 for Blog Masthead
• $20 for Blog Theme
• $895 for eLancer
• Free:  monitoring tools to listen for brand mentions

Measurement:

At the time of Susan’s presentation, Sharpie measured Total Visits, RSS Subscribers, Blog Links, Google Friends, and Comments.

Here’s what Sharpie would like to measure moving forward:

The reason?

Social media enable brands to build strong customer relationships that deliver value to multiple functions e.g., new product ideas (NPD), answers to customer questions (Customer Service), or advocacy (Marketing).  Managing these shared relationships requires strong cross-functional collaboration, which only a leader with significant clout and authority can achieve.  As the customer champion, the CMO is uniquely positioned to play this role.

To drive firmwide collaboration on social media, CMOs tend to share the following core behaviors:

• Invest significant time in learning about social media and its business impact (e.g., ask youngest staff members for regular updates on emerging trends; set up extra monitors to show live feeds of social media chatter)
• Widely communicate a belief in (and rationale for) the importance of social media
• Set bold goals to encourage firmwide social media experimentation
• Align multiple functions around social media strategy

Beyond those core behaviors, however, there are many different approaches to getting executive buy-in on social media and silo-busting.  Some CMOs are personally active in social media, while others lead from behind the scenes.

Below are 4 profiles of CMO pioneers of social media.

MLC members, learn more about the CMO’s role in social media at our 2010 meeting series, “Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media.” Register here.  Or, attend the webinar on July 14 with your team, where we’ll share some of the highlights from the research.  Webinar registration here.