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

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.

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.

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 magic of branding and emotional connection, so powerful yet so mysterious that—remember now—it was only fairly recently that GAAP rules were amended to account for brand value in financial statements; official acknowledgment of the reality and potential of such intangibles.

Within the past decade especially, this promise of brand-based competition spilled over into the B2B space in a big way—but the applications and function of branding in B2B have proven fairly different.  As we’ve outlined in our past research, B2B brands primarily serve to “open the door” for sales reps, efficiently communicate capabilities and benefits (on a good day), and to reduce perceived risk for buyers who have greater confidence in partnering with known brands.  These are great things, and as the Caterpillars and IBMs of the world know—it’s great to have a great brand.  But for the majority of companies that would need to build one from virtually scratch, branding in the more traditional sense is simply not a viable near-term option for competing.

However, differentiation—by establishing a deeper connection with the buyer and amplifying the perceived benefits of a product (a function performed by a well-manicured brand in the B2C space) is still quite possible in B2B, but it’s probably not a function of the brand per se.  It’s more directly affected by particular types of deliberate marketing and selling tactics across the purchase experience.  Those that do this best typically take what we’ve come to call an “insight-led” approach:  they start engaging potential customers by sharing perspective and insight with them and, through the course of several interactions, create a deep connection to customer issues and accentuate the supplier’s unique capabilities in helping resolve those issues.

With big, diverse buying centers and complex multi-component offers, branding itself will never be enough to drive a purchase decision.  But those B2B companies who are combining reputable brands with an insight-led approach are the companies, a decade from now, B2C marketers will be envious of.

Adversarial Leadership

Jeff opened by saying:“my job as CMO is to create tension,” and explained how he challenged the status quo and broke the rules to get action on social media at Kodak. He once asked Legal how many people he would have to annoy before he got fired. When they said a third of the company, he decided he still had plenty of leeway to push his plans through.  Similarly, when we asked how to deal with Legal’s approval processes for social media, he answered “You’re in marketing, be creative.”

He Who Dares…

One good example of Jeff putting his neck out, was the naming contest for Kodak’s waterproof camera (originally the “Zx3”). After reading an article criticizing Kodak’s unoriginal product names, Jeff decided to launch a contest for the best name and put the winners’ picture on the box. The problem was, they had just one week to choose the name. When slow Legal procedures threatened to thwart the contest, Jeff decided to ignore protocol and risk an unknown fine. The contest was tweeted just 26 hours after the article came out and generated more than 28,000 names in 4 days. “PlaySport” was chosen – an amalgamation of two entries. The contest saved Kodak $250,000 on nomenclature and created so much buzz that Marketing didn’t need to buy a single piece of advertising for 6 months. This is what Jeff calls “OPM”: Other People’s Money. And the fine from Legal? $300.

As well as sharing leadership techniques, Jeff also gave some useful color around Kodak’s social media team, processes, and strategy.

Kodak’s Social Media Team

Kodak has 14 full-time digital staff (who cover Web and SEO as well as social media), including a Chief Blogger and a Chief Listener.  In addition, it has a network of part-time bloggers and twitterers who come from all parts of the company, e.g., Sales in China, Finance in India, or HR in France.

Kodak’s Social Media Coordination

Kodak has five standardized “step and repeat” plans for coordinating social media activity around new content. The plans specify exactly what the Chief Blogger, Chief Listener, and Twitterers should do in different circumstances and vary in intensity (e.g., Plan A= one message in channel X; Plan E= multiple messages in channels X, Y, and Z.).

“The 4 Es of Social Media”

Four core principles drive Kodak’s social media strategy:

1. Engage: Reach people on a one-to-one basis. Kodak hired a Chief Listener to act as “air traffic control” and route comments to Sales/NPD/Customer Services for reply. She uses Radian6 and PeopleBrowsr to watch trends and identify comments that need a response.
2. Educate: Listen and learn. When customers said Kodak’s new camera needed a microphone jack, Kodak listened and passed the message onto NPD. The modified camera outsold its competitor 10 to 1.
3. Excite: Show customers that their input makes a difference.  Kodak’s contest to name the Zx3 drummed up a lot of excitement.
4. Evangelize: Excitement leads to advocacy. As Jeff explained, when you get people in the same direction, you don’t need control.

Finally, a few of my favorite soundbites:

On ROI

“When someone asks ‘What’s the ROI?’ ask back, ‘What’s the Return on Ignoring?’”

On risk:

“You never had control of the message. Customers always controlled the brand because they got (or didn’t get) the promise delivered. You have to give something up (control) to get something back.”

On Legal:

“Legal are there to advise, not make decisions. They don’t monitor every call or email, so why every social media interaction?”

On viral videos:

“Quit wasting your time – you can’t do it.”  Marketers tend to see viral videos as a home run, but social media is a game of building hearts and minds, not eyeballs and ears. Richer conversations have a bigger long-term pay-off.

On the future of Websites:

“They will become a hub.” Jeff uses a tool called Socialize Your Stuff to aggregate positive comments on his brands/products from across the Web on his site.

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.

In advance of the book release, though, Hsieh released an excerpt to Inc. magazine, detailing how that vision created conflict between he and his investors – venture capitalists who sat on the Zappos board:

Some board members had always viewed our company culture as a pet project — “Tony’s social experiments,” they called it. I disagreed. I believe that getting the culture right is the most important thing a company can do. But the board took the conventional view — namely, that a business should focus on profitability first and then use the profits to do nice things for its employees. The board’s attitude was that my “social experiments” might make for good PR but that they didn’t move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.

As Hsieh (correctly!) points out later in the excerpt, Zappos’ corporate culture is its biggest differentiator. When you order from Zappos, you know that you’re going to get exactly what you ordered, delivered directly to your door overnight, and if there are any problems with your order, an extremely friendly customer service rep has the power to unilaterally fix them. Hsieh intuitively knew something that MLC research has confirmed – emotional differentiation leads to much higher customer loyalty than functional differentiation.

Creating this culture isn’t easy. For one thing, it’s expensive, as Zappos investors found out. But in the online space, where trust reigns supreme, encouraging that culture turned out to be the right investment. Hsieh ultimately sold to Amazon, with explicit promises that they would preserve the Zappos culture.

What I thought was most telling, though, were the jaded reactions of the venture capitalists who questioned Hsieh’s “social experiments”. Surely these folks had read, at some point, a marketing guru talk about “authenticity”.  It’s a mantra that has pervaded marketing thought in the last few years, nearly to the point of meaninglessness. But here, directly in front of them, was true authenticity – a founder sacrificing short-term profits in exchange for implementing his vision and building an enduring brand – and the only value they could see was that it might make for a good PR stunt; a short segment at the end of the local evening news, maybe, or some cred in the marketing blogosphere.

I see Hsieh’s story as a leadership challenge. Authenticity isn’t something you can just implement – it starts with a vision, an idea for how an organization will change the world, and that vision has to be baked into every aspect of the business.  You have to be willing to take risks to preserve it, as Hsieh did when he defied his investors, and when he sold to Amazon. And, most emphatically, it’s not just a way to get some good press.

MLC Members, revisit our 2009 study, “Accelerating Loyalty“, for our insights on how authentic cultural and emotional differentiators can lead to increased customer loyalty.

As a very first step, companies should limit downside risks by implementing a social media policy (MLC members, click here for tips and examples).  In addition to defensive guardrails, companies should also offer simple guidelines or training to help engaged employees make the best use of social media.

Beyond this, now is a good time to redouble efforts to measure and boost employee engagement. Indeed, 46% of executives agree that surveying employee satisfaction and acting on the results is the best way to protect online reputation.

Today, a number of companies use the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) internally to measure employees’ likelihood to recommend products/services to their friends or family on a scale of 1 to 10 (more info here). Although originally designed to measure customers’ willingness to recommend a product/service, many companies have recognized the NPS as a quick way to gauge employee engagement and simplify internal satisfaction surveys (though companies should note that employee NPS scores may be lower than customer scores).

Given the rise of social media, we see a host of new uses for Employee NPS. By combining the question “How likely are you to recommend our products or services to your friends or family?” with a few demographic questions, (e.g., location, function, work arrangement, tenure, age, gender,), companies can use the data to:

1)     Identify teams/regions with high NPS scores and drive social media uptake in those areas of the company

2)     Identify teams/regions with low NPS scores for extra guidance on social media policies (e.g., obligatory training and sign-off on the policy)

3)     Isolate environmental drivers of engagement and use that knowledge to boost engagement, thus increasing positive employee involvement in social media

MLC members, see how leading companies manage employee advocacy and learn about the five major components of a successful Net Promoter Score strategy.

“Make a list of the cultural trends that influence your consumers’ behavior.  Take your time; all of the items on this list will not be immediately apparent.  Stay with it, and you will gradually observe more and more.  Be a good observer.  Remove yourself from your own cultural perspective.  Look for the absurdities, the incongruities, the things that don’t necessarily make sense.  You will begin to laugh as you start to see the culture from the outside.  (Laughing is a good sign).”

Bogusky’s hypothesis underpinning this advice is simple: consumers are participants in a culture first and an economy second—they’re much more likely to spend their hard-earned dollars on culturally relevant products than culturally ambivalent products.  If a brand wins the cultural relevance game, they’ll likely see the economic benefits as well.

The passage also was timely as I’d just returned from Iconosphere 2010, the signature event for Iconoculture clients.  The two-day session was essentially a lightning round of the cultural immersion and consumer behavior mapping Bogusky recommends in Baked In.  The marketers who joined us were treated to in-depth analysis of the trends and values that are shaping consumer behavior today, accompanied by a healthy dose of practical advice for brands looking to stay relevant.

While the “you had to be there” cliché rang true for the Iconosphere event, the insights and ideas we talked about were very portable.  One sample topic: a deep dive into the changing values shaping Generation X behavior as that demographic approaches midlife.  We’ve captured a summary of this session’s key takeaways along with the presentation deck and an audio file for Council members here.

Stay tuned for more on the Iconoculture methodology and more insights from their team of cultural, demographic, and category experts.