Steve Rubel continues his iMedia Summit speech with examples of companies embracing consumer-generated media. Part 3

Steve Rubel is the Vice President of Client Services at CooperKatz & Company. He’s also the author of the Micro Persuasion blog about consumer-generated media. He is an evangelist not only for consumers to be involved with the media they consume, but also for his clients to embrace what consumers are doing.

Rubel spoke at February's iMedia Brand Summit in Coconut Point. In the first installment of that speech, he asked: "How do we deal with the fact that consumers are in control? What do we actually do to leverage this voice? And how do we keep our margins high so we can go to these fancy-schmancy conferences?" In part two, he answered those questions. Today: examples of those embracing consumer-generated media and resources.

Some words of wisdom from Bill Gates. He said, “Another big phenomenon is building communities around websites and around products.” Virtually every company ought to have on their website the ability to talk to customers -- and employees should jump in there as well.

And that’s exactly what Microsoft has done with Channel 9. Channel 9 is a brilliant, brilliant concept. It’s the brainchild of Microsoft’s Developer Relationships Group. If you think about Microsoft in the late '90s, the company had a horrible image. It was Darth Vader. People were afraid of Microsoft. Well, somebody in the Developer Relationship Group, named Len Pryor, had a brilliant idea. He said: "I used to be afraid to fly. And when I was afraid to fly I went on United Airlines once and they said take your headphones, plug them into the arm rest and listen to Channel 9 and you hear the cockpit and the pilot talking to the control tower. You’ll feel more at ease because you’ll have more transparency into what’s actually happening." And that’s exactly what he did.

He created from the bottom up -- not a top-down initiative, but from the bottom up -- a customer evangelist community: a place where employees, where users and developers gather together and share ideas and passion. And Microsoft employees go around with their $300 video cameras and they interview folks from, you know, average employees who are working on projects there -- not the top brass -- showing what life inside Microsoft is like. And it has been very powerful. This site, with no PR and no marketing gets hundreds of thousands of page views a day. And it’s helping Microsoft create a much better image in a community that’s very important to them.

Jones Soda, popular youth brand, they went out and found people who were blogging about topics that were in line with their brand message and their audience, and they didn’t give those blogs a home on their site, but they’re linking to those blogs. If you go to their site you will see they are saying, "Hey, here’s some blogs you should check out from our customers." That’s a new way to connect.

Firefox, this is perhaps the greatest example of open source marketing -- no marketing team here. The community markets the browser together through this Spread Firefox site. Then thousands of enthusiasts gathered and took an ad out in The New York Times. They paid for the ad themselves, no agency.

They have a list of projects on their site. And they just say, hey, we need help with all these different things -- you know, partner relations, press relations, wordsmiths -- come help us. That’s community marketing.

So your opportunity here: Find your influences. Listen to them, engage and empower them.

And here are some resources you can check out. My Blog -- at the top -- Pub/Sub and Technorati are search engines. And the different blogs I mentioned earlier.

And now I’ll take your questions.

Over here?

Mark Silva: Hi, Mark Silva, Real Branding. There is a recent article I saw that said if users can post text, why not Photo Shop and video? And what you presented was an example of that. I think the darker side of that, which you kind of glossed over here, was some of the stuff like we saw with the Volkswagen ad that I think is worthy of comment. The fact is that there is some stuff out there that you simply don’t want for your brand. And I don’t think it’s protect and kill it, but I also think you need to somehow manage it. I mean, I’d like to just ask you to address that a little bit in terms of: How do we manage the good with the bad?

Rubel: I don’t know if you can actually manage it. That’s the key. I mean I think you have to just … there’s a poker game going on and it’s going to go on whether you’re there or not. The one thing you can do though, I think, is to actually engage your critics and people who are doing things like that, in their transparent dialogue. And ask them why this is happening, why do you feel this way? Why do you feel the need to create an ad? How could we work with you to do something for us -- you know, that’s more productive? So I think that people would be surprised if they have that.

Am I out of time? Okay.

Rick Parkhill: Thank you Steve.

Rubel: Thank you.