Hacktivism against brands: Detri-viral Marketing III

"Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations, not nations."

Merriam Associates reports: "It was just a matter of time before the kinds of people who vandalized brand symbols at world economic summits resorted to brand cyber-vandalism. The Wikileaks hacktivists have targeted and threatened global brands like Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, Amazon, Twitter and Shell. Because of their symbolic power, brands are regularly co-opted to attract attention and dramatize political issues. That is how The Gap has become a symbol for sweatshops, McDonald's for the obesity epidemic, Walmart for labor violations and on and on. Many brands are more powerful than sovereign nations. Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations, not nations."

My first attended discussion at the Vietnam Digital Marketing and Technology Conference was a really fast talking guy from Singapore who gave a very convincing presentation on how, over the last year, Nike won and Accenture lost by their corporate behaviour regarding Tiger Woods*. In terms of public sentiment only, Nike won favour by standing by Tiger Woods and Accenture (those lovely folks who used to be Arthur Anderson) lost. People all over the world vote with their wallet (or credit card) every day. Last year the gay website Fabulis, had their account frozen by CitiBank when a mid-level manager thought the website contained "objectionable content". It did not, unless of course, you are homophobic. "When telephone calls, emails and meetings failed to resolve the situation, Fabulis site owner Jason Goldberg started an online attack, blogging snippets of bank conversations and virally sharing their stonewalling decisions. Just twenty-four hours after Goldberg’s blog campaign began, Citibank recanted, issuing an email apology to Goldberg. Having created an online PR disaster for the bank, Jason then took his business and $625,000 account elsewhere.", reports Business Spectator.

Hacktivism, while mainly associated with the WikiLeaks story currently, can now be practiced by anyone with a computer, an opinion and a few others who agree with them - and all brands should very much be aware of that. I've coined it Detri-Viral marketing. Of course, the best defense is a pro-active offense. More on that here.

* BTW: As a man in China is perceived to be more powerful depending on the number of mistresses he maintains, Tiger's rep in China (Nike's biggest future market) went up, not down.

For more on digital marketing and social networking see:

Xing vs. LinkedIn: Round II
Trial and Error: The New Normal
What's Wrong With My Social Networking? Xing vs. LinkedIn I
Low Tech Germany. Who Knew?
Advertising People and Blogs
How to Write the Best Blog in the World
What If Gutenberg Had a Blog?
If Blogs Are Free Does That Make Them Worthless?
Detri-Viral Marketing II: The Top 10 Social Media Blunders
Bright Lights, Big Internet and the WWED
Saigon Digital Marketing Conference Successfully Avoids Plumbers Convention
A Tale of Many Marketing Conferences
Detri-Viral Marketing I: How Web 2.0 Can Go Against A Brand
Marketing Predictions for 2009
Barcamp Saigon 2008
"Ignore Everybody" is Born: A Plug for Hugh MacLeod
Are the Bloggerati Missing the Market? Asia has Risen,
Into the Gapinvoid - Web 2.0 Social Networking Born 20 Years Ago

Tech word of the week: "Hacktivist"

Courtesy of the BBC, the word "hacktivist" has now entered the lexicon meaning computer hackers who work for a cause. Wherever you come out on the WikiLeaks story this week, and I'm bound to come out differently again next week, I hope it continues to provide us all with food for thought and the freedom to have those thoughts.

"Wikileaks 'revenge' attacks hit Mastercard Web attacks by a group of hacktivists targeting firms that withdrew services from Wikileaks have disrupted Mastercard payments, the BBC learns."

Correction: The term 'hacktivism' was coined by techno-culture writer Jason Sack in a piece about media artist Shu Lea Cheang published in InfoNation in 1995.

Late Notice: The Vietnam Digital Marketing and Technology Conference 2010

My sincere apologies to all. I'm way late on this one. Even back in July, Tony Troung from Golden Digital had asked me to be on the organizing committee for this conference, and what can I say? Things got lost. The other day I checked into LinkedIn, which I do every few days, and there were 35 requests for 'contacts' from all sorts of people. Tony was one of them. From July. So I'm blaming LinkedIn. Seems fair. Personally, I think all my contact requests had been 'leaked' to WikiLeaks and then just released this week when WikiLeaks got busted and pissed off and released my stuff just to show what kind of damage they could do if things got really hairy! I hear they've got film of Justin Beiber and Osama Bin Laden doing heroin in a cave somewhere. So, Word Up! The Vietnam Digital Marketing and Technology Conference is up on Thursday. See their website for full details. I like this one because it's partially hosted by a Vietnamese advertising agency and it's just really nice to see a Vietnamese company taking the lead for a change, instead of carpetbaggers from other countries. Cheers all. See you there. "I'll be covering it for Technorati. Of course they won't have Jimmy Wales (see photo), so I'll just have to hang with Aryeh Sternberg from Group M instead.

This is going to be one hell of a busy week. We have our second Saigon/CreativeMornings meeting on Tuesday and are now working with Tina Roth Eisenberg, AKA SwissMiss, to be a real franchised chapter of this fantastic series in Saigon and are just pumped about that. Then I have the conference above on Thursday, and of course, The Big Show on Friday and Barcamp Saigon on Sunday. And after all of that, I'll be writing my tail off for Technorati, Cheers again all. I need to work, and write.

WikiLeaks Censored in the United States

The land of the free has decided that freedom of speech has it's limits and in this case the limits say that WikiLeaks must host its website out of Switzerland instead of the US. Backup servers are located in Sweden after a series of 'denial of service' attacks last week by black-ops hackers that crippled WikiLeaks in America. See WikiLeaks defense strategy by clicking on this link. I wonder how things would have worked out had Paul Revere had his Twitter account suspended?

Technorati had this to say:

"WikiLeaks didn't create these documents, nor did it allow them to fall into the wrong hands. These were the actions of our own government agencies. If those responsible for publishing this material are criminals, what does it make those who were so careless with sensitive documents? If a bunch of amateur snoops at WikiLeaks can get hold of our secrets, imagine how easy it must be for foreign security agencies. One advantage of publishing these “secrets,” is that every country has access to them, and we know it. It creates a level playing field, and in a weird sort of way is more secure than one foreign power being privy to our secrets, and us not being aware of it".