(1) 
John Naughton in Monday's Guardian wrote about the WikiLeaks saga and concluded his piece with a statement about the new reality.
"But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables - and probably of much else besides - are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.
While most of the talk has centered around the massive political ramifications of the leaks, there's also the corporate impact. Wikileaks was supposedly primed and ready to leak some very damaging internal documents from a leading bank, but It remains to be seen if this now happens.
Irrespective, of the future of the founder of WikiLeaks or of the organization itself, the trend towards greater transparency is out there as are the means to make it happen.
Corporations and their brands will have to assume a position, which will have a significant impact on their relationship with consumers in a more open, dynamic and human world.
Here are some thoughts that brands need to consider in the light of WikiLeaks
1. What do they open up and what do they close?
2. By operating a "lock down" mentality- do they risk damaging their brand?
3. How do they become more transparent?
4. What tools would they use to display and demonstrate this transparency?
5. In what ways might greater transparency provide competitive advantage?
6. How do they control employees- what can they say and where can they say it?
7. Response- How do you and should you respond to rumors?
8. How would you respond to a massive leak that reveals multiple issues?
I am assuming some of these questions might be part of a social media audit or an audit by a PR company, but I imagine they might be looking at things through different lenses, pre-Wikileaks; one might be a single issue crisis management and the other might simply be the the competitive pressure to engage in social media and the new rule sets that surround it.
A WikiLeaks scenario is a game changer that re-writes the old rules. It's a situation where company secrets are dumped on such a massive scale that they rock the core of the corporation, forcing its very existence called into question. This would be tough and an almost impossible scenario for anyone to respond to, but it's a potential reality.
However, if you have some plan in place and also make steps to becoming a more transparent organization, perhaps you could anticipate this potential nightmare scenario, a little better.
The real response from corporations to WikiLeaks, I believe will be a little different. While Naughton suggests in his Guardian piece that politicians don't really have the option to shut down the internet, inside corporations they won't shut the internet down, but access might be limited and usage monitored, lawyers will become more aggressive and there will be more of a "lock down" approach. They will do anything and everything to stop information from escaping.
The brand consultants and the legions of planners who've recently been actively arguing for their brands to be more open, will soon discover that WikiLeaks might not be the force for change they were hoping it could have been. Instead they will find clients holding it up as a reason and an excuse to do the opposite.
While the negative impact on efforts for radical transparency will be obvious, i am also going to assume that even doing interesting and more open experiments with social media has just gotten that much tougher.
Please note that the image above was stolen from Colin Drummond's Posterous.
It was way better than the original screenshot of Wikileaks
Posted by Ed Cotton
Both organizations are seemingly desperate for creative thinking that can help re-energize their withering franchises.
Sony has a couple of bets placed in the key areas of 3-D TV and is targeting $11.3 billion in 3-D related sales by 2013. Sony basically controls this world from broadcast outwards. It's morphing the now successful Playstation Network into a fully blown multi-media entity that goes way beyond its gaming roots. The company sees it as a way to sell everything from networked devices to content for the network. This will become even more of a challenge, since its arch rival Apple is now poised to enter the space.
The company's music division is also struggling adapting to a changing world and is opening itself up to a host of new ideas. It recently signed a deal with American Idol's Simon Cowell, recently helped some authors complete a sell-out stadium tour and is acting as a cultural consultant for one of Argentina's provinces.
Nokia is just reeling from Apple's onslaught and although the brand has huge levels of recognition and market share outside the US, it's starting to see Apple and Google as a considerable threat to its business. The company has a new head of Mobile Solutions, who made his task very clear on a blog post.
"Yesterday was the first day in my new job. I’m fortunate to say that I must have one of the most exciting jobs in the business. As head of Mobile Solutions, it’s my aim to ensure Nokia stays as the market and intellectual leader in creating the digital world. I’m under no illusions; it’s no small task.
Over the coming months, we’ll be advancing current projects and working to simplify the way we work in order to deliver products and services faster, and with a laser focus on quality.
I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices. Achieving this will require performance and efforts over and above the norm. This is a role I’ve personally been preparing for over the last 20 years. We have all the assets — including R&D and product development - at our disposal under one roof - to produce killer smartphones and market-changing mobile computers."
These legacy companies are going to have a tough time turning their business around because of the pace of the forces that are against them.
Twenty years ago, it might have been an easier task to re-position and bring a corporate giant back from the brink, but today it's that much tougher. The companies are so much bigger, so generating massive change inside an organization is almost impossible and then there's the technological landscape that's constantly shifting.
Both Sony and Nokia stood on the sidelines as their businesses shifted from hardware to software and were incapable of change because they lacked the core skills required.
The only way these guys will survive is by creating open cultures that encourage more risk taking and experimentation. Having success in the outlying areas will shows insiders the possibilities and become infectious.
Product and service excellence will be mandatory and then there's the small issue of brand. Both these brands are in the fashion business and have to recognize they need to re-inject the magic that surrounds their products; the products have to "wow" which makes marketing's task that much easier, it just has to cleverly amplify the good news. In recent years, both brands have been guilty of over-promoting products that simply can't live up to the hype.
One open opportunity for both brands is to engage their communities and outsiders more. With Apple operating a very closed and controlling culture, Sony and Nokia have a chance to do something very different.
Posted by Ed Cotton
(1) Potential remixers download the elements of the track "Nude" from iTunes and then upload their remix to http://www.radioheadremix.com.
The band seems to have given up on the whole idea of free and instead charges a $5.99 for the elements.
Browsing through the entries you quickly come across one that stands out from the pack; the remix, currently ranked No3 was created by a blogger(s) named Hipster Runoff.
It's interesting because it complete take down of the band and their obsessive/nerdy fans.
So far, it hasn't been removed and there's always a possibility it could win the contest.
It would be easy to remove it and have less to worry about, but it would be tough for the band to live up to in the long run better to have a sense of humor about the whole thing.
Unlike Radiohead, most brands aren't happy letting critics into the conversation, clearly in this changed environment, you have no alternative, but to open. You brand and your people have to be ready to take the rough with the smooth.
The more open you are, the more respect you are likely to generate and importantly, the more you are likely to learn about yourself.
Posted by Ed Cotton