• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 12, 2011

Um, I love Charlene Li, and she's one of the smartest people operating in the new media and marketing marketplace, but did anyone review her opening keynote at GroupM’s “What’s Next” conference in New York this morning? The reason I ask, is that Li, who is founder and head of consultancy Altimeter Group, opened with a really powerful example of a "brand completely out of control" and it just so happens to be one of parent WPP’s biggest accounts: Dell Computer.

Li opened by showing a picture of a Dell computer literally blowing up (and bursting into flames) during a meeting in Japan in 2006, not long before WPP won the computer marketer’s multibillion advertising account. Needless to say, much has been made of WPP’s occasionally rocky relationship with the computer giant, but I’m going to guess it gets bit rockier now. Sure the computer exploded before WPP landed Dell, but Li said it hasn’t gotten much better at mastering the fallout if experienced and continues to experience from consumers ripping it with social media.

Li gave Dell a mixed grade to date, noting, how “far we’ve come and how far we have not come in five years, which is a huge amount of time for technology.”

Li's main point is that completely-out-of-control-brands is the "new normal" largely because consumers have seized control of brand communications vis a vis the explosion of social media.

She opened with a slide showing dozens of social media platforms. It pictured Facebook in the middle, with a bunch of smaller and emerging platforms on the periphery -- destinations like Plurk, Yammer and Hi5. When she asked how many of the GroupM conference attendees had used all of them. Few if any people in the room raised their hands from what I can tell, prompting Li to quip, "Your customers are,” and adding, "it's out of your hands." Talk about biting the hands that feed you.