My colleague Augie Ray has written a great blog post about why the Old Spice campaign with Old Spice Guy Isaiah Mustafa has been such a huge success out of the gate. Here are some of the early stats from Mashable. I have summarized Augie's blog post below, but you should read the whole thing.

Lesson No. 1: Paid and earned integration is the key to a successful social campaign. Paid support plus a motivated audience to amplify the message equals success in building earned media and awareness.

Lesson  No. 2: Adaptive Marketing means you need to be flexible. The world has changed, and marketing is not only always on but also increasingly unpredictable.

Lesson No. 3: Lose Control. It is something you need to give up willingly.

Are you ready to handle this truth? Tell us about your brand, what you would like to accomplish in this ever-adapting world of marketing, and how social media can contribute by commenting below.

In the mid- to late-90s, many business leaders observed the advent of the Web and asked the wrong question:  “What will the Internet do for us?”  Instead, they should have been asking, “What will the Internet do to us?” 

The difference between these two questions is the difference between a false sense of security and a necessity for action.  It’s the difference between Amazon organizing itself around the online channel in 1994 and Barnes & Noble opening an e-commerce site in 1997—today Amazon is worth $55.7B and Barnes & Noble has a $1.1B market cap.   It’s also the difference between newspapers struggling with a 70% decline in classified advertising over the course of a decade and eBay seeing revenues increase over 1900% in the same period.

Today, many business leaders are again asking the wrong question:  “What will social media do for us?” instead of “What will social media do to us?”  The difference between those two questions will define the business winners and losers of the next decade.  Let’s explore what social media already is doing to business and how organizations must adapt. 

Would you classify your marketing organization as "highly accountable"? What I mean is, are you always able to accurately measure the true business value of your marketing efforts, and do your senior leaders trust the results? If you're like most marketers, the honest answer to that question is a resounding "no". Proving the business value of multichannel marketing is getting progressively harder—and more important—because:

• Traditional marketing measurement practices are rooted in stable but inflexible tactics that leave marketers ill-equipped to keep pace with the real time nature of channel digitization.
• CFOs wield ever-more influence over marketing budgets, which is driving your CMO to lean harder on you to measure business results with scientific rigor.
• Your customers are in control; uncertainty and unpredictability are the norm; and marketers that can't adapt appropriately are doomed to fail.

This is where you come in. I believe that Customer Intelligence professionals are remarkably well positioned to address these challenges head on, and improve marketing accountability across the enterprise. Why? Because you sit at the cross-section of unfettered access to mountains of customer data from a dizzying array of online and offline sources. "Big data" as the recent article data, data, everywhere in The Economist puts it, is big business. CI professionals are right in the middle of it all helping firms capture customer data, analyze it, measure business results, and act upon the findings.

Coming to you live this morning from the kick off keynote of the Adobe (nee Omniture) Summit in Salt Lake City.  And I'm pleased to report that so far the event is as thumping and hued in neon green as in years past. 

A nice change from past summits: Instead of discussing developments to Omniture's online marketig technology, today's Omniture keynote by Josh James is themed around "The New Principles Of A Successful CMO."  These are Josh's principles for how marketing execs can succeed.