A musician named Dave Carroll becomes a YouTube sensation by singing about how United Airlines broke his guitar. The Whole Foods brand suffers a blow amid a consumer boycott fueled by social media.  Just the usual signs that consumers are in control, right?

I don’t think so.  And I don’t believe consumers want to be “in control,” either.

We’ve all heard (and told) the same story.  Social media have empowered consumers.  With Twitter, we can publicly shame the restaurant that gives us bad service.  Through blogs and platforms like Facebook, we can rely on our friends and peers to learn about new products without involving the voice of the brand itself.

But I believe there’s a difference between consumers becoming empowered and consumers taking control.  And although word-of-mouth marketing remains the most powerful form of endorsement, I think it’s a stretch to say consumers want to shut out brands completely.  Consider the following:

• If consumers were really in control, Dave Carroll would not be a news sensation.  His “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube video would be the norm.  But his experience is the exception to the rule.

• If consumers were really in control, we’d see a huge improvement in notoriously customer-service challenged industries.  But we have not.

• If consumers wanted to shut out brands, we would not so willingly allow consumer products like iPhones and Blackberries to turn us into a society of inveterate text messengers and screen tappers.  We would not happily participate in their marketing, like the fans at Comic-Con who engaged in a massive scavenger hunts to find teaser trailers for Warner Brothers’s The Dark Knight in 2007, and for Disney’s Tron Legacy in 2009.

As a consumer, I love the fact that I can complain about my Comcast bill on Twitter and receive a rapid response from Comcast Cares.  But you know what?  Although consumers like empowerment, I believe we do not want the responsibility of being in control.  We want a relationship with brands, which means we accept the fact that both the brand and consumer exert influence.  We want companies to delight us with new products and services, and we will gladly pay them to do that.  We want to watch new ads on the Super Bowl.  We want to have fun with in-store and digital experiences.  Nearly 3.5 million of us have become fans of Dell, JetBlue, and Zappos on Twitter.  (Whole Foods, boycott or not, has 1.2 million Twitter followers and has done many things to impress consumers.)  Another 1.4 million consumers have become members of the Victoria’s Secret PINK Page (and are proud to post pictures of their favorite PINK clothing).

The difference between empowerment and control is more than a matter of semantics.  In a world of consumer empowerment, marketers still matter very much, and so do the “old” forms of brand building.  In fact, a recently released report by my employer Razorfish (Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report) says that when making purchasing decisions, consumers are more likely to trust television ads than online friends.

But on the other hand, consumer empowerment is real, and woe to the marketer who fails to understand that reality.  As Fluent also points out, marketers could help themselves by more effectively employing the same social media and user-generated content tools that consumers are using — hard to pull off, but, according to Forrester Research, worth trying.  Forrester says that 73 percent of online Americans are consuming social media, which Forrester cites as a harbinger for marketers.  Writes Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff, “Marketers, if you’re not doing social technology applications now, you’re officially behind.”

Well put.  There’s a reason why my Razorfish colleague Shiv Singh coined the term “Social Influence Marketing” as opposed to “social media.”  Social Influence Marketing says that marketers can and should employ social influencers and social media to meet their marketing and business objectives.  In other words, marketers can be empowered by social media and influencers, too.  Marketers just need to act wisely by incorporating social into broader forms of marketing, not tossing out the playbook completely — and by creating enjoyable consumer experiences and products that are as compelling as their advertisements.

Consumers will cede “control” to a brand that delights them in an authentic way.

PS: Dave Carroll has become something of a Social Influence Marketer himself. He now has versions of his “United Breaks Guitars” songs and video available for purchase online.

On June 15 I was privileged to be a speaker at the O’Reilly Twitter Boot Camp (#OTBC) along with luminaries such as Tony Hsieh, Steve Rubel, Tim O’Reilly and Eric T. Peterson.  The purpose of the event was to swap insights on employing Twitter for business use.  Topics ranged from measuring Twitter’s value to integrating Twitter into a marketing and PR program.  Here are some ideas that resonated for me:

• Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, described Zappos’s employee Twitter policy this way: “Just be real and use your best judgment.”  Incidentally, Tony also dangled the possibility that 20 years from now, Zappos could diversify into more businesses — even airlines — because Zappos is about obsessive customer service, not just shoes and other consumer goods.

• Eric T. Peterson and Mike Volpe covered Twitter measurement tools. Mike shared the HubSpot Twitter Grader, which you can use to measure your reach in the Twitter universe.  Eric shared the Twitalyzer for assessing your Twitter influence.  These tools are easy to use.  Check them out.  Eric T. Peterson: “Measure your return on influence, not your ROI.”

• Amy Martin gave a peek inside the world of Shaquille O’Neal’s justly famous the_real_shaq Twitter account, which has 1.3 million followers (Amy herself has nearly 500,000 followers).  If you enjoy following Shaq on Twitter, thank Amy — she got him to do it.  And how hard was it?  Getting started was not that difficult, as it turns out.  Amy just needed to get Shaq plugged into Twitter and set him loose.  He quickly gathered a following because of his authenticity. (Amy: “Shaq has zero ability to fake anything.  He’s transparent and genuine.”)  After a few months, Amy collaborated with Shaq on an idea: what if he used Twitter to give the world more than his ideas and random observations?  The result: “random acts of Shaqness,” in which Shaq uses Twitter to do good deeds for fans such as offering free tickets to basketball games.   At a time when celebrities are carefully protected from the public, the concept is quite stunning, actually. If you’re lucky enough to catch the right tweet from Shaq at the right time, you stand a good chance of meeting him at, say, a food court, where you can pick up a free ticket.  We can learn a lot from this example.  Per Amy: “Don’t ask what Twitter can do for you.  Ask what you can do for Twitter.”  Amen.

• Marla Erwin of Whole Foods discussed how Whole Foods uses Twitter to be responsive to customers and build the Whole Foods brand.  She also cleverly demonstrated her point by offering Whole Foods gift cards to boot camp attendees who could generate the most retweets about Whole Foods during the event — a nice way to generate consumer enthusiasm.  Marla also dispelled the notion that consumers just want to talk to each other about your brand on Twitter rather than talk with you.  She asked, “If people don’t want to interact with a brand, then why are 786,000 people following Whole Foods on Twitter?”

Marketers: even in an era of consumer-generated content, your message does matter and consumers do care about you. It’s just that marketers need to share their messages in a different way.  To cite a popular — but true — cliche, we must join the conversation that consumers are having about us. And we need to empower our brands to do things, not just say things.  Marla’s nifty contest during the O’Reilly Twitter Boot Camp was a case in point.

One of the benefits of appearing at the event was receiving the recently published The Twitter Book by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein.  The book is like Strunk & White for Twitter: a summation of practical tips for communicating clearly and effectively in the Twitter universe.  I highly recommend it even if you consider yourself an experienced pro. Brushing up on your Twitter etiquette never hurts.

Incidentally, you can find my O’Reilly Boot Camp presentation, “Twitter: The Two-Edged Sword,” here.