Here’s an idea for a low-budget branding program. Take a digital video camera to a soccer field and let it roll as an athlete plays around with a soccer ball. Upload the assiduously amateurish clip free on YouTube. Watch consumers by the millions view it and share it with friends. Of course, it helps if you’re Nike and have a ten-year endorsement contract with the best soccer player in the galaxy to feature in your videos. Nike’s spot of Ronaldinho repeatedly kicking a soccer ball with breathtaking precision at the crossbar so that it comes right back to him has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times. Video-sharing sites such as YouTube are taking off with an amazing 40 million watched videos daily. Most of the video clips are consumer generated. But, smart marketers like Nike are tapping into the craze with videos that have a raw unpolished feel. While Adidas is shelling out $200 million as the official sponsor of The Soccer World Cup in Germany, Nike is taking a viral approach that is destined to pay off.

Building a great brand has little to do with traditional marketing communications activities. Instead, it’s all about turning customers into “Promoters.” That’s the message in loyalty guru Fred Reichheld’s new book, The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth. The director emeritus of Bain & Company has completed an extensive study, which concludes that the best predictor of top-line growth can be summed up in one simple question: “Would you recommend this company to a friend?”

Reichheld argues that customer satisfaction and retention studies are overrated. Instead, his findings point to a simple new approach to customer research: blunt as it may seem, just ask them if they would recommend your company to a friend. Next, segment customers into promoters, the passively satisfied, and detractors. This keeps customer surveys simple enough to be reported in a timely matter to the front line. The value of evangelical customers is rarely disputed, yet there’s a lack of commitment behind the rhetoric. Instead of measuring and managing promoters, managers get mired in complex customer satisfaction research that’s rarely even shared with the employees in the trenches who can really make a difference. These research programs are “usually complex loyalty indexes based on dozens of proprietary questions and weighted with a black box scaling function, designed to generate more business for survey firms,” says Reichheld. “Contrast that scenario with one in which a manager presents employees with numbers from the previous week showing percentages and names of branch office customers who are promoters, passively satisfied, and detractors, and then issues the charge to produce more promoters and fewer detractors.” Reichheld advocates that the “net promoter” number - the percentage of promoters minus detractors - can be made transparent to front-line employees, creating a line of sight from the executive suites to the front lines.

I interviewed Reichheld via email and asked him if real-time communication of the net promoter score would really be enough to improve performance? Reichheld admits that more needs to happen to focus front-line employees on improving the customer experience and encouraging customer evangelism: “Selective hiring, orientation, training, recognition, rewards, promotion, and outplacement are vital components. One important ingredient is the linking of promotion and bonuses to the net promoter score at the individual and small-team level.”

Would you agree that this is what brand and corporate communications leadership is all about, measure, communicate and hold frontline employees accountable for their net promoter score?

The Soccer World Cup in Germany this summer will not just be a fight among the world’s top football teams, but between Adidas’ conventional mass-marketing approach and Nike’s new digital, viral marketing strategy. As the official sponsor of the games, Adidas is spending $200 million on an all out mass-marketing blitz. Meanwhile, Nike has partnered with Google in an attempt to create a social network for soccer fans at “Joga.com.” The ambitious project will be rolled out to 140 countries in 14 languages and models the successful MySpace. Soccer fans can set up their own blogs, swap videos, chat, upload pictures, get news, create their own online clubs, get access to exclusive interviews with Nike’s stable of soccer stars, etc. Joga.com is named after the Brazilian phrase “joga bonito”, or “play,” and is available through invitation only. Even if Nike will only reach one percent of the audience of MySpace, they will be in good shape. Consider these staggering statistics about MySpace (reported by Steve Rubel): It is the largest online social networking portal on the web, with 61 + million registered users, it’s the second largest destination on the web, by page views, it splits 50.2% male, 49.8% female, and attracts 220,000 new registrants daily. During the time you read this post, 150 new members signed up on MySpace. You can’t blame Nike for trying to get into this social network space. I’ll be rooting for team U.S., team Sweden and Nike this summer!