Harry Potter is an extended tale of no, not just wizards and magic but the wisdom of the crowds in action. But that story got buried in the hoopla around the launch of Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows last Saturday.

Very predictably, the traditional news media covered the event in the same way they did, say, the iPhone. Too much attention to people queuing up for the book, the parties, the ‘education’ component, but very little about the phenomenon itself.

The fact is, the Harry Potter franchise just doesn’t belong to J.K. Rowling anymore. The books may be in 200 countries and 63 languages, but the Potter brand goes beyond that geographic reach. It’s been open-sourced in more ways than you could imagine; the wisdom of the Potter crowds has always ruled when it comes to creating their own message channels, cranking out their own Potter-esqe stories etc. Despite the fact that this is a book, and not a digital product, the fans are all over the social media map. There is:
* The Mugglecast podcast run by high school students, that has some 50,000 listeners a week, and features Elton John and Bono.
* The Leaky Cauldron leaks news about the books and carries a disclosure that it is in “no way affiliated with J.K. Rowling.”
* No shortage of Potter blogs, including one that suggests a Bollywood storyline for an Indian audience.
* The Harry Potter Fiction store, that’s not managed by Scholastic, the book publisher; it’s also “unofficial.”
* The Academy of Virtual Wizardry, at “Caledon Highlands” in you guessed it, Second Life!

I could go on…

So I wanted to track how the raving fans were behaving. I had a haunch that there would be an equal outpouring of passion on Saturday the 20th July around midnight not in front of the bookstores where the TV crews were waiting in hoardes, but on Wikipedia. At 11.00 pm Pacific Time the discussion (on the “comments” page of the Harry Potter Wikipedia showed signs that things were heating up. The Wikipedians had been discussing the value of locking down the Wiki, since everyone knew the book had leaked and the plot was being discussed elsewhere.

“Just wait until the official release time. Then we can put everything up in 5 minutes or so, considering the number of wikipedians interested in this.” said one editor at 11.03 pm. This was clearly a hard core editor, but also a big Potter fan. “Most people, me included, will be too busy reading the book on Saturday to check the article.” Others like him (or her) were unhappy that some editors had moved to freeze the pages until a week after the launch. Fan passion was expressed in the form of outrage that some newspapers’ reviewers had created spoilers by discussing the plot before the launch. Reading through their discussion gives you a glimpse of not just how these unpaid wikipedians work, but how fans operate late at night, doing a thankless job for what? To them this isn’t JK’s book. This is theirs.

If only other brands let their customers work their magic this way!

Walk through the networking area at the IABC International conference here in New Orleans, and you’d be forgiven if you thought you had mistakenly stepped into a new media event. Flat panel screens display models, hubs, portals, feed rooms, and video products that all promise to engage audiences more, track marketing better, and simplify PR and media relations.

In one analysis, this is the fork in the road for communicators wrestling with the trusty old tools of engagement and the spanky new ones. Topics range from “Is corporate communications a thing of the past” to “Be Heard. Bringing a brand to life.” to Building brands and community via e-marketing” to “The good the bad and the unethical.” The booths for Melcrum and Ragan Communications, the American and British contenders for social media communicators’ hubs are strategically located at different parts of the room. Everything you hear or see seems to have an ‘e’ factor, a global dimension, or a PR-meets-marketing angle. The lines are blurring. The oxygen of new media fills the room.

Terrific stuff. Invigorating to say the least. The coffee pots aren’t conveniently located close to the meeting rooms, but even at 7.30 am, people seem incredibly alert.

Alan Scott’s session on “The Blogging Explosion” had that kind of energy. Scott, the CMO of Dow Jones‘ Enterprise Media Group laid the usual groundwork with references to the Cluetrain Manifesto etc. The four trends we should be aware of are:

* Commodization & Competitiveness
* The New Message Battleground
* Buyers Reward Authenticity
* Markets are global conversations

What was interesting, and telling, was that the presentation turned into great participation. Questions posed by members of the audience were being answered by others. When Scott referenced Bub Lutz’s blog he was corrected by someone from GM.

The blogging explosion, Scott maintained was humanizing the corporation; better, it was providing insight via text mining –gold for CSR, corporate intelligence, PR, HR, Marketing, product groups, and Sales. The disruption (or it it upheaval? Or revolution?) is easy to see because you could buy a camera or car tires without paying any attention to the carefully crafted communications from the marketing, PR and web folk at those companies. You know, folks like us…

It reminded me of the words from song The revolution will not be televised:

The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

And our seat belts are fastened, too.

If you’ve been following the controversy over the 2012 Olympics logo, you’ll see a familiar pattern.

Many new logos, and brand names even, seem odd and –as Londoners complain– say nothing about them.

I have a strong opinion about this one. I think it’s not very inspiring. Vibrant, yes. But hey, I don’t live in London, and it’s easy to be critical when you’re not privy to the brief or the marketing context.

This is turning out to be not just a branding nightmare, but a PR one –with the organizers seeming to not want to listen to the protests.

I like the fact that they are now at least asking people to create and submit a logo design.

They welcome user generated content, with ‘downloadable ‘templates’ backed up by a huge section on the use of and removal of content. Yes, they will moderate comments, they say!

In defense of the edgy (or odd) logo, it is in sync with their objectives:

“London 2012 will be a Games that make the most of exciting new technology to get people closer to the action..”

“The new emblem is dynamic, modern and flexible. It will work with new technology and across traditional and new media networks.”

As for what will happen when a logo isn’t working in isolation and has more context, see what ordinary people are submitting to not the IOC site, but Flickr.