I continue to like T. Boone Pickens’ communication strategy. While it helps to have deep pockets, you still have to pull it all together and execute. His so-called “army” is actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting itself with all sorts of digital tools and services that spur the creation of consumer-generated content. Over the last 48 hours there was a battle brewing over whether or not NBC would show a recent Pickens’ ad.

Below was the first message I saw early this morning. I didn’t realize that I was a half day late seeing the initial email message. The first blog post was this:

We have four new ads which are either on the air, or ready to go on the air. The ads have been “cleared” by every network… except for NBC which has refused to clear a :15 second ad about Iran.

Right when I was about to post this, I circled back to the site and saw a more recent blog post that updated the situation.

On Wednesday the Pickens Plan Army engaged in a battle against NBC. The network had refused to run our 15-second ad talking about how Iran–IRAN–is moving quickly to CNG-powered vehicles so they can free up their oil to sell it to us at $120 per barrel.Guess what: We won the battle!By Wednesday evening, NBC had re-examined its position and told us they WOULD allow our ad to run in its original form.

There’s no questioning the web’s impact on things like this. Call it social media, citizen journalism or what have you, the fact remains we’re in the midst of some big shifts around traditional media. The winds of change are here.

Hat tip to my fellow Telligenti Jim Gross for pointing us to a recent video interview conducted by Uberpulse at a Dell event in San Francisco. Open (minds, finds, conversations) emphasized a quote from Lark below that portrays Dell’s reliance on social media to drive its marketing strategy.

The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic… It’s about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

The Austin-based WCM guys at Vignette sent me a story discussing how NASA manages its information and technology infrastructure. It of course highlights Vignette’s involvement among other things, but more importantly it underscores the dynamic nature of content these days. In NASA’s case, they have multichannel publishing requirements that span everything from NASA TV, to its website, to Second Life.

“A key tool the team uses in-house to keep the content organized is Vignette 7.2 (specifically, Vignette Builder and Vignette Portal). Remember, the mission’s content is feeding to podcasts, NASA TV on the Web, Second Life, and elsewhere. We’re taking the same content and representing it in many different ways and by all means.”-Jeanne Holm, chief knowledge architect for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

VC heavyweight Tim Draper described how differently content is distributed and syndicated into today’s market, which apparently is influencing the way venture firms like Draper Fisher Jurvetson develop investment models.

John Shinal at vator.tv interviewed Draper at the OnMedia Media conference recently about the changing new media landscape.

..it may be a little like a producing company and a little like a venture capital model..but somehow we’ll pull those two things together and end up with a new model for venture investing that none of us has quite envisioned before.

It just validates how the social web is redefining how content is controlled and monetized. If you’re a marketer and not positioning your company to operate more like a media company, you should beware of being replaced.