Clay Shirky believes the media revolution was televised (on YouTube) and if you missed it you’re in trouble.

Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and adjunct professor of graduate interactive telecommunications at New York University, gave the opening keynote speech at day two of the Canadian Marketing Association’s national convention this morning in Toronto.

Shirky showed how consumers are using social media to take large portions of branding and marketing away from companies, and how some companies figured out how to use this change to their advantage.

His talk could be summarized, he said, in five words: “Group action just got easier... The loss of control that everybody fears is already in the past. It’s done. Instead of control, substitute clarity.”

He pointed to Modernista, a Boston-based advertising agency that essentially had no website.

Instead, it redirects visitors to various client and third-party sites where its work is discussed.

“They realized no one who comes [to a Modernista site] will trust anything we say about ourselves,” he said. “They said, ‘If you want to know how we work, we get that you’re going to be looking out in the world for what other people are saying about us. That’s our brand.’ ”

When asked about Skittles’ similar decision in March to make its website a Twitter search for the brand name (which resulted in many inappropriate comments appearing on the site), Shirky attributed the failure to forcing a product conversation into a space where one hadn’t previously existed, and the assumption, commonly made by marketers “that the public is uniformly on your side.”

Shirky acknowledged that social media tools have allowed companies to interact with consumers in unprecedented ways, but said the biggest change has been consumers interacting directly with each other.

“It’s the conversations about you that don’t involve you that are the real change in this environment, and they dramatically outnumber all conversations in the [old] environment.”

He pointed to an example in the United Kingdom where HSBC was forced to back-pedal on proposed changes to one of its chequing accounts in 2007.

After offering university students a account with no penalties for overdraft during the school year, they announced that overdraft fees would be introduced during summer break.

Students used a Facebook group to notify each other of the change, transfer their account out of HSBC, start online protests and plan a real-world demonstration in London.

“HSBC had not backed down because the customers were unhappy,” he said. “They backed down because the customers were unhappy and coordinated.”

The CMA convention continues this afternoon and tomorrow.