If you are Best Buy your internet is connecting your retail staff across the country to share what consumers are asking for and possible new products and services. If you're Intuit you're ‘staffing' your ‘help line' with few paid employees and mostly letting users answer each other's questions. If you are a sophisticated email or Web marketer you inspire your recipients to pass along offers, news and entertainment to their friends. A Web site shouldn't be built today that doesn't include social bookmarking, the attraction of consumer generated content or the habitution of conversations via applications like podcasts, blogs, widgets and more. Even highly competitive scientists are sharing discoveries on social networking sites to speed up learning and discovery. Technology has enabled rampant conversations of all sizes and kinds. Meaning is even being found in millions of ‘tweets' from around the world. Where will it end? It's only just beginning so its hard to say. But if we thought we had overwhelming info, choice and clutter before, we ‘ain't seen nothing yet.'

Not so long ago Web sites were heralded as magic vehicles to communicate with prospects and customers.  Marketers and agencies were happy to dabble in banner ads, search, pay per click campaigns, search marketing and email blasts. But these tactics were rightfully termed Web 1.0 because of their very elemental ability to only do push marketing. Today, all is pull.

All is pull because technology has advanced to such a degree that consumers do on a huge scale what is innate within us all: Turn to each other (communities of the like-minded) and not marketers for gossip, info, recommendations, rankings, content, help and cause creation. In this generation of digital technology called Web 2.0 , conversations aren't just two-way and more interactive, they're happening between consumers without marketers at all.  Empowered with blogs, podcasts, You Tube and more, consumers are disintermediating marketers from their traditional role as purveyors of product info, endorsements and entertainment. The secret behind even the most successful commercial Web sites (such as Amazon) is that so much of their content is consumer generated.  To be successful in the world of Web 2.0, a marketer has to figure out how to be invited into the conversations of their consumer. That requires 3 things:

Nailing, in the eyes of the target, what about their brand is seen to deserve a role in their lives.
Jumpstarting a conversation about it.
And filling the pipeline with news, apps and events that keep the conversation going, ideally habituating it.

For marketers still thinking in Web 1.0 terms, Web 2.0 can seem like a foreign land.  And that's a pity because Web 3.0 is already emerging in practice. If Web 1.0 is "push" and Web 2.0 is "pull," Web 3.0 is what we call "pay to say."  That means it's the ability to not just assess the sentiment of the myriad number of digital conversations going on out there about your brand and competitors, it's knowing how to harness the positive sentiments to your advantage. One way this works is paying your brand's fans to post on their Facebook or LinkedIn page an endorsement of your brand (an ad, a recommendation, a self created demo).

In other words, to compete in a world of Web 1.0 the brands that were successful pushed their messages with cool design, great videos and sensational news and commentary.  In the world of Web 2.0, successful brands most often get invited into conversations by hosting them: creating a comfortable, convenient democracy where people can converse about the category or the motivation/need driving them to it.  But  the world of Web 3.0 will be the ultimate reckoning: The brands that survive will have figured out two things: the meaning that gets them invited into conversations and the means to monetize the time and effort the consumer spends in positive conversations about them. Web 3.0 is where both the marketer and the consumer generate an ROI from their chatter.

Twenty years ago, it was all the rage to measure activities and behaviors in service to process improvement. Today, the ability to measure more marketing activities more quickly is actually inhibiting clarity, insight and optimization. This, when there are really only six areas (below) you need to measure on your dashboard. And every item you can measure should be sorted and prioritized in service to a clear, succinct analysis of each of these:

1. What your target does (behavioral engagement such as involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence)
2. The leading indicators of these behaviors (well known to be awareness and sentiment)
3. How efficiently the process driving the above is performing (things like the return from the marketing mix, stickiness on one's Web site, Net Promoter Score)
4. The sales, margin and share outcomes of the above
5. From the above, who are your most profitable customers in each of two camps: share of wallet and share of mouth
6. How you compare in all the above to your competition (hard to determine but gold if you can find it)

How often have you heard someone say "our strategy is to generate buzz"  or "our idea is to do something viral"?  How sad.  Like sales, buzz and pass along most certainly aren't themselves a strategy but the result of a big idea.  So to be clear: Buzz is not an idea, nor are executions such as banner ads, a Web site or press tour.  A big idea has a meaning so compelling that when it's cleverly messaged it measureably changes attitudes and behaviors. It is born of a consumer insight that the competition doesn't know or has yet to harness. And given that the worlds of commerce, culture and communication have all converged, that means that big and transformative ideas required of brand marketers are more and more likely to be "killer apps" (such as those of the iPhone or Nike +), branded entertainment and gathering places where ever-narrower niches of self interest can feel at home, networked and listened to (social networks).

A survey of CMOs from top brands (recently conducted by the American Association of Advertising Agencies) finds them compelled to completely transform themselves into Chief Digital Officers. This is to be expected. With digitization, marketing's 4P's have converged just as culture, commerce and communications have converged. To survive, every brand must become a media platform and all brands are in the business of e-commerce - either to sell or gather data comparable to what their competitors have. This reality is making CMOs very nervous. Most don't feel expert enough to leverage digitization to drive or measure results at a time they desperately need to. One CMO reportedly believes "If we don't get digital right we'll cease to exist as a company." To all who panic, we at LSB are here to reassure you based on our years of experience. Digitization will unleash what's always been in you trying to get out: A means to leverage the voice of the customer and easily jumpstart engagement, creating brand fanatics and inspiring word of mouth. It will make agency selection and management easier too, as you find that there's no such thing as the world of "traditional" agencies and media vis a vis the world of "new" media and interactive agencies. There is only one world and one type of agency-the one fluent in digital. All other agencies are, or are soon to be, out of business.