Start looking for an agency that understands the nuances of the consumer conversation because media is about to shatter. Are you ready for it?

Feeling left behind these days? Is all the talk about social media and its implications having you scramble to figure out how to leverage it for your clients or your brand? Are you chasing after another agency that specializes in this emerging market? You are not alone.

Does the frenzy over social media this year remind you of something? Widgets maybe? Or viral marketing? Every year we seem to create a new buzz over… well, buzz. But is this trend different? It's hard enough for those of us in the space to catch up with it all. Just imagine what it's like for the luddite clients you have. But should you be chasing the golden goose this time?

First, let's get one thing straight: There are not going to be examples of companies that are "left in the dust" for not adopting social media because, to be honest, social media doesn't mean "one" thing. In some ways, it falls into the same category as viral marketing. Viral is not a cause, it is an effect of a program.

Social media is not a catch-all, the same way that "new media" is a catch-all for all things non-traditional. It's just a smaller diagram circle within our larger one, but it is growing and will have much more profound effects on the internet, society and our industry than anything we've seen before.

But what is it? Social media is merely a collection of various sites and techniques trying to get closer to the Holy Grail of every marketer: word-of-mouth transference. The difference this time is that unlike previous "hypes," it is the social infrastructure determining information, a multi-directional, multi-way chaotic conversation involving the consumer, and not the linear cascade from brand to agency to media to consumer… downward.

What is different about social media from all of the other over-hyped things we chase every year looking for consumer gold? In the normal social infrastructure, we, as marketers, have been isolated from the offline word-of-mouth transference of brand memes. We could not measure it. And that's where all the consumer decisions actually happen. What social media does, being digital, is give us a lens into that conversation. It allows you to plant the seeds of that and engage more directly in the active lives of those you are reaching -- to help create the memes instead of being reliant on the social chaos to do it for you.

You can prod meme creation, encourage it, and seed it, but be careful because you cannot control it. And that's why social media makes many advertisers wary, for when you start to monitor the conversation at that level, you will hear things you don't want to hear about your brand.

Those conversations were already happening, you just didn't know about them. Embrace them and learn from your audience.

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