Because markets are changing faster than businesses
Today, your brand is being watched, augmented, and de-located. People are writing their own stories, thoughts, ideas, and developing new products and services using social media technologies. These simple social networking and web 2.0 technologies and services: Blogs, Wikis, Forums, Tagging, Podcasts, and RSS are connecting people and information in new ways, conversations, faster than you can say oh shit.
What, how, and where people are discovering new ideas.
Marketing has a marketing problem. Seth, "Marketing is not about trickery or even insincerity. It's about spreading ideas that you believe in, sharing ideas you're passionate about... and doing it with authenticity. Marketing is about treating prospects and customers with respect, and realizing that it's easier to grow the amount of business you do with happy people than it is to find new strangers to accost.
"The Importance of RSS By Kevin Hale from Particle tree is an essay on quot;...the state of RSS, taxonomies, advertising, [tagging, social software and services]. Kevin, "I think the reason Del.icio.us is so successful at bringing the appropriate audience to good material is because they track the changing web by using people to calculate what is essentially page rank. They get access to decent fuzzy logic for a fraction of the cost and the democracy of the system allows anyone to get their idea of what deserves face-time into the system almost immediately.
Basically, tagging systems are wonderful breeding grounds for the principles contained in Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point. They do a great job of gathering Salesmen, Mavens and Connectors all in one place. Mavens stalk the new entries on the front page and certain tag pages to filter through the chaos and find the latest treasures. The RSS feeds act as a sort of technological bridge/pseudo-connector to get the information to the real Connectors and Salesman. From what I've noticed, a good idea can make it into del.icio.us/popular in about 5 days, a good Salesman/Connector/Maven like Dave Shea or Jeffrey Veen can get a good idea into del.icio.us/popular in less than two hours."
Terry's post is about journalist's students and the old guard and the way information used to be handled. I think the ideas apply equally to any business since most organizations follow a hierarchical structure with tightly controlled information flowing from the top down instead of the bottom up.
The POMO Blog, Following the cultural shift with Terry Heaton - "The matter of hierarchically-determined licenses and "position" will be one of the most gut-wrenching battles we face, as the world moves farther down the postmodern path. Obviously, this does not sit well with the status quo, and I would add that I'm only a messenger on this. There is no requirement that you accept any of it, but it is my experience and observation that the higher one ascends society's pedestals, the less open-minded one becomes. In my belief, that is the most dangerous issue facing the professional journalism community."