socialmediatoday reporting:
...Over the next months, clearly all things digital (especially social and mobile) continued to gain unprecedented momentum so that within barely 30 months into my wager, just this past December, IDG declares:  The War is Over and Digital Has Won. Over 50% Marketing Budgets Go To Digital in 2012. It’s a “Wow” moment, confirming what I sensed many months ago; marketing was changing fast and irrevocably.
But unlike the canary in the mineshaft – I have no intention of just kneeling over. Instead, with 30 years of experience under my belt, I have a distinct advantage over my more narrowly tech-trained younger colleagues to understand what all this means and imagine a way forward.
At the heart of the matter lies the reality that digital marketing, especially social and mobile marketing, are highly disruptive because these technologies are successfully challenging the established “Content as king” marketing technologies of the last 30 years.
In content based marketing, the brand message was the payload in the efficient, centralized, mass content distribution platform. It worked because its effectiveness was dependent on reaching mass audiences where people trusted the content. The more trusted the content, the more the content producers could charge brands.  
Then, in the blink of a digital eye, newer technologies offer marketers a community distribution platform that rivals the content distribution platform across the board. Social/ mobile marketing is cheaper to create and permits ongoing marketing that was not economical in paid media. It is also incredibly efficient at reaching scale (albeit somewhat chaotically). It is more nimble than content based marketing and most importantly, social marketing shifts trust from content to the community, thus delivering more efficient brand ROI (NY Times ad rates makes my point aptly).
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2011 was scary for many marketing companies and it’s appropriate to take a moment to recognize this significant juncture in our business’ evolution. “The forces of creative destruction take time. New forms of economic output do not come automatically” (The Experience Economy, Updated edition 2011: Gilmore & Pine) describes the current cycle very well.
It’s clear we can’t simply apply new social technology to the old marketing mix and expect it to work anymore than we can apply wings to a car and expect it to fly.  Nor can we maintain the naïve thinking that social/ mobile marketing can operate frictionless within traditional marketing planning.  
In crossing the digital marketing divide irrevocably, we can be freed from  entrenched notions about what marketing must be and get inspired by wonderful new socially based businesses such as:  “Map my fitness”- a fitness centric community encouraging community interaction and motivation; “Change My World Now” -  a specially designed social community for kids (built by r2i) to help them to discover their true “bright light.” And Zivity, a longtime favorite community for indie artists and photographers led by CEO Cyan Banister who introduced an innovative revenue share model that promotes community interactions not content consumption.
http://socialmediatoday.com/node/429749?utm_source=smt_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter