Social media has fundamentally changed the way that people discover products, services and content. It's no longer simply about the old method of product, price and placement, it's about relevance, value and virality. As the effectiveness of traditional online marketing continues to decline, how can you be sure that your message is not only absorbed, but embraced, passed along and viewed as valuable?

I like to take a holistic approach to marketing. Most people think that marketing is about promotion, or advertising, but that's a misconception. Marketing encompasses everything a company does to acquire customers and maintain relationships with them. It's about aligning a product with a market.

I was inspired by Gregarious' post on the pervasiveness of streams. Streams to me represent another step towards the end of top-down broadcast and the beginning of a confluence of information and communication exchange patterns that function multi-dimensionally. At this point, anyone who is active with social platforms and social tools has streams of information revolving around them. Streams are pervasive, (as Gregarious points out) in that they persist in cyberspace long after we take the actions that add to our streams.

There is a lot of buzz these days about social media. Everyone's trying to figure it out. There are some who understand it, and some who might be missing the mark. The "web" is quickly, and deservedly, becoming a science unto itself. The web is still perceived by the majrity as a platform. A medium. An "it". When, as I observe it to be, the web is much more, it's "where," "when," "how," and "why." And most importantly "who." My friend Stowe Boyd refers to practitioners of social media as "the people formerly known as the audience" - a term I am quite fond of. In general, this is a concept that the world of marketing communications has yet to catch on to.