I have writing about this shift for sometime now and the need for marketers to take note of this change to take action. Marketers need to evolve to what I call as "inclusive marketing" methods by involving, empowering customers & building an open channel for a conversation with them.

Davide Raab has provided a very interesting perspectiveon this change. He writes about the power of social media getting more importance when it comes to active customer engagement as compared to search marketing as these are an 'explicit group' of customers wanting to be involved and engaged in a particular topic, issue or cause.

He has provided a brilliant summary of how the marketing focus needs to change. Take a look at the table on various dimensions: medium consumer; engagement authority post-sale relationship marketing focus mass media (broadcasting)passively exposed conferredservice / support brand message database marketing (narrowcasting) targeted relevance-basedcross sell / upsell / retention segmentation search marketing activity-triggered implicit group Web self-service content social marketing consumer-controlled explicit group public engagement empowerment.