The future of the customer (long foretold) is finally here. It couldn't be a more exciting time to be marketing â€" and listening to â€" your customers. But what's really interesting is what leading marketers from Seth Godin to Chris Brogan to many of the bloggers on social media today are saying: it's really not so very new what's going on. The ability of businesses to have direct, immediate and inter-active communication with their customers is so... what? 19th century? We got away from that in the past century when the Mad Men ruled the world and the "campaign" to customers was born. But with the fragmentation of traditional media on the one hand, and the empowerment of individual contributors on the other, the customer has found his (and her) voice like never before. Think of how two hundred years ago a customer would go into a hat shop and rather than be told that he should buy a hat because everyone else was buying it, he'd be asked what kind of hat he'd like, and what color. And when he had good service, he could tell everyone else in his town. Now think of that on steroids because of technology... and we have met the future and it is us.

So all of us at SMT are totally psyched about being able to create this conversation in real time with the best bloggers worldwide and with you.