So-called Voice of the Customer programs have become a hot topic. According to our friends at Communispace, search results from Amazon.com reveal more than ten times the amount of material about voice of the customer than was available fifteen years ago. In 1993, there were thirty three books published on the voice of the customer; since the new millennium there have been on average thirty-three books a month published on the same topic.

With the fundamental and relentless changes occurring in the marketing landscape, it is interesting to see how this plays out in "agency land". You may have seen some of the video portrayals - both insightful and amusing:

At the risk of repeating myself, consider the following statements:

1. Never before have brands had so much data about their customers or capabilities to analyse this data
2. Never before have we had customers so willing to interact with brands and each other online (social media, user generated content)
3. Yet, we are the least connected that we will ever be...

"Reach over 350 million active users on Facebook. Learn how to connect your business with real customers through Facebook Ads" - so goes the Facebook online pitch.

From a marketing viewpoint, when you look at the large public social sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter - are you just looking at traditional mass media advertising applied to a new channel?

Not too long ago one of the people I follow on twitter posed the rhetorical question; ‘when is the last time your loyalty programs showed it was loyal to you? ‘ Mmmm go me thinking.

The great challenge for contemporary marketing is summed up very nicely in Rethinking Marketing (Harvard Business Review, Jan 2010):

'Never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them and tailoring their offerings accordingly.

And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use.'

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time... ever more sophisticated consumers looking to exercise their economic muscle and progressive companies providing them with the platform to do so. 

We have talked about the rise in consumer power before; what is new are the brands that have not just seen the writing on the wall but turned this into a positive. 

"The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." (William Gibson)

And so it is with organisations and brands as they experiment with social media how best to operate in the (increasingly) connected era.