Valeria Maltoni wrote a blog entry on Marketing Profs that made me think about how marketing and advertising is coming full cycle. Here is a clip from her post:

“Getting people to do anything they don’t want to do has always been hard. These days, customers and prospects seem to be made of Teflon, nothing you send out seems to stick very much. Direct response is running out of juice in its current incarnation.”

She goes on to talk about how important it is to build relationships with your clients/consumers.

I believe Valeria hit on the reason that social media marketing is so important. There is a fundamental shift in the way we consume advertising.

It is as if communications technology has become so prevalent that it has reverted us back to the good old days before the telephone, newspapers and reliable postal services. In those years people depended on recommendations from friends and family for buying goods. You grew up in a neighborhood or small village and you used the vendors your parents used.

Once mass media technology came to pass we were so thrilled with "choices" we were willing to listen to and watch ads in anticipation.

Now we have so much to choose from we are once again relying on the community, friends, and family to help us choose the goods and services we buy. Instead of those influencer's living just in our neighborhood they live all over the world and they become part of our virtual neighborhood through social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook. 

It is time for marketers to embrace social media marketing.