Companies must listen to the Web 2.0 world

Those that ignore social media critics risk being blindsided by negative comments, experts say

"Marketing is now distributed off the corporate Web site," he said. "The savvy marketer knows that communities are forming elsewhere on the Web. That is where your marketplace is."

With this paradigm shift, companies also need to dramatically change how they go about measuring the effectiveness of marketing through the social media, he added.

"Web analytics are good for measuring the activity on your servers - emphasis on your servers ... who is coming to that site and visiting that page," he added. "Unfortunately page views are not sufficient alone anymore. It doesn't tell us what people thought, how they reacted."

Instead, companies need to measure attention users are giving their marketing message on social media, how they are interacting with the media, their sentiment and tone and what they do after engaging with content within social media.

"You really can't manage what you're not measuring," Owyang added. I certainly hope that you're not just deploying blogs ... without thinking about what success will look like.

When you're deploying a social media program, it is important to make in-flight course corrections. If my blog post was wrong, then I will update it. This is not just an advertising campaign that you launch and you let it run. This is a real active dialogue that you are having with people."

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