by the 1980s, buyers became customers with cynicism, opinions, and expectations, and by the 1990s, the old approach was starting to show the strain. Then in the early twenty-first century, so-called “customers” began to exert co-creative tendencies.

inwhat ways can we structure things entirely differently to create more value in the context of our times, to be fast to market, to be fluid in mind-set, to be flexible in how we organize, deliver, and create value?

Unlocking talent is not the frosting on the cupcake as it was in the industrial era. In the Social Era, it’s the key ingredient in how we make the cupcake itself, and whether the cake is viable.

But before we can explore it, we need to disaggregate two words—social is not always attached to the word media. Social can be and is more than marketing or communications-related

The artifice of who is in or out of the organization will be less important than what work needs to get done by what talent and with what motivation.

The Social Era constructs we’ve been describing say it doesn’t have to be about one or the other; we can “allow people to contribute their best” and “create scale” at the same time,

Perhaps because marketing has been conceived of as “capture” rather than “connect,” we can say that solving what marketing needs to be in the Social Era fits into the second bucket.

But our current organizational constructs have been focused on scale at the cost of connection.

Where once usage came last, at the end of the marketing process, it is now more frequently starting the cycle.