If Marketing 1.0 was mostly about print collateral, then Marketing 1.5 moved to the web brochure, and Marketing 2.0 is about the entire online experience. In Marketing 2.0, you no longer have tight control of a polished, coherent message stream.

In effect, marketing is turning into a myriad of interlocking conversations between people inside and outside the company. Blogs and online communities give individuals a loud voice in conversations about products and brands, while keyword-based marketing is changing the way corporations disseminate their messages.

In truth, the conversations were always out there, in coffee shops, book club meetings, over the garden fence, at the corner store; millions of conversations are going on about hundreds of topics relevant to your company every day. The extraordinary thing today is that you can literally watch these conversations as they unfold online.