Cynics often remark dismissively that there’s nothing new under the sun.

In the case of social media in business, however, they’re wrong.  Over the last three years, we’ve witnessed the integration of social media and community into our personal and professional lives with unprecedented stealth and ease.  Nowhere has this been more evident than in the marketing arena.  Organizations of all sizes are marrying the tried-and-true marketing communications, outreach, and research methods of print advertising, direct mail, and surveys with social media.  On the surface, this may appear to be a joint partnership between tradition and upstart, but the truth is this: Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, discussion forums, event chats, idea management, and social profiles have fundamentally altered the dynamics behind traditional business functions.

We’ve entered an age of incredible transparency in business—an age in which companies and their customers and prospects can interact with each other openly, frequently, and most importantly, instantly via the web.  In the days of Web 1.0, it was enough just for people to visit your web site.  We now know that what matters, at least for marketers, is the “stickiness” factor—how long those visitors actually stay on your site and why.  Often, the “why” is due to the opportunity for visitors to interact with other consumers through social profiles, read product reviews and provide their own ratings, and contribute ideas and suggestions. 

Social media enables those interactions, and it’s working.  According to recent figures from the Magazine Publishers of America, traffic to consumer magazine web sites increased 8.5 percent during the second quarter of 2008, with an average of more than 69 million unique monthly visitors.  As an example:  CBS saw its web traffic grow to 48.19 million unique visitors in the month of July, up more than 130 percent from June, according to ComScore.

For marketers, social media presents an opportunity of staggering importance.  Quite simply, new marketing channels don’t come along very often, and social media represents what can only be described as a revolution in corporate outreach and communications with their target audiences – something that can be likened to consumer transition from radio to television, for example.

The largest and best-known brands in the world have recognized the benefits social media can bring to core business functions such as brand building, market research, and product innovation.  What are iTunes and Apple.com if not exceedingly perfect examples of brand building, innovation, and support communities in action, populated by the most devoted enthusiasts in the world?  Or consider Dell’s IdeaStorm and Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea, both of which garner innovative, cost-saving, revenue-producing ideas from those companies’ customer bases while simultaneously (and almost slyly) increasing customer satisfaction.

Why pay consulting firms to discover what your customers, and the market, really want when you can simply provide them with a method to let them tell you?  Giving your crowd a voice—and then listening to them—is the smartest business decision any company or executive can ever make.  Social media and online communities are the way to do it.