It’s not the investment in technology that disconnects us from customers—the wealth of new customer-focused technologies has enormous potential to improve the practice of marketing. But the challenges and demands of learning and integrating complex new systems tend to shift our focus from real human beings, our customers, to abstract profiles, targets and segments designed to represent real human beings. To bring the irony full circle, this distraction from engaging real customers by developing technologies to signify them within the organization is developing at precisely the moment when customers are demanding greater authenticity and meaningful engagement with the companies they patronize.

In fact, the biggest danger marketers face in navigating all the changes reshaping our profession is failing to spend enough time truly understanding what’s driving changes on the customer side. We’re all hearing a lot about Social Media, Web2.0 and Customer Generated Media, but the buzz is far more focused on snappy new technologies and cool widgets than understanding why this revolution is taking place, and what it means for businesses.

Social media—what many are calling the democratization of information—is having an enormous impact on institutions and organizations, from politics to education, from startups to Fortune 500 businesses. The shift in control over how knowledge is shaped and how it's accessed is a significant rebalancing of power between businesses and consumers, and it has a big impact on marketing organizations.

For marketers struggling with the concept of Social Media it helps to understand why this trend is taking place, why it's not just another short-live fad, and why it represents a life-or-death proposition for business. And it's really simple. In the old days, communications channels—print, radio, tv, mail—were limited and expensive. Big companies broadcast a one-way message into the marketplace, while word-of-mouth among consumers rarely extended past the last barstool. Reputations could be established and maintained by blanketing the market with a consistent message—and far too many companies abused this environment by delivering relentless, misleading and sugarcoated messages that made consumers jaded and cynical. But with advancing technology, now everyone can publish from their desktop and easily reach a worldwide audience of anyone who wants to listen. Word-of-mouth is now ubiquitous, tuned in with a simple search on Google, and it often focuses on getting around the corporate message to the truth. If you want to get the dirt on a company, just search on "The Truth about ___".

In a very real sense, your market is now a networked community of customers, and technology has amplified the conversation to the point where people see more value in learning about your product from others like themselves than from your marketing campaigns. So what does it mean in this new environment to be truly customer-centric, and what kind of organization is required to achieve it?

Peter Kim is an analyst at Forrester, and last summer completed a report called Reinventing the Marketing Organization. In a blog post that accompanied the release of the report, he invokes the enduring disconnect between what businesses say and what they do when it comes to building a customer-centric organization, and he sums up the executive summary of the report:

Today's marketing organizations are broken. Three out of four marketing departments have reorganized in the past two years. Almost 80% of marketers don't influence a critical customer interaction like customer service, and 85% don't even own the "four Ps" of marketing anymore. To regain effectiveness, marketers must transition to a Customer-Centric Marketing Organization. Doing so requires: 1) redesigning P&Ls and metrics; 2) shifting culture away from marketing communications; 3) investing in a customer relationship infrastructure; and 4) rethinking agency relationships.

Finally, he asks, why is there "so much more talk than action today around being customer-centric?" And this is where a few of the threads came together for me that bring the impact of social media right down to the front line of marketing.

When it comes to customer centricity, I think there's a missing part of the equation that is highly relevant to what's driving social media. It's not just about "customer-centricity" per se, but about what that actually means to an organization. Businesses can be customer-centric in ways that are predatory, empowering, manipulative, supportive, exploitive, collaborative, opportunistic, or even just utilitarian. Unfortunately, the mainstream trend is towards a kind of customer-centricity that consumers mistrust. People are engaging in social media to directly inform purchasing decisions because they feel manipulated and exploited by advertising and marketing, and they want to see behind the spin before they invest their trust in a business or product.

Much of the literature on customer-centric metrics highlights the depersonalization of customers in ways that run in direct opposition to the trends driving social media. You can be incredibly efficient at doing the wrong things, a truth that is hammered home every day by mercenary marketers that drive relentlessly toward a 1.5% campaign conversion rate, while antagonizing the other 98.5% of their prospects—people they'll go back to again and again in the future, but couldn't care less about if they don't convert today.

If you're truly going to be customer-centric, you need to define what that means to your organization. If you want to be customer-centric in a way that resonates with today's highly networked customer communities, then you better define it in terms that actually have meaning for the customer.

This doesn't mean a tectonic shift in the tactical mechanisms of marketing as much as it means a shift in the attitudes companies have toward customers, and how those attitudes shape behaviors. I see many companies call themselves customer-centric while spamming their own customer lists repeatedly in order to squeeze out an extra percentage point in conversion. In a few cases they actually justify their approach by saying they're doing their customers a favor by giving them another shot at an incredible offer. Is that customer-centric? Absolutely. But not in any way that's going to help them sustain their customer base in an age of Word-of-Mouth on steroids.

Social media is an emerging concept that many people are trying to frame in ways that help us understand where all this new communications and networking technology is leading us. What it means in the simplest terms is this: Your customers are comparing notes. So are your partners and suppliers. That means effective transparency about everything you do and say—not just what you wrap up in a pretty bow for consumption—whether you like it or not.

Does that change the way you think about and market to your customers? If not, you're either already well-aligned with your customers, or it will take the market and not a blog to convince you otherwise. If it does change the way you think about customers, then the place to start is by asking what customer-centricity means to them. They're the ones who will be spreading the word about you.