I’ve been following the cycle of hype and backlash about Facebook and MySpace and Twitter, and the hand-wringing over Juicy Campus.

I’m learning a lot about the tactical implications of social media. But more important, I’m gaining a very clear picture of what it means for marketing organizations. If you dig below the surface hype in marketing and mainstream media about social networks, there’s clear evidence that marketing is teetering on the verge of a tectonic shift. That shift looks increasingly likely to be accelerated in the US by a deep recession. If you’re not ready for what’s on the horizon, it’s going to be rough ride over the next few years.

I’ve written frequently in the past about the evolution of marketing and the drive toward social media. Simply put, word-of-mouth has been the dominant force shaping consumer purchasing behavior for 7,000 years. The rise of technology driven mass communications only gained a head of steam in the past two centuries. We’ve all grown up in a bubble in which broadcast communications controlled by business flooded the market—and our heads—with messaging. We’ve lived in a collective consumer consciousness in which word-of-mouth was muted. But now the bubble is bursting. The Web has democratized communication, amplifying word-of-mouth to an increasing volume that rapidly blunts the effectiveness of broadcast messaging. Why believe the claims of an ad when you can pop online and listen to the direct experiences of 1000 other people who bought the product you’re considering?

I hear a lot of marketers questioning whether or not this is a real and lasting phenomenon. All I can say is, 15 years ago many marketers were asking the same question about Web sites. Remember all that frothy talk about the “information superhighway”? We all got sick of hearing it. But looking back now, it was true. And yet, it was just a highway. Social Media is the traffic—it’s people using a network to stretch out far beyond their old boundaries. And once a new highways is opened, the traffic only continues to grow.

The problem is, every marketing organization we know today has evolved in the bubble of one-way broadcast communications. That paradigm existed because communications—printing, radio, television, advertising—was incredibly expensive and only wealthy businesses owned the means of transmission. It was a single, large stream of media. Mainstream media. Public relations evolved to influence the stories being told in mainstream media. Advertising evolved to insert special interest stories directly into the stream of media. Even direct mail is an evolution of this paradigm—a mass distribution channel of predominately one-way communication.

Communications channels were not designed to listen or to engage. Marketing organizations developed tools for listening to the market after a fashion, but feedback was massively filtered and reshaped as input for reshaping the broadcast message. Demographics and consumer profiles are not about listening to customers and engaging in dialog, but about tuning the stream of messaging.

So now here we are. We have a monolithic structure of marketing that evolved in the middle of an economic anomaly that is in the early throes of a major correction. Marketers are huddled behind CRM dashboards in order to “know” their customers, trying to devise new programs that treat social media as the same old vehicle of broadcast messaging. If we can only make it viral, the thinking goes, consumers will become the channel of communication. Nice thought. Until you actually try to create a viral campaign and realize that consumers aren’t all that willing to spread your oh so very cool message.

The problem is, marketing has no relevant organization to manage social media engagement. Customers are learning to connect all over the Web, to share their own ideas and impressions about products outside the marketers positioning frame, while marketers are still outside these discussions sitting behind their dashboards. And sadly, most marketing organizations don’t even yet recognize the problem. So for all the interesting things I’m learning about tactical marketing engagement, none of them have a fraction of the value of a simple truth that lies at the heart of the social media challenge for marketers. It’s about the role of marketing, and how that role is changing—and not coincidentally, this is precisely the issue that many marketers are struggling with today as they are increasingly pressed to demonstrate their value to the business.

Simply put, marketing has evolved in our lifetime as the Voice of the Company. All messaging, all positioning, all public contact must be channeled through marketing. In a world of social media, that entire paradigm is turned on its head. Not only is it too slow to respond to social media dialog, it’s too narrow a point of view, and too contrived. Consumers not only want to engage with peers through social media, they want to engage with real people in your company that have real insights and an authentic understanding of what your business is about. Ironically, this is what managers often spout as conventional wisdom—that everyone in the company is an ambassador of the company mission—they just don’t practice it, clamping down on employee communications with the market through strict policies. The transition marketing needs to make is to evolve from being the Voice of the Company to being the Choir Director. Marketing needs to leverage its valuable skills in messaging and positioning, and learn to distribute those skills to effective representatives in every corner of the company. Those representatives, trained by marketing on effective communications skills, can join customer communities in authentic dialog representing the company’s interests more authentically than the packaged and filtered voice of marketing.

This change won’t happen overnight, but I’m convinced we’re on the threshold of transition, and the impending recession is likely to accelerate it by the process of natural selection. Remember the last recession in 2001? Marketing was disproportionately represented in large layoffs compared to other departments, and that pattern will continue. Look at Yahoo’s recent layoffs—disproportionate cuts in marketing staff. The marketers still standing will be those that understand how to leverage new market forces, like social media, to connect with customers, delivering both market insights and actionable leads.