We've had collossal bank failures--WaMu and Wachovia--a $700B Wall Street bailout, and the single largest one-day drop of the stock market, more than 9%, followed by an insane roller coaster of highs and lows. That's just the surface stuff--not getting into interbank lending rates, credit markets, Fed liquidity and foreign capital flight. The past few weeks has seen direct news of the ripples hitting our own industry with layoffs starting in advertising and media.

All of this, of course, is only symptomatic. As the CEO of a social media technology startup, SocialRep, I depend on sales, credit and investor funding to keep the business accelerating down the runway. In the past few weeks, one of my major prospects, a company in the financial sector, went belly up rather suddenly--eating up weeks of energy, time and investment to close a deal. Many of my other prospects are visibly slowing their spending--holding back on any outlay of cash until they can see where things are headed. The limit on one of my credit accounts was cut back, leaving me a lot less breathing room. On the VC front, the impact is also evident--even though many VCs have large funds, they're slowing down dramatically and being more careful in their investments, waiting to see who has what it takes to survive a downturn.

These are all serious signs of a market slowdown that goes way beyond Wall Street--right to our own front doors. When banks stop lending and credit dries up, it's like running out of gas. But I didn't write this post to spread doom and gloom. While we're in the early stages of what may be the biggest market correction of our lifetime, this is all part of the cycle.

It's the nature of systems--part of the very process of organizational advancement and evolution--and many of the most important transformations of social and economic systems can only happen through disruption. The larger the disruption, the greater the capacity for fundamental change. Everywhere you look where we try to control and minimize the natural cycle of systemic disruption, we wind up only delaying--and often increasing the magnitude--of the eventual, inevitable disruption.

Consider the forest fire. We spent decades trying to control and minimize forest fires--Smoky the Bear!--only to discover that we were inadvertently causing a massive buildup of dead underbrush and fuel, making the eventual, inevitable forest fire far more powerful and destructive than the smaller fires that used to happen more frequently.

We've done something similar in our economy. We've leveraged our assets through credit to unnaturally extend and sustain a supposedly endless cycle of prosperity. We used equity and credit to go beyond our paychecks to buy lots and lots of stuff, and the economy grew unnaturally--like some genetically engineered 1000-pound pumpkin. But we leveraged our prosperity on something unsustainable--housing prices. And when we finally reached the headwinds that pushed prices down, the whole thing began to unwind. If you don't have any more equity and credit to buy lots of stuff, the economy slows down. But it's worse than that, because now you have to divert your paycheck from buying even the important stuff to pay down the credit bill, so the economy stalls even more. That we're seriously floating major legislation to try and prop up the underlying housing prices and credit is not surprising, but it's not comforting. It's as if we're saying, uh oh, bigger fires? Let's clone an army of Smoky the Bears, and stop fires once and for all. The whole premise is simply not credible. The decline, the disruption, however painful it may be, however we may be able to attenuate some of its worst effects, is a natural part of the system. Not only can we not avoid it. We literally can't grow without it.

Once you understand that reality, get past the denial, you have a clearer view to what it takes to survive and even thrive in transformational chaos.
Speaking dispassionately, the role of disruption is to challenge the system and eliminate weaknesses--to burn out the deadwood and disease. Once that happens--assuming the system wasn't so diseased that it collapses entirely--there's an opportunity for reorganization and redevelopment, an advancement to a higher order of organization.

From an American perspective, we have seen this cycle play out in marketing for well over a century. Some of the cycles of disruption and reorder have been dramatic, some more subtle. We've seen marketing evolve through cycles that defined marketing by distribution, merchandizing, personal selling, mass markets, mass media, branding, database marketing, internet marketing and most recently social media, just to name some of the most obvious transformations. Some of those cycles were driven most by innovation--radio, TV, computers, networks--others were driven most by disruption--two world wars, the Great Depression, regional wars and countless smaller recessions.

I watched this cycle play out directly during the Dotcom boom and bust when I was president of an agency in San Francisco, and I'm anticipating that we'll watch it all play out again, but this time on a larger scale, with greater disruption, and with greater impact on the reorganization of marketing as we rebuild. The cycle is predictable, but it's not orchestrated. It happens through a process of natural selection, driven primarily by short term business objectives. So here's my 2-cent prediction on the mechanics of this correction.

Companies are already starting to feel the liquidity squeeze, and their first response will be to hold off on any new expenses. This will ripple out and return as a drop in orders and an increase in selling cycles, making the liquidity crunch tighter. After cutting programs, the more aggressive companies will start layoffs. Layoffs ultimately will disproportionately affect marketing, as companies focus more intensely on short-term sales efforts. At this point, we'll see a large number of senior marketing executives and managers retired--they're expensive and their contribution is more strategic than the short-term imperative to close deals. Marketing will be redefined functionally as sales support and lead generation, and marketing directors will take over the day-to-day reins. Most companies will retreat into this relentlessly sales-driven mode until the bleeding stops and markets stabilize.

At this point, the natural selection shifts from who and what gets cut to who and what gets selected for stabilization and growth. Companies still have to compete, and they'll look for ways to gain a market advantage. The focus early on will be disproportionately on demand generation. Budgets will move to more highly measurable marketing programs, fueling a tidal shift towards digital media.
Marketing directors who have grown up with technologies will explore emerging tools that improve lead generation and campaign performance.

Vendors and startups who weren't overly leveraged before the drop will aggressively innovate new technologies to feed the hunger for cheap and efficient lead generation. But all of this will happen against the backdrop of a new, accepted foundation of social media technology. All of the Web 2.0 hype will have long since burned away, and the useful stuff--the components that help companies connect more effectively with customers to provide the products they want and need without all the bloat of inneficient product development and promotion.

This, ulitmately, is the evolution imperative that will be at the heart of recovery. An evolved paradigm of media--no longer a fight between broadcast and social--but an integration at the foundational level based on what allows successful businesses to advance. It won't happen by design. It won't happen by chance. It's the natural direction of the system, and the massive disruption caused by the financial meltdown is only the catalyst.

Personally, I'm convinced social media is going to be woven into the fabric of the new marketing infrastructure. Suffice to say that it's not "true belief" on my part. I've written and spoken about this in the past, that the media paradigm we've known all our lives and accepted as the norm is in fact a bubble that is bursting. The historical status quo has always been word-of-mouth. Technology simply evolved in a way that disrupted the status quo and put control in the hands of a few, primarily because of the expense of technology-based communication. But technology is now commodity.

Communication has returned to a higher level of democratization. And now we're seeing the media bubble burst, right at the same time we're seeing a more acute economic bubble burst along with it.