Much of marketing in the past has been about maintaining a brand image and paying professional marketeers and PR professionals to do this for us. Social media offers the possibility of finding our own voices and having real conversations with real customers.

Much of the public use of social media by corporations up until now has been by marketing. In fact the phrase has come to mean a subset of what is possible with the social web and has to some extent become devalued as a result. I have deliberately avoided that bias in this book partly in an attempt to address the imbalance but also because I believe that helping organizations, or those who work for them, to find their own voice, or voices, is the best way to connect to their customers.