Bear with me as I wax a little nostalgic. The year was 2000. As the world wiped its collective brow after the near-calamity that was Y2K, it was time to laugh again. It was time for Alan and Jerome…

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There are currently over one billion people online. There are only 6.865 billion people in the world (for an up-to-the minute count see this), so that’s about 1/7 of the global population. Wow, are you as amazed by that as I am?

Well it’s no wonder then that with the potential for 1/7 (or 14 and a half percent) of the world population to all communicate with each other at any given moment, one person’s opinion matters so much. Many branding and marketing experts are awakening to this phenomenon. Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell have called it the Church of the Customer or Citizen Marketing. Trend spotters call it the “tyranny of transparency.” Whatever you call it though, the fact remains, whether your product or service is the best ever or a total disaster, millions and millions of people will know about it in real time. I think of this observable fact as “word-of-mouth on steroids with a Star Trek transporter.” Anyone, anywhere, can trash you or sing your praises…and they do!

And as if that weren’t thought-provoking enough, soon online critics will be able to save 1,000 words or two by including the audio track they just recorded with Skype-recording or the picture they just took with one of their camera phones. Scared yet? If not, maybe you don’t know about YouTube, where every brand’s a star…or not. Now there are even sites that encourage real time uploading of video like comvu or ustream.tv.

OMG!