clipped from: www.creatingcustomerevangelists.com 
A solitary citizen today with a blog or podcast has a substantially better chance of influencing the public's perceptions of billion-dollar corporations than ever before. With a voice, a vote and a vocation, tens of millions of Americans are involving themselves in the cultural lives of business. Social media are enabling the fusion of pop culture with traditional marketing, and it's causing all manner of disruption.
With that in mind, "Citizen Marketers" makes the case that the distributed, power-sharing nature of social media is a reflection of the ideals of democracy, where liberty, free speech and freedom of association are its ruling principles. As a result, positioning, message delivery and reputation management are in the hands of the populace, where anyone can be a publisher or broadcaster. For tradition-bound managers, the book's theme is simple: Autocratic message control is out of control. People are creating content about products and services whether companies like it or not. The citizen marketers themselves are hardly average members of society or customer databases, which of course makes them progressive or dangerous, based on one's vantage point. "Citizen Marketers" examines and classifies the work of everyday people who build content on behalf of products, brands, companies or people and provides ideas on working with them.