Today’s agencies fail to help marketers engage with consumers, who, as a result, are becoming less brand-loyal and more trusting of each other. To turn the tide, marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations. Over the next five years, traditional agencies will make this shift; they will start by connecting with consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them.

We are becoming more trusting of each other? WTF? Last time I checked word-of-mouth had been around since the dawn of time and was so powerful because we trusted each other. If it’s true that consumers are becoming less trusting of corporations it’s only because they try to pretend they’re our friends rather than just selling us the products that we want or need.

Somehow dimwits like Zuck have not figured this out yet. Perhaps OpenSocial is a move in the right direction, and someone will figure out how to create a parent meta-structure, as individual social networks come and go. Zuck did it the other way around- he tried to buold an internet inside the internet, instead of trying to create a meta-structure ABOVE the social networks.