Denise Howell writes:
Savvy advertising and public relations professionals have always known this truth: if you're not engaging your customers or clients, you're not reaching them. Today, the same savvy professionals recognize something else: the Web has inalterably shifted the traditional rules of engagement, and continues to transform them every day. The network represented by the Web and our other ubiquitous tools of instant, constant, and potentially global conversation, is now and increasingly will be a cornerstone of human interaction, work, and entertainment. In such a world there are no more "messages." There is only show, don't tell.
Technologies such as blogs, RSS, podcasts, and wikis are revolutionary for many reasons, but the primary one for businesses is this:
These tools enable fast, inexpensive, direct, genuine discussion between those within an organization and the rest of the world. In other words, they allow a business as never before to show, not tell, its customers precisely how it cares about them, what it is doing to continue to warrant their trust and loyalty, and, perhaps most importantly, why its products or services are high quality and worthwhile.