Todd recently wrote an insightful post about marketing. The bit I liked the most came near the end:
But I think the opportunities are way bigger than the risks or challenges. Instead of mass-distributing brand awareness with loud, blunt messages, the awareness of what you offer gets passed from group to group like crowd surfing at a concert. It’s not falling, but it’s sure not in any one set of hands, either.
I’m not sure who qualifies as the crowd, but I like how Todd doesn’t discriminate. Presumably some of those hands belong to marketers and some to other people behind the product (maxim du jour: everybody is a marketer). Most, of course, belong to everybody else. Call them users, customers or the people formerly known as the audience–they’re the crowd that your stuff (ideas, products, causes) surfs on.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Thanks for the link! You’re right that I don’t differentiate who makes up the crowd, as it’s any combination of people on both sides of the vendor/customer line.
Brand communication feels more like some kind of participatory theater these days, played out across different channels at different times, rather than in a single shared time and space. Leveraging that is tricky and exciting, and as I try to get across in the post I think that being a good marketer is to be a facilitator of that experience, rather than its conductor.