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New school of thought: PR and marketing need to completely rethink their approach--from pitching to listening, from measuring eyeballs to measuring engagement, from PR-speak to the language of business.

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It's no secret that social media tools are turning both the media and the communication world upside down. To paraphrase Ken Kesey, in today's media environment, the inmates are now ill charge of the asylum. A new blog is created every minute, and millions of tweets are making their way around the world (at one point during the Iranian election controversy in July, 200,000 tweets an hour were being posted to social microblogging site Twitter.)

Thanks to advances in technology that have made it incredibly easy and virtually free to create content, your customers, your employees and other stakeholders are now the media, the editors and the reviewers. They are in control, and they're going to let you know what they think by voicing their opinions and changing their behavior. Despite the best efforts of PR and marketing types, consumers will continue to seize power from those in control, be they dictators, CEOs, PR professionals or marketers.

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"Mental earthquakes"

From a measurement perspective, this social media revolution requires an entirely new way of thinking about what we do and how we define success. We need to look at these changes as we would an earth quake: The tectonic plates of marketing and communication are shifting. As a result, some institutions will collapse and others will rise from the ruins. The degree to which we can get our minds around these "earthquakes" will be the degree to which PR and marketing professionals will survive. There are three areas where I would suggest that "mental earthquakes" have occurred:

1. Timeliness has been redefined.

2. The role of PR and communication has been redefined.

3. Most definitions of success are irrelevant.

This requires a completely new mind-set if we hope to evaluate our success in this new environment.

The need to redefine "now"

The most obvious change in how we approach communication today has to do with the definition of timeliness. There's no...

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