While the ultimate execution will no doubt evolve, the direction is actually good for consumers, advertisers, and publishers alike. It’s good for consumers, because what they see is custom-tailored based on the company they like to keep. It’s good for advertisers, because they enjoy highly targeted inventory (which is hard to come by online). It’s good for publishers, because it allows them to charge premium CPMs (and invest in improving the quality of their site) without loading up their pages with irrelevant ads all screaming for a consumer’s attention. Everybody’s happy.

Now the challenge is up to marketers. How do you tap this opportunity? Who are your most influential customers? Where do they hang out online? How does your brand become part of the conversation? Will the cash register ring? Get smart now. This genie is not going back in the bottle.

The answer from the WOMMA attendees was clear: Better measurement. Better predictability. Better industry benchmarks. PQ said that 83% of the market comes from services, and 17% from technology and tools – look for the latter to grow as brands increasingly demand ways to automate and manage WOMM results.

You’ll also see new models around influence behavior, with ways to identify self-motivated “genuine” influencers versus those that have sold their soul to the highest bidder to spread the word. It’s no doubt hard to find those needles in a haystack – but leading marketers will have strategies and tools for this since they know the lifetime value of a genuine influencer is greater than anything the largest direct consumer can offer!

Click here for a recent video Jim did on the social graph, its history, and how it impacts online marketing today.

Marketing through Facebook or any social media site works if done strategically. To do it right, find out what is emotionally engaging about your brand and what motivates people to connect with and influence their social circles – and make sure you test, analyze, and optimize to prove it. Then put what works on social media sites like Facebook or any other, and watch the results come in (see the iLike example).  Social media sites are great marketing channels if given the right content, brand experience, and testing approach – this is what makes the medium work, not the medium itself.

Blognation’s Oliver Starr reinforced last week that people are sharing more than searching these days, and Google’s recent launch of Google Share is further evidence of this trend. Try searching for the best cell phones using Google search – how long does it take to weed through the results? Now ask your tech geek friend the same question – you’ll get much more actionable info.

We’re not saying that traditional marketing is completely dead, but sites like Mahalo and Techmeme get it - they use “human filtering” to make finding trusted, relevant information easier - and marketers should take note. Today’s consumers are tired of information overload and seek guidance from friends and contacts to get through the mess. In other words, motivate people to share your brand messages with their social circles, and you’ll get much better bang for the buck than trying to squeeze extra pennies out of your SEO or SEM campaigns.

It’s true that social networking has historically been dominated by the younger generation, but as mentioned recently in the NYT, those times are changing. Sure – grownups often need more hand holding to get them started. But ultimately they have deeper pockets, stronger and more established networks, and greater spheres of influence – so if you can motivate and activate them socially as sites like Gather, Eons, and ReZoom are doing, you can make a killing.

Ultimately age doesn’t matter for social media to be effective. Everyone has social needs that smart marketers can nurture and monetize through social networking functionality and strategic use of the social graph. And it’s not just about MySpace or Facebook - as more niche sites are built and as other core sites build in native social networking elements, marketers should think less about being tied to specific sites and more about the overall tapestry of social connections and how to leverage it.

The cat’s out of the bag now! Actually, the news was no real surprise to us. Most marketers are clueless when it comes to developing a social media strategy. They rely on ambitious creative executions that succumb to the inevitable. They either get watered down by the content police, or fattened up with the kind of marketing schlock the world could care less about.

Achieving real viral marketing results starts with strategy. You need to test multiple approaches to your program — content, creative, offers, experiences — whatever is strategic and on-brand for you. Analyze the data. Figure out what out what the world will find engaging, useful, funny or entertaining — and don’t be so darn sure of yourself as to skip this critical step. As we put it last week: your job as a marketer is to figure out what’s going to make people sneeze. It’s a critical step, adopted by far too few marketers.

The Jupiter piece also dissed advertising on social networks. Why? They’re too cluttered, they say. That may be the case with MySpace. But ask just about anyone who has done a banner buy on Facebook (noted for its clean UI) how their media buy performed. They’ll tell you it stank. Again, no surprise to us. People are on Facebook to connect. To entertain themselves. Get scoop. Poke friends. That audience isn’t mindlessly surfing, distracted by monkeys bouncing around trees. They’re highly, highly engaged with the property and they’re engaged with their social circle. They’ve got no time for you. And just when you thought those crazy kids couldn’t be any more clever, they go and do something like this. Now we’re talking!

But does this maxim really hold up? Very few people who talk about influencer models support their assumptions with data, primary research, or mathematical rigor. From where we sit (analyzing a network of over 20 million consumers), the secret to marketing in today’s media landscape – which is driven by word of mouth and consumer control — is less about identifying sneezers, and more about determining what makes people sneeze. When marketers figure out a formula for making people sneeze and apply it to a well-understood social graph, suddenly people who would not match legacy definitions of “influential” begin to contribute greatly to viral growth.

For example, one thing we have seen repeatedly is that in order for virality to scale, clarity is key — clarity of the value proposition, clarity of the messaging, clarity of the social standing one can achieve by both participating in and sharing an experience. As a marketer, the time window you have to motivate a consumer to act is usually a matter of seconds, and lack of clarity can be disastrous for viral activity. Often marketers try to become too clever when attempting a viral campaign, but the subtle truth is that too much cleverness and complexity can lose the audience in that split second where they are deciding whether or not to share an experience with their peers. When the value of both participating in and sharing an experience is immediately clear, viral activity is much more likely to flourish.

A key to our success is our ability to deeply understand and measure the behavior of consumers, and to steer them towards what motivates them to act. Even with the best creative campaign, if it does not use clarity to play to an individual’s motivation to share, it will never achieve meaningful viral results.

It is only a matter of time before everyone is doing this, and must be doing it to stay competitive. As Jim (our CEO) covered in his eTail keynote, the era of “connected commerce” is now, requiring a fundamental paradigm shift in marketing strategy that focuses on enabling consumer-initiated brand and product advocacy. People advocate when they are emotionally engaged, so a marketer’s primary goal should be to provide brand experiences that create strong, positive emotional connections - inspiring consumers to share those experiences within their social circles. Since consumers are inherently complex and unpredictable, the only way to determine what will engage them is through trialing and testing, knowing how to measure and optimize, and steering the experience toward what generates the greatest positive emotional reaction.