• Forbes CMO Network, Friday, October 22, 2010 9:56 AM

Josh Bernoff, svp of idea development at Forrester Research, says top-down ways of running the marketing department are on their last legs and you'd better start training your people about what's important to you, and then trust them to do things right.

The reason? "Your voice -- the marketer's voice -- is going to be drowned out" by consumers talking to one another on social networks. Forrester has developed a tool called Peer Influence Analysis that shows that consumers generate 500 billion impressions upon one another regarding products and services every year -- or 2,841 impressions per online consumer per year.

"Only empowered employees can operate at the speed of empowered customers," Bernoff writes. "For marketers, this boils down to a key question: Are you allowing your staff to come up with solutions that will improve your word of mouth?" Handily, Bernoff has a book -- Empowered: Unleash your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Company -- that tells you how to do it.

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