Conversational or word-of-mouth marketing is the new challenge for today’s marketers.

The market landscape is less-and-less under the control of big corporations and more-and-more defined by consumers themselves (e.g., through the emergence of new media such as the Internet).

Any consumer becomes a potential amplifier for a brand (positive or negative) and his or her opinion can be shared among peers as well as through his/her extended peer network.

The consumer is in control and wants to share his/her view on brand experiences. The blogs phenomenon is but one facet of this radical change in society.

As an illustration of this paradigm, the graph to the right shows the growth in the amount of weblogs created since 2003 (according to Technorati, www.technorati.com & www.sifry.com). Moreover, an estimated 120,000 new weblogs are created worldwide each day.

This shows the importance of the role consumers play in the new “global village”.