With marketers all over the world recognizing that social media is having an enormous effect on the bottom-line; we're entering an age of participatory marketing. Many marketers are no longer willing to launch a social media campaign that hasn't gone through a focus group or user test that's provided feedback on whether or not it's going to bomb.

The risk of launching a social media driven campaign that could spin out of control is huge. But we can mitigate the risk by including users right from the beginning. Focus groups & user tests are great, but often an expense that doesn't return insightful results. The real insight comes from statistical metric analysis post-launch. Where we can see what users are talking about, how messages are spreading, and who we need to incent to get more awareness or engagement.

The following is a representation of the phases of a standard marketing model with entity leadership denoted next to each phase.

Where represents the client, represents the agency, and represents the customers.

Now, involving the customer earlier and keeping them involved changes the model to the process of participatory marketing.

I'm not saying that this model is the best way to run social media projects; but if we start listening to customers and use those insights to drive business needs we're already starting on better footing. Keeping the user engaged throughout the process will help ensure the campaign is really targeted to the right crowd.