The biggest heist in history was when newspapers and magazines allowed Google to "crawl" their content to readers, to pay nothing and to sell ads around their stories. Google became, in other words, the ubiquitous newspaper right under the noses of proprietors who should have charged.

It turns out that consumers want one thing: their issues resolved. And, they want it done fast. Faster than fast. The challenge is this: the majority of brands act fast... as fast as they can. Sadly, it's not even close to being fast enough for consumers. Now, brands and consumers are going to have move forward and figure out a way to define what the true speed limits are.

The true humility and humiliation of social media is not what the web analytics tell us: it's what the audience does (or doesn't do) with the content. You can buy audience, links, and clicks, but you can't buy people who care and want to share whatever it is that you are doing.