Listen. This is possibly the most obvious and most difficult change in mindset that social media marketing requires of businesses. While we're all used to identifying a target market, deciding what to do, what to offer them, and putting together a call-to-action, it's not so easy to do marketing when the first step is listening. Because this means listening before you act - listening to what consumers have to say and the way they recommended products or brands to each other. It's from here that you need to extract the information for taking action. If, then, we step back just a little from the way we're accustomed to thinking about marketing campaigns, we can see that listening to consumers before acting is probably what we've always wanted to do. Certainly, we have tried it. Focus groups, market research and other means have all provided information, but this information has always been incomplete, influenced by context and, by anyone's standards, limited. But what if we'd had the chance to listen to consumers while they were waiting for a bus, having a coffee or eating out with friends? What information could we have picked up for guiding our activities? This is what social media marketing lets us do today, because that's where the conversations between consumers are: they leave traces, and we can identify, track and measure them. And once they've been tracked and measured, we can choose what action to take, how to stimulate consumers both on- and offline. Marketing then becomes a case of listen & act.