As a brand and communications planner, what’s different for me is the availability of consumer insights, beliefs, proclivities and biases — all in real time. Posters (not to be confused with Pasters) flood the web today with product and usage comments, all of which are searchable and findable with some finger work. The resulting brand building and brand managing insights were previously only available via qualitative research, which took weeks to recruit and field. As a planner, I feel like a kid in a candy shop. In answer to your question, I say evolution.

The brand manager for a large company is entrusted with something of considerable value and therefore has the immediate burden of “not screwing it up.” So, it takes a tremendously bold person to step out and be revolutionary in that position. The adoption of digital media will be slow because it’s either unproven, the data is not established or trusted and so on.

The small company can be more revolutionary because they don’t have the same overhear of preservation, and may be willing to be more experimental.

As far as your question I think the answer has got to be split into two categories – Large and Small business. For a large business (like P&G) digital is just an evolution. Yes, it is different and companies will have to first staff up for it and then actually learn how to best exploit it. While I’ve seen some good attempts in different areas it seems pretty clear that there is a lot to try and not many companies (including the platforms like facebook) really know what will work yet. What’s worse is that there seems to be some talk about this outlet or that – podcasts or blogs or twitter or facebook – when in reality each of your consumers will use a different combination of social media outlets so large companies will need to use them all to hit everyone.

As for Small businesses it is a Revolution. In the dark ages before the digital revolution everything was expensive. You had to have storefronts and market research firms and IT guys. Now everything is cheap. Ebay and e-commerce sites for sales, facebook and online surveys for research, and video posted on youtube and streamed to your site. It allows companies to do things that they couldn’t do previously.

Ultimately the biggest challenge is the same for both: What is the best way to use the literally hundreds of new tools to best connect with your consumers to increase sales?