Bernoff presented a quick outtake from his recent book “Empowered”

The ratio between customer generated brand mentions and brand generated impressions is about one to four.

Roll in a believability factor – Who ya gonna trust? Your friend or the advertiser? – and you pretty much get the idea: In today's social landscape the customer is clearly a voice that is heard. And it might justs be louder than the brand..

But the good news from a brand managers POV is that of all the customers speaking up, Bernoff estimates between 6 to 7 percent are the primary influencers - those who are making the biggest and widest spreading ripples in the pond.

Find them, listen in and mine their insight as well as their influence and your brand have a better chance at success…

The fundamentals are surely the same – the need to connect emotionally to the consumer, the need to provide utility and relevance to satisfy the consumers “WIIFM” factor. And effective consumer engagement and dialog has always impacted the bottom line - not matter the age.

Dani Nadel, of Publicis Modem USA points out that the B2C conversation today is now “always on,” happens at a speed and with connections between the physical and digital world probably not imagined just a few years ago.

And the consumer has more influence over the discussion that ever before. And dialog is across all channels and all processes that the customer encounters in their journey.

So what are the key things a brand can do to be effective? Dani points out that the pillars to success for digital dialog today are:

1.Listen First. Talk later.
Successful businesses are targeting their conversations where they will be most effective. And this means listening in first to what is being said, and who is saying it.

2. Help your Friends.
Once a brand has connected to the heart of one, the brand can encourage that “friend” to connect to their herd – and facilitate that connection by making it easy to share information and social currency.

3. Be inclusive and accepting
Allowing co-creation and crowd sourcing – provided the brand is actually present and active in the conversation. Don’t “launch it a forget it.” Consumers are providing feedback – good, bad, ugly and otherwise. Don’t ignore it.

4. Be useful
Provide utility to extend your brand.

5 Walk the talk
Successful brands empower their employees and unleash them to participate in the conversation

6. Be social
Don’t be a brand that goes social – shift from “campaign think” to live connection, real time sharing.

And one final tip Dani provides – measure, test, rinse and repeat. Do holistic analytics, measure impact, and learni from the analytics to improve your brand's dialog skill set.