These are interesting times indeed for marketers and a clear challenge for us to step up. Many are struggling and experimenting with how marketing communications can infiltrate the open sharing world of social media; how can you go beyond simply emersing the brand message in the consumer world unless you "own the community". There is a world of difference in both advertising messages and sales instances between old guards like MSN or Amazon and Facebook or any one of the dozens of niche communities. This goes to the role marketing needs to play in the new world - marketing should step up and defend the fundamental business principles of embedding revenue models into web 2.0 ventures. The basic exchange of delivering consumer value in return for payment is too often lacking in social media - and we are left scrambling to make a buck from advertising. Fine if you are large enough to risk R&D capital on experimenting with human behaviour (and great for us humans who love to play for free) but not fine if monetisation becomes an afterthought in a hype-inflated scramble for eyeballs that exhausts the passion and funds of smaller entrepreneurs. This will not only make web 2.0 another dotcom tragedy (as frequently and vehemently predicted in some forums), it will further position marketers as soft communicators only and not as the ones who approach customer needs from a solid commercial perspective.