Tip of the hat to Kirk Skodis who turned me on to Mitch Joel’s blog, Six Pixels of Separation. In anticipation of this week’s Advertising 2.0 panel in New York, Mitch’s macro perspective on the value of Social Media has added relevance:

What if everything we knew about Marketing and Advertising until now really was just an anomaly…maybe what we’re really seeing with Social Media and Web 2.0 is how Marketing, Advertising and Communications was really meant to work… even as traditional agencies continue to clamp on to business as usual.

The digital revolution, the ability to receive so much data from multiple inputs, has changed the rules of marketing. Consumers are empowered in the control of their engagements. The DVR lets us skip commercials (or watch them again), the blogosphere lets us hand pick our information sources, the web lets us communicate with whom we like, when we like, how we like.

More data means more clutter in our lives, which is why Social Media, rises in value as a marketing tool. Word of mouth, also known as peer pressure, is the most powerful catalyst for purchase. Just ask any teen-ager.

The web is the perfect peer pressure proving grounds. Increasingly, we rely on the suggestions of friends who send links to videos, community for ratings on restaurants and social networks like Facebook to keep our finger on the pace of culture, politics and entertainment.

Mitch’s point is important because in the search to create a viable economic model for web entertainment content, distribution is key, but distribution is worthless without effective marketing.

You can’t open a movie without a big budget advertising campaign and a a water-cooler urgency for audiences to see your film on opening night. You can’t break a TV pilot without a decent time slot and a lead-in audience and you can’t get a critical mass of views on a web show without virality and decent editorial promotion. In all of these cases, Social Media is playing a larger role in defining success.

Those who understand how to harness the power of Social Media will be among the winners in the shakedown of “business as usual.”