There’s a lot of good books and blog posts around these days about Social Media and Marketing. Sometimes more then I can keep up with. Something funny happens when I’m about to crack a book open or discover a new post–I feel like Charlie looking for the Golden Ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

I can say in all honesty that every day since I’ve gotten into this blogging period of my life (yes, it’s become one of those delineated time periods), I find many golden nuggets–ones I want to share. After all what good is the find if you don’t share it, keep the excitement going?

This week, I found the Golden Ticket in Larry Weber’s book, Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business. Weber describes Old Marketing vs. New Marketing in a brilliant table (pp.33-34). He describes the components of marketing, how they were handled the old way, and how they’re now being done the new marketing way. When reading the table marketers are promised to have many ahah moments, where the pieces to the Social Media puzzle will all fit in.

For now, the one I want to refer to is what he calls the “hierarchy” component of marketing. The old marketing way organized information into channels, folders, categories to suit advertisers. Weber says, the new marketing way is by making information available by demand, by keyword, by what suits users.

If you’ve been sitting at your computer for lets say, a few hours–think about how many times already today you’ve googled a term, looked for a colleague on LinkedIn, read the article that came to your inbox from NYTimes.com, looked up a new artist on iTunes or Amazon mp3 and downloaded the one song you really wanted. You get the point.

If you have a success story of how you’ve recently made information about your organization available by demand, how it’s helping to build your business – we’d love to hear from you.