So you think the world of marketing is moving too fast. It’s about to move 4000 times faster. And, if you can’t keep up, you may be out of business sooner than you think.

I was recently paying a cell phone bill for my teenage daughter and noticed she had over 4000 text messages in 30 days. That’s over 5 text messages per hour with no sleep. I was complaining to a friend about this massive amount of text messaging and he said his teenage daughter had 6000 text messages last month. What’s all this communication buzz about? It’s about the mobile phone constantly vibrating with a new message. It’s about the multi-tasking ability of our next generation and it’s about your message being lost in a world of fast paced conversations.

What does that say about the attention span you can expect on your advertisements in the future? Who would possible sit down and watch a 30 second commercial or take the time to read a banner ad when they are communicating with 10 friends on Facebook, checking in on Twitter, watching a YouTube video while playing an interactive video game on their laptop?

The answer is no one will take the time to engage with your advertisement if you are not part of their conversation in the first place.

You only need to listen and watch a teenager to know what’s ahead. If you have had the pleasure of spending a few days with a teenager recently, you can easily see that the art of communication is changing rapidly and will have a profound impact on marketing communications.

First of all, the expectation of a relevant response when a teen asks you or your company a question will go from “we will get back to you in 24 hours” to “you better get back to me in 5 seconds” or you will be lost in the conversation.

You will need to listen and learn to understand how to be a part of their conversation or you will become irrelevant. And, if you attempt to be part of a conversation that is intrusive, you make become relevant very quickly and out of business even sooner.

The art of telling a story in marketing is rapidly changing to participating in a conversation. And, the most important part of a conversation is listening, not talking. Are we good listeners in marketing?

I don’t think so, in fact most companies still spend their time trying to figure out what we need to show and tell our customers to get them to buy our product, but few are really listening and figuring out how to engage a customer in a conversation, because that is much harder. There are conversations taking place right now about your product, they might be taking place via text messaging, on a blog or on Facebook, but most companies don’t even know what they are saying about them, because they are too busy figuring out what to tell them.

As these teenagers get older and become even a bigger force in the marketplace, we all better figure out how to become part of their conversation in a positive manner or you will be lost in the conversation or  even worse, you will be part of a conversation that may kill your brand and you will never even see it coming.

If you want to get back to your comfort zone, the one area that hasn’t changed about our teenagers is they still know everything!

However, if you want to be a successful business, you better start listening.