Want to know whether your whiz-bang online marketing idea will reach your target audience? Unsure how your best customers would respond if you set up a Facebook page or started a blog? Still insisting that you are representative of your ideal customers even though you only log on to do occasional banking, read the news and check email?

One of the most overstated and misunderstood concepts in business today must be ROI - return on investment. Ever since the arrival of digital marketing with the promise of highly specific metrics capable of breaking down a campaign into detailed numbers of clicks, conversions, dollar value and revenue versus cost, lazy marketing has been ruled by the instant analytics displayed on a sales spreadsheet. Every proposal becomes prefaced with “What is the potential ROI?” Every campaign is judged by the immediate numbers with little consideration of context, long term effects or related benefits to the business.

Customers don’t buy products.

You read that right. Before you click away thinking I’ve finally given up on life and gone ga-ga, think about it for a moment. Customers don’t buy products - they buy the means of achieving a personal goal. That means your business isn’t really the product you are selling, but the goal others are achieving.

“Any company that can’t imagine the future, won’t be around to enjoy it.”

CK Prahalad

Decades ago, the pace of change was slow enough that the future seemed far away. The car people were driving today would still be around next year. Technology still lasted for years instead of weeks. Companies could feel safe and secure operating within rigid business models based around what worked before.

I, along with many others, have been shouting the customer engagement mantra for a while now as online business continues to evolve. The upswing in social networking use, greater transparency through word of mouth and the ability for consumers to find virtually any information quickly and easily has meant businesses have had to begin communicating more openly with consumers if they wish to stave off negative publicity.

Google’s new Sidewiki project, recently launched in Beta, has removed any last doubt (official Google post). Sidewiki is potentially the biggest development in word of mouth marketing since instant messaging started, and a failure to take it seriously could be very costly indeed for some businesses. Sidewiki gives everyone the ability to leave comments - positive or negative - against every single webpage.

Including yours.