Now, Amanda Chapel’s agenda is pretty transparent. She (or, more precisely, the anonymous people that created her) is trying to keep her job relevant.

So @brampitoyo retweets this:

Retweet @amandachapel: When press releases start with 'cause I'm friendz with @chrisbrogan' the market economy is over.

Which just smacks of complete ignorance about the processes that create a market economy.

This is how the market works. Someone you trust—your friend, your sibling, your co-worker—buys something of interest, and if they really like it, they’ll probably talk about it a lot. Depending on how much you trust them, you’ll probably find yourself compelled to get one, too.

This is how it worked in the medieval burghs. There wasn’t any advertising, or PR, or demographic research. It was all word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth spread faster if you trusted where the words were coming from.

Skip ahead about 500 years, and the mass media has subverted this word-of-mouth trust system. We’re just expected to believe that the media has our best interests in mind. Ads replace word-of-mouth. Professional reviewers replace recommendations from your cousin or your mom. We’re trained to trust the system. And the market is being gamed.

And then the World Wide Web came into play.

Now we’re moving back towards the word-of-mouth network. Even though you’ll probably never actually meet the people you’ve met on the web, the ones you trust the most are actual real people. Not bots, not sock-puppets, not corporate-controlled personas. Believe it or not, the human brain actually has great capacity for weeding out bullshit, it’s just that most of us, for some stupid reason or another, refuse to actually activate it.

So you learn which sources to trust. It’s still not easy to eradicate the corporate party line, but it’s easier for someone to get their voice out there.

There will always people who will continue to game the system. But the returns will continue to diminish.

What corporations will discover is that people will come to demand actual quality, and not the mere promise of it. Look at what happened to the music industry. Look at what is happening to the movie industry. You can’t just make a single product and clone it repeatedly ad nauseam and expect the people to lap it up. You’ve actually got to make something.

I wish I could credit where I got the word from, but it does describe part of what Web 2.0 has accomplished. Disintermediation. Getting rid of the middle man. Both seller and buyer can only benefit.