Marketers can no longer reach their goals for brand awareness and reputation just through paid media and PR. The media and social worlds have become too complicated. The new channel is people. You can make a bigger difference by getting other people to think creatively. Treat all of your employees, partners, and even customers as if they were part of your marketing team.

Each employee at Plum Organics gets a business card with coupons on it. All employees are encouraged to watch people who are shopping in the baby section. When it makes sense, they ask shoppers a few questions about what kinds of baby food they like and give them business cards with coupons for free products as a way of saying thanks.

Surveys at Equinix showed that a third of its employees were not sure how to tell the company's story. The company made a program for its more than 6,000 employees to act as "inside ambassadors." This program gives all types and levels of employees tools to learn more about the company, its culture, its products and services, and how they help customers. In the first few months of the program, more than 20% of employees took the training online or in workshops, and the number of referrals of sales leads and job candidates by employees went up by 43% and 19%, respectively.

Old Navy has always spent most of their advertising budget on TV, especially during the back-to-school season. But in the last few years, they've been putting more effort into digital content that focuses on positive life experiences and helping others. By taking this approach five nights at freddy's, the 2016 #MySquadContest got 32,000 kids to share their "squads" of friends for a chance to win an epic day with their favorite influencer. This led to 3 million video views, a 60% increase in social conversation about @OldNavy, and a 600% increase in the likelihood of recommending Old Navy to a friend (versus those that viewed TV ads only). The program also brought in more money than ever before for their partner, The Boys Girls Club.

4. Add your own ideas to measuring
We can now tell exactly what works and what doesn't because we can measure digital engagement. This gives marketing a chance to find new ways to measure and run itself. In the past, marketing success was measured by how well budgets were kept and how many creative awards were won. Now that data can be measured and strategies can be changed in real time, marketing can show its value to the business in whole new ways.

Cisco has made an online dashboard that lets the whole marketing team see how things are going in real time. The leadership team checks every week to see if what they are doing is working. This analysis can be done on different digital projects, in different places, through different channels, or even on single pieces of content. The result is that resources can be moved around and changed quickly.

A Value Management Office was set up by Zscaler, a cloud-based security platform for businesses. The Office helps each client set, measure, and keep track of their own business goals related to implementing Zscaler. Both Zscaler and its clients are responsible for specific, measurable, and time-based results.

OpenTable just released an app to help restaurants make better use of the information they've been gathering through their reservation system. Now, restaurant owners can run their businesses from their phones, making it easy to answer questions like "How did your last shift go?" The app can tell them if they don't have enough reservations, and soon they'll be able to run marketing campaigns to get more reservations for the same day. More than half of the restaurants that use OpenTable's cloud-based service are already using the app, which they visit an average of nine times a day, seven days a week.