Back in 2001 when the first Sales Pitch Society hit the Web, the burgeoning phenomenon of engineered Word of Mouth was in its nascent stages, barely emerged from its primordial promo goo. Now, just a few years later, this buzz-fueled marketing species has evolved. It's walking upright, developing its own language, establishing cultural groups and social mores, and even christening leaders.

WOM has spawned a bevy of marketing agencies specializing in its practice, a booming trade association, countless books and blogs written by a host of "experts," business conferences and boot-camp-like seminars and newly-devised metrics for measuring success.

In fact, as a true testament to its presence, the WOM movement has prompted analysts to estimate its value as a full-fledged sector of the marketing industry: appraisals show WOM as accounting for anywhere from $40 million to $150 million in annual marketing spending.

Translation: marketers are spending millions of dollars to get us to talk, write, email, blog, rap - whatever - about their products. That's money they used to spend on TV spots or print ads or, hell, skywriting. They're not only tracking, aggregating and scrutinizing what we say about their brands online, they're allocating marketing monies towards influencing us to do it more, be it in-person or not.

So, all those pie-charts and bar-graphs and stats that marketers employ to quantify return on their marketing investment are no longer just measuring how many people watched their ad or heard their ad or drove past their ad.

When it comes to WOM marketing, those pie-charts and bar-graphs and stats are measuring how many people became their ads. If that's not creepy enough, what's really disturbing is that today even more people are ready and willing to morph from human to hum-ad.

It's about time we take a step back and contemplate this new era in the Sales Pitch Society evolution.*

Download Sales Pitch Society II PDF (No knowledge of the first Sales Pitch Society necessary!)

Want more? Download the first Sales Pitch Society PDF.

*Please note: This is by no means an anti-capitalist or anti-advertising manifesto. In fact, it comes from the heart and mind of a spirited proponent of free market capitalism. Neither is this an effort to denigrate the individuals who work in the WOM industry. This is merely an attempt to spur further dialogue regarding the ethical and societal implications of engineered WOM marketing campaigns.