Unless you are a marketer at Citigroup and have received billions in bailout money from the Federal Government:  you have a lot of work to do in 2009. There will be no corporate bailouts for most of us. Tightening your marketing budgets while still trying to drive new business and retain clients, in addition to creating customer evangelism isn’t going to be easy. BUT it could be getting cheaper.

There are a number of new social media weapons in our arsenal that enable us to communicate inexpensively with consumers on a one-on-one basis — and become evangelists for their brand. For instance, my view of Twitter (a new mobile phone social media platform) was forever changed recently when I “Twittered” my love of the AMC show Madmen. Moments after tweeting about the show I was pinged by “Betty Draper”, the lead character’s wife in the show. I clicked on her profile, and the link took me to a Twitter profile page for all of the main characters from the show who were Twittering about their lives circa early 1960’s Manhattan. I can’t imagine how cheap it was to do this. As a consumer, it was something I felt connected to on a very individual basis. This is just one example of the type of new media initiatives marketers can employ to create brand evangelists for their products.

One might say the Mad Men example is too different from the majority of CPG and services companies located in Chicago. Investigate the products people are talking about online. Check out this article on Facebook to see the level of interest that a paper towel can generate. The bottom line is that people are passionate about the smallest things and they ARE talking. No better time to engage them than now.

When you have stories like today’s Adage article concerning consumers being tired repetition in advertising, there seems to be a real opportunity for companies to step into this “ad vortex” and engage people more easily. It’s a whole lot cheaper than a million dollar ad campaign AND you don’t have to change your name to do it.