Marketing departments to become conversation departments?

I was recently in a research debrief where the latest ad was being analysed.  This was a regional ad and people from many countries were linked in via phone.  Around the table was the regional brand manager, marketing director, two representatives from strategic planning as well as the regional and global planning directors from the ad agency.  All-in-all a huge level of resource all focused around the production of a 30 second piece of content.

It made me wonder how marketing departments are going to cope with the "bandwidth requirements" of producing and controlling the greatly increased amount of content they are going to have to manage if the become more socialised as well as the fact that this process is going to have to be more interactive and real time.

Perhaps they will switch money away from spend on traditional broadcast media to convert themselves into conversation departments - or at least set up conversation departments within marketing.  These will be staffed by brand dialogue managers whose job it will be to manage the brand's presence in all the various social spaces it is represented in.

Its going to be very interesting.