One of those statistics: " [The] glut is so great that if all the world's 6bn people were to talk solidly on the telephone for the next year, their words could be transmitted over the potential capacity within a few hours." Financial Times (no link, surprisingly)

Corporate communications is becoming the key marketing activity for most global companies. There's a crisis somewhere everyday, and the need to understand and react is vital. Traditional marketing has little to contribute to this process, since marketing is a much more considered and histrorically more cerebral company function.