You know the drill. This whole "user-generated content" thing is liable to put us all out of our jobs, right? The explosion of Web 2.0 is shaking up the media industry. The power of many. The wisdom of crowds. Who needs a communication expert? Doom! We're all going to be out of jobs, because the public will learn to make ads as well as we do. A million monkeys and Shakespeare, or something.

Hold up a second here. What, really, is this "Web 2.0" nonsense? Web 2.0 is more than just user-generated content. It is, in short, rich media applications (AJAX), folksonomies (like tags), new development approaches ("fail fast, fail cheap" and agile development), interoperability (RSS) and, yes, user-generated content. And since this is also the world of publishing 2.0, you should totally look up those terms on Wikipedia.

So there is all this new technology and social behavior that lets everyone talk about everything, about our brands and clients, right there in public, and comment. The industry has lost control of the megaphone and it's scared. But what if, rather than freak out about user-generated content being the end of advertising, we fought back, pulled a Yankee Doodle and took those Web 2.0 technologies and used them for our own ends?

Everyone talks about how the industry is changing, nontraditional media, fragmented audiences, blah blah blah. It's true, it's progress, and it's fantastic. It is also obviously scaring the crap out of traditional ad shops. But it's not that hard to adapt, if you really want to.

Let's start with the idea of open sourcing creative within your own company. Imagine how much better a big agency could be if it did things the way we all wished it did, and collaborated -- on everything.

Imagine you're a brand manager. Which would you rather have from your agency: a mid-level art director, a copywriter and an account person as your team, or the knowledge that every single person in the company has given your brand some thought, and that the people who are working on your brand were chosen because they had the most input, enthusiasm and ideas about your brand?

If user-generated content and open initiatives are so powerful, why are we hiding from them? Let's unleash the wisdom of crowds within our organizations.

Basically, what we do at Barbarian Group is, at certain key points in the process, treat the entire company as our creative department. Everyone's smart and talented and different from the next person. So we'll send out a brief to the whole company, and solicit everyone's first instinctual response (which is usually the best thinking anyhow, from a pure inspiration perspective). You don't always know who is going to have the most interesting instinctual solution for a problem. So we look everywhere.

These techniques could also be applied to Web site, advertising creative and television development. For Web site creation it actually has a name, agile development, and it's the primary reason a brand like Facebook is leapfrogging its competitors. For advertising creative development, it's about eliminating silos and finding the best ideas. And for television? Replacing the archaic pilot system with a Web-based petri dish.

If you are a "full-service" agency, then full service means a wider variety of skills and tactics than it did before. If you do Internet, you can't just make a microsite anymore. If you do PR, you can't just talk at the reporters anymore. We all know this. But what to do about it?

It's time to put an end to fixed-feature development processes. We need to build something that resonates with the audience. And as soon as we build it, the audience starts commenting on it. Right now, if we're lucky, they comment positively and we consider it all a success. And if they comment negatively, well, we start over. We've started listening to them, but our response times are stunted.

This industry is still building broadcast spots and Web marketing as if the 24-hour news cycle never happened, as if the blogosphere doesn't exist. If the advertising industry were a social network, we'd be MySpace: played out, man.

Facebook came along with an entirely new development paradigm, making new features every couple of weeks, and is doing laps around MySpace. Advertising needs a Facebook.

What if we developed sites and spots and other marketing experiences as quickly and lightly as possible, launched them, listened to feedback, and launched them again, modified and improved every couple of weeks? Tweaking the message and the features and the tone until it works perfectly. And did it all out in the open, letting our audience see what's happening. They know anyway. The audience isn't dumb (despite decades of effort to the contrary). They notice a change in tone. They know they caused it. They blog about it. They loudly, stridently tell us what they think, and we pretend not to be listening, all the while listening intently. And as we do all this, we seem oblivious to the fact that our pretending not to listen is the part that's most aggravating to our customers.

Why not acknowledge it? What's the harm in telling the audience you're working with them to find a pitch-perfect tone to your conversation? It's time for us to stop being scared of Web 2.0 and take some inspiration from it.

Benjamin Palmer is CEO of the The Barbarian Group.