I am hoping that you will put this post in one of those time capsules, bury it under a pile of paper on your desk, bring it out in 2015 (that’ll be the next time you clean your desk), and say, “Well, gawldarnit-all, that Old Man Eklund may have been right…once.”

A million little things are said every day about social media. Of those, 842,653 of them are written by media people. (You know ‘em – nice glasses, fashionable jeans, iPad.) The remaining pieces are written by people talking about the media people writing the other stuff.

You know who doesn’t seem to be writing a lot about social media? Organizational development people. They should because of all the people within the economic ecosystem who will become most affected by social media, it’s the people who understand how organizations work, communicate, engender trust, and organize resources who will need to lead companies through the onslaught of billions of consumers wanting access to all layers of a company’s culture.

Marketing won’t lead the social media revolution. There’s no way. So, here’s my prediction for what’s going to go down.

1. Marketing will continue to be the pied-pipers. They will be the first to embrace intense customer dialogue. They will — as they always have — attempt to speak on behalf of all other departments when called upon. For example, when a cacophony of consumers ask a brand to address a product flaw, it will be marketing who will attempt to address it, not the product developers or product managers. Increasingly this will frustrate consumers as the answers they need outpace the flow of information that marketing can provide. Depending upon the circumstances, the consumers will rise up using their social connections to become a deafening cry for help.

2. When dealt with this type of situation, marketing too will cry for help. They will say, “The questions they’re asking are legit. They’re detailed. They want real answers.” Marketing will reach out to the product managers who will reach out to their product development teams, who at first will push back. They will ask marketing “How many people are asking this? Who knows about this problem? Why can’t you squelch it? Isn’t that your job?” So now marketing and the product development teams don’t like each other.

3. The VP of Sales begins receiving emails from sales people in the field. This product flaw has become ingrained into each and every sales discussion. It seems as though everyone knows about it. “Where did this come from? Who started it? What isn’t marketing making it go away? WHO’S ADDRESSING THIS PRODUCT FLAW??!” The VP of Sales goes to the CEO saying, “There’s a problem. We have a serious flaw with one of our products and we can’t sell it until we address it.” The director of customer service comes barging in the room. “Sorry to interrupt but our phones are on fire. There’s some problem with the product, and my people haven’t been trained to respond!”

4. The CEO realizes quickly the problem: for all too long, the company had treated the social networks like another marketing sound amplifier. She realizes that her long-held hunches were in fact correct. Social media isn’t “media” as in broadcast, it’s media as in a decentralized, cross-departmental, easily accessible connections ecosystem that needs broad participation (although perhaps not deep because, you know, people still have jobs to do), published rules of engagement, commonly held measures and analytics, and cross-functional leadership teams who listen and find efficient and truthful ways to respond to customers. You know what the CEO needs? Great organizational development.

Remember that time capsule? You can choose to print this piece and bury it for a while but I’m pretty darned sure the above scenario will repeat itself over and over again on many scales, from very small but important to large and potentially catastrophic (read: Toyota). I would encourage you not to bury it. At the very least take the above scenarios and have a conversation about how they would affect you if they came true. Ask yourself an important question: what if our social media plan doesn’t originate in marketing at all? What if our strategy shouldn’t originate in any department whatsoever but at the very top of the organization itself with leadership understanding the broad implications of a new type of marketplace where there is no longer any gap between a brand’s claims and actual brand experience? What if we co-create (hello, 2003!) our brand every single day, interaction by interaction? A very different company culture needs to be fostered to excel in that type of market dynamic.

There’s a comment section here for reason — let’s have an honest discussion about this. I look forward to it.