Today’s markets have splintered into millions of powerful consumer communities—how can businesses adapt?

It’s no secret that traditional mass marketing—network television, newspapers, direct mail—is dying. Consumer markets are increasingly fragmented, even as they become more connected, transparent, and global. The future of business is about penetrating self-forming niches, from affinity groups on Facebook to thousands of satellite channels and millions of private online communities.

So how can businesses reach new customers, win their trust, and earn their loyalty? Tom Hayes and Michael S. Malone urge an entirely new approach, embracing small, trust-based online groups as powerful vehicles for creating customers and gathering invaluable feedback. But what they call “marketing 3.0” isn’t as simple as setting up a YouTube channel.

Drawing on many case studies, the authors offer a new set of tools for a world where attention is harder than ever to capture, but even more lucrative to hold. They explain how to use social media for a new kind of marketing—bottom-up instead of top-down, personal rather than public, subtle rather than full frontal.

The payoff is a return to the power of old-fashioned handselling—turbocharged by bleeding-edge technology.