Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The collaborative economy is valued at an estimated $26 billion. Despite its hippie underpinnings, sharing is big business. And as brands look for ways to enter this uncertain value chain, at least one truth is becoming self-evident: Your product is not a product; it is a means to deliver services to a new kind a consumer.

The advertising age had a good run, from the birth of mass media until the point it went social. Then consumers began to talk back online--in Amazon reviews, Yelp ratings, and Facebook posts--and the customer experience age was born. Today snarky comments are the least of marketers' worries, as we enter what the Altimeter Group calls "the collaborative era."...

When it comes to company culture, Boston-based HubSpot could very well be the next Google. At the very least, it's one of the most unique places to work in the tech industry today. An MIT professor has even been studying the 550-employee company for months as the subject of her PhD dissertation, cofounder and CTO Dharmesh Shah told Business Insider.

This isn't about strange or over-the-top perks it gives employees, although it has a few of those. It's about an attitude in which workers are treated in part like cofounders and in part like students, Shah explained to Business Insider. Here's a lightly edited transcript: BUSINESS INSIDER...