Are you a blogger? Do you have a podcast? Have you ever spent time replying to posts on an internet message board? What about uploading videos to sites such as YouTube?

If you answered in the affirmative to any of those questions, the odds are that you have already engaged in citizen marketing. The fan who creates his own poster and trailer for an upcoming movie is a citizen marketer. So is the customer who creates an online community around the idea of saving a discontinued product, or the loyal customer who uses a bad customer-service experience to bring about change within a business organization.

But above all else, citizen marketers are motivated by a sense of loyalty. That loyalty comes from a sense of ownership that citizen marketers feel for their favorite product, company, movie, etc. Even citizen marketers who create campaigns designed to bring attention to mistakes the company has made often do so out of a desire to see the company improve its processes.

The rise of social media tools has given citizen marketing its jumpstart into the business mainstream, and today's companies must understand both what motivates their customers to make the transition to concerned citizen marketers and who those customers are.