My name is Andrew. I'm a Tiger-holic.

Over the past several weeks I have been caught in a strange vortex of slogging through the budget process for my clients' 2010 marketing plans and keeping an eye on the saga of Tiger Woods. This has proven to be quite a mess. On the one hand, I'm attempting to help a few clients thrive in a world where they no longer have a rather tight grip on the message through their advertising and media relations efforts. On the other hand, well, there's Tiger.

Each time I fire up Twitter and search for "Tiger Woods" I begin reading the posts. Every ten seconds or so, the screen refreshes and an alert leaps onto the screen saying "27 more tweets since you started searching." Then 40, then 100, then 1,000. Let it run overnight and there might be 100,000 new Tweets, all breaking down the brand of Tiger Woods into 140 character character characteristics. (The finale to that sentence was awesome. Ahhh, thank you very much.)

Every so often a tweet will occur that appears to come from someone credible -- you know, let's say TMZ.com. Or the New York Times. At that point, the cacophony of noise that is Twitter and Facebook -- known as a "meme" -- becomes news, then becomes embedded into our cultural gestalt. And in Tiger's case, the gestalt ain't that great.

Reporters of this paper and most others are increasingly using Twitter and its like to keep an eye and ear on emerging stories. I liken it to flying a Predator drone over Afghanistan from your Aeron chair at the Air Force base in Fargo. The use of social media to gather intelligence on a story isn't relegated just to seasoned reporters. In the modern age of information, all of us use our own brand of intelligence gathering to hone in on, contextualize, and substantiate or discredit information. I am certainly willing to commit to an argument with seasoned reporters as to whether or not this is truly "reporting" or intelligent news-gathering, but suffice it to say that, as a consumer, if I were to plan a vacation or purchase a new car or consider going to the theater, I would go through the same process to vet brands as I would to catch up on the dalliances of Tiger Woods.

So guess what just happened? All of that chatter, all of those intimate details from consumers about brands, all of those stories -- the good, the bad, and the ugly -- are now becoming a core function of Google. (Must reads here, here, and here. Actually, this was a giant week at Google with the launch of Google Suggests, Chrome updates, and Real-Time Search.) Whether they asked for it or not, brands just got enormously intimate with their customers. In the very near future, any search for your brand will include chatter about you, stemming from the keyboards, video cameras, and picture phones of your consumers, your fans, and your enemies. If you're loved, you're in luck. If you've got "issues," prepare thyself.

We're entering into a permanent state of brand intimacy. Frankly, I'm concerned. I still see brands of all shapes and sizes continue to struggle with Web 1.0, not even culturally close to the change necessary to thrive and prosper in this emerging age of intimacy. For those brands who can embrace brand intimacy go the fruits of real-time and collaborative product development, real-time and very public customer service opportunities, and real-time and very rapid sales inertia as happy consumers share with others their love of a new gadget or new game or new service or new < insert any product here >. For those brands who cannot make the adjustment to this real-time market, once again, be prepared.

As old man Dickens once wrote, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

For those of you counting, since I began writing this post there have been exactly 2,011 tweets about Tiger Woods. I've got some catching up to do.