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I have enjoyed digging into the archives at the Attention Trust blog lately. Lot’s of thought-provolking topics that get me thinking in new directions while affirming that I’m on the right track with my focus on bridging the gap between attention and data ownership and marketers and consumers.
Jemima Kiss (what a cool name) on social media marketing at Content 2.0:
So how do we as individual users establish relationships with advertisers on our terms, so that they’re marketing with us and not at us? By capturing and sharing aspects of our attention data with them–again, on our terms–so that they know more about our needs and interests and can present us not with annoying, irrelevant ads that we’ll do anything to avoid, but with compelling, relevant offers.
I call this prepositional marketing. Marketing “at” someone is orthogonal to marketing “with” someone. Marketing “to” someone is somewhere in between on the warm/fuzzy new paradigm, we’re making progress jackpot meter.
Me, I would like my marketing profile to ask me who I would like to meet, Audi, Kia or Saab. Myspace is charging $35k to create a brand as a person. Brilliant, for the handful of companies willing to shell out that kind of cash. The rest will simply create the profiles and hope for the best. Myspace can barely keep the pedophiles off the site, let alone track down someone promoting a t-shirt company.
I must say that a few weeks ago, Helio left me a message last week on my Myspace page, that was surprisingly cool, a bit of a shock at first, truth be told, because I had forgotten that I had made a comment on their Myspace page. The HelioMyspace deal is going to be sweet for people willing to shell out $285 for the phones. The Myspace integration looks tight, and now myspace has yet another channel to bug you on, I mean establish a conversation.
I’m not hearing Friend Trains mentioned often enough in the social media marketing conversations. I wrote about them at my other blog, Online Dating Insider, which is where I cover the online dating industry and social networking trends.
With Myspace Friend Trains, you sign up for a train, sign up as other people’s friends, and in return more people sign up as your friend. This is an interesting phenomenon, because the trend is to severely limit the people on your friends list but many people still beg for friends, even people they don’t know. Friend trains could become popular to advertisers, reaching people who may not necessarily want to have Burger King as a friend but end up with BK as a friend because of a friend train. If BK is friends with Puma, then Puma is my friend. Potentially insidious and fascinating at the same time and way under the radar. Especially when the UK director of Myspace is saying things like:
Consumers in the social media space are very savvy and know they are being marketed at, so want something more meaningful in a relationship with advertisers - they want to be marketed ‘with’, not ‘at’.
I’m surprised this is the level of sophistication they are working at.
To Ed Batista, I’m not so sure that attention is best mined in a social context. I have a lot of ideas about one-on-one attention marketing that have nothing to do with social contexts. For certain they will play a growing part in the new attention economy.
Before I forget, would someone please explain what marketing “with” someone means? My BS Buzzword alert went off when I read that.
Creating opt-in marketing profiles under the users control is where I see things going. Transparency is key, whereas storing clickstream data in a cookie format on a remote server is not so much. I’d rather tell marketers what and when I’m interested in being addressed, and having control at some level of granularity about turing that on and off after the sale or impression has been made. This is what Trufina, Opinity and iKarma are doing as identity and reputation aggregators and where the ROOT Markets partnerships come into play with third parties providing tools and services to both consumers and marketers to tighten the bond between buyers and sellers, hopefully reduce spam and target market more efficiently.
