TRAACKR

Last night, I had the chance to briefly meet Tim O’Reilly at Ignite 4 Boston (thanks Sara!). Better yet: I had the opportunity to talk to him about Traackr!

So I went on to explain that Traackr is about finding and qualifying social influencers in online communities, helping them become aware of their role and influence, and, when relevant, connecting them with marketers (I guess it you’re reading this post I probably didn’t need to tell you all this, right?). Tim’s reaction was to say “you had me until you mentioned marketers”. I tried to qualify what I meant but my window of attention was closing, darn!

I have grown increasingly frustrated since last night about this interaction. Not at all at Tim O’Reilly but at the fact that “marketing” or “marketer” has become a quasi curse word in social media lingo, and in many ways, rightly so due to decades of mass media.

So now is the time to reclaim the term ‘marketing’ for what it is intended to be (and in some ways is): an open channel between a brand and its customers.

For too long brands have had the “luxury” of mass communication, primarily consisting in pouring TV dollars in marketing campaigns. Exxon Mobile has an image issue? Let’s do a large TV campaign on how they works hard at solving all the world’s greatest problems.

The theory behind this approach is that perception trumps reality and you can muscle your way to controlling perception (much cheaper than actually changing reality). There is nothing new here and Exxon has perfected this craft over and over again.

So if *this* is marketing, no wonder that the perception by most is that marketers are there to get you, crafting messages to shape perceptions, deliberately manipulate cognitions and direct behaviors.

Here is the glitch: the definition I just gave is the one for propaganda, not marketing; propaganda never made the list of the famous 4 Ps defining marketing.

No question that some (many) marketers still behave like propagandists. So let’s just call them for what they are instead of polluting marketing.

The good news is that they are an endangered species as the propaganda machine only functions when the leaks are limited, meaning when the audience targeted has limited access to other sources of information and opinions. With mass media is taking a plunge, the one-sided perception of brands is weakening; meanwhile new social media are offering the general public amazing opportunities to voice their opinion, seek the one of peers, unmistakably leading to the end of the era of propaganda. I don’t mean that there won’t be (or isn’t for that matter) propaganda in new media but rather that the openness of the system makes it impossible to succeed.

I understand Tim’s concern when we talk at Traackr about connecting social influencers (i.e. the most influential voices in communities) to marketers, envisioning these community leaders becoming themselves propaganda agents. This is not this type of relationship we’re anticipating.

Traackr’s perspective is that there is a fundamental and symbiotic relationship between social influencers and marketers that is in the making and will accelerate the downfall of propagandists.

What form could this collaboration take? We don’t believe that it is or will be one-size-fits-all. Depending on the role played by a social influencer, their community, and the brand a marketer represents, the collaboration could take very different forms (from simple information sharing to product endorsement).

A good example of how this is already happening may be the way the Obama campaign collaborated with social media moguls to call out the misrepresentation of the facts by the McCain campaign of Obama’s comment on “putting lipstick on a pig”, falsly presented as describing Sarah Palin. All the Obama team had to do to stop the propaganda machine was to make available the full clip of his speech and let social influencers communicate on their own terms.

A more symbiotic collaboration as described above between influencers and marketers has the potential to lead brands into the social media revolution by forcing them to pay more attention to their audiences and not only on how to sell to them but more importantly how to be relevant. Social influencers in turn can provide better insights for the community they represent and further their role by impacting decisions on products and services by brands.

Now I need to find a way to summarize all this in a couple of sentences for the next time I meet Tim