There is a huge disconnect between the marketers and their market. A disconnect in understanding what the market wants, needs and desires to use. The market is you, me and all our "social friends" who enjoy paving our way through all the social clutter toward a more user centric landscape. While fighting through the clutter the marketers continue to create new "guns" aimed at us as targets of commerce.
Do You Like Being A Target?
Mediapost reported today: "AdBrite now offers behavioral targeting across the more than 70,000 sites within its network. The San Francisco-based company announced the news at OMMA Behavioral on Monday, along with the claim that it has become the largest ad network (in terms of sites available), to offer behavioral targeting. "
"This is really just applying a new form of targeting to our existing network," said Paul Levine, AdBrite's vice president of marketing. "So as soon as we switched it on, we became the largest behavioral targeting network in terms of number of sites. Our best guess was that ValueClick had the largest number of behaviorally targeted sites available. Our site count is five times theirs."
Just Maybe They Are the Target
Who are they? The marketers, the companies they represent and those that support their methods with new technology enabling them to shoot at us.
Brian Solis writes: "Jakob Nielsen added a unique perspective to ClueTrain when he surmised that the authors "defected" from marketing and took sides with markets against it".
"The markets on the other side of the proverbial "other side of the fence" however, should be warned that the very marketers that forced the defection have figured out that there's fortune and bountiful opportunities in jumping ship and blending into the new world of Social marketing."
"If it's one thing that we can learn about Social media is that people and the markets they represent have rallied against marketing and slick marketers and have demanded personalization, transparency, and sincerity."
Social Media is about breaking down barriers to engage in conversations
Doc Searls says: I'm not only a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, but guilty of being the guy who foisted the "markets are conversations" line on the world in the first place. For all the good intentions behind that line, it's still woefully misunderstood.
Because we weren't just talking about "transparency". We were talking about turning markets into places where buyers were not just seen by sellers as cattle to be herded into walled gardens, as "targets" for one-way messages, or as tools for other marketing purposes.
What Is Your Aim?
We don't want a relationship with people and things that aim a "marketing gun" at us and target us with advanced technology and slick messages. If you want to know what we really want you'll have to engage in a conversation and listen to what we're saying. By the way what we are currently saying is targeted at you, your message and your methods. Be careful because being shot by the customer is not a good thing.
Get it? What say you?