From Content 2.0: Marketing "With" Users, Not "At" Them

Jemima Kiss at PaidContent discusses a Content 2.0 session on The Uncomfortable Issue of Marketing in a Social Media Space. What jumped out at me was her reference to comments made by Jamie Kantrowitz, MySpace's Senior VP for Marketing, Europe:

[Kantrowitz] did say that 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’.

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.

And it's equally important to note that these comments were made in the context of a discussion about social networks. I'm increasingly convinced that our individual attention data is going to be most meaningful not in isolation and not in contrast with the world at large, but in the context of bounded, known communities (co-workers, friends, family), i.e. social networks. As I wrote the other day, "attention data is the medium of exchange, the social network is the marketplace within which it circulates."

tags: attention attentiontrust attention+economy attention+data jemima+kiss paidcontent content+2.0 jamie+kantrowitz myspace social+networking