possibly noteworthy wrote:
Clive Thompson, in the latest issue of Fast Company:

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Interested marketers apply here?

This article kind of sucked. Tons of fluffy journalistic page filler to parse through (I don't have two hours! Who really reads this stuff?) and although the information about bellweathers having less influence than people think is useful, the solution proposed is to attach a little social network map to an ad. That's just a trinket. The ads are more effective because people like the trinket and not because you are really harnessing the power of the social network... :/

Decius wrote:

possibly noteworthy wrote:
Clive Thompson, in the latest issue of Fast Company:

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Interested marketers apply here?

This article kind of sucked. Tons of fluffy journalistic page filler to parse through (I don't have two hours! Who really reads this stuff?) and although the information about bellweathers having less influence than people think is useful, the solution proposed is to attach a little social network map to an ad. That's just a trinket. The ads are more effective because people like the trinket and not because you are really harnessing the power of the social network... :/

It is simple really, to harness the power of the social network, you must get more people talking about you inside of their network.

possibly noteworthy wrote:
Clive Thompson, in the latest issue of Fast Company:

Marketers spend a billion dollars a year targeting influentials. Duncan Watts says they're wasting their money.

Interested marketers apply here?

The question becomes not how best to understand the social network, but how best to understand what new memes the society is ready to accept. Its really about market timing.

Decius wrote:

The question becomes not how best to understand the social network, but how best to understand what new memes the society is ready to accept. It's really about market timing.

Consider:

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself."
-- Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker: Well, then, how would you define marketing ...?

Philip Kotler: The most important tasks in marketing have to do with studying the market, segmenting it, targeting the groups you want to service, positioning yourself in the market, and creating a service that meets needs out there. Advertising and selling are afterthoughts. I don't want to minimize their importance. But you put it so well years ago when you shocked a number of people by saying that the aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.

What could marketing be if it isn't selling? The shortest definition I've heard is that it is finding needs and filling them. I would add that it produces positive value for both parties. The contrast between marketing and selling is whether you start with customers, or consumers, or groups you want to serve well -- that's marketing. If you start with a set of products you have, and want to push them out into any market you can find, that's selling.

(Update: I was amused to notice -- only after making this post -- that in the print edition of Fast Company, the advertisement which is located adjacent to the conclusion of this article features a quotation by Peter Drucker.)