Where are the marketers? There's a bit of a preaching-to-the-choir quality to Syndicate. Most of the attendees appear to be bloggers or social media companies. A lot of people are asking where the marketers and ad agency people are. It's a good question, since Syndicate was sited in Manhattan presumably to reach these people.

I suspect this deficit is indicative of the head-in-the-sand attitude of mainstream marketing toward social media. One possibility is that marketers are scared. They're deer in the headlights of a fundamental change in the way business and consumer customers want to be reached. So instead of dealing with the change, they're denying it and simply hoping it'll go away. A lot of these people will lose their jobs, in the same way that hundreds of CIOs were fired in the 80s and 90s because they refused to make the transition to end-user computing. The value proposition of direct-to-customer marketing is too compelling for this industry not to grow a lot. Marketers who aren't embracing this change are signing their own walking papers.

A more cynical theory I've heard here is that marketers and agencies don't want to embrace this media because it's so cost-efficient. A three-month viral marketing campaign can cost less than a single 30-second TV commercial. If you define your value to an organization in terms of the size of your budget, are you going to embrace a new approach that promises to substantially reduce that budget? It doesn't matter that you're delivering greater efficiency and lower cost. Budget-cutting is a sign of weakness in most organizations. And ad agencies are hardly going to support a strategy that reduces their commissions.

An agency that gets it is NightAgency. Check out this new viral campaign they did for Symantec called SafetyTown.  ¶ 10:29 AM