Have you  noticed the term Context Marketing getting attention  lately? Ironically people slip the word into conversation and give it no context. 99% of people who talk about context assume you know what they are talking about. That thought made me smile.

Read on Macduff. You will soon discover most people are not thinking about context, well not if you believe google search words.

Context is being used as a magic bullet. The new open sesame! It’s no shortcut for engaging with real people.

I was curious to hear Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are writing a book “The Age of Context” for release in 2013. I am looking forward to their thoughts.

I’ve been tracking “The Post Information Age”  since 2003 so the notion of a “contextual age” is fascinating to me.  There’s no winner yet for what term will be coined to represent the “post information age”, but Age of Context, or Contextual Age would definitely be on the short list. I’m curious to explore what people really mean by “context marketing” and whether we are ready for it. Are we culturally on board with the idea? For this age is so much less about technology and so much more about people and being human.

I made a list of interesting posts on “context marketing” and began to read on the topic. I found one post dated 1998. So clearly, this isn’t a new concept. Feel free to add posts you think are significant.

Peppers and Rogers coined the term “1:1 Marketing” in 1997, perhaps a little earlier than technology could really enable and certainly long before people were ready to experience context marketing.

We’re all converging on content marketing as this deck explains.

• 1:1 Marketing – Peppers & Rogers
• Persona Marketing - David Meerman Scott (Tuned-In) & Pragmatic Marketing
• Our slow and steady adoption of frictionless sharing – Facebook, 4SQ, Instagram etc
• Mass Adoption of Smart Devices – iPhone/Android/Blackberry
• Preference Graph in Real Time (via big data)

Context marketing is about communicating with an individual based on:

• Where they are
• Who they are
• What they are doing
• How they prefer to receive the information we’re sharing

In some ways context is another way of saying preference/interest graph. This is the holy grail we all seek.

Ray Wang takes this thinking a little further in the list of Seven Dimensions of Context in this post, I turned them into a list. I thought it was a pretty neat segmentation.

Which ones do you think are most significant. Is he missing any?

I’m sure the real meaning of context will emerge over time, but I’m sure there will be a huge element of automation.

I’m not sure that’s good, but it’s a typical brand response to want to automate and scale the task of creating meaningful engagement with your customers and prospects.

Real deep human engagement comes from real deep human engagement. I’m not sure there is a short cut. I’m sure you can supplement  actual humans and that you can do it effectively, but don’t expect to bypass the need that real people have to talk to real people.

As I researched, I got the impression Context Marketing was hot in the inner marketing circles, so I wondered how much of a mainstream search term it has become. How well adopted is the term? My hunch was right. It’s far from mainstream.

There’s 37 million searches each month that include the term “marketing”.

Internet marketing comes top with 1 million searches per month!

Context marketing accounts for a mere 3,600 searches per month. Tiny, right! That’s right at the bottom of the top 50 marketing segments.

Persona Marketing didn’t even make the 50. I added it for context.

So what do you think? Are we ready for Context Marketing?

Image Credit: 21496790@N06

Nick Kellet (143 Posts)

Nick is co-founder the social curation platform Listly, that combines crowdsourcing, content curation and embedable lists to drive high-level community engagement, live inside your blog posts. Connect with Nick on Twitter · Linkedin, Facebook and G+ and follow his writing via his other guest posts and on his blogs at NickKellet.com and blog.list.ly