Marketing specialists love to invent new words to describe complicated consumer behaviour. That’s complicated, as in, say, acknowledging an advert rather than clicking on the tiny “x.” Or agreeing to fill in an online questionnaire in exchange for three free issues of Classic Cars or Trout Fisherman.

Back in the mid-Nineties when I was covering Madison Avenue advertising agencies, the buzz word was “incentivize”, for New Yorkers, or “incentivise”, on this side of the Atlantic. It was not yet an officially recognised word then (it wasn’t added to the Oxford English Dictionary until 2003), but these wordsmiths used it with such conviction. Who was I to question their vocabulary when they were passionately explaining how their washing up liquid would incentivize/se women to regain control of their lives?

Today, the world is more complicated. Look what we’ve accomplished by telling consumers they are in control of their own lives. We’ve had things like YouTube and another war in Iraq. Surely, the message is not that everybody should take control – that’s a recipe for anarchy – but rather that select people should be the ones into whose ears marketers whisper? So today the marketing mantra is all about the “influencer” or the “influential” – those people who hold sway with fellow consumers when it comes to purchasing decisions.

Who are these people? Good question. They blog about their encounters with Proust and Paris. That, we know. They have an unsigned band with several hundred devoted MySpace fans. The last music video? Yep, 500,000 YouTube viewings in the first week. Their LinkedIn connections is maxed out. Sorry, Mr Kissinger. Best of luck, Hillary. First, clean up your act, Kate.

They are not just sociable. They are socially networked. And, to marketers, that’s a big distinction. In other words, they have a quantifiable following – the trackbacks and traffic figures back this up. A positive brand endorsement from an “influential,” the thinking goes, moves product. For a marketer, the trick is to get your product – a new digi-cam-bluetooth-blog-ready mobile phone, a new zero-calorie cola, a celebrity gossip magazine – mentioned in a glowing post on an influencer’s blog, in his or her MySpace profile and in their LinkedIn “interests” tab. Then, the marketers sit back and wait for them to coin new descriptions and verbs about said product, which will be tabulated in an Excel spreadsheet and studied for possible inclusion in the next TV advert.

In the past year, more and more advertisers have flocked to social networking sites to promote their products to the tens of millions of users there, hopefully winning over a few influencers in the process. Burger King set up a MySpace page. The American Brewer, Anheuser Busch, is sponsoring MingleNow’s Clink section where the object apparently is to share photos of semi-inebriated community members. Others, like Southwest Airlines, Pepsi and Doritos, are going an extra step, asking consumers to submit ideas for the next ad campaign. The hope is that the homework assignment will get consumers to think creatively about the brands in their lives and potentially spur a series of user-generated spots worthy of the tube, or better, on YouTube.

We’ve only just begun to see the advertiser migration into social networking sites. According to a recent Jupiter Research study, 21 per cent of the American marketers surveyed intend to advertise on blogs in the next year, and another 20 per cent intend to encourage (or incentivise) consumers to contribute their own words, photos, videos, whatever about the brands for use in a marketing campaign. The shift in thinking is an obvious one. The MySpace generation tunes out traditional marketing messages. According to Jupiter, “30 per cent of frequent social networkers trust their peers’ opinions, but only 10 per cent trust advertisements.” It continues: “To increase trust, advertisers must target influentials to act as brand advocates.”

Winning over the cool kids is no small task. Advertisers have been trying this for years, with varying results. The emergence of social networks, with their well-defined user profiles, makes the task of finding the influencers easier. But getting them to do a marketer’s bidding may actually be more difficult than ever. One of the biggest problems is getting their attention. Teens and twenty-somethings may be multi-tasking masters, but they tend to be a suspicious lot when it comes to overt marketing messages. They can smell a product endorsement a mile away. Social networkers go to MySpace and Facebook to chat with friends, not to champion brands. But, they do chat about the things they are most passionate about, and often that means brands, cool brands. And, in this multimedia age, the web chatter can look just as slick as anything Madison Avenue produces. Case in point: as of this morning, there are 47,600 videos on YouTube dedicated to Nintendo’s gaming platform, Wii. That’s influential.

Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

Times recommends

• From joystick to helmet: it's all in the mind
• 'Maniacal' engineer takes city computers hostage
• 3G iPhone review: fast but power-hungry