David Schatsky of Jupiter Research has posted a response to the concerns of the social marketing community about the use of the term "social marketing" that shows that Jupiter doesn't quite understand the issue:

If we find over time that the term loses its relevance in our industry we'll revisit it. We have renamed coverage areas in the past. But for now, and with no disrepect to those who have worked at the other social marketing for years, whose efforts I applaud, I think the name for our coverage area is appropriate in our context and will stick with it.

Perhaps they already ordered the letterhead and don't want to have to change it.  Perhaps they don't want to appear to be backing down to bloggers again after an earlier controversy.  I'm afraid they see this as just an issue of us trying to defend our turf, when it should be about helping their customers find them and avoiding confusion when faced with pages of completely irrelevant (to them) search results for social marketing.

We lost this battle.  Can we win the war of words over time?  If you agree that this is an important issue for our profession, what do you think we can do to keep the semantic waters from becoming muddied?


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