No one hates jargon more than me.  But I have to tell you about my new best friend -Social Influence Marketing, or SIM for short.

It is always good to be present at the birth of a new marketing acronym, so I thought I’d invite you along to wet its head.

If you believe the hype, SIM is a whole new way of marketing online, engaging consumers in their worlds’ and in their languages. You and I might call it ‘online PR’ but that might be doing it an injustice.

When you tell people you’re into ‘on-line PR’, they think they know what you mean.

The basic PR premise is that editorial is more powerful than advertising, getting people to recommend you is better than recommending yourself.

This premise still works online, if you’re simply focusing on the blogosphere.  You are now targeting an army of citizen journalist (bloggers) instead of real ones and your audience is always listening, not just periodically reading selected publications.

However, given the advent of social media (the dreaded ‘S&M’ words had to come out sooner rather than later) bloggers are no longer the most important influencers online.

Individual bloggers, especially if they are professional journalists are undoubtedly key influencers, especially if they have offline credentials, but there’s an even more powerful collective – the social and business networkers.

You can’t target them with press releases whatever digital mechanism you use. You can’t invite them all on a press trip and send them free goodies to review. You can’t charm them into saying nice things about your brand for the price of lunch at Simpsons.

You have to join their communities, listen to their conversations and become a trusted presence in their world, speaking their language and sticking to their agenda.

You might want to get some help with this, lest you end up looking like the social media equivalent of your dad dancing.

SIM is the clever way of building brand engagement online and it is a lot more subtle than the term ‘online PR’ suggests. It therefore deserves a better name and mercifully I’ve now found one. Online PR is dead: long live Social Influence Marketing.