P2P-marketing has a name: socialgraph targeting. This is how the new world looks to those who want to sell us things, in other words, it’s an old world attempt to use p2p dynamics to sell more. For a new world bottom up approach, rather see Vendor Relationship Management, which reverses the relationship between supply and demand. VRM presupposes a system where users/consumers can make known their real demands, broadcasting it to possible suppliers.

From Auren Hoffman’s Summation blog:

“People interested in wine tend to hang out with people that also are interested in wine. And if a company is pitching a product, its best prospects are the friends of its current consumers: a golden leads list.

A study by Shawndra Hill, now Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management at the University of Pennsylvania, shows a very strong correlation among friends purchasing the same items. This intuitively makes sense: one cannot pick his demographic makeup, but can and does pick his own friends, often based on similarity in attitudes, values, interests, and personality. This similarity leads to similar behavior and buying patterns amongst those friends.

Implications of Socialgraphic Targeting

The problem for marketers and companies is knowing who someone is friends with since few companies have access to the social graph of their consumers. But companies with access can leverage that information for better targeting. By better targeting consumers, companies can cut down on advertisements, spam, and harassment to consumers and create a world with more relevance, consumer happiness, and better use of everyone’s time.

Companies with this information include telecom providers, social networks, webmail and IM clients, and search aggregators. As one’s social graph becomes a commoditized way to do better targeting, these companies (and others) will become increasingly valuable. It could even be a friend.

Telecom providers have great social graph data. They know who often calls each other – an accurate representation of one’s social graph. These companies can do analysis on this data and even determine type of relationships based on the frequency, duration, and timing of calls (e.g. most people tend to call their mom on Mother’s Day).

Similarly, free webmail clients (Gmail, Hotmail) and IM chat clients (AIM, Yahoo) have a gigantic social graph of everyone that communicates with each other. In the future, this social graph data can be used to change the way these webmail and IM clients display ads based on the behavior and activity of one’s social graph.

Online social networks have a good idea of who people know and the extent of their relationships. They could partner with retailers to better pitch products based on what peoples’ friends are doing. Facebook already does this with Social Ads (and is what they attempted to do with Beacon).

Search aggregators, such as Google and Rapleaf [disclosure: I work for Rapleaf], aggregate public connections data from thousands of blogs, forums, social networks, discussion boards, and more. These aggregators can enable marketers to better understand their consumers and provide a more customized experience and product recommendations based on the consumers’ friends’ interests and buying behavior. Companies that really want to better serve their consumers with a more customized experience, can leverage these friend maps effectively.

It turns out that the obvious is true: birds of a feather really do shop together.”