The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

These people are idiots!

Do you know how little I care about that last statement? Allow me to explain…

I’m on an email list that I think is a very valuable resource. And it’s a new list, so I’m a little more forgiving in terms of giving a pass to the inevitable bumps and rough spots. But there’s been a recent issue that I think would make for a good discussion here, so I thought I’d share it with y’all.

If you run an email list of any sort, one rule is paramount: Keep the list professional, and don’t use it as a bully pulpit from which to whinge on about how stupid other people are who don’t agree with you or who don’t “get” you.

Here’s the story:

This list is new and growing. It’s one of those compilation lists that comes out three times a day (sorta like a Yahoo group, but private label). A while back, apparently some folks griped to the list-runner that three emails a day was too many. So he held a survey of the subscribers, and the overwhelming response was that three emails was just fine, thank you very much. So the list-runner has decided (wisely, I feel) to keep it to three emails a day and let those who disagree unsubscribe.

And if that were the end of the story - list owner takes the responsible route vis-a-vis some complaints, checks in with the list and comes out with a majority ruling - we’d have nothing to talk about. But it’s not.

The list-runner has spent the time since that event complaining about the people who think three emails is too many - basically trying to argue them out of their own opinions. In a recent email, he pointed out that a similar service sends over a dozen emails a day, and by that comparison his list is downright shy and retiring, so these people are crazy for thinking three emails is too much. Which is a ridiculous argument to make, because A) how many emails constitute too many is for them to decide, not you, and B) if they’re unsubscribing to a list with three emails, they’re almost certainly NOT subscribing to the other list anyway.

I chalk it up to this being a new list, and have corresponded with the list-runner to share my opinions (and they have responded more or less in agreement). Hopefully, this will die a natural death and all will be well.

The point I’m trying to make here is that if you’re running a list, a newsletter or any other professional public correspondence, keep the tone professional and on-topic. This is not to say you have to be without any personality at all. Said list-runner does include some witty personal banter in the emails which I find very humanizing and funny, and which I think adds to rather than subtracts from the list, although that’s also an opinion others have apparently differed on.

But for God’s sake, don’t use the list to harangue others, revile people who don’t agree with you, ridicule “losers” who leave the list for some reason or basically turn the list into a platform for you to rage against all those people out there who just don’t get you, and how stupid they are because of it.

Doing so only makes you look whiny, intolerant, ungracious and unprofessional. It never makes the others look stupid, no matter how clearly you try to connect those dots, because every single person on your list has held a minority opinion on something at some point and knows good and well that opinions are just that - a matter of personal preference, and as such, always right (for that person, at that time, in that situation). If I hate meatloaf, than I’m right, regardless of how much you feel meatloaf to be the food of the Gods - trying to argue me out of my opinion by pointing out how much other people like meatloaf, how nutritious it is, how cheap it is to make and so on is both pointless and makes you look like a blithering idiot for trying.

I’ve had to unsubscribe to countless lists for just this reason - some of which were hard to give up, given the value I was otherwise receiving. But, as I noted in my correspondence with the list-runner, I’ve got enough drama in my life to be adding someone else’s to the mix.

Do your subscribers a favor. Keep it light and professional, stay on topic and don’t give into the temptation to feed the trolls. This is even easier if you’re running an email list or newsletter, since the trolls can’t even be heard by anyone but you unless you give them a platform in the first place.

Your subscribers are there to get the information you’re sharing and to be a part of the community. And none of them wants to wade through your rants about the philistine, uncultured idiots who are chapping your ass because they don’t get your particular brand of genius in order to do so.

Tags: Conversation Economy, Ethics and Business, Internet Marketing by Soni Pitts
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The Creative “FAIL Your Way to a Win” Business Model:

Sell Crippled Hardware and Shut Down Anyone Who Tries to Make It Work Right

Profit!!!

Well, I’m sure it sounded like a good idea at the time…

Don’t know how many non-geeks are aware of the flaming ball of suck that has become hardware producer Creative’s response to a user-created hack, but it’s worth paying attention to.

To make a long story short, Creative produces the popular Sound Blaster soundcard. Which is great, except that there are some functionality issues in Vista and just in general that the users aren’t thrilled with. To be blunt, the sound cards are crippleware, meaning that their functionality is intentionally dehanced (lovely neologism, that) by the company in order to…well, I have no idea why, personally, since I’m not a hardware geek. But I’m guessing it’s either to sell more of a different hardware or upgrade, or as a butt-kiss to someone like Microsoft or the RIAA, as such companies have an unsettling tendency to get hardware makers to hobble their goods so as not to give the end user Too Much Freedom To Do With Their Purchased Goods As They Wish. (Can’t have the peasants getting it all their way, now can we?)

It’s like buying a car that won’t make left turns, because the car manufacturer has a deal with a soft drink company who’s slogan is “The ‘Right Way’ to Refresh,” or they have another line selling GPS units and want you to buy them in order to generate right-turn-only paths to your destinations. I.e. your car has the capacity to make left turns, but the company has interfered with the steering so that it won’t. But it’s your car…surely once you own it, you should be able to go in and remove that “fix” or have it removed for you. Right? Wrong…

Along comes Daniel_K, a modder (geek speak for someone who creates “mods,” or modifications). Daniel_K mods custom drivers for people who have bought the crippled hardware. These drivers give you the ability to actually use your Creative soundcard to do essential soundcardy things, functionality that the soundcard is already capable of but that has been hobbled in-store. In short, he makes downloadable “left-turn-enabling” patches.

Yay!!! The customers are thrilled. Now they can buy these really nice soundcards and still get the functionality they require for whatever applications they’re doing. So they buy more soundcards. The customers get functionality, the company gets sales, everybody’s happy, right? Wrong…

Here is Creative’s response to Daniel_K, basically a cease and desist letter whose content boils down to, “Quit making our stuff work, dammit. We farked it for a reason, and now you’re stealing from us by giving our customers the right to do what they want with the stuff they bought.”

This was posted in Creative’s own support/user forums. It was the equivalent of dumping flaming gasoline on a beehive. Welcome to the world of the Internet swarm. Enraged geeks from all over the place have been breaking their soundboards and posting pics, calling for boycotts, including setting up a site named BoycottCreative.com, spreading the word through top-listed sites like Digg and Reddit and just basically rampaging around loudly in forums and other outlets ‘net-wide. The Creative forum itself is full of thread titles like, “Recommend me a NON Creative sound card”, “Creative Boycott,” “FAIL” and just plain old “Bye.” (Or, at least, these posts are there right now, and haven’t been removed as of this writing.) There’s even a rather ominous thread titled “Class Action Filing.” That can’t be good.

To sum up, Creative got greedy and stupid. They decided it was better to sell crippled hardware to geeks whose sole purpose in life is to tweak their stuff for maximum power and functionality, and then attempt to tightly control what users could do with it (and thereby make more money through some corporate sleight of hand). And when someone came along and gave their customers what they actually wanted (i.e. the ability to use their soundcards to their fullest capacity), instead of saying, “Hey, great, thanks for fixing that - now our customers will be thrilled to buy even more of our stuff,” Creative shut them down, publicly and with clear statements to the effect that their priority was making money, not providing functional sound cards.

End result? It’s a reasonable possibility that Creative will suffer enough of a financial and PR setback to deal them a critical, or even possibly fatal, blow. The original cease-and-desist only went public two days ago, and already some retailers are suspending sales of Creative products due to the high rate of returns. Geeks around the world are boycotting, breaking and busting on Creative loudly and publicly.

In just a few days, Creative went from merely a clueless company producing good quality products that required some tweaking to really work well, to pure, unadulterated, kitten-punching evil bastards who have been caught publicly monologuing their evil plans at the battle-bloodied and bound-and-gagged hero (Daniel_K) who was trying to free the princess and save the day.

As they used to say back in the day, “Smooth move, Ex-lax.”

Moral of the story: DO NOT PISS IN YOUR OWN WELL.

Don’t try to sucker your core customers by selling them junk and pretending it’s a business model. Give them what they want, not what you want to give them. Don’t try to cripple what you sell in the hopes of selling more stuff to make up for what isn’t working (or by bowing to outside commercial influences) and then get mad when someone creates a work-around to your craptastic fail. You should be hiring those people, not trying to bury them.

And if you do fail to heed this warning, you’d better hope like hell you have a really good Plan B, such as a hefty retirement fund. Because you can’t unkill the Golden Goose, and your customers will be winging those golden eggs right back at your head with a vengeance when they find out what you’ve done.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Customers, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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That’s a quote from Rabbi Pinny Gniwisch, speaking on a podcast with Hugh McLeod about marketing and “Influencers.” They discuss a lot more, and the conversation goes in some very interesting areas, so you might want to give it a listen.

But the primary reason I stopped by to blog was to lay out some righteous honesty for you, from a marketer who hates to hype:

The reality is, you can have the best copy, the coolest widget, the best demographic targeting, the shiniest website and the most bitchin’ marketing plan this side of Eden’s apple and your product launch can still completely and utterly fail. As in no sales, no interest and no money. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Why?

Luck. Happenstance. Random acts of wtf.

Maybe you just happened to launch at the same time as someone else did and they got all the juice. They don’t even have to be superior to win, just first. Or loudest. Or luckiest. (Remember the Betamax/VHS tech race, now being replayed between HD-DVD/Blue-Ray tech.)

Maybe your launch got overshadowed and out-shouted by world events, local news or just the latest, greatest Internet meme hitting the feeds at the same time.

Maybe, despite all your careful research, quality control and expensive design, no one gets it. Or wants to. Why? Don’t ask me. You’d think that in this day and age, those teeny-tiny gas-sipping mini-cars that the British are so fond of would be all the rage over here in the States. But they’re not. Why? Many reasons, few of which have anything to do with the quality, utility or value of the vehicles. Mostly it’s just cultural machismo bullshit.

Maybe a partner firm or even an unrelated company, in the same business or a completely different one is going down in flames, and for some reason people are associating you and your products with them and the nasty taste in their mouths that the company left behind. This happens completely at random as often as it makes any sense. Several specific toys made in China are discovered to be contaminated with lead. Your toys are made in Japan, or Poland. Now no one will touch them with a ten-foot pole. Why? Mass hysteria bleed-over, that’s why. Foreign toys = death on a stick, no matter what the facts really are.

Mostly, though, success is just a matter of nearly pure luck, thinly plated with a veneer of wisdom, experience, skill and confidence.

And that’s something that marketers don’t always want to admit - the reality that with all of our fancy tricks, our secret handshakes, our specialized knowledge, our dark and eldrich incantations and so on, the best we can do is give you a reasonable chance of taking advantage of whatever luck comes your way.

We can’t guarantee results. We can’t say you’ll make more sales. We can’t promise you the world. We’d love to, trust me, we would. But we can’t. Or at least the honest one’s can’t. Because your luck (or mine) can change on a dime and give you back 8 cents change. And the best copywriting, marketing or advertising can’t do a damned thing about it.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Subtitled: If You Don’t Get That Flyer Out of My Face, I’m Going to Strangle You With Your Own Spam Thread

[This is crossposted from a response I wrote on an a Google group in reaction to a bit of spam trying to sell a video full of “Google Smashing” techniques to get you to #1 on Google overnight, or some such crap.]

Here’s my question:

There are all kinds of tricks, tips and tools for getting your website, your ebook, your telecourse or your blog into the top spot at Google. And some of them even work, no question about it.

But (and that rustling sound you hear is me dusting off and donning my coaching hat), let’s reframe this issue for just a second and ask:

Does your content actually DESERVE to be #1?

Is it, really, the most relevant information on the topic a person could find if they went searching for those keywords and phrases? Is your product, site or blog really what they’re hoping to find?

Or, by putting yourself at #1, are you simply acting like one of those annoying campaigners standing outside of the voting hall that won’t let you through their ranks to vote for who you have already decided to vote for without listening to their spiel first and, probably, taking a piece of brightly colored and expensively printed landfill with you?

Are you helping, really, or are you simply getting in the way?

Google and other search engine rankings are supposed to be an indicator of relevance, not your 133t algorithm-hacking skillzzzoorzz. If you can’t get to the number one spot, or at least on the front page, simply by being the most relevant, the most interesting and the most current information, product or service specific to that keyword or search term, then really…you *shouldn’t* be there. (Yes, I’m simplifying a lot. The principle remains the same.)

What is it about being in business that changes us, the minute we get behind our desks, from thinking, caring and empathetic members of the human community into single-minded, blindered profit-makers with bottom-line eyes and a “sell-sell-sell” one-track mind? (Of course, I’m sure that none of you guys are like that. It’s all those other people. I’m using the generalized “royal we” here. Humor me for a minute.)

We stop thinking about how we would like to be treated, and start thinking about what we can do to make the next sale, regardless of how we respond to those exact same tactics when we’re back to our normal “just folks” selves (where most likely we’d spot it for the commercial pitch it is and either ignore it at best or be annoyed with it to the point of fissile combustion at worst).

We stop acting like people who like and are trying to help other people, and start acting like hunters on the prowl, loading up with the latest and greatest take-down weaponry, deceptive camouflage and covert maneuvers we can get our grease-painted, doe-scented fingers on.

In short, we quit being people and start being businesses.

“But the whole point of being in business is to make money…isn’t it?” I hear from the peanut gallery.

Look, I’ve got no beef with anyone making any amount of money, provided they do it legitimately and ethically. Go on, get rich. Roll around naked in a pile of shiny gold coins if it makes you happy (although…ouch). I couldn’t care less.

That’s not my point.

What I’m saying is…hell, you’ve been out there. You’ve been on the net looking for something you needed. You’ve bought stuff from people. You shop.

The times, they are a changing. People these days not only don’t want to be sold (they never did want that), but they’re savvier, smarter and have more recourse to avoid you if you try to sell them stuff.

Business is beginning to be viewed (at least by the customers, which includes you some of the time) as less of a commercial activity separate from and outside the sphere of the rest of human interaction and more of a stewardship of valuable goods from there to here. We the people expect to be able to find what we’re looking for and have it delivered to us with concerned attention to our needs, without having to wade through sidewalk squatters on the way in, or a gauntlet of ads, emails, harangues and other annoyances on the way out. And if we can’t get that, we’ll change laws, we’ll change technology and we’ll change the nature of commerce itself until we can.

Be an ass, and don’t be surprised if your assholery gets blogged, Tubed, Boinged, Dugg and Redd for all the world to see. And act on.

But some people in business just don’t get it. They see anyone who’s buying anything from anyone other than them (or even just looking) as someone who has just proven they have cash in their wallet, regardless of the fact that said wallet-bearing primate has demonstrated NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER IN THEIR CONTENT, PRODUCT OR SERVICE.

Trying to buy something online during this time of transition is a lot like trying to buy something in a big, open-air market in a third-world country. You spend the entire shopping trip fending off repeated, endless offers of guides and personal shoppers, ambulatory sellers trying to interest you in their wares and people whose uncle is selling the very thing you’re looking for, if you’ll just come this way, sirrah (even when they haven’t a clue as to what you’re interested in).

And God save you if you actually buy anything, because suddenly you’re the picnic at the ant Olympics. You’re immediately swarmed by a thronging mass of these same “helpers,” plus a veritable river of beggars and pickpockets that appears to pour forth from the very walls of the market itself. If you can make it back to your hotel room with all of your limbs, possessions and coins intact, you count yourself very, very lucky.

By participating in “Google smashing” techniques, by engaging in marketing and advertising strategies that would annoy or inflame you if you had to deal with them, by spending more time tweaking your SEO than your content, and by positioning yourself in front of what someone really wants in the hopes of catching some of that traffic (or, likewise, thronging around them on the way out of the store after they’ve bought), you just become part of that crowd of beggars and commercial mercenaries. You’ve become the problem, instead of the solution.

But don’t these tactics make money? Uh, yeah, they do. Quite a bit, actually. I won’t deny it. But they do so at the expense of our humanity, by turning other people into prey and turning us into people who see other people as prey.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, is not who I ever want to be. Not for any amount of shiny gold coins.

Just something to consider, the next time you see an ad for something that promises to get you to the top of Google, or the next time you’re considering just how intensively you want to market your next product or service offering.

I’ve got no beef with good business practices. And I think people who actually have something of value are ethically and morally required to do their best to get it into the hands of those who can benefit from it. But this isn’t that. And if you can’t tell the difference between the two, or if the glare from those shiny coins tends to blind you to such subtleties, then IMHO you really have no business being in business in the first place.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business, Ethics and Business, Internet Marketing, Society and Culture, Success by Soni Pitts
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In the comments section of yesterday’s post on making love, not war, with your customers, reader Dina writes:

I think this is a complete misinterpretation of the old cliche. I’m pretty sure that whoever out there is calling business “war” is referring to the competition and not the customer.

In my reply, I said:

A decade or so ago, I would have agreed with you. These days, though….well, apparently you haven’t seen some of the marketing training literature I have. A lot of it does act as if the customer (or prospect) is, if not the enemy, then something akin to prey.

Based on this exchange, I thought I’d expand on this a little today to illustrate what I mean. (Yes, I do have lots of work to do - I’m using this as a brain warm-up)

Although there was, and undoubtedly still is, a blood-tinged atmosphere of war between competitors in the world of business, these days that war is spilling over from the competition front and on to the customer front. But it didn’t used to be that way.

The main reason for this is that back when we (the customers) were all behaving like good sheeple and tuning in to watch tv or listen to the radio like we were told to, there was no need for warlike tactics. We were a captive audience; if we wanted to be entertained or informed, there was nowhere for us to go. We had to watch their commercials and listen to their spin, or go without.

Things have changed.

These days, it’s every man, woman and child quite literally for themselves. You can build personalized, eternal music playlists, rent all your movies, watch entertaining video shows and read up on the news all day long and never see or hear one single ad or commercial, if you so choose. Oh, sure, a few businesses are still trying, putting up banner ads and inserting text-link hovers like commercial landmines in a field of information. But a few simple ad-blocking plugins usually suffices to render all that expensive advertising completely invisible. At the same time, the field of competition has gone from just those who can afford the cover charge of big business to anyone who can set up a point-and-click website. And these changes are creating an unsustainable starvation ecosystem for those on the business end of things.

The end result is that these days, the customer isn’t a sheep to be led, they’re prey to be hunted. As such, tactics have changed.

And the language of the copywriting, advertising and marketing information I’ve seen reflects this change. I tend to avoid the worst of it, but it’s not unusual to see copy like, “how to manipulate customers” and “shooting fish in a barrel.” They talk about using holidays to “break down a customer’s barriers to sales,” and about hitting customers with up-sell promotions when they’re “vulnerable” to buying more. There’s even a software product called Marketing War Room, for crying out loud.

Also, it’s no secret that corporations have big, expensive lobbies to make sure legislation stays on their side. But what most people know (but don’t really think about) is how much of that is spent battling offenses by the very customers these companies “serve.” Whether they’re protecting themselves from being legislated out of using tainted or sub-quality meat, false advertising or deceptive business practices (has anyone ever signed up for a cell phone service and actually gotten the price on the poster, or been able to cancel a subscription service without being sent on a months-long runaround?), businesses are making it clear that while they are indeed still fighting a war with competitors, their opposites aren’t the only enemies on the playing field. Anyone who can negatively impact the bottom line is on their shit list. And that includes their own customers.

And then there’s the ubiquitous phrase, “targeting prospective buyers/customers/the market.” I don’t know about you, but I have never “targeted” someone I loved for any reason. I may focus on them, pay attention to them, look at them, listen to them, think about them and try to figure out ways to make them happy. But I don’t target them. That’s what you do to prey, or other stuff you intend to shoot.

This change is also the origin of web tricks like using onLoad and setTimeout calls that prevent a user from leaving your page by hitting the back button (hitting the back button just reloads the page they’re on). I know I’ve fallen afoul of this annoying practice, and no doubt so have you. It’s also the reason for the innumerable popups, popovers, popunders, floating pop-windows and many other pops designed to make your life hell if you don’t pay attention to what I, the site owner, want you to pay attention to. No deluded site owner is saying to himself, “I bet my customers just loooove popups. Let’s add a few!” No, the conversation is more like, “How can I force them to see this ad?” and, “How can I hold them hostage long enough to squeeze an email address out of them?” And sites that sell these devises or tricks don’t promote the positive reaction of customers. They tout their “unblockable” code and “unavoidable” visibility.

And if you think the “attacks” on customers are solely relegated to web hacks, legislation and annoying advertising, you’re sadly mistaken. They don’t just want control of your wallet, they want control of your mind. Marketing and advertising firms pour millions (it’s probably billions, by now) into psychological and neurobiological research (called neuromarketing) in a quest to track down the marketer’s Holy Grail - the Buy Button. This so-far theoretical “buy button” is a response in the brain so strong and so deeply embedded that we won’t be physically able to resist saying “yes” (most neuromarketing research in this arena is now focusing on the science of addiction, a potent and promising field). The hope is that if the scientists can find it, all advertisers will have to do is poke the button and we’ll buy whatever they put in front of us. It’s a serious enough subject that in 2003, a watchdog group called Commercial Alert actually sent a letter to Emory University pleading with it to halt neuromarketing research, calling it unethical and claiming that it promotes human misery and suffering.

So far, though, researchers haven’t been able to find a specific buy button, although they have found a “don’t buy” button, at least for impulse purchases. This is useful knowledge as well, since it tells advertisers what to avoid. But they are uncovering more and more about how our brain works and the results they have uncovered are continually being tailored for and used by advertisers and marketers, not to gain insight into the human mind so they can better serve customers or create better products, but so they can develop better and better ways of manipulating our responses and thoughts, with or without our awareness or permission.

And I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot more like psyops (military psychological operations) than love to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Customers, Ethics and Business by Soni Pitts
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Came across this quote in one of my newsletters today:

Many marketing experts like to compare business to war.

I don’t like the martial metaphor, because it views the customer as the enemy – as someone to be tricked or bullied into submission. As a short-term strategy, this can sometimes seem to make sense. And the direct-response universe abounds in promotional copy that badgers, beats, or bullshits the customer into making a purchase. Smart marketers and copywriters avoid this sort of approach, because they know that, in the long run, it is destructive and self-defeating.

Business should not be like war. It should be like love. And not a steamy, one-night-stand kind of love, but a mutually beneficial, steadily improving romance that lasts a lifetime.

- Michael Masterson

Yes, exactly. Get this, and a lot of other things will suddenly become a lot easier and clearer in your business life.

From AWAI’s The Golden Thread Newsletter, Issue 315

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Copywriting, Customers, Ethics and Business by Soni Pitts
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“Don’t be a dick” is the tagline for Wil Wheaton’s blog, which I read fanatically (that is, I am a rabid fan of Wil’s and pay attention to his stuff accordingly). I love the simplicity of that statement. It’s clear, it’s concise and it’s straightforward.

And most of us agree - we don’t want to be dicks and we don’t like dealing with dicks. We get it. And in our day-to-day lives, most of us manage to follow this advice most of the time. Until, that is, we step through our office doors.

Then, for whatever reason, we tend to turn into dicks whether we realize it or not. We send out sales pitches to our customers that under the pretense of touching base from one friend to another. We try to figure out how we can squeeze an extra buck or two out of a sales interaction without pausing to think whether or not we’re actually giving value for that extra money. We blatantly pimp affiliate products not because we believe in them or because we think they work, but because we went shopping on an affiliate source site for stuff in our niche with the highest payout per sale. We offer tele-seminars that are 95% pitch and 5% not-quite-useful information. And so on.

Why do we do this? Because we believe that that’s what works. We’ve been told by marketing and business specialists that every conversation with a customer or prospect has to include a “call to action,” that we must use upsells and cross-sales at every sales point, and that we should couch our sales pitches in the form of friendly emails (and that sounds like good advice - it’s telling us not to be sales drones when we contact people - until we stop to think of it from the other end, which is that maybe a real email from a real friend wouldn’t include any pitch at all). We’ve read business books that teach us how to maximize our profits and minimize our effort. We’ve listened to seminars, enlisted in programs and so on that fill our minds with high-powered business boosting techniques and strategies.

And for the most part, this is good info. But when we get out into the real world, we do it wrong.

We forget that this raw information has to be adapted to our situation. We forget that our clients are people, just like us, and not merely ambulatory wallets upon which to exercise our new-found skills. And we keep score by tallying the income we earned, rather than the number of people we helped.

The trigger for this post was an article by Clayton Makepeace called The Triumph of Hope Over Experience. In it, he writes:

Companies that are experiencing declining results in the mail now appear to be eager to repeat those failures online.

They attract new subscribers by offering a “free report” in paid ads and PPC (pay-per-click) efforts. Then, once they’ve captured their prospects’ e-mail addresses, they direct them to a high-hype landing page.

At their very first contact with a new subscriber, these companies prove that they’re not to be trusted.

RESULT: Conversion rates stink.

But what if, instead, they offered a free report and then actually delivered a report and not a pitch?

I agree with Clayton. Conversion matters, but in the end aiming at conversion at the expense of humanity fails on both accounts. Conversion goes into a fatal downward spiral, and takes our humanity (and our view of our customer’s humanity) with it.

My advice is simple: Listen to Wil and don’t be a dick. Everything else follows from that.

Tags: Customers, Ethics and Business by Soni Pitts
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If you haven’t heard of Bumvertising ™, take a moment to click over and check it out. Go on, I’ll wait.

Bumvertising ™ was developed by PokerFaceBook as a way to get their name in front of as much traffic as possible. From their site:

Benjamin Rogovy, president and chief economist of Front Door Enterprises, developed this system after realizing the enormous potential in wasted homeless labor. Bums use a business model that takes advantage of high volume traffic, with the expectation that, on average, a certain number of people will donate to them in the form of cash, clothing, or food. Some people, by principle, will never give a homeless man money. Some will give food to them whenever they can. But what is the use of holding up a bum sign to 99% of car traffic that will only read but never donate to these vagrants? With such great exposure, Mr. Rogovy imagined that there had to be some value that was not being utilized.

According to their site, the advertiser pays the homeless sign-holders both in money and food, screens the applicants to make sure they are up to the job and otherwise deals with their contractors in an forthright, businesslike manner.

So, here’s the question: Is this exploitation of a vulnerable population, or a legitimate way for homeless people to earn money and food by doing real, valuable work?

[Read more →]

Tags: Business, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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