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eBusiness as Usual Don Marti points us to a great cartoon at WebReview.com. Hold it right there. Don't move. Now put down the customer and step away from the marketplace. It's irony time. Suddenly Cluetrain, which called for burning Marketing as Usual "down to the water line," seems to be inspiring quite a bit of, well, marketing. First there was this Zeroknowledge ad in which a little girl proclaims that she is not "a pair of eyeballs to be captured" or a "profile to be sold." Then this NetCreation's ad, featuring a worried looking mom and herlittle girl, across from a framed statement that reads —
Unlike Zeroknowledge, NetCreations' Web site bears no resemblence to the ad. It also lacks the ad's slogan, "higher order emarketing," exposing a lack of synergy between the company's advertising agency and whoever does the Web site. No matter. What's surprising is that the NetCreations site features a manifesto: "five corporate principles that we live by." (Just five?) Basically they say that opt-in is the only way to fly these days in the direct marketing business. At least on the Web. Take principle #3: Consumers, not marketers, call the shots. In the postal world, you can blitz consumers with millions of catalogs and credit card offers and become Direct Marketer of the Year. Try sending junk email over the Internet and you'll be kicked off your ISP faster than you can spell the word, spam. That's why we created PostMasterDirect.com, the Internet's only 100% opt-in® email marketing network. Use it. The Web site puts it this way: Unlike other permission-based email marketing services, Netcreations' PostMasterDirect.com connects consumers with only the information they've asked for. Twice. We call it double opt-in. This "permission marketing" business is the viral idea of Seth Godin, whose book Permission Marketing has had a powerful effect on marketers, if not markets. Seth has his own new "manifesto" (he calls it that), released in its entirety on the Web: Unleashing the Ideavirus. So here's the question. Is "permission marketing" a step in the right direction or polite spam? Discussion has heated up around this item at the Cluetrain Topica list site. Links:
For reference, here is the statement (which Chris wrote) that got Cluetrain energized in the first place:
Still says it all. There are responses to this message:
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