Know the Room (aka Get Selective). When you go to a party, what’s the first thing you do? You look around and see if you know anyone. That’s a good idea on the internet, too. Try to learn the nature of the people with whom you converse. Knowing the room means knowing what your audience likes and doesn’t like, their technological limitations, and a range of other attributes. It means selecting your audience rather than accumulating it. It’s the foundation of a good campaign.
Dress Appropriately. That’s appropriately, not cool. You don’t wear a ripped T-shirt to a black-tie dinner. And you don’t wear a tuxedo to a football game. Your web site should know where it’s going, too. It should be designed with your audience in mind — classy if elegance will resonate, simple if complexity is a threat, or a multimedia extravaganza if entertainment is paramount. Internet marketing is a communications contest, not a design competition — do what’s appropriate.
Sound Smart. This rule could actually be “Don’t sound stupid.” If you know the room, and you’re dressed appropriately, then you’ve probably cleared that first, quick inspection by fellow conversationalists. Now you have to actually converse. On the internet, that means a few things: you have to deliver good content, in the correct order, and your site has to work. Sounding smart brings together architecture, writing, programming, usability, and contingency design, and these will occupy a lot of our time as we move through this book.
Make a Connection. It’s great to meet everyone at a party, but you want them to talk to you later on, too. At a party, you exchange business cards or phone numbers. On the internet, you use e-mail or some other technique (such as RSS — if you don’t know what that is, do a quick search on the web and you’ll find out) to help folks keep in touch with you.
Brag Modestly. At a party, nothing’s better than having the
host introduce you as “The person I told you about. You have to talk to
him/her.” Someone else just bragged for you — that’s modest, but still
a great boast. On the internet, modest bragging abounds. Search
engines, blogs, and an endless array of PR opportunities allow someone
else to say how important you are.
Observe and Adjust. A conversation is really millions of
near-instant observations and adjustments. If I’m talking to you and
you look at me as though I just turned bright yellow, I may change the
subject or ask if you’re OK. If you laugh, I may tell another joke.
Internet marketing is remarkably similar — you can use web site traffic
reports and dozens of other measurements to gauge audience response and
adjust your efforts, whenever. This is the lynchpin and litmus of
successful internet marketing. It is also where I see most
organizations fail, miserably, to realize the real promise of internet
marketing.
Put these all together and you have a recipe for a selected, interested audience seeing a campaign that they find truly compelling. The rest of this book will explore these six principles in detail, and tie them together. I’ll include examples, tools, and, as you read, a step-by-step guide for implementing the six rules in a way that’ll realize concrete goals for you and your organization.
Six Rules of Internet Marketing
To read the entire book online: http://www.conversationmarketing.com/cmonline/intro.cfm
