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There are really only a few sins in new media marketing. For the most part, it’s the wild west out here, which is good. It means that a lot of interesting stuff can and does happen. However, there are four deadly sins that can really wreck your efforts.

As hard as it may be to believe, this Internet thing is new to a lot of us still. Many businesses are still trying to get their heads around it, and thank God for it because it means I have a lot of work to do!

Here’s the most basic change between old media marketing and new media marketing. It’s so important, I’m going to bold it. Let’s be bold!

Old Media marketing is geared toward helping the seller, and New Media marketing is geared toward helping the buyer.

This is is the kernel of the big change between then and now. You’ll notice that a lot of big companies are struggling with their image and customer trust. This is because one tiny little customer with a bad experience has a global voice. This is a big topic unto itself, though, so let’s stay focused.

Here is my list of four deadly new media marketing sins. If you can think of more, please contact me (jim@hodgsonco.com) and tell me about it!

1. Overplugging
2. Content encrustation
3. Sneakyness
4. Abusing Permission

All righty, let’s get cracking!

1. Overplugging

We start with the least severe of new media marketing sins, Overplugging.

Overplugging – Only using new media tools to plug your business, or talk about boring stuff. Failing to include the human element.

This is something that people who are new to Twitter, as an example, often do. Let’s say a party promoter attends a workshop on social media. She watches that video that all social media people show with the numbers talking about how awesome it is (this one), and she’s totally jazzed. She signs herself up a twitter account and starts gathering followers.

She posts whenever there is a party, or a special event. She gets a hundred followers… which is great! But it doesn’t go anywhere from there.

After a year of the same hundred followers, she might be less jazzed about social media. She might start thinking that the workshop was a waste, and that she’s wasting her time on twitter. Oh no!

In this case, Twitter is not the problem. She’s just overplugging! The great thing about new media marketing is that not only are you allowed to talk about stuff other than business, you absolutely should! I know a party planner has a million funny or endearing stories from wedding rehearsal dinners or New year’s Eve parties, or whatever. Those stories should be on Twitter!

Why? Because the point is not just to advertise. It’s to draw people into your story. Every business in the world has hilarious clients, silly stories, legends and folklore. Why not share that stuff with your customer base? Why not talk about your clients or customers? Throw them a shout out and they will return the favor!

Clients from small business ask me all the time “Does Twitter really work?” and I find it a hard question to answer. It’s like asking if books really work.

Well, yeah! The good ones sure do!

2. Content Encrustation

This is a pet peeve of mine, and has been for a long time. Network TV is so guilty of this it hurts, but they got away with it for a long time because they had a near-monopoly on visual media.

Unfortunately this has trained people that content encrustation is okay, but it’s not!

Content Encrustation – The practice of weighing down perfectly good content with so many ads that potential customers question their decision to view the content in the first place.

One of the chief examples of content encrustation that makes me seethe is web pages that have an intro. When I was teaching design students about web design, I forbade intro pages of any kind. Here’s my thinking:

Why would you ever want to put an extra step between what you have to offer and your consumer?

If you had a brick-and-mortar store, would you hire a dancer to leap out at people walking into your store, dancing and singing about how great your store is, or trying to “set the mood” before they walked in? I hope not!

Content Encrustation is a No-no!

Here’s another great example of content encrustation. Yesterday I was on the Bicycling.com web site. I noticed a video embedded on the right side of the page, appearing to show me a preview of the Gary Fisher Cronus bicycle. If you’re like me and you have a serious addiction to purchasing bicycles, then you will watch pretty much any video about them. This one is especially interesting to me because Gary Fisher is historically a mountain bike pioneer and this video is about a road bike.

So, I was interested, and I clicked play. That’s when I got hit with the content encrustation.

I had to sit through a 15 second advertisement for an SUV! Shame, Bicycling!

Their site is already fairly encrusted with blinking/shifting ads, but those do not annoy me too much because I have a Firefox plugin called AdblockPro that hides most of them. What annoys me is I am giving Bicycling a chance to wow me with their content (which is in itself an ad for Gary Fisher bikes) and they’re making me sit through an ad that I didn’t know I was going to have to sit through for something I don’t want at all.

This presents a problem for magazines like Bicycling, because they used to be the only source for first looks at new gear. You’d have to endure the content encrustation.

The problem comes when everyone in the world has a global voice. A quick search on YouTube returns many videos about the same bicycle with no 15 second ad. So now Bicycling has lost their chance to be a tastemaker to me on the subject of new bicycles.

Does that make sense?

Now, granted, this also presents some trouble for Bicycling in terms of monetizing a site without content encrustation, but that’s a business model issue. I don’t think that making it harder to see what they do will help. I think they should remove the encrustation entirely and use great content to boost traffic and then market their magazine to that customer base.

3. Sneakyness

It seems to me that for last year or two there has been a great push to create viral videos. Companies hired people to create them, and in many cases they hoped to appear to be amateur creations.

This is not a time to be anything but completely honest and open with your customers.

Also, it is important to realize that when you release a video on the internet, you are releasing it to a countless horde of people who have the time and interest to dissect it in every possible way. If they think they are being misled, they will stop paying attention.

So if you are considering a viral marketing campaign of some kind and it includes any attempt whatsoever to conceal the true source, in my opinion you should give it a pass. There are plenty of great ways to create interesting content about your business that people would love to watch.

For examples of great non-sneaky viral videos, check out hornsmasher.com (possibly the only web site with an intro that I’ve ever liked) and the newest Delta InFlight video.

Who ever heard of an airplane safety video being so good that everyone wanted to watch it? Or a site about musical instrument repair that is so hilarious? Amazing!

4. Abuse of Permission

Oh boy, we have finally gotten to the most terrible one of them all: Abuse of permission! This probably doesn’t need too much discussion as we all know what spam is by this point, but it bears repeating that abusing a customer’s permission is a terrible idea.

I advise against things like automatically adding them to your newsletter, and I definitely advise against texting customer mobile numbers. For some reason, local musicians think it’s okay to text everyone in their phones about upcoming shows, and it’s not. At least with most email spam I can click something to unsubscribe!

Conclusion

Above all, I get a weird sensation when I hear people talk about “driving” business. Things have changed now. We don’t do that anymore.

Now we “draw” business through the use of openness, and great content!

Once you try it, you’re gonna like it!

Just got through speaking at the NAMM show. It was so much fun! It really flew by.

If you didn’t get a handout from my talk, feel free to download it in PDF format here:

NAMM show handout (in PDF format)

Thanks again! Feel free to email or call me at any time.

I subscribed to the RSS feeds from LinkedIn for the questions people ask about social media and web development because I wanted to try my hand at answering them. I did manage to get a “Best Answer” in the web development category, a fact about which I am most proud, but many of the questions are a mystery to me.

One that I seem to see a lot boils down to “What social media tools actually work?”. It’s my opinion that it is the artist much more than the tools the artist uses that are important.

Would you rather listen to a great singer with a cheap microphone, or a terrible singer with an excellent one? Its true that as a terrible singer myself I have a vested interest in this question, but I’m relatively certain people prefer good singers. At least, that’s what my album sales indicate.

I look at the internet, much as we all do, as a giant series of tubes. Information flows by in these giant tubes, and social media outlets are the newest, hippest way to get your message into the rushing torrent. If it is an interesting message, it will succeed, but that has very little to do with the method you used to get it noticed to begin with.

Ideas that are truly viral take on a life of their own. You just don’t have to push that hard.

So, let’s concentrate on the message! Let’s work on our products until people are talking about them. Let’s get our customers to sing our praises to each other.

That’s what really works!

Designing web pages is a black art, it sometimes seems. Basically there are a lot of little helper programs that browsers understand that help web pages seem more like applications and less like static pages. If you’re not a web developer, you would be amazed at the cryptic gibberish of a half dozen languages that it takes to make seemingly simple effects a reality in a web browser.

The way that Gmail behaves, to give a popular example, is the product of heaps and heaps of behind-the-scenes wizardry executed by some very smart people intent on having a cool, intuitive web site. Facebook is another great example, I feel, as well as hulu.com.

But even when you find that slick piece of wizardry, you still have to fight with the web browsers themselves, as some of them refuse to follow standards in attempt to leverage operating system market share to gain web browser market share. Looking at you, Internet Explorer 6.

If you think I’m making that up, go up to any web designer and say “IE6″ and then run, because that person will immediately break something large… possibly on or about your person.

Sometimes web design seems like trying to get an automatic transmission to work with a horse and cart.

On the flip side, some of the things these helper applications can do are extremely annoying and, in my opinion, to be avoided at all times. One such black spell one can cast is to effectively disable the “back” button in a users browser. Most of us have probably experienced this, and it’s terrible.

Can you imagine wanting to leave a normal brick-and-mortar store, only to have the door to the outside lock you in? If you were the store owner, would you do that to your customers? Probably not, I imagine. So why is it ok to do it to them on your site?

Well, I don’t think it is. My philosophy with web pages is that good content will keep interested people coming around. I think its a much better business practice to draw traffic than to drive traffic to your web site.

Driving traffic is what the old media methods tried to do. There was almost no targeting, so your message went out to everyone. Many people who didn’t care were forced to see it, and you were forced to pay to broadcast to everyone… even people who didn’t care!

The most amazing part of the Internet is that everyone starts out with the same voice. So, having a web site is not like buying a TV or Radio ad where more money always means more exposure, although some people do still try to behave that way. I encourage people to spend those resources instead on creating good content on their own site. Draw traffic. Don’t try to drive it!

If you should be lucky enough to get someone’s attention, don’t abuse your relationship by disabling features of their experience. Treat them like a guest, not like a shoplifter.

Now, there may be times, such as during a shopping cart checkout procedure, where allowing the back button to work would create a double charge on someone’s bill, or cause two rows to be inserted into a database but I think that ultimately these technical concerns are the responsibility of the programmers to figure out, not the user.

I think relationships are everything in business. Let’s work together!

This is just a short update to note for posterity that I am going on record as saying that I have coined the term “Bingle” to refer to Google and Bing at the same time.

I feel immensely proud to have been the first to…

Aw crap it’s been thought of already.

Well the site linked above is neat, even if I wasn’t the first to think of “Bingle”. It allows you to search Google and Bing simultaneously and compare the results. I searched for my own name and found my own web site, so clearly I am still the most popular person with my name.

A fact about which I am most glad.