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!

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.

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!

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!

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.

Isn’t that kind of like Headline News announcing that they’re going to include the random jabberings of any teenager off the street? Wait… do they do that now?

Don’t get me wrong. I think Twitter is neat and I tweet regularly about stuff that is going on in my life, but that’s just the thing. Whatever I am posting is guaranteed to be Jim-centric to the detriment of whatever other nouns make it into my update.

If I tweet about fanny packs, it’s because I am putting one on and letting people know that I look like a dork right now. If you’re searching for fanny pack information, you probably don’t care if I am wearing one or how it affects my carefully sculpted image.

This is also why clicking on “Trending topics” on the right hand bar of Twitter’s interface is mostly a mistake. The law of averages dictates that at least some of those should contain real insight, but I have yet to see any. It feels to me as though I’ve stumbled into a conversation among teenagers at a mall food court.

Looking at the current trending topic on Balloon Boy, it consists of a bunch of copies of the same tweet making a joke about the trending topic on the rumor that Kanye passed away. One can only wonder why Google and Bing haven’t allowed us to search this gold mine sooner, or as I am calling them from now on when speaking of them collectively, “Bingle”.

It has a nice ring to it, I feel, even though I suspect Bing won’t really be with us for long.

From the photos of the thing that I’ve seen, it looks like they forgot to emphasize the number one design touch of the 2000s. It is the very thing that makes Apple products look so cool: rounded corners.

Come on guys.. we all know that in the 90s the technology design touch was a rectangle with one angled corner, but nowadays if you don’t have rounded corners you might as well be in the stone age.

Granted, they did round the corners, but I think they could be a lot MORE round. After all, there is no such thing as too cool, as historic cool pioneers such as Vanilla Ice have certainly proved.

What I would really like to see is mobile phones adopting a model more like the one we enjoy with computers and internet service. That being that any computer works with any internet service. It seems to me that this is an inevitable shift, but I wish it would hurry up and get here.

I like the mobile phone innovation we’ve seen lately, thanks in no small part to RIM and Apple, but I still can’t shake the feeling I have had the entire time I have owned a cellphone, and that is that they are purposely crippled. I think mobile phone manufacturers leave out obvious features so that they can add them later and call it innovation.

I have no hard evidence to support this, it just seems like the innovation in mobile phones has come at a horribly slow pace because mobile phones enjoy a somewhat closed market, being tied to a carrier. Sure, you can unlock them, but that’s something only nerds do.

I want to see phones compete against phones and carriers compete against carriers, not people choosing AT&T because they have an exclusive deal with Apple. I think that is dumb.

I have heard some rumors that Google is going to release such a phone, and I really hope they do. I think they are the chosen ones, sent to conquer any evil with a magic wand and a weird scar!

That’s right, Google is the Harry Potter of the internet.

Man, it’s such a strange feeling to watch something like this. It’s so right on, I want to scream “Hiyah!” and kick something.

Not only are the ideas being talked about in this video directly in line with things I have been feeling for a long time, the shirt worn by the guy asking the question to begin with is also directly in line with my wardrobe. There simply is no replacement for striking content, and a weird shirt wraps things up nicely.

Speaking of weird shirts, I used to play music for a living. Back in that dark time, Myspace was the big thing. I even heard a talent buyer tell me once he judged a band solely on their number of myspace friends. If they had a lot, he would book them. If they didn’t, he wouldn’t. Maybe there was something to that. I’m not sure, honestly.

Personally when I see an event on Facebook sometimes I will mark that I plan to attend just because I like the event or the idea of the event. When it comes to actually committing my time and presence, however, that’s another story.

I think that social networking is neat, and it can be a cool way to let a group of people know what’s up with you, but thinking that it necessarily will translate outside the internet is perhaps a mistake. I have similar thoughts about online dating, as it happens.

Speaking for myself, I post on some internet forums like bikeforums.net regularly. People who also post on forums sometimes meet each other in real life. I don’t want to do that. Can you imagine the damage to my reputation if I were discovered to be an internet nerd? The shame!

Have you ever been at a party where someone mentioned something they saw on the internet and tried to get everyone to laugh about it with them? I may be alone here, but I think it often feels weird to talk in real life about something that happened on the internet. There’s a line there. It’s the line of internet nerd-dom, and once you’ve crossed it you can never return.

We all think stuff on the internet is cool, and I think we can all agree that cat videos on YouTube are hilarious, but no one likes to be outed. Internet humor and internet relationships are great… on the internet. They don’t necessarily translate.

So, should you start a blog or twitter account or facebook page for business? Yes! It’ll be fun, you’ll get to connect with new people in new ways, and you’ll get to talk all about your point of view on your own terms, all of which are great for your business. It’s not a quick fix, and I caution anyone to be wary of people charging you to tell you how to catapult your business using any method including social media.

For that sort of growth, you’ll need to incorporate some seriously loud shirts into your wardrobe. They are perpetually the right call.

Take the WikiReader, for instance. Now, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that everyone already has this functionality in their pockets. They’re called cell phones, and they access the actual internet where Wikipedia lives.

The WikiReader, as I understand it, updates itself quarterly, and not for free either.

I guess if you intend to look up this or that on Wikipedia and you’re nowhere near any sort of technology for long periods of time it could make sense, but I don’t think it’s going to be a runaway hit. It seems to me that in that case you could take a book or print a few things out.

Seems to me like a mark missed, but I have been wrong before!

As you can see in the photo itself, it’s a striking image. It has great subject matter, some striking lighting conditions, and it embodies the weirdness of a flooded city. Add to that a little dash of the human propensity for making the best of a bad situation, and you’ve got yourself an incredible photo.

In the Southern Voice article, Ms. Smith talks about uploading the image to Flickr and talking about it on twitter with the #atlflood hashtag. She didn’t make any posters. She didn’t send a newsletter. She didn’t promote the image. It just took off on its own.

What I take away from this is that great content will take off given half a chance. It might not even need half a chance.

Having been a professional musician in a former life, I can tell you that there are a lot of bands and songwriters out there promoting themselves with all the gusto they can manage. They are carpet bombing every available outlet. They relentlessly text message everyone in their phones about every gig they play. And yet, they don’t take off.

I was guilty of this behavior myself. Why doesn’t it work? No good content! Those artists should spend that effort on one good song rather than trying to push twelve okay ones.

Contrast this with my friend Sonia Leigh, who has never gone looking for a gig in her life. She’s only ever played gigs other people asked her to play. When I heard that I told her I was going to play in her band. I did, for over a year.

Her songs are so good that people are dying to get her to come play her music at their venue.. she doesn’t have to sell herself because she has good content. Of course, the best combination is good marketing and good content, but good content and no marketing is a lot better than any kind of marketing and no good content.

So if things aren’t taking off, marketing might not be your problem. You might need to refine your product until it helps market itself!