Hellchick

I was quoted in Seth Godin's blog today.

Among a certain group of people I like to talk with, reading marketing books is made fun of. But Godin's books should be essential reading for anyone who wants to sell something online (even offline, but for my line of work his books are especially useful when it comes to the subject of marketing and the net).

I recently finished Unleashing the Ideavirus and I had a realization while reading it. It wasn't, "man, I should do some of the things he outlines here." It was, "I've been trying to do this! I'm on the right path after all!" The book is a bit jargony, which would normally turn me off and smack of marketingspeak, but the terms he uses, like "sneezer" and "hive" really do do a great job of defining and describing exactly who you're trying to sell to and how to do it.

The book resonated with me because it reinforced my belief that many companies just don't know how to sell products online. Again, the book isn't limited to that description, but it's the focus of my job, and I experienced this problem first hand last year in a situation I won't detail here. The problem reinforced to me that many companies expect to be able to apply brick-and-mortar marketing techniques or print marketing techniques to the online world, and they're shocked when it either doesn't work or it backfires on them.

Unlike most of the population, I live in the online world and make occasional forays into the real world. This is especially true of the audience that I'm hired to speak to. My belief for a while now, bolstered by my own experience, has been that you have to talk to them and sell to them in entirely different ways than you would expect to.

And yet, whenever I discuss this with my peers I'm met with resistance, especially from those people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy if they don't find a way to monetize the exchange of information on the net, and fast.

For a while now I've wanted to write up a short book or manifesto on how to talk to the online audience, or at least the specific segment I work with, but Godin's book does this already in a more general sense. Still, there are specific points I want to talk about, phrased a bit more specifically for my line of work.

The Internet is nothing like the real world.

Seems obvious, right? You'd be surprised at how many people expect the net to be a reflection of every day real life. But it's not. The net, or at least my neighborhood within it, is a place that thrives on things like the goatse.cx link (if you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky) or Viking Kittens. the net is black to the real world's white -- the voices on the net that are the loudest are those of the weirdos, the geeks, the nerds, and freaks that in the real world you'd actively avoid. The net's predominant voice is that of that homeless guy on the street corner that you pass going to work, the one wearing bizarre clothes who stands there talking to no one and geticulating wildly. The net is a weird, fetish-driven land of Oz.

Just take a look at the current crop of Quizno's ads for a prime example of this. How many of you reading this burst out in laughter the moment you saw those freaky little things singing, "THEY'VE GOT A PEPPER BAR"? If you're one of them, and I was, you laughed probably in amazement that you were seeing a bizarre meme that had passed around the Internet suddenly coming to life in mainstream television ads. And I'll bet money that if you were in a room of other people, you were the only one laughing, and that everyone else was staring with amazement at the screen, partially disgusted at what they were seeing. These ads came up in a discussion at work, and I work with people who are somewhat net-savvy. None of these guys had seen this before, and it was a hugely popular net meme for a while.

The spongemonkey ads are indicative of just how utterly weird the Internet really is, and how it just doesn't translate into reality very well, even if a lot of people might have seen it before.

(And actually, I think it's a neat ad campaign. Most of the people I've talked to were actually disgusted at the ads -- face it, the spongemonkeys don't exactly stimulate the appetite -- but the ads are so weird that people mention them, and someone in the group has likely seen the Internet meme. So they explain it, maybe even link to RatherGood.com, and the ad gets remembered really strongly. They're using the hardcore Internet audience to spread awareness of the ad's roots to the mainstream audience watching the ads. I think it's kind of risky, though, because the spongemonkey are just so out there that it may be a little too weird to work. We'll see.)

You cannot expect to shoehorn the Internet into your business model. You have to conform your model to the way the Internet works.

Case in point: MP3s. The recording industry can try as hard as they want to force people to stop file sharing music, but they're going to fail, and we all know it. They're stubborn, and worse, they don't seem to understand that they're trying to take a giant rabid lion and stuff it into a tiny kitty carrier (do you like my analogies? I'm really going out on a limb with that one). The only result is that they're going to fail, and there's going to be a lot of hurt and pain in the process.

They're trying to force their online audience and the Internet as a whole to conform to their business model instead of looking at the net and saying, "people want to share our product with each other, and it's extremely easy to do. How can we use these two key things to (a) get our products out to more people and (b) make money off of that?"

They're viewing online file sharing as something that has to make money rather than as a path to making more money, and if they can't do the former they'll try and squash it right out of the gate. It's not going to work.

Instead, they need to realize that file sharing is an absolutely fundamental aspect of the online world. People will file share, they want to file share, and it's as inherent to being online as breathing is to living in the real world. They can fight it all they want, but ultimately they're going to spend far more money doing so with dismal results than they would if they'd just accept it like they would accept that the sky is blue and then use it as a tool in their marketing arsenal.

The game industry has tried similar tactics with game demos, and this is where it relates to my line of work. You cannot cannot CANNOT CANNOT sacrifice someone playing your demo for a bunch of online ads. I don't care how many online ads you get for sacrificing X number of people playing your demo. Whatever the number is, it's not enough. No one cares about ads, they don't build brand awareness anymore because no one looks at them. People online beg to share your online demo with their friends. Use that, don't fight it. And if you're a web site that needs to monetize the transfer of that demo to a bunch of people in order to pay your employees, you're going to have to find a model that doesn't sacrifice the publisher's need and ability to get that demo into as many hands as possible as soon as it's released. I don't know what that model is, but anything that limits the distribution of a game demo online, for any length of time, is marketing against a title, not for it.

And finally...

You cannot use your audience as a marketing partner and then be surprised when they turn on you for doing something they don't like.

This is close to but not quite the same as what I sent Seth Godin that was quoted in his blog. He labels his blog entry where he quotes me as "Audiences are not a tool", and of course he's right. So when I rewrote this point here, I felt that "partner" was a more accurate representation of what I'm thinking. For the music industry, they should be viewing online file sharers as a kind of marketing partner (albeit one that may or may not realize that they're a partner). In the game industry, the hundreds of web sites that cover our games, distribute our demos, write about our games and provide forums for our fans to talk about our games are all our marketing partners, whether they realize it or not or whether we come out and say that or not. If they weren't, I wouldn't have the job I have now.

What's more, in my industry these sites are savvy enough to understand that they are on some level a partner. As such, we've established a certain relationship with them that's been built on a foundation of mutual work. It's been that way for a long time, for years.

The worst thing you can do is try something new without the involvement of this marketing partner, and then call them selfish, ignorant, or wrong when they turn on you. You cannot use them as a tool for years and then claim they're not part of the marketing equation when they turn on you. They're either important to you as a marketing partner or they're not. They are not a marketing partner only when it's convenient for you. Why? Because as Godin said in his blog, "You're not in charge of the conversations any more. Of course that's true, but a lot of people don't WANT it to be true, so they act like it's not."

For instance, when web sites rise up and boycott a company for doing something like an online exclusive demo release, the common reaction among both the company and the people who are releasing the demo (because they have to monetize this, so they're defending it) is, "they're just being selfish. They live off our demos so they can get more ad revenue and visitors, so we shouldn't have to indulge them just because they're being cut out of the equation."

Wrong. They're being selfish because their selfishness has served our purpose so well for so long, and we've indulged it. Not even indulged it, we've encouraged it actively. Is it any wonder, then, that the audience would turn on a company for suddenly claiming that it's the audience that's selfish and wrong?

I actually have more, such as a discussion on short attention spans and the overlap between the print world and the online world. But I'm going to save those. So pick up Unleashing the Ideavirus. You'll learn something.