Marketing

Let’s talk a bit about e-mail lists. Probably you’re already collecting e-mail addresses: Folks sign up for your newsletters or news alerts, or simply sign up for accounts on your site that are necessary for contributing content or posting a comment.

Alas, you’re limited in what you can do with those lists. You of course send them what they’ve requested (newsletters, alerts, or maybe personalized news reports). But you have to be really careful about anything else you send those users, for fear of being accused of spamming them. Continued

Lately I’ve been studying Internet marketing techniques, and there’s lots from that world that is relevant to news websites. One of the most powerful concepts in Internet marketing (well, all marketing, actually) is “social proof.” That simply means that you’ll get more people to buy something — or read something — if they know that lots of other people have bought or read it.

If you’ve got something to sell, a powerful statement to make to your potential audience of buyers is: “Wow! In the latest 24 hours we’ve sold 1,321 Widget 2.0’s!” Continued

Don’t you get tired of big corporations that are just friggin’ clueless when it comes to the Internet and marketing? I’m going to pile on along with Matthew Ingram, who comments on a boneheaded move by Hasbro and Mattel to clamp down on the Scrabulous application for Facebook.

The story is that the toy companies want Scrabulous — which is one of the top 10 most popular external applications on Facebook and was created by independent developers — to be removed by Facebook. While the companies are within their rights to demand that, they are profoundly stupid if they follow up on this.

This is another in a long line of instances where a dinosaur-thinking corporation thinks it needs to clamp down because someone is damaging their trademark, when actually the Scrabulous application is helping them sell more Scrabble games!

Ingram has the best suggestion: If the toy companies (which share the rights to Scrabble) are concerned, they should buy Scrabulous from the developers and hire those guys to keep it running. Shutting it down would be a collosally bad move.

Perhaps Hasbro and Mattel will come to their senses. As it currently stands, they look like D,O,T,I,S,I. (That shouldn’t be too hard to unscramble.)

(One last thought: It’s possible, I suppose, that Hasbro and Mattel are more calculating that I’m giving them credit for. The publicity machine ramps up, then they “save the day” by purchasing Scrabulous rather than shutting it down. They look like good guys after all. .. I think that’s unlikely, though; in that scenario they still look clueless and nasty for the short term.)