Don't Be Dumb in 2006

Whenever anything interesting comes along - like, for example, blogs - someone is going to try to figure out how to make money off of it. That doesn't bother me. When it's a way of communicating, someone is going to try to figure out how to use it to sell stuff. That's not inherently bad - if they know what they are doing, and have some respect for the medium.

After all, I'm a marketer too; this is what we do for a living. But the resulting blog needs to be interesting, provide something useful to readers, and so on.

Recently in my inbox for my personal blog I found this:

Hey there,

I just started a new Houston apartments Blog and I was wondering if you would put my blog on your blog site. I would also like to have your blog on our site. Please let me know if this is possible.

Stephanie

An apartments blog? What is there to say about apartments? I clicked the link and looked. It's not really a blog. It's a bunch of apartment listings, but they are all formatted like blog posts.

So you have a post for Whispering Bayou Pines Place - 2 bedrooms cheap! Then the post for Bunny Fuzz Trail Villas - conveniently located somewhere way beyond Beltway 8! And so on.

Oh, and dear Steph's address is at an apartment locator service.

This is what we call "poor use of a new medium." I suppose someone could make an interesting apartment blog, though I'm not sure quite what that would look like. This is not what these folks have done.

If they were looking for my advice, I'd say, "Why on earth would anyone read this? Only someone looking for an apartment would, and they'd want to go to your site and see what you've got, so why don't you just make a good apartment listing site, do some search engine optimization on it, and maybe some sponsored ads on Google?"

One of the most troubling aspects of our profession is the tendency of dumb marketers to turn interesting things like blogging into annoying garbage. It's already begun with blogging, which is likely to go the way of permission email - a great idea that is poorly implemented and becomes far less useful than it could be.

So here's a New Year's resolution for marketers: don't be stupid. Don't take any method of getting in front of a customers as an invitation to bombard them with bad marketing. Don't spoil the potential of things like email, blogging, and podcasting by misusing them. As the Google folks (somewhat hypocritically) say, Don't be evil.

And have a happy new year.