Corrected Version + Additions - Postage-Due Marketing Corrected Version + Additions - Postage-Due MarketingOnce again, I pray your indulgence and would very much appreciate your
comments. It is my hope that this will become widely distributed and can=
be used as a seed upon which inet-marketing can build a corpus of
literature of value to the Internet marketer. (Of course, the exposure
for my company ain't bad either. <grin>) Thanks.
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"Postage-Due" Marketing
By Robert L. Raisch
A Marketing White Paper from
THE INTERNET COMPANY 96 Sherman Street Cambridge, MA 02140 info@internet.com (617) 547-4731
------------------ Executive Overview ------------------
In recent months, a number of online marketing efforts have shown the failure of traditional direct marketing practices on the global Internet. By exercising significant limitations in the Internets technology, these efforts have sought to use the distributed news and mail technologies of the Internet as an inexpensive way to deliver commercial messages directly into the hands of consumers.
The public have dubbed this practice as "spamming" -- after the quality that a commercially available pink luncheon meat has, once thrown, to stick tenaciously to almost anything.
While the media have chosen to characterize this as a cultural issue, the truth is that these ill-considered marketing efforts cost each person reading the distributed advertisements a measurable fee for their receipt.
For this reason alone, this style of marketing is both ineffectual and potentially very damaging to the marketer.
--------------------------- Internet "Direct Marketing" ---------------------------
Arizona "Green Card" lawyers, Lawrence Canter & Martha Siegel, used the global Internets second most popular information delivery service, Usenet News, as a direct marketing channel in a manner which initially appears to be similar to traditional direct mail. By "posting" an advertisement for legal services to thousands of separate discussion forums, Canter & Siegel succeeded in placing their message in the hands of hundreds of thousands of consumers for very little cost.
But Canter & Siegel posted their commercial solicitation in every newsgroup available without any concern for the topic of discussion in those newsgroups. They posted a message about their service to help foreign students fill out federal immigration forms into discussions about the Information Superhighway, cultural issues of Tamil Indians, Microsoft Windows(tm) development tools, and thousands of other discussions -- few of which had any interest in issues of American immigration.
While some point to the minimal cost of this marketing effort and the huge return it generated as proof that Canter & Siegel have discovered the holy grail of direct marketing -- cheap, effective information distribution, this assumption ignores the real costs incurred -- not by the marketer, but by the consumer.
The media has chosen to paint this as an issue of culture clash between the idealistic Internet old guard and a pragmatic new breed of online marketeer without understanding the economic realities of the situation. Upon a little research, this characterization lacks any real substance.
In essence, Canter & Siegel's actions were economically irresponsible, demanding that the public shoulder the cost of their marketing tactics -- without any possibility of refusal.
----------------------- The Usenet News Service -----------------------
Usenet News is a collection of user-written messages or articles placed in separate categories or newsgroups based upon topic. These articles are then shipped from computer to computer to hundreds of thousands of Internet participants. An article about bicycling might end up in the newsgroup called "rec.bicycles.mountain" or an inquiry for employment opportunities may show up in "misc.jobs.wanted."
The programs that accept or reject these articles do so based upon the newsgroup in which they appear -- e.g., if a subscriber has an interest in bicycling and the article is labeled as a member of the "rec.bicycles" newsgroup, the computer will accept the article because it has been instructed to do so.
Suppose someone were to post a new article that talked about the sanctity of human life and how all abortion must be considered murder. This would be the authors opinion and an example of the freedom of expression that the Internet technologies support so well. However, for the sake of argument, lets suppose that this article was marked as being a member of the "rec.bicycling" newsgroup.
Since the subscriber has instructed the programs that receive these articles to accept anything in this newsgroup, the computer blindly accepts this inappropriate or off-topic article. Once the article has been received by the computer, the subscribers money has been spent and resources consumed without any opportunity to refuse the article. This is how it must be, because to judge whether an article is appropriate to the subscribers needs, it must first be retrieved and read.
--------------------------- "Smart" Information Filters ---------------------------
In this age of technological marvels, we could well imagine computer scientists might find some way of looking into the heart of each article received to decide if it actually belonged in the category it said it did.
The answer to this question is, sadly: No, not today and more than likely, not for a very long time. Any solution would need to address the very real problems there are in parsing human communications in any useful manner.
For example, the phrase "Pretty little girls school" has over 25 different interpretations in English including referring to
- a pretty school for little girls,
- a girls school which is both pretty and little,
- a school for pretty little girls,
- and if we consider the word "school" a verb, it might also be a statement about an activity in which pretty little girls engage.
And considering whether that simple, innocuous phrase refers to the non-commercial issues of juvenile schooling or is, in reality, a commercial solicitation for a particular girls school speaks not to the meaning of the phrase, but its use in the context of an ongoing discussion.
Parsing natural language for its intellectual content falls into a class of problems which computer scientists refer to euphemistically as hard problems -- e.g., problems with little hope of near-term solution.
--------------------- Postage-Due Marketing ---------------------
Using the global Internet as a direct marketing vehicle to distribute messages to users with little concern for their topical appropriateness or the costs involved in their distribution is called Postage-Due Marketing.
In the physical world, advertisers bear the entire cost of distributing messages to the consumer. The only cost the consumer shoulders is the time it takes to consider a solicitation and either embrace or discard it.
In the online world, the costs of distribution are shared between advertiser and consumer. Consumers pay a measurable fee to receive information via the global Internet -- from a shell or SLIP account to a highspeed dedicated connection. Some pay per hour charges for information and some pay per message, but each Internet subscriber pays in some way for the information they receive.
--------------- Social Compacts ---------------
All members of a society live by certain rules which make it possible to co-exist and communicate effectively with their peers. We do not lie, cheat or steal from those around us. We do not drive on the wrong side of the highway. And we do not use our neighbors property without their permission.
Simple rules like these allow us to function effectively as a society. Some are important enough to require protection by law while others are part of the social compact we all observe for the benefit and support of human community.
Engaging in Postage-Due Marketing ignores the single most important truth of the global Internet: above all else, the global Internet is a community -- and like any community, participation in it implies certain rules and obligations.
--------------------------- Effective Online Marketing? ---------------------------
To fully appreciate why Postage-Due Marketing raises the ire of the global Internet community, ask yourself whether you would accept a collect call from a telemarketer or an advertising circular that arrived postage due.
But in their own way, Lawrence Canter & Martha Siegel have been very successful. They have leveraged a dangerous misinterpretation of the online world into global media visibility and a potential best-selling marketing book that instructs others to freely tread on the flowerbeds of the public common. But at what cost?
-==-
About the Author
Robert Raisch is a 17 year veteran of the global Internet and founder of The Internet Company. He is the industrys leading expert in Internet-enabled marketing, co-creator of The Electronic Newsstand, and was instrumental in the initial design and technical implementation of OReilly and Associates Global Network Navigator.
Mr. Raisch is Vice-Chairperson of the Internet Business Association (IBA) -- the commercial trade association of the global Internet, a member of the Internet Advisory Board of America Online, and also sits on the Advisory Board of COMDEX -- the largest computer tradeshow in the United States. He is also active in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which is the body that continues to develop the technology that drives the global Internet.
Mr. Raisch speaks on a wide variety of technical and social aspects of the global Internet. He has spoken at each of the three Internet World conferences, Xhibition 94, and Groupware 94. Mr. Raisch has also been a guest presenter at the Harvard Business School, the American Association of University Presses, Telestrategies DC, and was a Power Panel keynote speaker at COMDEX Fall/94.
About THE INTERNET COMPANY
THE INTERNET COMPANY is the technical services provider for a number of the most popular and successful commercial projects on the global Internet including The Electronic Newsstand, Counterpoint Publishing, The Interface Group (the COMDEX, New Media Expo and Uniforum computer trade shows), and Computer Express.
Operating two datacenters on the global Internet with an aggregate bandwidth of over 10 million bits of information per second, THE INTERNET COMPANY designs and manages information distribution and retrieval services including specialized electronic mail, Gopher and the graphically exciting World-Wide Web.
THE INTERNET COMPANY has provided consulting services to the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX), Delphi Internet Services, Prodigy Services Company, the New England Journal of Medicine and Kaplan Educational Services.