Part 3 : Marketing hype and the "Cluetrain Manifesto"

What do you think of people that are pushing non-content based e-mail newsletters that are really just "hype" marketing newsletters?
They don't get it. People don't know how to use e-mail publishing as a good tool. Part of what our company is going to do is help design newsletters for companies, this is not marketing blurbs, not yes mail, not message media. I have four years of experience and what I want to do is show people how to fill the need for value added content and making sure people know what people really want to see. Marketers get buried in statistics and through all these years what we've discovered is that marketing online per se, just straight marketing hype doesn't work.

For instance if you use television as an example, I equate e-mail marketing to commercials and e-mail publishing to television shows. People don't turn the television on to watch commercials except maybe during the Super Bowl, they turn on the television to see a good show. They are watching the show to get something from it.

What do you think of the "marketing companies" that are e- strategist companies who go in there and advise but don't have any proven experience in the publishing world?
Have you heard of the "ClueTrain Manifesto"?

Yes, I've actually got that bookmarked and it's one place I've gone back to! I like the thesis that says, "You're too busy "doing business" to answer our e-mail? Oh gosh, sorry, we'll come back later. Maybe."
That's a great one and David Weinberger is one of our advisors for what we're about to do. He was one of the primary authors for the ClueTrain Manifesto, and I really believe in that. I feel that marketing and the Internet do go hand in hand. But that can be a problem, because there's a lot of tripe out there. You take a traditional marketing company out there and you put it online and it's like letting a bull loose in a china shop.

What is Lockergnome about to do?
You're getting a scoop now because this hasn't been publicized yet but I'm forming my own company. Our situation right now is that we are refocusing, and we actually let some people go because of creative differences. What we're in the process of doing is developing a model for e-mail marketing and publishing. We're going to become an advisory company for people out there who want to get everything right.

And you're adding newsletters to Lockergnome?
Yes, that's part of the expansion plan. We're going to have a digital media newsletter, the classic Windows newsletter, split the tips newsletter into two, maybe an IT professional newsletter and a Mac newsletter.

Continued...