ChasNote

Seth Godin has an odd — though perhaps too common — encounter with the robots that are building ad networks all over the internet. The robots in question, in this case, are employed by Forbes.

“A woman named Jennifer Rosini at Forbes sent a note that read:

Hi , You are invited to join the new community of the high quality business and financial bloggers from Forbes.com. Our community - the Business and Financial Blog Network, will launch shortly.

“I wrote her back, pointing out that she hadn’t even bothered to pretend it was a personal note… just a mail merge missing my name.

“She responded (this is the entire note):

I’m not sending these out. I have people working for me that send out 500 a day. Are you interested in joining, Seth?

“The juxtaposition of the third sentence with the second just highlighted the inanity of the entire enterprise. It’s a high-quality network, but 500 people a day are being asked to join, and it’s okay to spam people but do I want to join anyway?”

“The end result of spam (email spam, blog spam, Twitter spam, Squidoo spam, comment spam, phone spam, politician spam) is that it eats away at your brand. If you don’t have a brand, you might make some short term cash but it gets tiresome creating annoyance everywhere you go. If you do have a brand, a brand like Forbes, say, you don’t notice the brand erosion… until it’s too late.”

Needless to say, brand marketers don’t want to be associated with distressed brands — so what’s the point of this approach?

From Seth’s Blog:

“Sure, 1% of your customers blog or post or just plain talk. They’re louder than ever before. But the other 99% represent a real opportunity for you. Figure out how to get them out there. Cajole them to go to a caucus.”

(The 1% Rule explained here.)

I know it worked for Obama yesterday — get of them to caucus — but that might be the harder path, getting your quiet fans to alter their personalities so they become talkative fans. An alternative suggestion: Find talkative folks, and see if you can deliver a noteworthy experience with your brand.

From Seth Godin’s blog:

“Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.

“Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.”