Permission Marketing

Six years ago, when I wrote Permission Marketing, there were precisely zero matches for the phrase online. Today, there are more than 200,000 Google Search.

On one hand, that sounds like a pretty wide and deep adoption of a concept. Alas, a quick glance shows you that almost all of it is just selfish spam under a politically correct smokescreen.

Permission is supposed to be anticipated, personal and relevant. The persistent financial salesperson who put my name on his newsletter list and then sent me a note letting me know he'd done (he said I could opt out) wasn't using Permission... he was spamming me.

If it's all about me (not you), then opt out is spam. So is sending more email than you said you would.

The ironic thing is that Permission (the real thing) is working better than ever, but only when it has stuff like RSS to get through the filters that are springing up all over the place. The selfish spammers have peed in the water supply, ruining it for everyone else.

I think email is on its last legs as a useful tool, soon to be replaced by IM, RSS and other more reliable and steady filtering devices. That's too bad, but totally predictable.

Posted by sethgodin, May 30, 2004 12:32 AM | | TrackBack