Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

"Failure isn't to be feared on the Web, it is to be embraced. If you are not failing, you are not stretching as much."

Peter Black at Freedom to Differ cites an excellent report by Joe Strupp about the failures and successes of efforts by mainstream media when trying to do things online. What I want to focus on is one of the reasons this happens.

I remember Steve Jobs of Apple (AAPL) saying one time, "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

One thing I think we need to be cautious of in our online marketing efforts is listening to too many people in the endless array of new things coming about. We even need to be cautious of existing things that may not fit in with our targeted market.

We have to realize in the online world there are what I consider "professional ranters." All they do is attempt to influence by getting their friends and buddies together and putting things out there to make it look like more people believe something than actually do.

Think of online video. I've known for a long time that it would end up being monetized online, regardless of what the ranters had hoped for. It was a financial issue, not something to be voted on. You either get online video with some type of monetization or you don't get online video. People know that. They just try to make it look like nobody will accept it. In fact all the studies have concluded people are more than willing to watch ad-supported video in exchange for it being offered free.

I want to bring this back to the quote at the top of the post. We really need to be careful of listening to what is being thrown out as fact today. Even if we think something is fact, unless we try some things nothing will ever get done or accomplished.

It goes back to what Jobs say in that by time you do all your studies and focus group stuff, it's already too late because by time you gather and interpret the data, people have already gone on to the next thing.

We need to get in front of trends, not endlessly gather data that we hope to be perfect before we put stuff out there.

This is another way of saying we've got to have some guts today. People don't know what they want, as Jobs says. We can understand general trends, and from there offer stuff up.

As we've talked about before here at thealphamarketer, if you ask people about advertising online, they'll always tell you they prefer not to have to view it. But then when you ask them if they want to pay for watching video versus having ad-supported, free video, they'll tell you they prefer ad-supported. It's all in how you ask the question and what it stirs up in the mind of the one being interviewed. 

We must learn to try things and be willing to make mistakes and get ranted at. The other thing as far as online marketing goes, is we need to be careful in how we view those ranting. While there are legitimate concerns we need to hear, we need to be sure it's from real customers, and not people trying to manipulate how they want things to be. There's a big difference.

The only way to find out is to try it and quit trying to be too careful. I think the Internet especially has done a disservice to marketers in that it has made people look overly sensitive to advertising than they really are. The fact that it's all over the place online shows it's being accepted. It's just a matter of doing it in a way that's not too disruptive to what the viewer is trying to experience.