Permission Marketing

I recently finished Permission Marketing, subtitled “Turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers” by Seth Godin.

I’ve never had much interest in marketing, so why did I buy (and enjoy) this book? Well, it is visually striking. The cover shows Seth’s ultra baldhead from the ears on up, looking upwards. In fact my children referred to it as “The Bald Book.” It’s about Internet marketing (although not exclusively). As a 25 year veteran of the Internet, many things Internet interest me. And it’s got a catchy title too, so I picked it up in the bookstore to check it out and ended up greatly enjoying reading it!

The big idea in this book is that traditional marketing, which Seth calls “Interruption Marketing,” doesn’t work well anymore since we have less time than we used to. Besides, being interrupted is annoying. “Permission Marketing” is about sending information only to those people who have signaled an interest.

As I thought about the basic concept, I realized that I’m engaged in Permission Marketing myself.
On a basic level, I develop content (i.e. “write stuff”) and put it on my website, and eventually someone looks at it of their own free will and perhaps hires me because I seem so intelligent, well organized, and clearly never ramble or use run-on sentences which I would never do.
On a more sophisticated level, people sign up for my free newsletter securITy, giving me permission to interact with them (send them bulk email in this case). My spam – errr, newsletter, doesn’t contain “marketing information,” but does contain information that is useful to clients as well as potential clients, and hopefully represents me and my services in a positive light (and I enjoy writing it too!).

Seth states that potential customers are first “Interrupted” as in classical Interruption Marketing and offered value in exchange for permission, in my case permission to send them my newsletter every month or two. This only seems to partially apply to me as most recipients of securITy never were interrupted, but instead initiate contact to receive my free newsletter. However when I first started my newsletter, I did interrupt people. I asked about 30 friends who I thought would not become violent if I could send them my security newsletter. Only one became violent!

Seth expands on permission and interruption marketing techniques in quite a bit of detail and I honestly found the book hard to put down. The book is somewhat dated (1999) for an “Internet Book” but at most that’s a minor distraction. His case studies in chapter 12 are quite dated for example, but still useful.

I liked this book enough that I just ordered two more of Seth’s books, something about a “Purple Cow” and “Red Fez: Your website sucks and here’s how to fix it” or some similar title. Judging from this book, worst case they’ll be quick and amusing reads, and best case I’ll also learn a few useful things and will be spurred into thinking about things I never have thought about before.