Giving It Away

Marketing gurus with tons more experience and smarts than me (David Meerman Scott, Seth Godin, Tom Peters) talk about the importance of giving away content for free—not just without charging, but without requiring registration or an email address. In that small part of my 40-something brain that remains idealistic, I love the idea.

It’s interesting to me the way Godin and other marketing gurus are great at speaking to that part of our brains:

When I give away an ebook, I just give it away. I don’t say, ‘give me your email so I can extract your attention on an ongoing basis.’ That’s a transaction. The challenge with transactions is both sides expect it to be even. I give you $10,000, you give me a used car. If the used car ends up being worth a lot more than $10,000, you feel like it’s a lousy deal. If it ends up being worth a lot less, I feel like it’s a lousy deal. The transaction implication is that it’s going to be even.

But if I give you an idea, if I give you a blog post, if I give you a PDF and say, ‘Here, take it, spread it around,’ it starts by its nature being uneven. And since it’s uneven, it can be a gift, and when it’s a gift, it can be art and when it’s art it can make a change.

That’s some persuasive and very lofty language—and I like the idea as a philosophy—but in come cases it just doesn’t make practical sense to miss an opportunity to collect contact info about the people who are interested in the ideas I’m sharing.

It brings up a dichotomy I notice between B2B and B2C approaches to online marketing and social media.

I was at Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) meeting last week that featured a panel on integrating social media into the marketing mix

One of the four panelists was solidly B2B—he talked about defining leads and using proven methods like email marketing and white papers to find and nurture qualified leads. The other three panelist’s business, best I could tell, seemed to be mostly B2C—or at least those were the examples they kept referring too.

“I’m mayor of Doc Chey’s in Decatur on Four Square and so I got a reserved parking space in their parking lot—in Decatur, where parking is terrible. Doc Chey’s won a ton of loyalty from me for that. I don’t want to lose that spot!”

B2C online marketing is all about the fun and excitement and lofty ideals. It makes sense: a lot of companies in this space are selling lifestyle.

The thing is I rarely hear details of parallel examples in the B2B world, at least not in a from-scratch situation, e.g., start-up or a company just beginning with online marketing and lacking widespread name recognition. Does it really make sense to trade in proven practices for an unproven, more philosophically appealing approach? These companies need to know who’s accessing their expertise online in order to establish and maintain the relationship.