Small Office, Home Office Information |
| Marketing Your Business Without Hype Hype, Spin and Cow Manure What do you do when you find that you have been conned by a business that you’re thinking of dealing with? Or even worse still what do you when you have actually had dealings with a business and find that they have cheated you? If you’re like me you never go near them again and you start warning others about them too. And for me it’s the same with spin. Politicians love it because they can put the best possible face on a situation where the bald truth would be bad for them. Which looks better, “We have unemployment down to just 5%” or “Unemployment is down but there are still millions out of work”? Unfortunately spin is appearing everywhere these days and some see it as a very valid marketing tactic. But if you use it does it really have a positive impact on your small business? I got a press release in my email this morning that really made me think. The headline was ‘Internet Marketer Launches Entertaining Marketing Web Site for Newbie Market’ and of course that caught my eye. The release went on to talk about a site that has been launched by someone it described as a ‘professional Internet Marketer’. And it described the site as ‘an interactive web blog for teaching Internet marketing techniques to aspiring Internet marketers’. It went on to quote the site’s owner as saying “It’s all about learning and having fun. There are plenty of Internet marketing web sites and experts in the world today but few make learning fun or explain the basics of online marketing in simple terms.” So of course I just had to have a look. And one look was enough, I won’t be going back. I don’t know about you but when someone talks about a site being interactive I expect that it will be one where there can be a real dialogue between the site owner and visitors. There might be a message board or a chat room or some other way of exchanging ideas – that’s what I call ‘interactive’. In this case the ‘interactive web blog’ was no more interactive than Home Office Guide is and ‘interactive’ was never a term that I would have used in relation to our site. But what about the marketing tips and tricks? Well there was a post about an assault on an employee of a fast food outlet by a small child and there was a suggestion that .info domain names were good for throw-away sites. And there was a recommendation that people should use piece of link exchange software to build up the apparent importance of their websites. Unfortunately that’s something that Google is already moving to combat. And that’s about all the substance there is to a site that was described in such glowing terms in the press release. Now don’t get me wrong, I am all for any small business promoting itself by stressing its strengths and glossing over its weaknesses but when it reverts to spin and hype (or BS to take away all the gloss) then it’s only going to do more harm than good. I don’t
know about you but if a small business can’t tell me the truth then
I don’t want to deal with it.
12 Sep 2005 |
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