The Art of Promotional Behavior That Isn't Promotional Behavior

The best promotional behavior on the Web isn't ---> PROMOTIONAL!

[Webwork]

True or false: The best promotional behavior on the Web isn't promotional?

True, as in "Contribute value to a community. Show intelligence and authority . . . and people will beat a path to your door . . . or company website"?

IS the best approach to promotions on the Web . . . to NOT be promotional?

Besides publicly sharing knowledge/insights, perhaps contributing to a community, what else has (unintended) promotional side-effects in 2010?

Have you ever promoted "X, Y or Z" . . without being promotional?

How'd it happen . . . IF you weren't intending "it" to happen? :)

[weeks]

The best example of what you are talking about, of course, is Google. ("Do no evil.") It's all math, they said.

Alas, good intentions are not enough. You have to be useful. And, you have to be linked into some kind of $$ model.

A good example of folks who are struggling with this is those who write news. Best of intentions. But, there is no context on the web in relation to the news. You're reading about a new sewer plant and they are trying to sell you a car.

That's another issue: scale. How many houses or cars do you have to sell to make money? Not many. How many soft drinks or candy bars? A lot.

Commercial speech has value. It's not discounted by consumers as much as some would have you believe.

The problem many webmasters have is that their client has a weak product or poor expertise. I have small financial service clients who, quite frankly, can't play major league ball. With the web, you can be on the other side of the earth and compete with your "knowledge/insights" and "contribute to a community" as well. Barry Ritholtz is doing very well, for example, doing that. But not everyone can be Barry Ritholtz. And we only need so many Barry Ritholtzs.

As the folks at Yahoo can explain, second place on the web stinks. Even if you're better at sharing knowledge/ insights, contributing to the community.

Yet, this week our firm was put on a $1000 a month retainer for consulting by a small "can do" financial firm that I was working with on a pro bono community public relations project, sharing knowledge/insights, contributing to the community.

[islanddogg]

I think the perfect example of this was this post:

[webmasterworld.com ] from Marcus007.

He wasn't promoting himself, but, instead, giving information on what his experience had been. He had people beating down the doors to try to check out his site.

[lawman]

Wow, welcome islanddogg. I assume you're a long time lurker. ;)

[rogerd]

I think the more helpful (and clearly non-promotional) one is, the higher one's credibility. That may not drive as many inquiries/leads as constantly dropping promo references, but the quality of any contacts is likely to be higher.