[Sigia-l] white paper: "The Top 25 Things Every Content Management Vendor Should Know About What their Customers Want"

[Joe 10]

Like any on-line (and off line) transaction, what people are willing 
to trade for a commodity is a factor of the transactional friction to 
the perceived transactional value.  Ebay is a great example - the 
Friction is high, but the value is high enough that people put up 
with the crummy look-n-feel.
(credit where credit's due:  this analogy comes more or less from a 
conversation with Cliff from http://www.echovar.com/ )

If an email address for a report which might give you a business edge 
seems like too great a barrior, you don't make the trade.

I personally get fine results asking people to sign up for a 
newsletter in exchange for a bit of written effort, and yes, it's 
available without signing up too if Chris wants to find it and 
publish the URL :-) A matter of fact, it's available without signing 
up from a Canadian company who's stolen it and published it on their 
site as a "Tool", but that's another story.

I don't think most people with a e-zine or newsletter are trying to 
jealously protect their offering, but more saying "if you like this, 
you'll like what else I have to say...". It's a shame that some have 
spammed the bejezus out of folks and made the practice seem sleezy.

/Joe



At 2:30 PM -0500 4/3/03, Christopher Fahey [askrom] wrote:
>Todd wrote:
>>  Why should I have to give you my email address and
>>  subscribe to your newsletter to get the whitepaper?
>>  No thanks!
>
>1) You don't *have* to subscribe to the newsletter to get the
>whitepaper.
>2) You don't *have* to enter your real email address to get the
>whitepaper. You can enter a phony email address. In fact, you can even
>enter just a single character. Like many forms of this informal nature,
>the validation is nearly non-existent.
>3) Even if you were required to give a valid email address, is that so
>unfair in return for being permitted to read their whitepaper for free?
>4) With a little cleverness, you can skip the form entirely:
>   http://www.contentcompany.biz/25_Things_White_Paper.pdf
>
>Anyway, this makes me wonder exactly how many people:
>
>   1) Have a fit every time they see an email request
>     form and immediately take a hostile attitude
>     towards the site and the company.
>   2) Automatically attempt to enter phony email
>     addresses into such requests (such as z at z.z) to
>     'sneak under the radar'.
>   3) Maintain a phony email account for such
>     purposes.
>   4) Unquestioningly enter their real email
>     addresses.
>
>-Cf
>
>[christopher eli fahey]
>art: http://www.graphpaper.com
>sci: http://www.askrom.com
>biz: http://www.behaviordesign.com
>

-- 

Joe Tennis
Information Design Honcho
Joe 10 Group
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joe @ joe10.com
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