Guerrilla Marketing

by Charles Rubin

"So much information, so little time," laments today's Netizen. We all have a bandwidth problem with the Net as we try to absorb hundreds of information bits a day through what's usually a very narrow pipeline. It's depressing enough trying to maintain legitimate contacts and keep up with useful information without having to spend some of our precious online time dealing with garbage. When we want information, we want it now, and we form impressions about new Net contacts based solely on information content and presentation. Good information, presented logically and concisely, implies a professional approach to business. Bad information implies just the opposite. It behooves the astute guerrilla marketer to put his or her best foot forward at all times. To wit:

• Watch that signature. Sure, you should include your name, company name, and contact information in an e-mail or discussion group signature, but skip the space-hogging (and frequently indecipherable) graphics, quotations from notable people, long-winded mission statements or expressions of personal philosophies. Most mailing lists and discussion groups frown on any signature longer than four lines; some lists now delete any signature longer than four lines. And demonstrating your reverence for Ayn Rand or James Madison probably won't help you win business.
• Don't rant. If you can't make your point in one or two screens, then either your writing skills need work, you're overly enamored of your own opinions, or you're not focusing properly on the topic. I've gotten to the point in some discussion groups where I no longer read posts by certain individuals--not because they don't have something useful to say, but because they waste too much of my reading time saying it.
• Don't post lengthy articles. If you find an information resource that will be useful to a discussion group or mailing list, post a short excerpt of it and tell people where to get the rest. Otherwise, you're wasting a lot of time for people who aren't interested in it: it takes time to download, time to scroll past, and even time to ignore. If you're participating in a forum on an online service, upload the article to a forum library and point people to it in a message board posting.
• Use a good subject line. Describe each message you send or post by using an effective subject line. Nothing ticks me off more than opening a message with no subject or a vague subject only to find out it's something I don't want to read. If you believe your message or post is useful, then you shouldn't be afraid to announce it with a good subject line.
• Skip the kid and dog photos. Personal Web pages are sprouting like kudzu, but I am not impressed with the professionalism of someone who includes a photo of the family pet or kids. Your regular customers may come to know you well enough to care about your personal life, but if you force everyone to endure a 50K GIF file of Little Scratchy when they access your Web page, nine out of ten of them will be so turned off that they'll never become your customers at all.

Show respect for your customers' and potential customers' time, and they'll reward you with respect in kind.