My dad once told me that he believes that stale cake has no calories. (I think that he has a similar rule for ice cream scraped from the inside lid of the container.) He’s kidding, of course, but when he talks this way, he’s really speaking to a desire in all of us to get what we want with no costs. In this case, we’d like to be able to eat cake and ice cream while not gaining any weight. And while we might accept that eating delicious desserts would pack on the pounds, we’d like to think that some food wouldn’t have those costs. We do the same thing in Internet marketing.
One of the best things about Internet marketing is that much of it is free. Traditional advertising is quite expensive, so you’d spend a great deal of time poring over the benefits of a potential ad campaign. You’d ask lots of questions. You’d really have to convince yourself that it is worth doing.
Because Internet marketing is free, we sometimes skip the step of asking if we ought to do something at all. Our biggest competitor just launched a Facebook profile, so we should, too. A new social network just came out, so let’s get all of our consultants to build profiles there. One of our customers asked us why we don’t have a blog for our customer service, so let’s assign someone to that.
In a sense, this is better than what you hear at companies too afraid to do much of anything, but it might amount to so much stale cake. It costs you something—people’s time and attention—and maybe it doesn’t taste very good.
