Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Defeating the Splatter Syndrome
I remember growing up with the strange activity where kids would throw handsful of mud at a barn and watch to see how many of them stuck. (Yeah, entertainment options were a little more limited back then.) But the practice reminds me of the way many new marketers approach building their business.

I call it the Splatter Syndrome. It involves rushing out a whole lot of promotional activities in the hope that enough of them will work that some money comes out of it. Like the mud-slinging, it's nothing more than tossing a whole bunch of poorly thought out glops into the air and hoping that they'll defy gravity.

That's because it comes from not thinking any promotional strategies through to completion. If you're trying everything at once, nothing will work, nothing will "stick."

It's easy to start all sorts of promotional activities. But for those activities to have any chance of success, there has to be more than just a beginning to them.

Successful activities have to have a measurable goal and have to have a plan for getting to that goal. Simply going through the motions of some activity isn't enough.

For example, imagine you've decided to write a press release for your business. If the goal is merely to write a press release, all you have to do is to fill one page with writing and send it off. But a press release that is done with that type of a goal will accomplish nothing.

Now imagine instead that you've decided to write a press release that will be picked up by the media and that will bring 1000 new visitors to your site. That's a totally different goal, and it's going to require you to do a lot more than simply fill one sheet of paper with something—anything—about your business.

You're really going to have put some effort into that one. You'll have to:

• Figure out an angle that will catch the media's interest
• Figure out some reason in the story for the readers to come to your site
• Figure out which media outlets are most likely to be interested in your story

That's a whole lot more work. And if you actually do that kind of work, you won't have time to dash off the half-dozen poorly planned activities that you could do if you were content just to go through the motions of them.

In other words, you won't have time to throw glops of mud against a wall and hope that some of them—or even one of them—will stick. You'll have to focus on doing one thing and doing it in such a way that you actually do something that helps someone else. And that will give you a far greater chance of success than a hundred half-planned tasks.
Jeff