A couple of week ago Jim Hancock commented on Seth Godin’s admonition on spam at the Direct Marketing Association’s DMA•05 Show.
Earlier that same day, Brian Quinton asked What’s Wrong with This Picture? in a post about the disparity between the sparse crowd gathered for a session on the ethical, legal and privacy issues facing marketers and the standing room only scrum at something called "Emerging Technologies: How Marketers Can Capitalize on Innovations."
Does anyone else see something distorted in these priorities? Yes, new tech like podcasting and RSS offers lots of interesting possibilities for marketing. But some of those media pose the same important questions about information security and personal privacy that e-mail and adware do. And I can’t help feeling a certain amount of surprise that the DMA audience felt it wasn’t equally important to give attention to the policy issues surrounding both new and existing channels.
Quinton continued:
All the sexy tech in the world isn’t going to help if consumers don’t trust that opting out of a channel will stop the messaging or if they’re afraid of being tracked inappropriately on the Internet.
- How important is trust to the future of your industry?
- Where does your business rank among the most trusted companies in your category? How do you know that?
- What would a Trust Audit for your company look like? Could you do such a thing in-house or would you need to go outside?
- Here’s one benchmark against which to evaluate the level of trust your customers have in you — it’s Luke 16.10, part of The Sermon on the Mount:
Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.
- How do you think your customers would say you’re doing against that standard? Why do you think that?
