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Searching through the archives, I came across Seth Godin’s admonition about spam to the Direct Marketing Association’s DMA•05 Show:

You’re spammers, each and every one of you,” Seth Godin told the Direct Marketing Association this week.
You’re sending me unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant junk in a format I don’t want to get about a product I’m not interested in and won’t have time to look at. And you’re hoping to persuade enough people to buy so you can go buy more stamps, or call more people, or buy more inserts, or run more ads. And the problem is, spam doesn’t work like it used to.

Godin called this TV Thinking:

TV thinking says I’m a marketer, I have power. I can interrupt whomever I want, whenever I want because I’ve got money. I can call you at dinner, I can send e-mail, I can buy magazine ads. The entire model of this industry, the model of Proctor and Gamble or any company we grew up with is this: Spend a nickel. Make six cents. Repeat.

At that same DMA event, Brian Quinton noted the sparse crowd gathered for a session on ethical, legal and privacy issues facing marketers. Meanwhile there was a standing room only scrum at something called “Emerging Technologies: How Marketers Can Capitalize on Innovations.” Quinton asked, What’s Wrong with This Picture?

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.

So there it is again . . . Trust drawn front and center in the conversation about whether our companies can survive and thrive.

• 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?