Seth's Blog

Marketing the charity auction

How much would you pay for a twenty dollar bill?

In tough times, many schools and non-profits rely on charity fundraisers, and a popular one is the auction. The method is simple: supporters donate things, and then they're auctioned off, with all proceeds going to charity.

If you have a vacation house, the thinking goes, the incremental cost of donating a week is low. And wow, I can buy a week at that house for way less than it's worth. Everyone wins.

If you have a friend who works on the Letterman show, you can get two VIP tickets for free and donate them and someone at the auction gets to go to the show for not so much money.

This bargain hunting is fine as far as it goes, but it never leads to a wildly successful auction, because the story that's told is too small.

If you're only willing to bid $19 to buy a $20 bill at this auction, you're not doing charity, you're bargain hunting. There's nothing wrong with bargain hunting, it's fun, but it's not philanthropy. I think bargain hunting for a good cause is just fine, but wouldn't it be great if the event could raise far more money and change the way people view the organization?

The Robin Hood Foundation raised more than 24 million dollars at their last auction, because people competed to overpay. And that's the secret. The story the charity must tell is: "don't pay $19 for this twenty dollar bill, don't even pay $30, we need you to pay $40!" The satisfaction of overpaying (whether you overpay anonymously or in public) is what they sell, not a bargain.

This is not the easy path. It is much easier to sell your public on bargains than it is to sell them on generosity. The good news is that once you get over the hump, it scales. Bargains scale downward... better bargains are lower-priced bargains, which means you scale to zero. Philanthropy scales upward... better overpaying is more overpaying. A public auction is always a public competition. The challenge is to create social approval for what would otherwise be bad auction skills! Enlist a few stooges in the audience in advance, then start by auctioning off that $20 bill. When it goes for $45 and the winner gets an ovation, you've set a tone.

The goal of a non-profit seeking money needs to be to create an environment in which the community congratulates itself on overpaying.

Breaking the glass

John sends us this astounding thought piece.

It's a clock, turned off, not ticking, showing no progress, encased in glass.

When you're ready to make the leap, to commit, to make something happen, you break the glass. The sculpture is ruined. All you have is shards of broken glass. And a working clock. It's alive and it's changing and moving forward.

Analogy, anyone?

Four more words

Connect like-minded people.

My previous post only captured one part of the equation... the work of the marketer marketing to (or at) the consumer. It leaves out the future, which involves finding and leading and empowering the tribe of people who surround your organization.

While the obvious successes are sites like Facebook or Flickr or Twitter, this idea of connection is far more pervasive than that. Starbucks connects people, and so does Apple. Accounting firms have the opportunity to create value by connecting their clients to each other, and so do trade shows.

So, I guess we’re up to eight words, or seven if you believe in hyphens.

The Media markets

The product they sell is drama.

When I went to business school, we spent an entire 90 minute class on how to read the Wall Street Journal. That's a rare treat... being taught how to understand and psyche out the media.

With the vast bulk of our news coming online now, it's worth taking a second to look at the way mainstream media markets drama. You know and I know that they're doing this, but maybe it'll strike a chord with someone...

Take a look at a screen shot from the front page of CNN.com today:

I put a green checkbox next to every statement on the page that might be considered 'true' but could certainly be considered irrelevant, or at least unimportant compared to the actual 'news'.

The page would have been more accurate if it had said things like, "Obama gains more than 200,000 votes over Clinton" or "Obama campaign further extends delegate lead, picking up 12 more delegates" or even "Obama pummels Clinton in the bigger state."

That's not dramatic, though, and as William Randolph Hearst taught us a long time ago, the goal is to sell newspapers, not to report the news.

There isn't media bias in favor of Hillary (my friend Jeff is the first to point that out). Nor is there media bias in favor of floods. There's media bias in favor of drama.

Most of us are inclined to believe that government officials, doctors and the media are making an effort to tell us the truth. Actually, just like all marketers, they tell us a story.

All the News That Fits (do what you're great at)

The New York Times, like all newspapers, is in big trouble.

Unlike other papers, though, they've got a shot. And we can all learn a lesson about focusing on the great (by looking at what they should be doing, anyway).

All the News That's Fit to Print used to be the motto they lived by. Of course, now, all the news that fits = the web. Unlimited space and free newsprint means the web can actually hold all the news. "Fit" is a big question mark.

So, where can the Times excel?

I'd argue they have two opportunities:
1. If it's in the Times, it's true
2. If it's in the Times, it's important

I should clarify. By 'true', I mean vetted as well as can be vetted, I mean more true than other places. They can never reach this level of course, but they can try harder than most and they can be transparent and they can admit when they're wrong and correct it. Lots of noise online, not so much truth.

By 'important', I mean 'important because everyone else is reading the same thing.' So, for example, the NY Times bestseller list is important. A half page story about the last factory making washboards is important. A glowing, thoughtful review of an overlooked opera is important. It's important because the Times becomes one of the last cultural touchstones, the thing the other smart people read.

The mistake the Times is making, over and over and over again, is that few of the stories in the paper are edited with these wins in mind. I'm just not sure that anyone there has a list of what they're great at, or want to be great at.

Monday featured TWO stories about Barbara Walters and her new book. Why? We don't need the Times for 'truth' here, and while it may be important to Knopf and to Barbara, it's not really that important to us.

Sunday, my local version of the Times featured an in-depth restaurant review of the Olive Garden! And it was for a location 30 miles from my house (they're saving money by combining regional editions). Ouch.

If I were editing the Times, I'd look at every single editorial feature, every single article and ask if it met either of the two things the Times could stand for. If not, that piece should be gone, deleted, unassigned. No sports section, for example. If you can't be the best in the world, don't bother, because someone else is going to get my attention. The Times needs 50 more bestseller lists, 20 more trusted stories about real political fact and insight, ten more cultural touchstone features... and a lot less filler, a lot less copycat stuff and nothing, nothing about Barbara Walters.

[Not because I don't like Barbara Walters. Merely because a link to the other sites that can happily review and sell me her book is far more effective than wasting time and resources flogging a book that needs no flogging. Pick 20 books a day and point to them, don't write vapid features about three every week. The Times does better when they find something we don't know about and celebrate it instead.]

These choices represent the same quandary you face. Your product line, your choices, your services... if you obsess about doing the thing you are great at and let the mediocre stuff go, you'll do far better.

What are you great at? What if you did it exclusively?

More on passion and pop

The post about the gulf between passion and pop touched a chord.

A few readers remembered Geoff Moore’s classic Crossing the Chasm. This is a super book (particularly the original (used) edition, not the updated one). Geoff has a different take on the curves, but his approach is well worth a look, especially for technology related products.

A few other readers wrote in, pointing out that they are going for both. Both passion and pop because the flexibility of the web makes it easy to do that. Of course, it doesn’t, not really. Going for both is rarely the right strategy.

Most germane: the two humps are not static. They move. Sometimes you can move them (I think Apple did) and sometimes the market moves on its own (music, for example). Most businesses don’t have the patience or the resources to move the Pop hump on their own, and I think it’s usually foolish to try. Passion, on the other hand, is always fast moving, and if you have something extraordinary and there’s a cadre of believers, the passionate will find you.

Avoiding the Passion Pop Gulf

Here's a new curve for you: I'm calling it the passion/pop curve.

That bell curve to the left represents acceptance by the focused/excited/tastemaking community. Those are the people who love microbeers and haute couture and Civil War memorabilia. Like all market curves, there's a sweet spot. Go too nutsy on us ($90,000 turntables, for example) and even the committed will flee. Go too pop, though, and we'll avoid you as well.

Simple example: Jazz. If you do atonal world jazz played in the dark underwater, few people will come. On the other hand, you won't get many jazz fans at a Spyrogyra concert either. Too pop.

The bell curve on the right, you'll notice, is bigger. This is a second market, a bigger market, the market of pop. These are the folks who go to the Olive Garden for a nice italian meal instead of the authentic place down the street. They too want something that's not too edgy and not too (in their opinion) trite.

The reason you need to care is that gap in the middle. Every day, millions of businesses get stuck in that gap. They either move to the right in search of the masses or move to the left in search of authenticity, but they compromise. And they get stuck with neither.

A delta blues guy who plays for tiny audiences in Memphis is in the sweet spot of the passionate. John Mayer is in the sweet spot of pop. Both are great guitarists, neither is too edgy or too trite. Both made a choice. But there are a thousand guitarists who are neither. They're afraid to embrace one curve or the other and end up with neither.

You can move a curve one or way or the other... the curves change all the time. Chuck Mangione was pop for a while, much to the derision of the jazz purists. Now, though, the curve of pop has moved and Chuck can't possibly chase it down.

It's not just musicians, of course. Even dentists face this quandary. Should you be the most expensive, best trained, most extreme dentist in the world, catering to the edge of the passion market, or perhaps develop a chain of $19 five-minute whitening shops for the outer edge of the pop market?

You might get lucky and end up with a sweet spot accidentally. Inevitably, you'll itch to move to the other curve (cause it's bigger or because it feels more authentic) and I worry about your ability to do that.

The best choice is to choose.

Four words

Make big promises; overdeliver.

If you can define great marketing in fewer words than that, you win.

"Big promises": treating people with respect, improving self-esteem, delivering results, contacting as often as you say you will but not more, including side effects in your planning, delivering joy, meeting spec, being on time, connecting people to one another, delivering consistency, offering value and on and on. Caring. The stories involved in your promises matter. That's often what people are buying.

This is the first place that the equation breaks down. Marketers often make big promises that appear to be unrealistic or are delivered in ways that don't match the worldview of the prospect. Marketers get carried away with themselves and focused on their greatness and forget to tell a story that people enjoy believing.

And sometimes, they make promises that are too small to get our attention. Boring promises are hardly worth making.

"Overdeliver" means doing more than you said you would, which is the secret to word of mouth.

Here, of course, the pitfall is obvious. You made too big a promise and you did your best, but no, you didn't overdeliver, not really. You didn't amaze and delight and yes, stun me with the incredible results of your offering.

Just because it's only four words doesn't mean it's easy!

The coming backlash over green marketing

Micah points us to this campaign from Tumi Luggage. Buy some nylon luggage, they'll plant some trees (one tree? A bush? It's not clear how many trees per suitcase). It's entirely possible that Tumi's campaign is nothing short of generous, but as a consumer, it's awfully difficult to tell.

The easiest marketing promise to make is to say you'll do something green if people consume what you sell. That you'll support one green cause or another. No one is in charge of checking out your story, and my guess is that 90% of the time, it leads to a net negative--more landfill, more carbon, more waste.

I can still remember a car commercial that ran when I was a teenager... during the first big energy crisis. It touted that a certain brand of car was the one to buy, not because it got better mileage, but because it had a bigger tank! "Range," the announcer intoned, "is what you need in a car."

Consumers aren't stupid (we're dumb sometimes, but not stupid.) So, when the backlash hits, when every single brand has used up some green angle, then what?

Here's what's missing: a number. When you buy a fridge, there's a big yellow sticker with a number about relative energy consumption. Now, we could argue all day long about how to figure out the right number (should the number on the fridge include data about the amount of energy needed to make the fridge in the first place?) but an imperfect number sure seems better than no number at all.

Drive to Philadelphia: 150.
Take Amtrak: 22.

Stick with the lightbulbs you have throughout your whole house until they burn out: 175.
Replace them all now with something better: 142.

Organic strawberries from California: 88
Frozen strawberries from California: 80
Apple from Dutchess County: 4

The power of a number is the effect we saw when they put a number on restaurants (Zagats) and wines (Parker) and gas mileage (the EPA). People notice a number, and they work to improve it. If every car sold in our country had a real-time gas consumption meter on the dashboard and the rear window, things would change very fast. The only change from the status quo would be the story (communicating impact) but marketing the story is our biggest challenge right now. Once we communicate the most efficient path, I think we'll be delighted at how many people take it. Right now, marketers are doing a lousy job of that, devolving into short-term, often selfish come-ons. That's not going to last and it's not going to scale.

Marketers who truly care about the green thing should be scrambling right now to find a number or an organization that can defend the green brand. If not, it's going to be worthless and a great opportunity for improvement is going to be lost.

Inhaling

Dave Pell has a brand new site.

It's pretty simple. It gives you a popurls type view of the web for any search term you can imagine. Nicely done.

Sucking all the juice out

Just got some work back from a new copyeditor hired by my publisher. She did a flawless job. She also wrecked my work. Totally wrecked it.

By sanding off every edge, removing every idiom, making each and every fact literally correct, she made it boring and dry and mechanical.

If they have licenses for copyeditors, she should have hers revoked.

I need to be really clear. She's not at fault. She did exactly what she was supposed to do. The fault lies in the job description, not the job. If the job description of your lawyer or boss or editor or client is to make sure everything is pure and perfect and proven and beyond reproach, they are making things worse, not better. (Unless you're in the vaccine business).

Almost everything you do has some sort of copyediting filter. It might be the legal eagle or the graphic supervisor or the customer service police. They're excellent at making round things fit perfectly through round holes.

Boring and ignored is fine with them, because no one complains.

Fortunately, copy editors have a remedy. It's a word called STET. Which means, "leave it alone, it was fine." Time to teach that to your editors, wherever they may be. Maybe there should be a t-shirt.

If all you want is safe, have baby food for dinner. Just leave me out of it.

Let's skip the meeting

Chris sends us this classic "ad."

Today's resolution: skip at least one meeting every day for the next two weeks. Watch what happens.

The first rule of b2b selling

If it gets to the RFP stage, you lost.

Great business to business marketers (and profitable ones) make the sale long before that happens.

The RFP is an organizational punt, it's a way of saying, "it's all a commodity, we can't decide, cheap guy wins."

The cheap guy, of course, never wins.

Self promotion

Owen Wilson starred in a really bad movie that came out a few months ago. Most notable: he didn’t go out to shill for it. No Colbert, no Daily Show, no Larry King.

Perhaps he’s nursing a bad cold, but my guess is that he didn’t want to extend his personal brand to promote a movie just because he was in it.

Here’s an interesting dichotomy:

Watch this because I’m in it
vs.
I’m in it because you’ll enjoy watching it.

Or,

I published a book so I need you to read it
vs.
There’s something you need to read, so I wrote about it.

Or

I'm fifty and I just made an album because it was time for me to make one.
vs.
These songs won't let go of me and I want to share them with you because they matter.

The first is me-centric and explains that we’re promoting something that got made because we need to sell it. What we do is make stuff and sell it, and what you do is buy it or watch it.  “I needed to make something to sell, here’s the best I could do.”

The second is you-centric. It starts with the needs and desires of the consumer and ignores the committees, the compromises and the economic realities. It says, “I found something for you, here it is.”

Most of the time, most b2b and most consumer products are sold on the basis of: Yes, there are other choices, but this is the one we make. I'm not sure that's a good enough reason.

80% of the mail and promotion I get (and 98% of the ads) fall into this category. The enthusiasm of commerce, not of belief and pride.

[Apologies if I've given Owen motivations that weren't accurate. Readers have let me know about his recent troubles, and I certainly meant no disrespect.]

Wishing and hoping

Corey found this great insight into the way people think.

Twistori looks for certain words in the Twitstream.

We're a pretty spoiled bunch (check out the 'wish' column).

The fibula and the safety pin

Walter Hunt patented the safety pin almost 160 years ago.

It looks an awful lot like a fibula, which, of course, is used to hold your toga shut.

My friend Kevin has one (not a toga, a fibula). An old one. He's very proud of it.

So, the question that Walter Hunt didn't ask is this, "Why should I bother patenting the safety pin? It's already been done. I mean, even John Belushi has a fibula."

Just about everything has a strike against it. It's either already been done or it's never been done. Ignore both conditions. Pushing an idea through the dip of acceptance is far more valuable than inventing something that's never existed... and then walking away from it.

Signal to noise

In radio operator lingo, you look for a strong signal to noise ratio. That’s the amount of good stuff (the message) that comes through the static (the noise.) You can use your squelch button to turn down the static, but if there isn’t enough signal, you don’t hear anything at all.

For a decade, the web kept delivering an ever better signal to noise ratio to me. I was able to hear more things, more clearly, in less time. Websites and email and my RSS reader were bringing me signals from everywhere, and processing them (and creating, I hope, new signal) was a joy.

Lately, I’m feeling noise creep.

Lately, the noise seems to be increasing and the signal is fading in comparison. Too much spam, too many posts, too little insight leaking through. I don’t use Twitter, but I know a lot of Twitter users are feeling this. So are folks who go to too many conferences. And don’t get me started on victims of Blackberry cc: disease.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can’t. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem.

Ouch!

I just discovered that some of you recently received a piece of spam that began, "dear first name". Apparently, it was sent to people who signed up for an audio call I did several months ago.

This is obviously not my idea, and I'm really upset about it.

I have no idea who got the note, and it probably would make things worse to email everyone on the list apologizing, so instead I'm posting about it.

This is simple: Permission Marketing means delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who WANT to get them. The key word is want. Make it easy for people to sign up, but then give them exactly what you promise.

If you sign up for thing A and the fine print says you get thing B, that's not permission.

All I can do is apologize. I'll try to work harder to make sure that people I work with get this through and through. Sorry.

[Here's a note I just got from my friend who sent the ouch note:

Dear Seth and Seth Godin fans,

Even the biggest Seth fans like me and supporters of Permission Marketing screw up from time to time.  Today, that person is me.  I have egg on my face and give your readers a glaring example of what NOT to do to communicate with a permission-based list and to build relationships with customers and clients

...I accidentally sent an email to some folks who opted in JUST for the Seth teleseminar series earlier this year.  A big mistake...one that I didn't realize until it was too late.  To make matters worse, I left the standard "dear firstname" at the top of the email.  What a brilliant disaster and royal mess.  I did exactly the opposite of what I intended to do - to send a relevant message to a small group who gave me permission to send emails like the one I did.

I can't undo the damage, but I can apologize and can make sure that you and your readers know that it was not intentional.   I can only hope that you trust my integrity when I say that and trust that it won't happen again.

I have learned the hard way what can happen when you send a hasty email without double-checking whether it's going to the right people.

Moral: stuff happens. At least it wasn't on purpose...]

Nearly infinite

Infinite isn’t what it used to be. There used to be an infinite number of stars, and probably an infinite number of kids in high school who didn’t like you very much, but that was about it when it came to a typical human being’s interaction with the uncountable.

But now, infinite is everywhere.

There’s an infinite number of books at Barnes and Noble (you can’t read em all, in fact, you can’t even find enough time to know the name of every one, or even just the first name of every author.)

There’s certainly, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of web pages. And even Facebook, just a small subset of the web, has an infinite number of friends for you to make.

That’s where search comes in. Search makes the infinite finite (at least for a while). With search, we turn the infinite selection on Amazon into a nearly manageable finite selection. Except search (no matter where you look) is pretty lame, and it doesn’t really turn infinite collections into manageable choices. There are thousands of Godins on Facebook, too many for me to count (though one Godin friended a family member and it appears she’s trying to friend every Godin in the world--even though my name is a three-generation old fiction). There's a lot of haystacks out there, and the needles are really good at hiding.

There are essentially an infinite number of good causes to contribute to, an infinite number of people to help, an infinite number of great records to listen to as well. The problem is finding them. Connecting. Feeling like you were successful and not missing something you really needed or wanted.

Search on the web is now grappling with this. If you know 100,000 words, names and brand names, there are now a hundred trillion different searches you can do... with only two words in combination.  No, you might not want to search on Starbucks Matzoh, but you could. Just knowing what to search for is now as difficult as the search itself.

In the face of infinity, many of us are panicking and searching less, going shallower, relying on bestseller lists and simple recommendations. The vast majority of Google searches are just one or two words, and obvious ones at that. The long tail gets a lot shorter when you don’t know what’s out there.

Organizations that can help us manage the infinite are facing a huge (can I say it? nearly infinite) opportunity.

Cool Squidoo tool

If you have a Squidoo lens, I hope you'll check this out. (Type in the name of a lens, like sinclairlewis or michelangelosdavid or rick-roll).

Taking it a step further, the idea of being able to check everything you need to know about your blog or website (any website) seems like a powerful business for someone... Technorati and Compete are doing things like this, but no one seems to put it all in one place.

Thanks, Greg

You would think that the Red parking lot, parking lot #8 at JFK, would be the last place you'd find someone who actually cared, never mind someone who pretended to (a pale imitation).

And yet, that's where Greg works. Greg was the airport parking lot attendant who found the bag carelessly left behind on the third floor of the garage. I called, he grabbed it and secured it for me.

He even turned down the reward I offered him. Next time you fly American, be sure to thank the cashiers as you drive out.

Thanks, Greg. People who care are in short supply. I hope to repay the favor one day.

Pretending that you care

I spent part of the day in New York yesterday.

First stop, an expensive sporting goods store that prides itself on service. I bought some skates, paid and then asked the security guy (the one with all the shelves behind his desk, where people check stuff they bring in) if I could leave my stuff there for ten minutes while I ran an errand.

"No, I'm really really sorry," he said, "but we can't take responsibility and I'll get in big trouble if I do. I know it's a hassle for you..."

I left and did my errand. A little later, on my way back to the car, I had one last street to cross. Suddenly, a motorcade of 20 police cars, sirens roaring, whizzed by, blocking the crosswalk and making me miss the light (if anyone knows why NY City cops are suddenly doing this a lot, please let me know. Where are they going? Why? If it's an emergency, why don't they go faster? [Ari knows]).

As I waited for the cops to go by, I watched a meter guy walk up to my car and slowly start to write me a parking ticket. I was being penalized for being a good citizen and waiting for the endless motorcade!

I ran up and begged.

He turned to me and said, "I'm so sorry. I know what a hassle it is, but once I press this yellow button here, I have to finish. But I bet if you go to court and complain, they'll waive it." Then he reached into his pocket and handed me a lollipop. "Thanks for coming to New York, and I'm sorry."

Except this story isn't true.

The guy at the sporting goods store just grunted at me. Explained it wasn't his job and just dared me to return the skates I had just bought. And the meter guy didn't even bother to acknowledge me or make eye contact.

No, you can't always hire exceptional people for these jobs. No, you can't always invest enough time to train them sufficiently. But yes, you can make, "pretending you care," a barely acceptable alternative.

It doesn't take much to take the edge off an encounter.

[Boy does this sound cynical. How inauthentic! How manipulative! Isn't it better to just hire people who actually care? Of course it is. But as far as I can tell, that's a lot harder than it looks--because so many organizations are organized around policies, not caring, and because so many employees have been trained not to care.

So, the essence of the lesson here is this: if people start out pretending to care, next thing you know, they actually do care. They like the positive feedback and they like the way being kind makes them feel. It spreads. It sticks.]

Would you do me a favor?

Just about a year ago, I published The Dip.

It turned out to be one of my most successful books. Perhaps you have a copy--which I appreciate more than you can guess. Now, here's the favor:

A year later, would you mind sharing your copy? Take it off the shelf and loan it to someone. Someone at work or in your family, perhaps. If I could double the number of people who read the book, it would be pretty cool.

Thanks.

The five step brand lifecycle

Who is Brad Pitt? [insert your brand/name here]

Get me Brad Pitt!

Get me someone like Brad PItt, but cheaper!

Get me a newer version of Brad Pitt!

Who is Brad Pitt?

[original source unknown--though readers have suggested Mary Astor, Kirk Douglas, Jack Elam and of course, Ricardo Montalban!].

[Leon adds a few more:

- I wonder what happened to Brad Pitt.

- Get Brad Pitt back.

- Get me someone like Brad Pitt, who was around the same time as Brad Pitt. ]

Of course, it's hard to tell where you are when it's about you.

Silly Traffic

This is a truth of the Internet: When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces.

75% of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds.

Any site, anywhere, anytime. 75% bounce rate within three seconds.

By unfocused, I mean people who visit via Digg or Stumbleupon or even a typical Google search. If your site is spammy or clearly selling something, the number is certainly higher. If you’re getting traffic because you have a clever domain name, it might be even higher. I don’t know of many examples where it is lower.

It’s good for your ego, that’s certain. You can brag about hits if you can get away with it, or pageviews or visits. But the bounce rate is still that scary 75%.

So, what should you do about silly traffic?

The tempting thing to do is to obsess over it. If you could just convert 10% of the bouncers, you’d be increasing your conversion rate by almost a third! (7.5% is about a third of the 25% who don’t bounce). There’s a million things you can do to focus on this, and almost none of them will show you much improvement.

One other thing you can do is get hooked on the traffic, focus on building your top line number. Keep working on sensational controversies or clever images, robust controversies or other link bait that keeps the silly traffic coming back

I think it’s more productive to worry about two other things instead.
1. Engage your existing users far more deeply. Increase their participation, their devotion, their interconnection and their value.
2. Turn those existing users into ambassadors, charged with the idea of bring you traffic that is focused, traffic with intent.

“I’m just looking,” is no fun for most retailers. Yet they continue to pay high rent for high-traffic locations, and invest time and money in window displays. Very few retailers lament all the traffic that walks by the front door without ever walking in. A long time ago, they realized that the shoppers with focused intent are far more valuable. Smart retailers work hard to get focused people to walk in the door and to keep the riff raff walking on down the sidewalk.

Your website can do the same thing. In fact, you might want to make it more likely that bouncers bounce, not less, but only if those changes increase the results you get from the visitors you truly care about.