This weekend (Friday night at 8pm) I was contacted by a “content marketing” firm from California. After a litany of fast-talking hubbub (I thought fast-talking hubbub was passé) and admittance by the CEO of being a “pain in the ass,” I was asked if our writers could drop links on his client’s blogs for a fee. Really? I’d collect cans before I would have our writers post insincere, irrelevant links on blogs. In my mind it goes against everything wonderful and democratic about the web.

I’m going to do this company the incredible favor of not mentioning their name. But the part that saddens me is their client list seemed impressive and their sales numbers looked good.

I believe that branding and content marketing are about providing relevant content first and tuning SEO and technology second. But moments like Friday night give the impression that messages like 100% FREE and spamming are the way to go. Someone bring me back to the light.

This newsletter from Steve Baldwin, editor-in-chief at Didit, just popped in my inbox and gives hope:

“The onus is on us at SEM agencies to prove our case, realistically, free of jargon, hype, and especially over-promising. We need to start acting less like salespeople, and more like serious business consultants. If we can’t be honest and forthcoming about what we can — and can’t — do for our clients, and can’t find a way to make all the complicated moving parts of search comprehensible to plain people who don’t know or care who Danny Sullivan is, we shouldn’t be surprised when these people slam the door in our faces.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 11:58 am and is filed under Content, Editorial, Managing Editor, Technology, content marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.