Marketing Commentary from interlinkONE
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Information: For sale?
Posted by 
on Wednesday, July 1, 2009 
at 1:11 PM 
in There is an article in a recent edition of The New Yorker that I found quite interesting.
It was by Malcolm Gladwell, and it dealt with “free information”. It discussed newspapers, the Kindle, as well as free services such as YouTube.
Here is a link to the article: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/06/090706crbo_books_gladwell
Whether or not to give information away for free will probably be a debate that lives on for a very long time.
There are companies that are having success with both models. The Wall Street Journal claims to have a million paying subscribers for their online edition. There are marketing books that claim you can increase your downloads (perhaps to an eBook or White Paper) 50x if you do not require the contact to provide any information.
How can you decide what is right for your company?
Well, quite simply: test.
Do you offer a white paper on your website?
Well, for a week, require contacts to submit their full information before they can download it.
Then, remove the restriction, and allow people to download the PDF without telling you anything about themselves.
Measure the downloads – and see which category won.
Of course, it’s great to have the leads — the names of the people that download the White Paper.
But if your white paper is great, people will come back to you. They will also share it with their associates, or post a link to it on Twitter.
The battle of free or not-to-be-free is one that may never have a final verdict.
However, you can take advantage marketing software solutions o figure out what approach works best for your business.
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