How do you measure failure and success in online marketing? I have said for years that it comes down to conversions (but I’m being simplistic here). We do now have more people talking about Conversion Rate Optimization but is there a story for success in that body of theory or is there more to it?

Traditionally Website Conversion Theory says there are only three types of conversions: Informational Conversions, Transformational Conversions, and Transactional Conversions. However, I have come to realize that there is at least one other type of conversion: the Ideological Conversion.

Ideological Conversions go hand-in-hand with Viral Propaganda Theory but the Web doesn’t stratify itself into ideological and non-idealogical sites or content. Virtually every successful Website tells a story and that story has an ideological core.

There are two ideological poles: the Altruistic Pole and the Selfish Pole. An ideology tends to favor one pole over the other, although the favoritism may be very subtle.

We Agree That Social Marketing is Altruistic

Don’t confuse “social marketing” with social media marketing. Social Marketing attempts to bring marketing skills and resources to influence mass audiences for the greater good. Think of spreading vital health information, or of the historical campaigns that have been waged against tobacco (successful) and marijuana (unsuccessful). That is social marketing. We turn to social marketing when our society is confronted by a huge problem that affects millions of people.

Most sources say that Social Marketing began in 1952 when G.D. Wiebe asked, “Why can’t you sell brotherhood like you sell soap?” Research has shown that he was on to something. The problem is, what Wiebe’s successors have labeled as “social marketing” is hard to distinguish from propaganda. Technically the propagandist and social marketer are trying to accomplish the same thing: they both want to transform the ideological positions of mass audiences.

To be completely arbitrary, we might agree that social marketing is altruistic simply because it is putting the common good ahead of all other interests, whereas propaganda tends to be self-serving and contrary to the common good. The Internet has helped to blur the distinction, though, because one company’s common good might be idealogogical propaganda to another company (I refer to competing corporate messages because they are almost always addressed to mass audiences).

Political partisanship, corporate marketing, and savage hate-filled media campaigns (such as presented by personalities like Nancy Grace and Doctor Drew) are all examples of propaganda presented as social marketing. Selfish marketing does not have to be self-aggrandizing; a selfish marketer may only want to poison the well for a competitor, or to victimize someone who cannot respond in kind, or to create a hostile environment for an ideological opponent before that opponent can sway the masses to their own point of view.

The Internet has unleashed a flood of propagandistic tirades, but so did television and cable. And yet just like newspappers & magazines, just like television and cable, the Internet has also empowered true social marketing. There are truly altruistic campaigns across the Web that eschew politics, that call for reason in addition to passion.

Search Engine Marketing Has Struggled With Social Marketing

In our industry we see social marketing move into action in the wake of every major “search scandal”. The pundits and experts come out in force to talk about “what went wrong” and “why the result was inevitable” and “how we can help (ourselves and/or our clients) move forward” and “what we SHOULD be doing instead of [whatever caused the scandal]”.

Buying links is the favorite pariah of our Social Marketing SEO because paid links are so easy to villainize. No one’s feelings are hurt if we warn each other that acquiring paid links is a high risk practice. It’s a safe message and it becomes a safer message each time it is repeated because more and more people will have heard it before.

In addition to the Paid Link Bogeyman we have also villainized and trivialized deceptive redirects, link spamming, duplicate content, and other practices that — when first attempted — promised to give us an advantage in the search results.

In other words, the pure hearts of the SEO industry do their best to trample down the “bad practices” that hurt Websites in the search results simply for the greater good. Sure, we can rationalize our anti-spam arguments by saying that we don’t want to deal with the consequences when clients bring their penalized sites to us but the truth is that as long as people choose to spam the search engines in scale our jobs as SEOs become more and more difficult.

Spam drives a lot of changes in the search environment, forcing us to creatively compete with it until it is slapped down and then forcing us to adapt to new rules and new technologies that roll out in response to spam. The ever-escalating war between spammers and search engines isn’t doing anyone any favors and only a very small number of people can ever hope to become rich from spamming search engines.

And Now Social Media Marketing Has Met Social Marketing + Propaganda

Last year I could not help but point out how many people were deceived by Google’s anti-SOPA campaign. The day after the great Stop SOPA online protest generated 7 million petition signatures the US government showed that it already had the power created in other laws to take down foreign Websites (specifically the now-defunct MegaUpload service) that were created for the purpose of ignoring intellectual property rights. Sure, the campaign stopped the legislation from becoming new law, but you may be surprised to learn we are on the verge of entering a new SOPA-like world anyway. And, oh! what irony awaits you!

There were only two differences between SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and pre-existing laws that are still on the books:

1. SOPA was directed solely at Websites owned or hosted outside the United States
2. SOPA empowered Federal authorities to go after the advertising channels those sites use to make money

SOPA never threatened anyone with a penalty for linking to a pirate Website (that was a lie published on REDDIT that went viral). United States law already protects you against liability from linking to pirate Websites under freedom of speech (this has been upheld in our courts). What it does not protect you from is linking to Websites that promote or facilitate illegal activity (so what is the difference? Well, that question is troubling many tech industry journalists right now, but that story will have to wait for another time).

The anti-SOPA campaign was built on lies and therefore was simply propaganda masquerading as social marketing. That is not to say that many people did not ardently, passionately fear for their rights. There should be no question that millions of people fell for the propaganda and came to believe that SOPA would strip them of freedoms and rights and privileges.

But here is the poetic irony of that entire situation: Google has now embraced SOPA’s principles. They are working with credit card companies to devise methods to stop the flow of money to Websites (anywhere in the world) that are profiting from online piracy. Soon you may find your friendly neighborhood Googler is telling you basically the same story that the proponents of SOPA tried to tell you in the first place: that if you strip pirate Websites of their financial support they will go away.

Score one ideological conversion for intellectual property rights. But before you go and castigate Google for caving in on such a divisive issue, it might be good to review a bit of history. Maybe we should congratulate them on making a better choice than they did in the past.

Piracy is Theft, Not Free Speech: Here Is Why

Freedom of Speech has accrued many rich and sometimes burdensome attenuations. The United States’ Founding Fathers embedded the concept in the First Amendment to the Constitution because they were concerned that a future, potentially abusive government might use US law to suppress honest and necessary criticism. The democratic ideas that the Constitution embraces can only work if the citizens of the country are free to criticize, disagree with, and protest government decisions and actions. Citizen speech is the final check in our system of checks and balances.

But the freedom to speak has been and still can be abused. People have used their freedom (extended in good faith by generations of fellow citizens) to promote the overthrow of our government institutions, to deprive fellow citizens of their life and liberty and happiness, and to otherwise oppress those whom the Constitution guarantees freedom from oppression. Oppression comes in many forms, including depriving others of their freedom and their means to support themselves.

The United States Constitution also embodies the guarantee of intellectual property rights. Some people say that IPR has outlived its usefulness. And if that is so it still cannot simply be dismissed or disregarded because our elected governments at every level have a constitutional obligation to support and protect intellectual property rights. Freedom of speech does not empower you to strip others of their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

If you want to do away with intellectual property rights the only legal way to do so is to amend the US Constitution and force our government to withdraw from multiple international treaties. And even then we would still have to respect certain limitations imposed upon us by the wills of other nations.

You are free to hate intellectual property rights but you are not free to destroy them. Like it or not the US Constitution limits your freedom to affect the livelihoods of others around you, even if they are powerful industry associations whose own constituencies have sometimes criticized them for going too far in their zealous execution of their fiduciary duties.

With Such a Confused Message, How Can Social Marketing Succeed?

When the US Surgeon General’s office unleashed its war against the tobacco industry no one could have foreseen just how many decades it would take to finally win substantial victories against tobacco products. And yet, you can still buy these poisonous, addictive products in nearly every store in the USA if you are of legal age.

The clear objectives of the social marketing campaign were undermined by the US tobacco industry, which is now poisoning hundreds of millions of people outside the United States. Seeing the decline of their American market the tobacco companies turned to building markets in other countries, rather than retooling themselves to make money in new industries.

The fight against tobacco is not over. In fact, it could be argued that the US government blundered strategically because it focused only on the common good of Americans and not on the common good of all mankind. So the social marketing was flawed and weakened from the beginning; and the tobacco industry took advantage of the flaws and weakness to come back stronger than ever.

The fight against marijuana went even worse. Despite decades of scientific research that show just how harmful marijuana is (and today’s marijuana is far more potent and dangerous than the marijuana of the 1960s) a growing popular voice cries out for decriminalization. (NOTE: See the comments below for citations regarding scientific research about marijuana — please don’t waste my time arguing with me.) The propagandists have all but won and we are on the verge of replacing one poison with an even worse one. There is a certain irony in the prospect since there have been plenty of clear and blatant warnings against the dangers of widespread adoption of marijuana; if society ignores those warnings then those who avoid using marijuana will develop clear and numerous intellectual and financial advantages over those who use it habitually. In fact, habitual users will incur numerous health problems that may shorten their lives (certainly those problems will shorten their abilities to enjoy life).

And as with the battles against tobacco and marijuana the SEO industry has failed to win a resounding victory against spam. In fact, each time we see a major search engine slap against Web spam practices many people swear off spam forever. But the temptation is too strong and the message is clouded by propaganda from the merchants of spam tools and Websites. They say that spam is alive and well and continuing to give an unfair advantage to anyone who learns how to “do it right”. And so more suckers sign up for the software, for the link networks, and so forth.

The altruism behind social marketing is not sufficient to guarantee its success. In fact, that altruism may all but guarantee its partial or complete failure. The altruistic marketer plays by the rules. He’s not going to spread lies and propaganda. He’s not going to play on people’s hopes and fears in the same aggressive way that opportunists do. And it’s not like all opportunists choose to be evil.

We can villainize the tobacco industry executives and investors who chose to ignore the science that showed tobacco kills people but we don’t villainize the food industry executives and investors who choose to ignore the science that shows sugar and fructose corn syrup in particular are transforming a once generally fit and healthy population into an obese, diabetic audience that craves more and more of the foods that are killing them.

Food industry executives are quick to point out that they don’t put much of any sweeteners in their foods, and that they label their products clearly with the nutritional information required by the government. “It’s up to the consumer to manage their diet plan,” we are told. And yet these executives know very well that sweeteners are added to a multitude of products — that consumers cannot get away from the sweeteners. The sweeteners are added to make the foods addicting, to manipulate the consumer into craving more of the same foods. This was once a competitive advantage. Now it’s a desperate survival strategy in an intensely competitive field. The first company to stop adding sweeteners to its foods will lose market share to the others that continue adding them.

Doesn’t that argument sound familiar? When you step into a link war and see some immediate gains you quickly learn to rationalize what you are doing. “Everyone is doing it and if I don’t continue to spam I will fall behind.”

The difference between Web search marketing and food marketing, however, is that every now and then the search engines succeed in granting consumers a reprieve. It may not be a complete reprieve but it’s an opportunity to get off the treadmill and say, “I will do it differently this time.”

The food industry has no such regulation. There is no body that takes food products off the shelves and says, “You’re manipulating consumers too much with sweeteners and additives. You cannot play in the market until you clean up your act.”

Such a Dreary Picture: Is There No Hope for Social Marketing SEO?

I think that passion will continue to carry forward the Shari Thurows of the world, who have been struggling to teach people not to spam. The social marketing will continue and it will enjoy partial success.

But we have not learned lessons from history and therefore we are doomed to repeat it. Even as Google prepares to impose SOPA penalties on pirate Websites (and they will come to own the message, I am confident) we must sort through a sea of conflicting messages.

As experienced Internet marketers convene together every few months to share ideas across the globe they will continue to say one thing in one panel and another thing in another panel. There will still be winking in the audience as power-point presentations illustrate new ways of circumventing as-yet unborn search engine guidelines. The message of “don’t spam” will be watered down by “try this new idea that hasn’t been forbidden by the search engines”.

We need to do a better job of shaping the collective message we share with each other and with people who are just learning the ways of search engine marketing. Of course, I have often said that industry standards would help us tremendously in this area. In fact, industry standards would push back the threshold of chicanery but they cannot eliminate it.

We’ll always have the propaganda with us because we’ll always have people who want to cheat the system. But it behooves us to strengthen the social marketing, to practice preventive search engine optimization by ensuring that for every spam-related query there is good, reliable content to be found that explains the risks and outlines successful alternatives.

We don’t just owe it to ourselves as marketers to teach future clients what to expect — we owe it to everyone else to show that we do have a sense of right and wrong, and that we can and will respect the rights and prerogatives of others. Somewhere in there we’ll make the ideological conversions we need to make. Maybe one day we’ll make enough that we can move on to better things. Together.