Testing a theory…

Jun 02 2009

experiment

We were talking to David Meerman Scott — author of World Wide Rave — on our radio show this morning and he has an unusual perspective on distributing content online. When offering an ebook or a white paper, most marketers would tell you to offer your content in exchange for an email address or other personal information. The rationale is, of course, that a business owner should be able to A) determine who is downloading their valuable content and B) have the ability to follow up with that individual afterward.

Scott didn’t think so. In his experience, he claimed that allowing site visitors to download the paper without providing any personal information would increase the interest and readership of the content several times over.

So what’s more valuable? The information you get from the people who download your content online or the much larger readership that you may be missing out on because you are asking for information?

We’ve decided to make ourselves guinea pigs in this experiment. For the first time, our white papers are available with no strings or required information to provide. You can find them here:

For the next few months we’ll be openly reporting on how these papers do in terms of any increase in downloads and whether or not we see our online leads diminish as a result of this. Stay tuned, this should be interesting!