As a marketer I am responsible for helping my clients promote themselves, as a public relations contact I am responsible for helping them strategically maneuver, as a professional I am responsible for making sure that I do not sacrifice my clients well-being for my own, and as a thoughtful human I must hold myself responsible for everything else. Yet my industry is colored by many personalities and creatures that paint my world in a dark tone- one where they recommend advertising that doesn’t work, abide by rules that do not function, and support a system that is driven by the almighty dollar.

I would have to lie to say that money does not influence my business. Obviously we all need to pay bills, keep the lights on, and create enough cash flow to survive for next year.

I also believe that a positive cash flow is created by honest effort and leveraging your talents.

One of the core reasons I work with social media is that many of the benefits can be found for free or little cost. I am not in a business of selling more and more; I am actually in a business of selling less and less when it deals with most projects. Depending on who you are, any one of the free things you read on this site could have saved or earned you thousands of dollars (or millions.)

As a consultant working within a highly fluid and evolving landscape, worthwhile assets have become fairly basic:

• Willingness to make mistakes
• Aptitude to learn quickly from mistakes
• Insight to trends
• Talent for finding the right spot at the right time
• The competitiveness to take another step

Therefore- the ethical approach to online marketing (in my humble opinion) is to focus on other like-minded souls and technologies. The next “big thing” could be designed by Bill Gates or some teenager that develops code at two in the morning while eating pizza in his mother’s basement.

That leads us farther and farther astray from traditional marketing and advertising models, drives a stake in the public relations industry, and provides a wide-open opportunity for businesses both big and small. If you want to be a smart decision maker, educate yourself.

To help think about the “big picture”, here are some questions I ask of my corporate friends:

1. Why would someone use traditional public relations for $10,000 a month they could have similar affect with social media for $2,500?
2. Why would a business spend $10,000 a month on Google PPC when they could save $5,000 a month by strategically planning an organic campaign?
3. Do you need online marketing services, or do you really need a sales/service coach?
4. What demographic are you really shooting for, and do you have any data to back that up?
5. When was the last time you actually understood the information that wasn’t presented on your marketing report? (hint, it usually isn’t about what is on the report.)

When driving a company to success, here are some additional questions decision makers should ask:

1. Why does any CEO think that they shouldn’t be a leader online, isn’t it the CEO’s job to be a leader everywhere?
2. Do you care so little about your company that you actively ignore hundreds of prospects and clients everyday?
3. Do you even have enough knowledge about the online marketplace to know that you are ignoring them?
4. Who’s job on your team is it to stay up to date with technology changes in other industries?
5. Do you take responsibility for wasting budget re-inventing the wheel that three other industries already have?

Ultimately the reason for these questions point to the fundamental ideas that drive any company.

As an example of thinking big: Google is the 800 pound Gorilla in the online mist. They create rules and dictations on a massive level. I appreciate some of the rules and policies, but I also have enough of a brain to question them. Some of them are to make a system function better, but all of them are designed to create more profit.

When clients come to me, one of the first request is to be “on top of Google.”
“Great” I say, but then I ask the simple question “Why?”

I would offer up that 19 out of 20 decision makers I ask this question of simply cannot answer it, or they regurgitate two or three bullet points they have read online (i.e. they only know PR spin, not actual information.)

Business isn’t about bullet points found in PR statements or magazine ads. Google may be the NIKE of the online world, but truth be told Yahoo and Addidas make some pretty fine tools too.

The instant response to the question of “why?” is a math one that typically sounds like “But Google represents 80% of the online marketplace!”

So what!

Really, I would love to put you on top of Google and channel 80% of the marketplace into your company. It would probably make you a ton of money. It would also probably bankrupt you as you figure out how to handle the workload properly and manage to offend a huge slice of the marketplace as you bump into obstacles and fall flat on your face.

Business is about numbers and understanding your marketplace (and where that marketplace is). With roughly 250 million online users in North America, almost any business would be really happy to have 1/100 of 1% (that is .0001) or 25,000 users. Most regional businesses would be really happy to have 1/10th of that in a year (2500 new customers), and most single professionals would be buried in work if they had 1/10th of that (250 new clients.)

So who needs eighty percent? The answer is no one.
I have yet to find a realistic business model that could handle that much business (if it existed). I am probably one of the few consultants who will actually ask you if it makes sense to be “on top” of anything. 80% of the marketplace being on Google doesn’t mean that 80% of your target demographic uses Google.

What most businesses need is to identify niche categories that maximize a return on investment by creating superior penetration and conversion numbers.

There are niche demographics in group communities all over the net. Google and Yahoo represent some of them with specific keyword traffic, but most demographics are also identified by thousands of local community and niche interest sites, along with usage patterns found on less utilized search platforms. I am pretty sure that exploring promotional opportunities on specific niche sites that are 100% aligned to your target demographic may be of interest to the educated decision maker.

So really the best questions of an ethical online marketing consultant become very simple:

1. What do you want to be on top of?
2. Why?

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