Why is it that politicians have done a better job on the Internet than publishers?

It has to do with a concept I call Pitch Credibility.

Journalists understand the concept of credibility. It's the trust readers place in us. If there is a journalism profession, it's based on this idea of credibility. I took a huge hit to my own credibility when I screwed-up an item on Ev Williams. I went through hell on that not to regain my credibility, but to minimize the losses, and in hope the damage would not spread to innocent Corante authors.

But just as editorial work must have credibility, so must advertising. That is the innovation the Internet makes necessary.

Moveon.org understood this right away. It knew that if it suggested you give to Candidate X, then Candidate X better fit the desires of the Moveon audience, or the endorsement would damage Moveon. Because it had pitch credibility with its audience, Moveon was able to gain honest information (a mailing list) from its members, and even financial support, based solely on its promise to deliver.

While Moveon failed in these last two cycles as a political force (ask Presidents Gore, Dean and Kerry) it has succeeded in creating a business model that everyone else on the Internet needs to pay attention to.

So if Roger Simon, for instance, is to succeed in his efforts to unite the right-wing blogosphere and extract money from its members, he must retain pitch credibility. He better not let anyone like me in because I'd damage it. And he better use that credibility only to solicit for products, services and people the audience will surely endorse.

Perhaps you can see now why this idea is easier for a politician to understand than a businessman. Politicians are attached to what they're selling in ways businessmen aren't.

Belief is at the heart of pitch credibility.

How can we take advantage of this in the business realm?

Click to find out.

Some people, like Drew Kaplan, already understand this. His Dak2000 is limited only by his reach. He does all his advertising on his own site, and to his own members, because he can control all that. What he needs are a source of new prospects, and the ability of direct mail to turn out those prospects is limited by the willingness of direct mail users to go online.

The folks at Bottom Line, whom I've worked for in the past, also understand this concept of pitch credibility. They know their audience, they know how expensive it was to gain their trust, and they're not going to pitch them anything the company itself doesn't believe in.

Amazon has automated its interaction with the audience to an enormous degree, but it hasn't maintained pitch credibility, so it has had a hard time of late. Reporters said it had emphasized "growth ahead of profit," but it would not have needed to do that had it done a better job of explaining to its loyalists the pre-pitch bargain. The idea that you take cookies and build a database with Amazon is old-hat to oldtimers, but the value in that, and the need for you to do that, hasn't been emphasized enough to newcomers. As a result, Amazon has become a less-efficient generator of sales. It is meeting resistance as ordinary users clear cache and cookies, and question the need to give it data they then use to pitch products.

Pitch credibility builds efficiency. Having credibility with the people in your database means more than the number of people in the database. This is something most people in the direct marketing business understand deep in their bones. I have been saying for 5 years now that Internet marketers need to gain the discipline of the direct mail community, and I'm going to say it again.

If you want to make money on the Internet, establish, maintain and protect pitch credibility. Work for it as zealously as I work for my own credibility as a journalist.

That, and nothing else, is the coin of the realm, and the key to online success.