The man Business Week calls "the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age" explains "Permission Marketing" -- the groundbreaking concept that enables marketers to shape their message so that consumers will willingly accept it.

Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works.

Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity -- time -- Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness -- and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.

In his groundbreaking book, Godin describes the four tests of Permission Marketing:

1. Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite customers to "raise their hands" and start communicating?

2. Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them?

3. If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you have anything to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about your products?

4. Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people?

And in numerous informative case studies, including American Airlines' frequent-flier program, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!, Godin demonstrates how marketers are already profiting from this key new approach in all forms of media.

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An insightful book pointing out "self-evident" ideas that seems to be not so self-evident
Being an old book, a lot of information is a bit outdated. AOL, AltaVista are gone, Yahoo! was replaced by Google, and we had a dot-com burst since then. Banners and pop-ups are still with us. However the basic concept is still valid. I've read many reviews where people complain about Godin not writing anything "new", that the whole permission marketing idea is thousands years old - as he himself points out a few times in the book, it was the norm until about a 100 years ago -, and this is all intuitive, nothing new there. But if it is intuitive and so well known, why don't people use it? The concept is well explained - some would say, repetitive, but those who complain about it forget that he wrote a lot about frequency in his book -, there are 22 short case studies showing different aspects of the concept of permission marketing - including a fledgling amazon.com, just trying to be a successful online bookstore in the shadow of Barnes & Noble. Yes, it contains a lot of self-evident ideas (short term profit kills off long term profit), but looking around I think self-evident ideas have to be pointed out, because people always forget them, and yes, it can be a bit repetitive at times - how many times did you solve very similar equations in calculus class until you learned how to do it? -, but this is not a novel. It is book that intends to get a message through. Anyway, I say read it. It won't hurt. :)