The other day, one of my read­ers asked me the fol­low­ing ques­tion, which I found rather inter­est­ing: “Why should the author of a prod­uct be included in their sales copy?”

Seems like a pretty redun­dant ques­tion, right? Espe­cially to any vet­eran copy­writer or mar­keter worth their salt.

But the ques­tion didn’t stop there. The reader offered the fol­low­ing insight, which explains why this issue was such an impor­tant one to him, and why I felt com­pelled to answer:

“Specif­i­cally, why do my read­ers need to know who I am or what I bring to the table? How does telling them my qual­i­fi­ca­tions increase the strength of my copy? My prod­uct solves a med­ical con­di­tion. But I am not a doc­tor and I have never had this con­di­tion myself. I’ve spent a year research­ing the best method to cure this con­di­tion. I have a list of 20,000 peo­ple with this con­di­tion and con­verse with them a lot. I know pretty much every­thing there is to know about this con­di­tion and have made it into an ebook.”

The answer is quite sim­ple, actu­ally. In fact, in his attempt to defend him­self (i.e., that he’s not a doc­tor but has lots of expe­ri­ence and spe­cial­ized knowl­edge about his mar­ket), the reader answered his own ques­tion. Let me explain…

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Some peo­ple tend to tweet, blog, post, and status-​​update their lit­tle hearts out. Be it on Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, MySpace, their own blog, or what­ever. They say it’s all about trans­parency, and trans­parency is good.

But I think we need to be careful.

While we may be open­ing our­selves up for the world to see, we may be open­ing our­selves up a world of trou­ble, too.

Trans­parency may seem like the lat­est fash­ion. But it can also become dan­ger­ous on many lev­els. Some dan­gers are obvi­ous, like being robbed after pub­li­ciz­ing you were out. Oth­ers, not as much, like being rep­ri­manded for say­ing some­thing you shouldn’t have said, or even being fired for insult­ing your customers.

My con­tention is, too much trans­parency can hurt you in many ways.

I agree that social media is great for devel­op­ing and nur­tur­ing rela­tion­ships. That’s what the word “social” in social media means. Or what it should mean, anyway.

But as with all rela­tion­ships, even when con­tin­u­ous, open com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an impor­tant com­po­nent, there should be a lit­tle mys­tique to keep the flame alive. A lit­tle room to allow for explo­ration and dis­cov­ery over a period of time instead of all at once.

In today’s open, Web 2.0 world, pri­vacy is more cru­cial than ever before. Why? Because trans­par­ent or not, every­thing you say online is per­ma­nent, can be found, and can be eas­ily mis­in­ter­preted. Espe­cially when taken out of context.

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Yes­ter­day, I had a tweet burp.

(If you’ve been liv­ing under a rock in the past year, a “tweet” is a brief, text mes­sage on micro-​​blogging plat­form Twit­ter.)

I call it a “tweet burp” because it’s some­thing like a brain fart. But I pre­fer “brain burp.” Rea­son is, unlike a brain fart where one for­gets some­thing basic or says some­thing mean­ing­less, what I thought, and sub­se­quently tweeted about, was sur­pris­ingly meaningful.

And for some, even profound.

They are tips on how to Twit­ter bet­ter. (Try to say that 10 times in a row really fast!) Let me share it with you by post­ing some of the high­lights here.

Some of these tips are not extra­or­di­nary, of course. Most of them are sim­ply com­mon sense. But they are some of the things I do in my own social media involve­ment that has proven to work well for me. I rec­om­mend you do the same…

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“If you like to gam­ble, I tell you I’m your man. You win some, you lose some, it’s all the same to me.” — Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”

I’m get­ting fed up.

It seems to me that prod­uct launches of late have less to do with sub­stance and strat­egy, and more to do with tricks and tac­tics. Blame it on the econ­omy. But I think we need to blame it on some­thing else. Some­thing more sinister.

In fact, have you not noticed that a grow­ing num­ber of mar­keters are urg­ing you to join their “club,” as if it’s some secret, back-​​of-​​the-​​room, clan­des­tine poker game?

Speak­ing of poker, busi­ness is some­what of a gam­ble. And admit­tedly, gam­bling can be prof­itable. Very prof­itable. After all, the more you gam­ble, the greater you win, right?

But do we really need to gam­ble with our customers?

What about the long-​​term? What about build­ing busi­nesses rather than just mak­ing money? What about invest­ing instead? What about invest­ing in your cus­tomers that can pay some­times 10 to 100 times more over the long run?

For exam­ple, some­one men­tioned a new pay-​​per-​​follower pro­gram on Twit­ter. (Ugh. How is that any dif­fer­ent than from spam­mers buy­ing bulk email lists?) I responded, and this pretty much sums up my phi­los­o­phy — it should be yours, too — with:

“I’d hate to treat my cus­tomers like pris­on­ers or prostitutes.”

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Face­book is grow­ing by leaps and bounds. If you don’t know what Face­book is, it’s a social net­work­ing site much like MySpace, but with a lot more con­trol, flex­i­bil­ity, and ver­stil­ity. (Check out my pro­file.)

But after test­ing it for a while, I’ve con­cluded that it’s not a viable mar­ket­ing tool. At least, not for me. There are two rea­sons why using Web 2.0 social-​​driven sites to make money (or to drive tar­geted traf­fic) is not viable.

First, and more impor­tantly, it’s labor-​​intensive. It’s a full-​​time affair.

I don’t pre­tend to be a social mar­ket­ing expert by any stretch. And I’m sure that, if you are a social site junkie, you can find some pretty cre­ative ways for using them to gen­er­ate mas­sive amounts of traf­fic. Some already have.

But for me, my busi­ness, and my spe­cific tar­get mar­ket, and like many social net­work­ing sites out there, it’s a waste of time. So if you’re not pre­pared on work­ing it exten­sively and reli­giously, then I dis­c­om­mend it.

How­ever, noth­ing stops you from out­sourc­ing the leg­work, if you’re so inclined. But there’s another good rea­son why I don’t rec­om­mend it…

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Some mar­keters “get it.”

When I wrote my free white paper, “The Death of The Saleslet­ter,” I men­tioned that the web is chang­ing, whether we agree with it or not. Long-​​copy, text-​​only, sta­tic saleslet­ters are slowly being replaced by more dynamic, cleaner, pithier, multimedia-​​based, content-​​driven sales messages.

One case in point is my friend Jack Humphey and his Author­ity Site Cen­ter. His lat­est prod­uct, launched today, is a mem­ber­ship site that teaches peo­ple how to cre­ate “author­ity sites” that drive traf­fic and sell prod­ucts through con­tent, in par­tic­u­lar with the help of Web 2.0 web­sites, com­mu­ni­ties, and applications.

Jack actu­ally offers a free report him­self on this lat­est trend. You can down­load it for free — there’s a mini-​​video intro­duc­tion that leads to an opt-​​in page, where Jack offers his free report, the “Author­ity Site Black­book,” after you sign up.

But let me bring your atten­tion to the saleslet­ter for his new prod­uct, which is what I really want to focus on and what’s pretty amazing…

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So what exactly is Web 2.0? I’m not an ana­lyst or some dot­com pun­dit. But being online since 1991 (or since 1982 if you con­sider bul­letin board ser­vices), I’ve wit­nessed enough to have a good grasp of what’s going on.

So here’s my perspective.

At the dawn of the Inter­net the web was pri­mar­ily a uni­di­rec­tional, one-​​way com­mu­ni­ca­tions process. The web was com­prised mostly of sta­tic web pages, filled with hyper­text and links. It was akin to the direct mail indus­try, only this time it was served up on a com­puter mon­i­tor rather than on a piece of paper.

In fact, web pages that worked the best, espe­cially in a direct mar­ket­ing con­text, were ads and saleslet­ters that closely mim­ic­ked the long-​​copy print saleslet­ters we often get in the mail.

For many years and until recently, this was true.

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