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Content Headsets

By Joe Pulizzi | Published: April 28, 2010

Continental Airlines has changed their policy regarding headsets on most planes.

Before, you paid $3 for the headset while the programming was free. Most flyers hated buying the headsets. After a while, everyone remembered to bring their own. Continental saw headset revenues plummet.

Fast forward to today. Headsets are always free. While you’re at it, take two. The programming (mostly DirecTV) costs $6. More than half the people on my flight to San Francisco purchased the option. That’s about one thousand additional dollars per flight.

Are you charging for headsets when you should be giving them away for free? For example, are you asking prospects to register to get your white paper or ebook? Are you gating that research report, inhibiting anyone from sharing it with others?

While there is nothing wrong with registration (to a point), your very best content has to be free so they understand what product or service they are missing. Are you charging for content headsets and stopping customers in their tracks? Or worse, they bring their own headsets and find someone else (a competitor) who will help them without all the hurdles.

Painstakingly typed with my iPhone.

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  • http://brainbasedbiz.blogspot.com Robyn McMaster

    Joe, you bring savvy to all of us about giving away something to benefit others. People take something of value and use it like good advice you give here about not pulling too tight a reign on sharing with customers.
    I have much to learn about content marketing and your site looks like a real treasure trove.

  • http://www.retailing.org Dave Martin

    Great post. One of the challenges for trade associations is determining what content you make available to members AND non-members. Members pay a fee for membership and content is part of the value proposition. If you give away all your content to everyone it really diminishes the reason to join in the first place. What are your thoughts here?
    By the way, the fact that you typed that entire post with your iPhone is amazing. Man, you must be patient!

  • http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

    Thanks Robyn
    @Dave…great question. We are working on a membership site on our end so I really get your challenge. I would say this…you need a consistent stream of free content to attract new members and nurture prospective members. This content should all be set up as free with no restrictions, and easy to share. That way you can widen the net to your premium content.
    Two different purposes, two different types of content. It’s a balancing act…but most associations put most of their content behind the wall and don’t give prospects a chance to taste what you can really offer.
    Thanks again!

  • Megan Zuniga

    I don’t like it either when you have to go through registration process just to gain access to free content or pay for something when you can get that for free. It’s like paying for air. I don’t know how to it works for blogs, but for businesses it always brilliant to give freebies to customers, like giving away toys with your Happy Meal. It’s just the little added extra value that could keep your customers happy :D
    PS…Sharing more tips on customer relations. http://budurl.com/8egh

  • http://www.fahlgrenmortine.com Dennis Brown

    Interesting post. I’m a big advocate of content markeitng, but I’m not sure I’ve come this far in my thinking. (Continental is still charging for content; they just got smart about how to do it.) If the content has value and is more than a glorified sales piece, why not ask for a simple exchange of information? It can be difficult to quantify the value of content without some sort of registration process and these kind of results help encouraging continued investments in content. The key is to make it simple and allow a single registration to open the door for future access, imo.
    Keep challenging my thinking.

  • http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

    Hi Dennis…thanks for the post.
    Here’s my take. I’m all for gating content…when the time is right. Many brands gate most of their content and rarely share information. Consumers don’t share gated content via social media…they don’t spread that message. In order to widen the net to reach more people, share lots of great content and then lead them to your premium content. Information marketers have been doing this for years. Once you build a relationship with prospects with your content, then you can present them with opportunities to exchange information.
    Also, I will always say this…there are more ways than one to skin a cat.

  • http://www.kickstartall.com Mary Sullivan

    You need to have different content for different stages of the sales cycle. I agree that educational White Papers should be free. Make it easy to get and easy to share at the early stage when people are sorting out who offers what they need. Then when the visitor wants to fine-tune the decision, registering to view a competitive comparison or even a demo video makes sense. Make sure you have content for every stage of the sales cycle.