As a marketing director, I’ve been practicing “permission marketing” for years now. I just didn’t have a name for it. Enter Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing and vice president of direct marketing for Yahoo!. While I thought I was being polite, what I was really doing was asking my prospects for permission to market to them (I’ve never been the pushy type). Godin contrasts this with “interruption marketing” where the marketer interrupts the consumer (like a TV commercial).

In our information-overloaded age, interruption marketers bombard us daily. According to Godin, these tactics worked well in the past. Today, they do little more than clutter us with messages in the form of spams, commercials, and direct mail.

Godin’s solution is to ask consumers for permission to market to them; not to sell them. And why would people agree to this? You guessed it. They get something for their effort. I can give you a personal example of this. I signed up to get daily quotations by famous people. Each day with my quotes, I get a little bit of marketing from the sponsors of the program. I don’t mind it – after all, I signed up for it!

The king of giveaways will give you the first four chapters of his book if you simply go to his site and enter your email address. Now that’s marketing.