Interesting... my reaction to the OP was "Duh, everyone knows that!" But my reaction to your sivers.org link was "Great story!" Not sure if that says something about me or about the relative writing skills of the two posts.

> "Duh, everyone knows that!"

I wish. I still hear it a lot.

The sivers.org post tells the story through an anecdote. I'm with you. Who doesn't love a good anecdote?

On a semi-related note, I always found print advertising to convert extremely poorly no matter what. If your goal is to acquire customers, never invest in offline media, because you may aswell throw the money directly into a trash can (if your goal is branding and image though, print may be fine)

It depends on your target audience. For instance, print campaigns work extremely well in the aviation market. It turns out the various pilot magazines are still the most penetrated medium to that market. Print campaigns work better than anything else. I agree print campaigns for a social networking site is dumb.

I've discovered that as well. The only way it really works is if you do brute-force advertising. If you can afford to buy 10% of the available ad-space every month, you can probably do fine. Otherwise, forget about it.

I wouldn't mind getting 0.01% of the CRM market.