Are the “new rules” for marketing incompatible with lead nurturing?

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When I wrote the post Are web forms old school?, I referred to David Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Marketing and PR. I saw some incompatibility between letting go of your marketing materials and lead nurturing concepts. I suggested some ways to compromise such as only putting your best materials behind a form and limiting the amount of information you collect.

However, the thought that the two concepts were fundamentally incompatible just wouldn’t leave me. For example, one of the great things about lead nurturing is that you can tailor your follow up nurturing programs to the prospects interests based on what they download. If you only know a fraction of what someone downloads, you’ll only have a partial picture.

In addition, if you know how often they download something you can gauge their general level of interest and whether it’s worth your time and theirs to follow up with a call. They may download ten items from your site, but if you only have one of those items behind a form, you run the risk of missing a great opportunity to engage. Or, conversely, you may decide to call everyone who downloads that one item thereby wasting a lot of energy and the prospect's time.

I decided to ask the question on the B2B Lead Generation Forum on LinkedIn to see if others were wondering the same thing. Apparently I wasn’t the only one. You can follow the full discussion here including a comment from me on why I changed my mind about putting only your best content behind a form.