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Bestselling author, Entrepreneur and Agent of change. Seth's blog can be found at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
July 2008
Thursday July 31, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:28AM EST on July 31, 2008
That's not something you think about very often, is it? (Not my tooth, your tooth). When you have a toothache, on the other hand, it's all you think about. This is a double-edged sword for dentists. On one hand, dentists...
Wednesday July 30, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 9:24AM EST on July 30, 2008
Where did Wikipedia come from? All those hours, all that work. Where did the time and effort come from? Clay Shirky points out that it comes from the TV we're not watching. Take a look at Netroidcomics, courtesy of Bert....
Tuesday July 29, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 8:12AM EST on July 29, 2008
I'd like to invite you to join a members-only tribe. A tribe for marketers, for leaders, for those focused on building communities or creating products or spreading ideas. This online community will live on a site we've created that will...
Monday July 28, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:59AM EST on July 28, 2008
Markets love icons. We seek them out. Placeholders, shorthand for a bigger idea or a shortcut to a good enough solution. Marilyn Monroe is an icon. You can use her image and say a lot, instantly. Same with the Mona...
Sunday July 27, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 8:21AM EST on July 27, 2008
Rounding a corner, I saw a billboard for baseball's Home Run Derby, a sideshow attraction at the All Star Game. Turns out that the billboard was paid for by State Farm Insurance, also the sponsor of the Derby itself. This...
Saturday July 26, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 8:43AM EST on July 26, 2008
Steve sends us this video, way too true. And Your Business Bookyard, now as a free download to entice you to buy the book.
Friday July 25, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 8:19AM EST on July 25, 2008
I want to write a novel. What word processor do you recommend? Today on the radio, Jimmy Wales was talking about the Wikipedia movement. A caller who identified himself as a strategist at Amnesty International asked: We're going to build...
Thursday July 24, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:05AM EST on July 24, 2008
I feel badly for the airline industry. They are caught in a never-ending price war due to online websites and their own commodification. Pick the cheapest flight to get from here to there... The natural short-term solution is bait and...
Wednesday July 23, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:22PM EST on July 23, 2008
Aaron decided that the best way to tell his story was to turn his web site into exactly one (non-scrolling) page. I think that boundaries sharpen the mind. And if you have a one page web site, why not try...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:11AM EST on July 23, 2008
39 years ago, Neil Armstrong became the most famous person in the world. He was an astronaut, of course, but there were dozens of people who could have done the technical work that Armstrong did. What Armstrong became was a...
Tuesday July 22, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:10AM EST on July 22, 2008
Most marketers forget to ask this critical question. When I was pitching for investors in Yoyodyne (1994/1995) I met with many of the biggest VCs on the East Coast. Same company, same pitch, very different results. In retrospect, the reason...
Monday July 21, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 8:24AM EST on July 21, 2008
When I first started talking about Permission Marketing ten years ago, marketers asked, "sure, but how does this help us?" A decade later, marketers look at Wikipedia or social media or the long tail or whatever trend is finally hitting...
Sunday July 20, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:55AM EST on July 20, 2008
Well, that was one of them. Put a number in your headline and do a list. You know, there are a ton of tactics that you can use to increase readership. Plenty of blogs will tell you what they are....
Friday July 18, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:01AM EST on July 18, 2008
When you launch a new product or service, you have a choice. It's tempting to go for the bestseller list, to create a mass market hit. This is the box labeled 1 on the tail above. Everyone wants to be...
Thursday July 17, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:26AM EST on July 17, 2008
Chris Anderson of Wired had the insight and guts to discover one of the two most important natural laws of the Net, give it a name, explain it and teach it to the rest of us. The Long Tail is...
Wednesday July 16, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:02AM EST on July 16, 2008
...don't send email. If you send a note to 100 or 1000 customers/clients/prospects/shippers/parents (whatever), be sure to give people a way to reply! I think this is especially important for small organizations or small subsets of lists... Amazon and eBay...
Tuesday July 15, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 3:17PM EST on July 15, 2008
Mike has a fascinating post categorizing many of the most viral videos of our time. When a field gains steam, it seems as though everything is sort of random or magical (what does McDonald's have in common with Delmonico's? Not...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:26AM EST on July 15, 2008
I bought some clothes from a merchant via Amazon. The company that I ordered from shipped the wrong item. I sent it back and was told it will take three or four weeks to process my return. A month! I...
Sunday July 13, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:05AM EST on July 13, 2008
One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem. A product or a service or even a job that's in such high demand that people are clamoring for more than you can make. We can learn a...
Saturday July 12, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 9:05AM EST on July 12, 2008
If you want to enrage customers, just sit idle while they rage against a broken system at your organization. Someone shipped me a package from Indiana more than two weeks ago. UPS shipped it to my old address, mis-sorted it,...
Friday July 11, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:15AM EST on July 11, 2008
A terrific post on how to write stuff worth reading. A nicely laid out (always use portrait for ebooks) ebook about ideas that spread. A different way to do pricing online, starting to realize the vision that the Internet is...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 8:20AM EST on July 11, 2008
Compare! The bar graph is read left to right and seems to imply something about the declining relevance of Billygoats (even though close inspection shows that we expect high growth in billygoats next year). There's data here, but no information....
Thursday July 10, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 4:55AM EST on July 10, 2008
If you use graphs in your Powerpoint presentations, I hope you'll follow these three simple principles. 1. One Story 2. No Bar Charts 3. Motion ONE STORY The only reason (did I mention only) to use a chart in a...
Wednesday July 9, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:30PM EST on July 9, 2008
Blogging about blogging, writing about writing, documentaries about documentaries, songs about songwriting... It's tempting to use a medium to write about the medium. It works for a while, but there's a limit. Pretty quickly, you hit a natural ceiling and...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:25AM EST on July 9, 2008
Greg sent me an article about a bridge in Folsom. $117 million spent, it needs a name. How about "Johnny Cash"? He's famous, he made Folsom famous, he's dead, his daughter said yes, he has fans, they need tourists... you...
Tuesday July 8, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:06AM EST on July 8, 2008
Mark Brooks had a Kindle idea which got me thinking: Let me see the percentage of people who have bought a book and actually finished reading it. (The Kindle knows, right?) Even better, let me see Kindle books that are...
Sunday July 6, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:19PM EST on July 6, 2008
The biography of George Costanza is five times as long as that of Tim O'Reilly. As Wikipedia matures, there are hard decisions to be made about depth and breadth. Shouldn't Tim's entry be many pages long? He's one of the...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 1:06PM EST on July 6, 2008
Sometimes, busy people need to remind themselves (and us) how busy they are by shaving off the last two seconds of what would otherwise be a pleasant interaction. At a restaurant yesterday, the maitre d, who is paid to be...
Saturday July 5, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 10:16AM EST on July 5, 2008
Some businesses seem to be really lucky. Some careers, too. They have good things happen, things that push them along, that change the game in a positive way. If you think about parades, one thing that's clear is that marching...
Friday July 4, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 12:24PM EST on July 4, 2008
The world needs fixed-price web podiatrists. Podiatrists, not doctors. Doctors do surgery and prescribe expensive drugs and stuff. Podiatrists can just make it easier to get around. So, a pretty smart web-savvy person could have a checklist of fifty items...
Thursday July 3, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:09AM EST on July 3, 2008
Scoble has a great post about a 14 year old kid with 45 million viewers on YouTube. 45 million! He wins. You lose. You won't have more traffic than he will. Ever. And what about your ads? Are you busy...
Wednesday July 2, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:31AM EST on July 2, 2008
There aren't so many statesmen. People who speak truth to power. Leaders who describe what they see, whether or not it serves their short-term interests. They say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done, as long...
Tuesday July 1, 2008
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:22AM EST on July 1, 2008
I sent in a t-shirt order to customink a few weeks ago. Three days later, I got a note from someone named Lori that said, "Hi Seth, I noticed that you have designed shirts that appear to be for a...
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