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Bestselling author, Entrepreneur and Agent of change. Seth's blog can be found at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
September 2009
Wednesday September 30, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:07AM EST on September 30, 2009
Corey showed me the list of the most popular Wikipedia articles. It's insane. It makes no sense. It has rock stars, dead dictators and body parts on it. Huh? If you look at the top music of December, 1971, they're...
Tuesday September 29, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:05PM EST on September 29, 2009
I haven't done a live public seminar in a while, and I hope to announce two before the end of the year. Stay tuned. I also haven't done my favorite kind, though, which is a seminar for organizations that are...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:59AM EST on September 29, 2009
Some things are better when they're not free. If Craigslist charged a dollar for every listing, what would happen? Well, the number of bogus listings and repetitive listings would plummet, making the site far easier to use. The number of...
Monday September 28, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:16AM EST on September 28, 2009
Of course, it's not true. The record business, for example, is fundamentally altered by easily sharable, zero-incremental-cost digital files. It's not just vinyl but shiny. Your industry has been completely and permanently altered by the connections offered by the internet....
Sunday September 27, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:56AM EST on September 27, 2009
It's not difficult to throw something over the transom. That's not the problem. The problem is it's a waste. The internet has made it so easy to wrap your idea/proposal around a brick and throw it that we forget sometimes...
Saturday September 26, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 4:57AM EST on September 26, 2009
I gave a talk the other day, and at the end a woman sheepishly asked, "when you talk about an asset, what do you mean?" It's a fair question. For a marketer, an asset is a tool or a platform,...
Friday September 25, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 8:49AM EST on September 25, 2009
Two days ago, I posted about Brands in Public. The response from the brands we've shared it with has been terrific, but other people didn't like elements of it. And they were direct in letting me know. The goal of...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:26AM EST on September 25, 2009
It's very easy to underrate the value of cultural wisdom, otherwise known as sophistication. Walk into a doctor's office and the paneling is wrong, the carpeting is wrong and it feels dated. Instant lack of trust. Meet a salesperson in...
Thursday September 24, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:37AM EST on September 24, 2009
This might be the most subtle yet important shift that marketers face as they deal with the reality of new media. Marketers aren't renters, now they own. For generations, marketers were trained to buy (actually rent) eyeballs. A media company...
Wednesday September 23, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:11AM EST on September 23, 2009
The Washington Post recently laid off a columnist because his blog posts didn't get enough web traffic. Of course, in the old days, the newspaper had no real way to tell which columns got read and which ones didn't. So...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:06AM EST on September 23, 2009
I was talking with a senior marketer at one of the most famous brands in the world last week. She said, "executives keep coming to me with stuff they find on the internet, stuff they find on YouTube about us,...
Tuesday September 22, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:37AM EST on September 22, 2009
Does it really matter if you're right? Given the choice between acknowledging that your customer is upset or proving to her that she is wrong, which will you choose? You can be right or you can have empathy. You can't...
Monday September 21, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:18AM EST on September 21, 2009
Business Development is a mysterious title for a little discussed function or department in most larger companies. It's also a great way for an entrepreneur or small business to have fun, create value and make money. Good business development allows...
Sunday September 20, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:01AM EST on September 20, 2009
If ads had been free, then the way people would have learned how to do TV advertising would have been by running ads. If they were free, why not? Why talk about it if you could do it? Why guess...
Saturday September 19, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:46AM EST on September 19, 2009
What should you do next? Is it better to email an existing customer, send a brochure to a prospect or improve your product a bit? Should you tweet or post a new blog post? Should you have a meeting to...
Friday September 18, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:10AM EST on September 18, 2009
I don't do any consulting, but that doesn't stop people from asking me questions. The most common question people ask me when they want a new website is, "If you were in charge of this, who are the 2 or...
Thursday September 17, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:13AM EST on September 17, 2009
It's so tempting to do a little bit of everything. All the tools are there, a click away. You can be the designer, the copywriter, the head of customer service. Hey, you can even do the manufacturing or easily outsource...
Wednesday September 16, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:44AM EST on September 16, 2009
Stamps (remember those?) make direct mail work. Because it costs money to send a piece of junk mail, you'll think two or three times before you mail something to a million people. Email, of course, is free. Except it's not....
Tuesday September 15, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:36AM EST on September 15, 2009
Non as in non-profit. The first issue is the way you describe yourself. I know what you're not but what are you? Did you start or join this non-profit because of the non part? I doubt it. It's because you...
Monday September 14, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:32AM EST on September 14, 2009
I think it looks like this: Attitude Approach Goals Strategy Tactics Execution We spend all our time on execution. Use this word instead of that one. This web host. That color. This material or that frequency of mailing. Big news:...
Sunday September 13, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:41AM EST on September 13, 2009
In the age of rapid cycles and connected data, how long are we going to have to settle for dumb software? Here's the detail screen from iCal. If I write a long text to go with an appointment, the only...
Saturday September 12, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 4:47AM EST on September 12, 2009
I think it's dangerous and often fatal to put free on top of an existing business model. Things fall apart. People look at the free revolution and say, "oh, that could never work. If I gave x, y or z...
Friday September 11, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:54AM EST on September 11, 2009
What we do in the long run, over time, drip by drip, affects the market so much more than an angry reaction or urgent event. Smoking a pack a day for twenty years is a great way to be sure...
Thursday September 10, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:49AM EST on September 10, 2009
We try so hard to build the first circle. This is the circle of followers, friends, subscribers, customers, media outlets and others willing to hear our pitch. This is the group we tell about our new product, our new record,...
Wednesday September 9, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:43AM EST on September 9, 2009
This is a default response for many people--irked customers, angry bosses, disappointed colleagues. It's easy to go into high dudgeon (in fact, low dudgeon isn't even in the dictionary, it's always 'high'). The thing is: it doesn't work. It rarely...
Tuesday September 8, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:56AM EST on September 8, 2009
Lots of books cross my desk, and I think Amazon has me down as customer of the year. I've noticed that the quality of books keeps going up, particularly some of the business titles I've seen lately. No room for...
Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:26AM EST on September 8, 2009
That's what your team wants. Your employees, your investors, your boss. They're willing to put in the time and the energy and the work if they think: The outcome might be an avalanche of attention, new business and growth, and...
Monday September 7, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:22AM EST on September 7, 2009
The web knows something, but it's not telling us, at least not yet. The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog. It also knows how...
Sunday September 6, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:20AM EST on September 6, 2009
As a bootstrapping entrepreneur, my instinct has always been to work before spend. If there was a way to spread the word virally instead of buying ads, I would. If there was a way to change the project so I...
Saturday September 5, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:42AM EST on September 5, 2009
Perhaps the worst outcome most people can imagine when a project stutters is having to go, "all the way back to square one." Apparently, square one is an unhappy place, and far away, too. Hey, if you're lost, if you've...
Friday September 4, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:00AM EST on September 4, 2009
All the evidence I've seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything. Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they'll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just...
Thursday September 3, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 11:42AM EST on September 3, 2009
$5,000 bounty if you find us someone we end up hiring and loving. All the details are right here.
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:22AM EST on September 3, 2009
The local youth theatre troupe recently put on a performance of Grease. It was a high-spirited outing, with terrific performances and it was a great way for them to spend a month or two over the summer. I was amazed...
Wednesday September 2, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:30AM EST on September 2, 2009
Enormity doesn't mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible. The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn't work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down. Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments...
Tuesday September 1, 2009
Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:40AM EST on September 1, 2009
New media isn't the perfect marketing medium, and it won't be until we find the magic beans. TV had magic beans for forty years. For forty years, anyone, even a complete moron, could make a lot of money using TV...
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