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Seth Godin's Blog
Bestselling author, Entrepreneur and Agent of change. Seth's blog can be found at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/
December 2008
Wednesday December 31, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:31AM EST on December 31, 2008
Was Jackson Pollock a good painter? The critics at the time certainly didn't think so. Twyla Tharp's London debut was panned. The Prius was largely ignored by car magazines, mostly because it wasn't a very good car. If we define...
Tuesday December 30, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 4:31AM EST on December 30, 2008
Should the person who runs the customer service operations at a ski school also be required to love skiing? Can the CFO of a large church be an atheist? Does the head of marketing at Kodak have to have a...
Monday December 29, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:33AM EST on December 29, 2008
It's not surprising that Malcolm Gladwell's new book has made a splash. All his thought-provoking writing does and deserves to. The argument of Outliers: Where you're born and when you're born have an enormous amount to do with whether or...
Sunday December 28, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:42AM EST on December 28, 2008
Let's say you're stuck in the airport and you need to figure out if you can transfer your seat from your airline to another. Would you pay $20 to talk to a competent, empowered agent who answered on the first...
Saturday December 27, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:46AM EST on December 27, 2008
If your pipes break at 3 am, Roto Rooter is happy. They're organized for emergencies like this, for moments when you have no choice but to do business with them. Since you're out of options, their high-priced service is your...
Friday December 26, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:19AM EST on December 26, 2008
As chosen by clicks, biggest one last. Feel free to vote: Click through to see the plexo
Thursday December 25, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:21AM EST on December 25, 2008
I just found this post, lost and forgotten, in the bottom of a folder I was backing up. I meant to publish it in January, 2002, when I started this blog: Predictions for 2008 I know it's six years away,...
Wednesday December 24, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:01AM EST on December 24, 2008
All Santas look the same. This is important to you if you're a marketer. Lots of brands and markets splinter. We have markets with hundreds of different cell phone models, catalogs containing tens of thousands of different kinds of nuts...
Tuesday December 23, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:50AM EST on December 23, 2008
It's pretty easy for a successful marketer to be persuaded that his performance is directly related to his skill. Same thing with investment managers. In the fiscal year just ended, Harvard paid its top five investment managers an average of...
Monday December 22, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:17AM EST on December 22, 2008
Viral marketing is an idea that spreads--and an idea that while it is spreading actually helps market your business or cause. Two kinds of viral marketing: The original classic sort in which the marketing is the product and which a...
Sunday December 21, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:07AM EST on December 21, 2008
Think about this for a moment. If a trusted friend could arrange a meeting between you and anyone of your choosing, who would you choose? Not for entertainment or curiosity or bragging rights, but to help your business. Who could...
Saturday December 20, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:31AM EST on December 20, 2008
You could contact the organization that turned you down and explain that they had made a terrible mistake, the wrong choice and a grave error. You could criticize the vendor they actually selected, bring You could even question the judgment...
Friday December 19, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:43AM EST on December 19, 2008
Thing is, most of the stuff you do online doesn't cost money. In the old days, money added friction. Money made you choosy. Money ensured that you valued your marketing efforts appropriately, because if they didn't work, they cost you...
Thursday December 18, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 12:25PM EST on December 18, 2008
Pistachio is putting her twitter followers to work ($2 a head) Squidoo is giving away $30,000 via twitter. Givelist is blog, clearinghouse and portal for a whole bunch of new thinking on this front. Big donors always get the press,...
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:29AM EST on December 18, 2008
Here's a piece of (quite) good news: The smartest and most motivated young people are no longer itching to become investment bankers and lawyers. We're always hearing about a shortage of engineers or nurses--but there never seems to be a...
Wednesday December 17, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 2:44PM EST on December 17, 2008
Kevin Kelly is syndicating his classic book, the book that changed everything, over RSS. Free and mind-changing, at the same time.
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:49AM EST on December 17, 2008
The Times reports that traditional brand advertising on Facebook is a total failure. If you've been doing this for a while, this is no real surprise. And yet, Mark Drapeau insists that brands belong on Twitter. Venture Beat says that...
Tuesday December 16, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:39AM EST on December 16, 2008
Consider this riff from a professionaly printed freestanding sign in front of a Peet's in San Jose: "Unlike Any Coffee You've Ever Tasted Before." Wait. Why the capitals? "Unlike any coffee you've ever tasted before." "Before" is redundant. "Unlike any...
Monday December 15, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:07AM EST on December 15, 2008
I have been selling ideas for a long time, and decided to become a book packager (which I did before doing what I do now) solely because it's an industry that makes it possible to sell ideas. One project took...
Sunday December 14, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:12AM EST on December 14, 2008
If you want to win an Academy Award, it's clear that you need to release your movie at the end of the year. Early movies don't get remembered, don't get nominated, don't win. But for most marketers (and job seekers)...
Saturday December 13, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:32AM EST on December 13, 2008
I just read a post that said that some musicians were reporting that their perfect pitch (the ability to know exactly what a perfect C sounds like) is fading away. What could be causing this? I don't think anything is...
Friday December 12, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:06AM EST on December 12, 2008
Headlines matter now more than they ever did. Headlines provoke and introduce. They cajole and they position. No headline, no communication. This spreadsheet you just sent me... what does it say? What does it mean? It has no headline. Trashed....
Thursday December 11, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:42AM EST on December 11, 2008
... and neither am I. Nor will any blogger, including those far more deserving. The Pulitzer folks, stewards of one of the most influential and important awards in any field, have just announced their new rules. You can win a...
Wednesday December 10, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:46AM EST on December 10, 2008
Steve wrote me a note pointing out that as a marketer, he's always coming up with groundbreaking ideas that can help large companies or other marketers. Should he just let them go? Try to sell them? Submit them to the...
Tuesday December 9, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:37PM EST on December 9, 2008
It's possible that you're reading this in your web browser. Fine with me. You can also click here and find a wide range of ways to subscribe via RSS. RSS will deliver each post, right away, for free, into your...
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:15AM EST on December 9, 2008
Due to the extraordinary explosion in video, blogs, news feeds and social network postings, the internet is dangerously close to running out of room. Nothing can grow forever, and exponential growth is always short lived. We're running out of disk...
Monday December 8, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:08AM EST on December 8, 2008
My biggest mistake (at least in terms of income avoided) was not believing in the world wide web in 1994. It's not like I didn't know about it. I had written a book called "Best of the Net". I'd even...
Sunday December 7, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:16AM EST on December 7, 2008
This is a long, rambling story with a useful punchline. I posted it on a weekend so you could skip it without feeling guilty. Thanks to my friend Michael for reminding me. Twenty five years ago, I led the creation...
Saturday December 6, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:17PM EST on December 6, 2008
I spent hours watching the albatross in the Galapagos hang out. The first thing you notice is that they have a terribly difficult time taking off. In the water, an albatross will have to spend hours waiting for the right...
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 5:41AM EST on December 6, 2008
It's noisy and getting noisier. If you looked at web activity, you could rightfully assume that the web consists largely of porn, gossip, Britney Spears searches, trolls, trivia, anger, complaints, flirting and self-absorption. If you look at the logs of...
Friday December 5, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:02AM EST on December 5, 2008
Great caption for a cartoon in this week's New Yorker: There's a lot I want to experience, but not a lot I want to actually do. In my exposure to companies big and small, this is probably the single biggest...
Thursday December 4, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 7:43AM EST on December 4, 2008
The closer you get to the source and moment of information, the more it costs. If you wanted to be the first person to see Nokia's new phone, you could have flown to Berlin, as Robert Scoble did. Or you...
Wednesday December 3, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 3:48PM EST on December 3, 2008
Mark and I talk about radio. Archie and I pretend to talk about action figures. And a church interview with Milan.
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:37AM EST on December 3, 2008
Consider two cereals: Honey Bunches of Oats, a category creator, a big brand with spin offs and profits and growth. Fruit Harvest, a generically named cereal that leverages the marketing department's ability to run coupons, grab shelf space and take...
Tuesday December 2, 2008
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 10:24AM EST on December 2, 2008
Here's a ten minute video presentation I did for Acumen. I hope you'll discover that the idea of forming a nucleus applies to what you're working on as well.
Permalink Posted by: Seth Godin at 6:21AM EST on December 2, 2008
Are you marketing gravity or evolution? Newton gets all kinds of credit. They call it the Law of Gravity. They put his picture on pages that profile geniuses. They say he discovered gravity. Nonsense. He just named it. Everyone 'believes'...