Tag Archives: Seth Godin

Seth Godin on “the mediocre middle”

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“Most industries innovate from both ends:

  • The outsiders go first because they have nothing to lose.
  • The winners go next because they can afford to and they want to stay winners.
  • It’s the mediocre middle that sits and waits and watches.

They wait for ‘proof’ that this new idea is going to work, or at least won’t prove fatal. (It’s the impulse to wait that made them mediocre in the first place, of course). So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they’re persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in. The irony, of course, is that by jumping in last, they’re condemning themselves to more mediocrity.”

Websites: “great” and “good enough”

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Seth Godin on how to create a great website and how to create a good enough website. A few of my favorite nuggets:

Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a dealbreaker.

Many websites say, “look at me.” Your goal ought to be to say, “here’s what you were looking for.”

Start with design. Don’t involve the programming team until you’re 90% done with the look and feel of your pages.

(Do) not to create an original design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there’s one that you can start with? If your organization can’t find a website that you all agree can serve as a model, you need to stop right now and find a new job.

Toxic Employees

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“Toxic employees are usually afraid, poorly managed and underappreciated. They can rarely be bullied into changing their behavior, often because they themselves are bullies. Managers can hire the non-toxic, re-assign the toxic and be really clear with themselves that they’re willing to pay almost any price to keep toxic employees away from everyone else. And if toxic employees appears to be a pattern, my bet is that it’s your fault, not the employees.”

— Seth Godin

The Dip: Knowing when to quit, and when to stick

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The Dip

“Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets harder and less fun, until it hits a low point-really hard, and not much fun at all. And then you find yourself asking if the goal is even worth the hassle. Maybe you’re in a Dip — a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better, no matter how hard you try.

What really sets superstars apart from everyone else is the ability to escape dead ends quickly, while staying focused and motivated when it really counts.

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt — until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.

Losers, on the other hand, fall into two basic traps. Either they fail to stick out the Dip-they get to the moment of truth and then give up — or they never even find the right Dip to conquer.” [Squidoo]

I don’t blame Mr. Godin for wanting to make a buck, but this little “book” (about 70 tiny pages) should have been an eBook. Which I probably would not have bought, so… there you go.

But it brought back some memories.

It only took me about 3 months (in 1970) to decide I did not want to be a lawyer. I quit and I quit early. I then spent about a year as a Postal Inspector before calling it quits. I remember my boss urging me to stick it out.

I’m a Seth fan and found The Dip worth the hour it took to read. A few quotes after the jump.

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Seth Godin: Different kinds of advertising

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“The first kind is the rational kind. Yellow Page ads, direct mail and Google AdWords fit into this category. This is advertising that works, if ‘works’ is defined as, “pay $3 and make $4.” With measurable direct advertising, you can count on profit-minded small organizations to give it a try (small buys) and if it obviously makes money, to buy some more.

The second kind of advertising is the glamorous kind, the kind that people think of when they think of the Super Bowl or Time magazine or of profitable ads that are worth selling. These ads don’t sell because they work. They sell because they are sold.

Let me be fair: they work if we define ‘working’ as: pleasing the client, pleasing the agency, increasing brand goodwill, and building, over time, a groundswell of awareness and brand respect that ultimately leads to profits.”

— Seth’s blog post on selling advertising.

Seth’s Organic Path to Google Happiness

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Seth Godin on the “organic success” path to a high Google rank:

“If you want to be on the front page of matches for “White Plains Lawyer”, then the best choice is to build a series of pages (on your site, on social sites, etc.) that give people really useful information. Once you’ve done everything you can… once you’ve built a web of information and once you’ve given the ability to do this to your best clients and your partners and colleagues, then by all means apply the best SEO (search engine optimization) thinking in the world to your efforts.”

Seth Godin: “Blow up your home page”

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“Do you really need a home page? Does the web respect it?

Human beings don’t have home pages. People make judgments about you in a thousand different ways. By what they hear from others, by the way they experience you, and on and on. Companies may have a website, but they don’t have a home page in terms of the way people experience them.

The problem with home page thinking is that it’s a crutch. There’s nothing wrong with an index, nothing wrong with a page for newbies, nothing wrong with a place that makes a first impression when you get the chance to control that encounter. But it’s not your ‘home’. It’s not what the surfer/user wants, and when it doesn’t match, they flee.

You don’t need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they’re all just as important.”

This post by Seth Godin perfectly says what I’ve struggled to communicate to clients and friends as I try to steer them away from traditional “home page” websites… and toward blogs. It’s a hard sell because it’s easy to throw up some bull shit copy from those old corporate brochures we spent so much on, and really hard to engage with your customers in a fresh, timely and relevant way.

What are we going to build?

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“A huge portion of our lives (as marketers, as consumers, as voters, as citizens) has been dominated by the fact that there were three or twenty TV networks. That this was a scarce resource. It’s not. Not any more. So, if there’s unlimited real estate, what are we going to build?” – Seth Godin

During my years doing affiliate relations for our news networks, most (all?) of our programming decisions were based on what we thought we could convince radio stations to “clear.” Coming up with an idea that 30 or 40 radio stations (out of 60) might agree was worth putting on the air was daunting. Mr. Godin’s post brought this to mind:

“Why not start the Debate Channel? 20 hours a week of live debate available online. Get a cable network to run three or four hours of highlights every week as an inducement to the candidates, but it will really be about the Net. If a candidate doesn’t show up, the others get more time to talk.”

We still have to program for our affiliates but we are no longer limited by that. So, what are we going to build?

Good is not almost as good as great

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Seth Godin on good salespeople and great salespeople. The best sales managers know in their guts this is good advice. They just don’t have the stomach for it.

“The great ones reach out. They work the phones when they’re not first in line. They understand what a customer wants. They’re not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game.

My best advice: Fire half your sales force. Then, give the remainder, the top people, a big raise, and use the money left over to steal the best salespeople you can find from other industries or even from your competition. You’ll end up with fewer salespeople. But all of them will be great.

And the good guys? Have them go work for the competition.”