Tag Archives: Seth Godin

Naked Conversations

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Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:

  • Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
  • Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
  • “First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
  • Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
  • If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
  • If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)

If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.

I’ll update this post as I move through the book.

Seth Godin keynote at NAB

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Couple of nuggets (via Radio and Internet Newsletter) from Seth Godin’s keynote this morning at the National Association of Broadcasters annual meeting in Philadelphia:

“With the web and satellite radio and WiMax, radio’s not going to be one-way communication any more — it’s going to be two- or three-way. You’re either going to embrace it or not.”

“The FCC is the reason you exist,” Godin said. “It’s about limited spectrum. If there were a million FM stations, you couldn’t sell any advertisements.” But with the advent of TiVo, Xbox, DVDs, Yahoo!, Escient, home theaters, 400 TV channels, 10,000 magazines, and more, “the TV-industrial complex is going away. What are you going to do about it?”

He challenged his audience,”How many podcast subscribers do you have?”, noting that one New York City station has 50,000 subscribers now and will someday have 500,000 subscribers — “and each one of them is someone who’s not listening to you.”

Responding to the speakers before him who extolled the value of radio’s localism, Godin noted, “Local doesn’t necessarily mean local on a map; it can mean local based on interests.”

Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web

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Seth Godin’s latest ebook, Who’s There? Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Blogs and the New Web, is just a little 46 page PDF file but it’s packed with lots of small but profound insights. The kind of stuff you read and think, “You know, he’s right.” Some of my favorites:

We’ve become astonishingly picky. Picky about what we buy and picky about what we watch and picky about what we read. In a world where there’s a lot of clutter and where everything is good enough, most of the time we just pick the stuff that’s close or cheap or familiar. But when it’s something we care about, we go to enormous lengths to find the very best.

Radio is officially dead, especially when wireless internet access comes to your car.

The stuff you’re putting on your marketing site or in your blog or even in your brochures or in your business letters is too long. Too much inside baseball. Too many unasked questions getting answered too soon. The stuff you’re sending out in your email and your memos is too vague.

It used to matter a lot where an idea came from. When an idea came from a mainstream media company (MSM) or from a Fortune 500 company, it was a lot more likely to spread. That’s because media companies had free airwaves or paid for newsprint, while big corporations had the money to buy interruptions. Today, all printing presses are created equal. And everyone owns one. Which means that a good idea on a little blog has a very good chance of spreading. In fact, an idea from outside the mainstream might have an even better chance of spreading.

If you write something great, and do it over and over and over again, then you’ll be unstoppable. Whether or not someone helps you.

The problem is that the very things big companies, public companies, stable companies and established companies are good at are the things that make a blog boring.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

If you care about your personal brand and career and impact, you need a blog. And you should start the cycle of getting better at blogging.

What is RSS?

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“RSS is just a little peep, a signal, a ping that comes from a favorite blog or site, telling your computer that it has been updated. If you have an RSS reader (and they’re free and easy, and two of the easiest live on the web so you don’t even have to install anything), whenever a blog is updated, it shows up in your reader and you can catch up on the news. If there’s nothing new, it doesn’t show up and you don’t have to waste time surfing around.”

— Seth Godin