Seth Godin's Blog, page 327

Does everything have to become completely transparent?

One of the ideas du jour online is the rush to make things transparent. To tear down the barriers and raise the blinds on the way organizations do business and to expose as much as possible.

Does Apple become a more exciting or profitable company if they share their sketches, their plans, open source their new designs and engage the company fully? Does Steve Jobs have an obligation to tell his fanboys in advance that he’s fighting to stay heal

Marketing (in all its forms) is unlike everything else an organization does, because it's always different. There's no manual because everyone does it differently, and what successful marketers have in common is that they are successful.

The only way your organization is going to make an impact is to market in the way only you can. Not by following some expert's rules or following the herd, but by doing it in the way that works. For you. Don't worry about someone else's invented standards for new

At one point, the Singer Corporation had more than 12,000 people working in a single plant. They were selling more than a million sewing machines a year and had hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. By any measure, it was one of the most important manufacturers in America. It was fun while it lasted.

Back then, it was easy to believe that Singer represented everything that was right with our economy, and that our future was intrinsically attached to the company's.

When as the last time you e

Clay taught me a good lesson about making things happen with your brand.

Envision the events that might happen to a brand (shelf space at Walmart, an appearance on Oprah, a bestseller, worldwide recognition, a new edition, worldwide rights, chosen by the Queen, whatever) as a series of dominos.

It turns out that if you start with all of them at once, you'll fail.

And if you start with the big one, you'll fail.

But if you line up all the dominos one by one, in the right order, you may just have enoug

Justine plays a game that involves finding yellow cars on the road and shouting the appropriate term as you see them.

What you discover after just a few minutes is just how many yellow cars there are. A lot.

We notice what we choose to notice.

Consider playing a version of spotto involving great customer service or organizations going the extra mile, or employees giving more than they have to. What you'll notice very quickly is that there's a lot more of it out there than you would have guessed, wh

Along the way, we settle.

We settle for something not quite right, or an outfit that isn't our best look, or a job that doesn't quite maximize our talents. We settle for relationships that don't give us joy, or a website that's, "good enough."

The only way to get mediocre is one step at a time.

You don't have to settle. It's a choice you get to make every day.

The Olympics
Kumba Mela
Times Square on midnight
Burning Man
TED
The Super Bowl
Calcio Storico
Warren Buffet's annual meeting
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
Your birthday

People love them. We generally agree we don't have them often enough. What if you started one? More than half of the events on the list above were started by one person or a small organization.

You can be a trusted institution or a trusted individual.

A few weeks ago, I set out to buy some imprinted items. I probably looked at a dozen t-shirt options online before I picked CustomInk. Why did I pick them?

They weren't the cheapest (but it's actually very hard to compare). I picked them because the site is clean and professional. I liked that they're not weasels (they quote actual prices and actual ship dates) and  they have non-trivial, easy to use software that makes it easy to upload gr

Allan points out that Warren Buffet and Benjamin Graham invested in Circles of Competence. The idea is to buy what you know.

Too often, organizations confuse this with circles of convenience. They stick to the tactics, products, people and channels that they are comfortable with, instead of rethinking what the market demands.

When Amazon offered the New York Times millions of dollars in affiliate revenue a decade ago, the paper turned them down because they feared losing Barnes and Noble as an ad

Dave Balter coined this great term. It describes the quest of marketers for size at all costs. Because marketers were raised on the scale of mass—TV, radio, newspapers—they have a churn and burn mentality. The internet turns this upside down. The internet is about who, not how many. The internet lets you take really good care of 100 people instead of harassing 2,000.

Yet, panicked marketers still look for scale (How many followers can we get? What can we do with a Facebook fan page?) and then hij