Seth Godin's Blog, page 183

Free coffee, next exit

That's the most effective billboard one can imagine, particularly if it's typeset properly and if the coffee is good.

Most billboards aren't nearly as useful, because the wrong service is promoted, or, more likely, because someone saw all that space and worked hard to fill it up.

The same thing is true of most websites. You know so well the why's and how's of what you built and how terrific it is, and the thought of using just a few words when a bunch will do is frightening indeed.

No, your solution doesn't have to be simple or obvious. But the story about it accomplishes does.

The goal of a marketing interaction isn't to close the sale, any more than the goal of a first date is to get married. No, the opportunity is to move forward, to earn attention and trust and curiosity and conversation.

Simple, clear and actionable.

Effortless

When John Coltrane plays the melody early in the track Harmonique, you can hear some of the notes crack.

Of course, Coltrane was completely capable of playing these notes correctly. And yet he didn't. 

It's this effort and humanity that touches us about his solo, not just the melody.

Sometimes, "never let them see you sweat," is truly bad advice. The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present.

Perfecting your talk, refining your essay and polishing your service until all elements of you disappear might be obvious tactics, but they remove the thing we were looking for: you.

When you don't know what to do...

That's when we find out how well you make decisions.

When you don't have the resources to do it the usual way, that's when you show us how resourceful you are.

And when you don't know if it's going to work, that's how we find out whether or not we need you on our team.

Making instructions is harder than following them.

You can't argue with success...

Of course you can. What else are you going to argue with? Failure can't argue with you, because it knows that it didn't work.

The art of staying successful is in being open to having the argument. Great organizations fail precisely because they refuse to do this.

Where do you go to trade in the points?

There are all sorts of actions we can take to earn points. We can earn points with our spouse, with a boss, with a customer... "Wow, you get extra points for that."

The question one might ask is, "what good are the points?" Hey, I'm earning all these points, what am I supposed to do with them?

When it comes to trading them in, they're actually a little like frequent flier miles. They're really difficult to redeem, even for an upgrade you'd like. Hardly worth the effort, it seems.

But for this kind of points, that's okay. The best part of earning points is earning them, not trading them in.

Avoiding the false proxy trap

Sometimes, we can't measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that's much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.

TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad, so instead, they measured how many people saw it. Or a model might not be able to measure beauty, but a bathroom scale was a handy stand in.

A business person might choose cash in the bank as a measure of his success at his craft, and a book publisher, unable to easily figure out if the right people are engaging with a book, might rely instead on a rank on a single bestseller list. One last example: the non-profit that uses money raised as a proxy for difference made.

You've already guessed the problem. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.

Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal.

To protect and serve

How much of your time and effort goes into protecting yourself from the things you fear?

And how much is spent serving your muse and your tribe and your potential?

How I broke my nose (for the second time)

The first time was youthful bravery--I was playing hockey with people far better than I (not older, merely better) and they slammed me into the boards. That's something almost heroic, at least when you're twelve.

No, the second time was two days ago. I finished a delightful breakfast with a friend and as I walked out of the restaurant, I focused on the door to the street and the weather outside--and completely ignored the interior plate glass door, slamming right into it at full speed.

The important lesson: while it matters a lot that you have a goal, a vision and an arc to get there, it matters even more that you don't skip the preliminary steps in your hurry to get to the future. Early steps might bore you, but miss even one and you might not get the chance to execute on the later ones.

My nose is fine, thanks, better every day, but the reminder was a worthwhile one.

The whiner's room

When my friend Elly taught in a middle school, he never hung out in the teacher's room. He told me he couldn't bear the badmouthing of students, the whining and the blaming.

Of course, not all teachers are like this. In fact, most of them aren't. And of course, trolling isn't reserved to the teacher's room. Just about every organization, every online service, every product and every element of our culture now has chat rooms and forums devoted to a few people looking for something to complain about. Some of them even do it on television.

The fascinating truth is this: the people in these forums aren't doing their best work. They rarely identify useful feedback or pinpoint elements that can be changed productively either. In fact, if you solved whatever problem they're whining about, they wouldn't suddenly become enthusiastic contributors. No, they're just wallowing in the negative ions, enjoying the support of a few others as they dish about what's holding them back.

It pays no dividends to go looking for useful insight from these folks. Go make something great instead.

Why vote? The marketing dynamics of apathy

Here's what political marketers learn from people who don't vote:

Nothing.

If you don't vote because you're disappointed with your choices, disgusted by tactics like lying and spin, or merely turned off by the process, you've opted out of the marketplace.

The goal of political marketers isn't to get you to vote. Their goal is to get more votes than the other guy. So they obsess about pleasing those that vote. Everyone else is invisible.

Steakhouses do nothing to please vegetarians who don't visit them, and politicians and their handlers don't care at all about non-voters.

The magic of voting is that by opting in to the system, you magically begin to count. A lot.

If you don't like negative ads, for example, then vote for the candidate who ran even 1% fewer negative ads. Magically, within a cycle or two, the number of negative ads begins to go down.

One reason that people don't vote (a real, usually unspoken reason) is that they don't want to feel responsible for the person who wins. The other reason is that they don't want to live with the disappointment of voting for someone who loses. Both of these reasons ignore the marketing reality: not voting doesn't make marketing or politics go away. It merely changes the person the marketers are trying to please.

Vote tomorrow. Bring a friend. If enough smart people start voting again, things will improve, because billions of dollars in political marketing will suddenly be trying to please you.