Seth Godin's Blog, page 220

The difference between a failure and a mistake

A failure is a project that doesn't work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn't move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don't kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won't work, while opening the door to things that might.

School confuses us, so do bosses and families. Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.

The simple first rule of branding and marketing anything (even yourself)

Not a secret, often overlooked:

"Keep your promises."

If you say you'll show up every day at 8 am, do so. Every day.

If you say your service is excellent, make it so.

If circumstances or priorities change, well then, invest to change them back. Or tell the truth, and mean it.

If traffic might be bad, plan for it.

Is there actually unusually heavy call volume? Really?

Want a bigger brand? Make bigger promises. And keep them.

On buying something for the first time

There are only three kinds of sales:

Buying a refill, another unit of a service or product you've already purchased before

Switching to a new model/brand/style

Buying something for the first time

Here's an overlooked truth: until quite recently, buying something for the first time was a very rare and almost revolutionary act. In fact, more than a billion people on Earth don't do this as a matter of course. The standard is to only purchase the seeds, fuel or shelter that your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents did. That's the way it's always been.

Take a minute to think about what it means for someone in poverty (which until recently was almost everyone) to buy something for the first time. The combination of risk and initiative can be paralyzing. One of the little-known transitions of the industrial revolution was the notion that companies and individuals could set out to discover and buy stuff that they didn't know about until just recently.

You see a box or a store window or a product on the web and you start imagining how cool it would be to open the box, own the product, use it, engage with it and benefit from it. A product you've never purchased before. That's new behavior. Until a hundred years ago, that sort of imagining was rare indeed, just about anywhere in the world.

If you are trying to grow your coaching practice or b2b saas business or widget shop, understand that you are almost certainly pushing against a significant barrier: most people hesitate before buying something for the first time. If you're trying to develop trade in the underprivileged world, understand that teaching people to buy anything for the first time is a revolutionary concept.

Campbell's soup is almost never bought for the first time. It is a replacement purchase. No one switches to Campbell's either. They buy it because their mom did.

The first iPhone, on the other hand, was a first time product for just about everyone who bought it... most of the people on line that first day were buying their first smartphone. Worth noting that a few years later, many millions have made the switch--we don't make first-time purchases lightly.

And most of what gets sold to us each day at work or at home are switching products. "Ours is just like the one you already use, but cheaper/better/faster/cooler."

The potent mix of fear of loss, desire for gain and curiousity fuel the appeal of buying for the first time. But it's magic, it's not science, and it doesn't often happen on schedule.

Here's a six-minute video presentation I did on this for the Acumen Fund. Sorry about the video glitch near the beginning--part of the magic of being on stage is that I wasn't even aware of being projected upon...

Santa and the mob

A recent study by UBS and ARG found that one third of the American parents surveyed said it was hard to find toys and gifts because nothing was new.

Nothing new?

What they're actually saying is that there's no mad rush for the "it" gift, the safe, coveted gift that demonstrates the giver was able to finagle a favor or brave a crush of shoppers. The notion of the one, the it, the winner, the safe choice--this is about buying without taking responsibility.

Clearly, there are as many new and wonderful things this season as there are each year, all that's missing is an anointed toy of the year. The masses want to buy what the masses have chosen as the winner, because then the purchase isn't their fault.

And that's what happens every day in just about every market, business or consumer. A few people want to take responsibility, go first, lead the way, be choosy, inquire, find the remarkable, the magical and own the outcome. But most? They just don't want it to be their fault.

The lack of a clear winner in the toy biz is a symptom of a move to weird (without mass TV, etc., selecting the one clear winner gets more difficult). There's still a crowd, still groups looking for the safe choice, but the trend to weird has dispersed them into smaller pockets.

It is also a useful reminder to marketers that within every sector, there's a huge advantage to the organization that's seen as the choice of the crowd. A self-fulfilling prophecy, no doubt about it.

Unfair or not, one Catch-22 truism remains: popular is often a prerequisite for being popular.

Assorted tips, hope they help

No stranger or unknown company will ever contact you by mail or by phone with an actual method for making money easily or in your spare time. And if the person or company contacting you asserts that they are someone you know, double check before taking action.

Don't have back surgery. See a physiatrist first, then exhaust all other options before wondering if you should have back surgery.

Borrow money to buy things that go up in value, but never to get something that decays over time.

Placebos are underrated by almost everyone.

It's almost never necessary to use a semicolon.

Seek out habits that help you overcome fear or inertia. Destroy those that do the opposite.

Cognitive behavorial therapy is generally considered both the quickest and most effective form of addressing many common psychological problems.

Backup your hard drive.

Get a magnetic key hider, put a copy of your house key in it and hide it really well, unlabeled, two blocks from your house.

A rice cooker will save you time and money and improve your diet, particularly if you come to like brown rice.

Consider not eating wheat for an entire week. The results might surprise you.

Taking your dog for a walk is usually better than whatever alternative use of your time you were considering.

Told you they were assorted.

"WATCH THIS!"

This is a common attention-getting technique online. Throw yourself under a bus, attract spectators.

There are countless ways to reveal your embarrassments, your inner demons and your current conflicts. There are a myriad of crazy projects you can undertake, all guaranteed to attract an appreciative crowd, the same people who want to see the crazy guy jump off the bridge or the brawl break out in the parking lot.

Do it well enough and enough often and you will gain attention.

But you'll still be under a bus.

Insulate yourself...

from anonymous angry people

Expose yourself to art you don't yet understand

Precisely measure the results that are important to you

Stay blind to the metrics that don't matter

Fail often

Ship

Lead, don't manage so much

Seek out uncomfortable situations

Make an impact on the people who matter to you

Be better at your baseline skills than anyone else

Copyedit less, invent more

Give more speeches

Ignore unsolicited advice

The most important page on the web is the page you build yourself

The internet is an engine of connection. It has been from the start (email, chat, forums, blogs, social media...)

One reason that so many of the most popular sites online are those that permit people to express and expose their ideas is that those are the pages we care most about. We go back to see how people responded, how the traffic is, what we can do to improve the page.

Lifestyle media isn't a fad. It's what human beings have been doing forever, with a brief, recent interruption for a hundred years of professional media along the way. That interruption is fading away, and lifestyle media is resurging. People publish. Instead of denigrating user-generated content (what an obscure way to describe human stories), marketers need to understand that this is what we care about.

We shouldn't be surprised when someone chooses to publish their photos, their words, their art or their opinions. We should be surprised when they don't.

The trap of social media noise

If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up.

Now that everyone is a marketer, many people are looking for a louder megaphone, a chance to talk about their work, their career, their product... and social media looks like the ideal soapbox, a free opportunity to shout to the masses.

But first, we're told to make that number go up. Increase the number of fans, friends and followers, so your shouts will be heard. The problem of course is that more noise is not better noise.

In Corey's words, the conventional, broken wisdom is:

Follow a ton of people to get people to follow back

Focus on the # of followers, not the interests of followers or your relationship with them.

Pump links through the social platform (take your pick, or do them all!)

Offer nothing of value, and no context. This is a megaphone, not a telephone.

Think you're winning, because you're playing video games (highest follower count wins!)

This looks like winning (the numbers are going up!), but it's actually a double-edged form of losing. First, you're polluting a powerful space, turning signals into noise and bringing down the level of discourse for everyone. And second, you're wasting your time when you could be building a tribe instead, could be earning permission, could be creating a channel where your voice is actually welcomed.

Leadership (even idea leadership) scares many people, because it requires you to own your words, to do work that matters. The alternative is to be a junk dealer.

The game theory pushes us into one of two directions: either be better at pump and dump than anyone else, get your numbers into the millions, outmass those that choose to use mass and always dance at the edge of spam (in which the number of those you offend or turn off forever keep increasing), or

Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that's worth owning and an audience that cares.

Only one of these strategies builds an asset of value.

Getting the OS right (for the iPhone, the iPad and the Kindle)

Stores went from being buildings to becoming websites... and now to devices. But Mr. Gimbel and Mr. Macy would be amazed and probably peturbed if they had to use an iPhone for more than a few minutes.

Some easily answered requests:

Why can't I see my apps in alphabetical order?

Or in the order they are most used?

Why can't I list the apps in text form, putting 80 on a page in two columns, instead of only 16 or 20 at a time?

Why isn't there a suggestor/genius that allows me to find apps that others with habits like mine use? It could change over time and reward me for opting in.

On the Kindle, why can't I see my archives organized by order of purchase? Date last read? Length? Popularity?

With ebooks, when shopping, wouldn't you want to know what percentage of the people who bought the book, finished it? How about being able to opt in to circles of readers and sharing comments, progress and reading lists as you go?

All of these improvements help people use the apps they've chosen and read the books they've purchased. And none of them cost much at all to deliver.

But let's not forget that some people actually like shopping. Are the online stores for these devices fun or exciting or social? Do they live and grow and change or are they static warehouses?

The seeds of what we buy and how we buy it are being planted with these early versions of the devices. I wonder if we're being cheated out of discovery, productivity and a bit of fun.