Seth Godin's Blog, page 282

It's not my birthday

Not any more.

Some of you may have discovered that today is supposed to be my birthday. No longer. I've never really liked birthday hoopla, especially mine, so I've given my birthday to Scott and the folks at Charity:water.

If you go to the special page they created and buy a well for a village that doesn't have one, you can supply clean water to two people for twenty years. If just a thousand of the readers of this blog do it, we could alter the lives of tens of thousands of people for a...

Fans, participants and spectators

A good preacher ought to be able to get 70% of the people who showed up on Sunday to make a donation.

A teeny bop rock group might convert 20% of concert goers to buy a shirt or souvenir.

A great street magician can get 10% of the people who watch his show to throw a dollar in the hat.

Direct marketers used to shoot for 2% conversion from a good list, but now, that's a long shot.

A blogger might convert 2% of readers to buy a book. (I'm aghast at this).

And a twitter user with a lot of fans will b...

Updates

Over the last few months, I've tried experimenting with leveraged

ways to teach and engage, and I thought it would be worth doing a recap.

The short version: digital tools make it easier than ever to create

events and experiences that work--without the risky staffing and

trappings and overhead that used to be required.

THE ROAD TRIP: In two weeks I'll be in DC for the second in a series of all-day interactive events. Minnesota is in August and Chicago is September. You can see...

Low esteem and the factory

If you want to hire people to do a job, to be cogs in the system and to do what they're told, you might want to focus on people who don't think very highly of themselves.

People with low self esteem might be more happy to be bossed around, timed, abused, misused and micromanaged, no?

And the converse is true as well. If you want to raise your game and build an organization filled with people who will change everything, the first thing to look for is someone who hasn't been brainwashed into...

Payola

For twenty years, the Billboard charts were easy to manipulate. By paying radio stations and some retailers, record labels could push an act to the top 40, which would increase sales. People liked buying what they heard on the radio, and the radio played what they thought people were buying.

Billboard changed their methods about twenty years ago, and overnight the acts on the list changed. Suddenly, it became clear that what we were listening to wasn't what we thought it was, and as a result, ...

Betting on smarter (or betting on dumber)

Marketers fall into one of two categories:

A few benefit when they make their customers smarter. The more the people they sell to know, the more informed, inquisitive, free-thinking and alert they are, the better they do.

And most benefit when they work to make their customers dumber. The less they know about options, the easier they are to manipulate, the more helpless they are, the better they do.

Tim O'Reilly doesn't sell books. He sells smarts. The smarter the world gets, the better he...

What's the point?

An idea turns into a meeting and then it turns into a project. People get brought along, there's free donuts, there's a whiteboard and even a conference call.

It feels like you're doing the work, but at some point, hopefully, someone asks, "what's the point of this?"

Is it worth doing?

Compared to everything else we could be investing (don't say 'spending') our time on, is this the scariest, most likely to pay off, most important or the best long-term endeavor?

Or are we just doing it because...

The theory of the case

Here's a way to get more strategic.

Instead of arguing for a course of action based on the status quo or your emotional gut, describe the theory of the case.

A is true.

B is true.

If we do C, then A and B should permit us to get D.

The method of this strategic analysis is that you expose your assumptions, you describe your actions and your posit the results. This permits your teammates to supply facts that might change your analysis.

Wait, A isn't true.

Wait, we're not capable of doing C.

Wait, if...

The non-optimized life

When you measure an activity, you can improve it. Computers make it easy to optimize just about every portion of your life.

Surely, you can optimize a website or a blog for traffic. You can optimize ads to make them yield more results. You can optimize your presentation style to close more sales or change more minds. You can optimize your workout to get faster and stronger. You can optimize your diet to lose weight and gain muscle. You can optimize your sleeping patterns to get more rest in...

The difference between running and managing a project

If you choose to manage a project, it's pretty safe. As the manager, you report. You report on what's happening, you chronicle the results, you are the middleman.

If you choose to run a project, on the other hand, you're on the hook. It's an active engagement, bending the status quo to your will, ensuring that you ship.

Running a project requires a level of commitment that's absent from someone who is managing one. Who would you rather hire, a manager or a runner?