Seth Godin's Blog, page 299
February 20, 2010
Moving the line (the power of a zealot)
Extremists move the middle.
Compromise is everywhere. Most of us can't possibly be pure extremists or true fundamentalists, so we draw the line somewhere in the middle.
Consider the choice of what you eat (or don't eat). It ranges from the omnivore at one end to the fruitarian at the other:
Cannibal...chimps...dogs...cats...cows...pigs...chickens...fish...foie gras...unfertilized eggs...honey...yeast...cherries... dust
My guess is that few people care so little about their role in the food chain ...
February 19, 2010
more, More, MORE!
Some consumers are short-sighted, greedy and selfish.
Extend yourself a little and they'll want a lot.
Offer a free drink in the restaurant one night and they're angry that it's not there the next.
The nuts in first class weren't warm!
The challenge of winning more than your fair share of the market is that the best available strategy--providing remarkable service and an honest human connection--will be abused by a few people you work with.
You have three choices: put up with the whiners, write...
February 18, 2010
The best reason for a big event...
is being big. Nah, HUGE. Ordinary big isn't good enough any more.
Big events, grand openings, national events that just can't be missed. These work (if they're big enough).
Big events, if they're truly big, change the rhythm and demand a different sort of attention and preparation. We can push through the dip, expend emotional labor and do things we never thought we'd be able to do if there's a charette and a deadline and an audience.
Human beings respond to emergencies and to hoopla. We like...
February 17, 2010
No more big events
Here are things that you can now avoid:
The annual review
The annual sales conference
The big product launch
The grand opening of a new branch
Drop dead one-shot negotiation events
The reasons? Well, they don't work. They don't work because big events leave little room for iteration, for trial and error, for earning rapport. And the biggest reason: frequent cheap communication is easier than ever, and if you use it, you'll discover that the process creates far more gains than...
February 16, 2010
How to use clichés
I love this definition from Wikipedia:
In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable
type. This is also called a stereotype. When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase
used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. "Cliché" came to mean such a
ready-made phrase. The French word "cliché" comes from the sound made
when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to
make a printing plate.
To save time and money, then, printers took common phrases and...
February 15, 2010
Viral growth trumps lots of faux followers
Many brands and idea promoters are in a hurry to rack up as many Facebook fans and Twitter followers as they possibly can. Hundreds of thousands if possible.
A lot of these fans and followers are faux. Sunny day friends. In one experiment I did, 200,000 followers led to 25 clickthroughs. Ouch.
Check out the graph on the left. The curves represent different ideas and different starting points. If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation...
February 14, 2010
Invent a holiday
Find an emotion that needs social approval in order to be easily expressed.
Hook it into something you sell or do.
Discover other organizations that would benefit from the holiday as much as you would.
Voila! Mother's Day/Valentine's Day/Festivus/New Year's. It doesn't have to be a national one, of course, just one for your tribe.
All the great religious holidays started as secular or pagan holidays first, because they filled an essential social need. Spring his here! It's dark out!
And if your p...
February 13, 2010
Phoning it in
This was sort of shocking, at least to me:
I was talking to a religious leader, someone who runs a congregation. She made it clear to me that on many days, it's just a job. A job like any other, you show up, you go through the motions, you get paid.
I guess we find this disturbing because spiritual work should be real, not faked.
But isn't your work spiritual?
I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art...
February 12, 2010
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