Seth Godin's Blog, page 321

Are we solving the same problem?

This is the biggest disconnect I know of.

It happens all the time in B2B sales, in service marketing, in getting along with your boss and even in hiring someone.

One side thinks they have figured out a solution. They spend a long time talking about the solution, architecting it, refining it, pricing it, pitching it, delivering it. The other side ends up not liking what they get. The disconnect: the first side says, "this solution is exactly as we described it!" the other side says, "it doesn't wor

The bandwidth-sync correlation that's worth thinking about

Check this out. Every once in a while a cool graph pops into my head.

Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time--like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other--like a phone call).

Up and down, I've charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 charac

High Definition

Am I the only person who wants a Hi Def telephone?

A headset that sounds better than the handheld receiver, and a handheld receiver that delivers the kind of quality calls we had back in the day...

I want to have a phone call where I don't have to strain to hear the other person, apologize for static, call people back because they went through a dandelion storm...

I'm happy to trade weight or transportability for this device.

I'm betting there are a dozen other items where the market would love a hi

Bear shaving

Global warming a problem? Just shave the bears.

Let's define "bear shaving" as the efforts we go to do deal with the symptoms of a problem instead of addressing the cause of the problem. A rare Japanese PSA (now long lost to the copyright gods) showed a girl shaving a bear so it could deal with global warming (here's a lesser one)...

Example: putting a sophisticated queue management system into the Department of Motor Vehicles so that people waiting in line feel like it's less of a mob. This is be

All storms are perfect

That's what makes them storms.

When someone describes a situation as a perfect storm ("two different backup servers failed, plus there was a blackout, no one could have predicted this, it was a perfect storm,") it's important to remember that if the backup server hadn't failed, there wouldn't have been a problem at all.

Just because a storm is perfect doesn't mean you shouldn't have anticipated it.

Fidelity vs. Convenience

Kevin Maney has a book out in September about the trade off between delivering extraordinary experiences (which he calls fidelity) and doing it in a way that's cheap and easy (convenience). The book takes this simple idea and supports it with dozens of examples.

The simplest example is movies. You pay to go to a theatre when you want the fidelity of the big screen and the crowd and the speakers. You stay home when you want the convenience of Netflix and the pause button. Vinyl records and live co

The initiator

"I'm just here to learn."

Learning is fine. Listening is good. Consensus is natural.

But initiating is rare and valuable and essential.

How often do you or your brand initiate rather than react? How often do you tweet instead of retweet? Invent rather than exploit?

eBook design and motion graphics

If it's worth doing, it's probably worth paying to do it very well. If you're going to do a presentation or write an eBook, spend the money to do it right.

Paul Durban created this example of motion graphics. It's a lot easier to do now than it used to be, so you get a lot for the energy and money you invest. If you can't be there in person (with an eBook, for example), the energy you get from great design really matters.

If someone sends me a PDF that's just a word file, I rarely make it past th

"All I do is work here"

Over the past few months, I've had quite a few interactions with several people who work at a (previously great) brand.

One person will email to ask me for a favor or a connection, and I'll point out that just yesterday, I got three emails, all spam, from three different people at the organization either selling me something irrelevant or sending me a press release I didn't ask for.  And the unsubscribe button doesn't work. And I've unsubscribed ten times before. When I pointed this out, he said,

Win, place or show?

One of the biggest brands in the world is getting ready to go online, and they're aiming to not win.

Sure, they've been online all along, but now it's become clear to them that the web is a real thing, and that a placeholder website and a few gimmicks aren''t sufficient. They're trying to generate online income and respect and audience.

Now, the choice: The safe thing is to organize to show. Showing up without glaring error and a major meltdown is something you can organize for. You say, "well, if