Seth Godin on marketing

One sign of Seth Godin’s success as a marketing guru is that he comes up number three in a Google search on “Seth”—right after the guy in the Bible and the Canadian cartoonist. Three of the top ten results are currently about him.

Yet as he admits himself, Godin sometimes makes mistakes. The title of his book All Marketers Are Liars was provocative, but surely turned off many potential buyers. (On the new cover, “are liars” is crossed out and “tell stories” written in.) And for me at least, the title and cover image of his 2007 book Meatball Sundae were nauseating enough to keep me from reading it until now.

As usual, though, reading any book by Seth Godin proved worthwhile. I’ve read most of them and reviewed The Dip and Purple Cow (the book I recommend starting with). Read a couple of his books and you see that he has a coherent view of how marketing works, and how it is changing. Each book takes a different piece of the puzzle and looks at it in more detail.

Purple Cow argued that it’s no longer enough to sell average products to average people by interrupting them with TV ads or billboards. The world is too full of noise for you to cut through the clutter that way, and the Internet makes it too easy for your potential customers to find your competitors. The key is to have a story that is so compelling and so authentic that it resonates with a core group out there—and then to let that core group do your advertising for you.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter make it easier than ever for stories to spread and become “viral”—but just having a Facebook page and a Twitter account won’t help you much if you don’t have an unusual story to tell.

More than that, Godin argues, that story won’t take hold unless it reflects who you really are as a company. It’s a hopeful message for start-ups but not so hopeful for big, established companies that have sunk enormous resources into doing things the way they already do them. Putting nifty new-media tools on top of a stodgy organization, he argues, is like putting whipped cream and a cherry on a bowl of meatballs.

“If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea,” Godin writes at the end of this short but challenging book, “it’s this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.”

Words Without Borders

The Words Without Borders website has been beautifully recreated for the new year by Bud Parr, WWB’s Lead Developer and Blog Editor—and the proprietor of Chekhov’s Mistress. The WWB blog is now known as Dispatches, and at the Contributors page (though it’s not yet finished) you can click on my name or anyone else’s to see what they’ve done.

My latest post, and the first for this year, is a comment on the feature Translate This Book from The Quarterly Conversation. “Translate This Book” includes some African titles that deserve to be known in English, plus recommendations by the WWB’s Susan Harris, Rohan Kamicheril, Ilya Kaminsky, and Sal Robinson.

The end of January will mark my first year as a WWB blogger. It’s been a lot of fun so far. I have a few pieces in the bank for 2010, and some ideas for when those run out. 

Worth the while

“The cost of a thing,” Thoreau wrote, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

In the Journal as well as in Walden, Thoreau played the canny New Englander, weighing the value of things both material and spiritual. The phrase “worth the while” often marks the places where he does so. Below are some examples, from Damion Searls’ new edition of the Journal. 

It would be worth the while to tell why a swamp pleases us, what kinds please us, also what weather, etc., etc.—analyze our impressions. (March 30, 1852)

Would it not be worth the while to describe the different states of our meadows which cover so large a portion of the town? (April 16, 1852)

It is worth the while to walk in wet weather; the earth and leaves are strewn with pearls. (August 7, 1853)

It might be worth the while, where possible, to flood a cranberry meadow as soon as they are ripe and before the frosts, and so preserve them plump and sound till spring. (November 15, 1853)

There is, no doubt, a particular season of the year when each place may be visited with most profit and pleasure, and it may be worth the while to consider what that season is in each case. (August 22, 1854)

The conventional acorn of art is of course of no particular species, but the artist might find it worth his while to study Nature’s varieties again. (September 30, 1854)

It is a lichen day. How full of life and of eyes is the damp bark! It would not be worth the while to die and leave all this life behind one. (January 7, 1855)

It was worth the while to see what a burden of damp snow lay on the trees notwithstanding the wind. (January 19, 1855)

Skated up the river with Tappan in spite of the snow and wind.... It was worth the while for one to look back against the sun and wind and see the other sixty rods off coming, floating down like a graceful demon in the midst of the broad meadow all covered and lit with the curling snow-steam, between which you saw the ice in dark, waving streaks, like a mighty river Orellana braided of a myriad steaming currents,—like the demon of the storm driving his flocks and herds before him. (February 3, 1855)

Seeing me going to sharpen some plane-irons, and hearing me complain of the want of tools, he [Mr. Rice] said that I ought to have a chest of tools. But I said it was not worth the while. (November 16, 1855)

It is worth the while to know that there is all this sugar in our woods, much of which might be obtained by using the refuse wood lying about, without damage to the proprietors, who use neither the sugar nor the wood. (March 21, 1856)

It would be worth the while, methinks, to make a map of the town with all the good springs on it, indicating whether they were cool, perennial, copious, pleasantly located, etc. (July 12, 1857)

It is worth the while to walk in swamps now, to bathe your eyes in greenness. (November 5, 1857)

The beauty of the fish, that is what it is best worth the while to measure. (November 30, 1858)

I go to get one more sight of the old house which Hosmer is pulling down ... The latter [Nathan Hosmer] draws all the nails, however crooked, and puts them in his pockets, for, being wrought ones, he says it is worth the while. (March 11, 1859)

In keeping a journal of one’s walks and thoughts it seems to be worth the while to record those phenomena which are most interesting to us at the time. (January 25, 1860)

Another finger-cold evening, which I improve in pulling my turnips—the usual amusement of such weather—before they shall be frozen in. It is worth the while to see how green and lusty they are yet, still adding to their stock of nutriment for another year; and between the green and also withering leaves it does me good to see their great crimson round or scalloped tops, sometimes quite above ground, they are so bold. (November 21, 1860)

The Long Kiss Goodnight

Most years around Christmas time, Jenn and I get out our secondhand VHS tape of the 1996 movie The Long Kiss Goodnight and curl up with some popcorn. It’s a terrific action movie with a strong (scarily strong) female lead played by Geena Davis, and an ice-cold but weirdly charming villain (Craig Bierko). And it’s a Christmas movie!

If you’re into 9/11 conspiracy theories, the plot overseen by US intelligence official Leland Perkins (Patrick Malahide) will give you something to mull over. The section of dialogue below, between Perkins and Charly Baltimore (Geena Davis) may help explain why you don’t see this movie on TV much.

PERKINS
Budget cuts, remember? Congress blinded us in Eastern Europe, Central America. Across the board, an intelligence blackout. We had to recruit any eyes and ears we could find, even if it meant going to former targets.

Pause. Suddenly Charly’s eyes go wide. She whispers:

CHARLY
Budget cuts… oh, God. Is that what this is about...? The foot soldiers, the tanker truck… Fuck me, you’re running a fundraiser!!

Comprehension, dawning. She looks up in disbelief.

CHARLY
You’ll get all the money you want at the next budget hearing, won’t you...? All you need is a major terrorist incident.

PERKINS
Interesting theory.

CHARLY
Theory, my ass. I think some terrorists were planning a strike. Bought supplies from Daedalus, that’s how you knew they were coming…
(eyes widening)
No way. Don’t tell me you’re gonna sit there and let them go through with it, just to get a budget increase.

Perkins shrugs philosophically.

PERKINS
It’s not without precedent. 1993, remember the World Trade Center bombing...? The CIA had advance knowledge, don’t think they didn’t. Worse, the diplomat who issued the terrorist’s visa was CIA, they facilitated the bombing. Purely to justify a budget increase. Of course, they’d no way of knowing the terrorists would botch the job.

CHARLY
That’s not gonna happen this time...?

PERKINS
No. This time, the terrorist event will come off precisely as planned. This time the terrorists can’t muck it up… because we’ve killed them and taken over.

Dennis Brutus 1924-2009

When I think of Dennis Brutus, I remember a photo I once saw of him standing in front of a portrait of Frederick Douglass. His graying mane and stoic expression gave him a certain resemblance to Douglass, which I’m sure he was well aware of. I met him several times when I was doing anti-apartheid work in the 1980s, and I was sorry to read of his death.

I once helped organize a fundraising event at Harvard where Brutus spoke about his efforts to have South Africa banned from the Olympics, and about his attempt to escape after his arrest in 1963. Finding himself with his guards on the streets of Johannesburg, he broke free and ran, thinking that they would never be reckless enough to shoot him on a crowded street.

He was wrong. A bullet passed through his body, and before long he was serving an 18-month sentence on Robben Island.

I was carrying a copy of his book A Simple Lust, and before the event I mentioned to him that I liked his poem “The companionship of bluegum trees.”

To my surprise, he stopped what he was doing, sat down, looked up the poem, and read it to me: the only time that I have been privileged enough to be an audience of one for a poet.

The companionship of bluegum trees
their sheen and spangle against the midday
winter sun
and the companionable nudge of my heart
knocking against my mind and memory
with evocation of my student hazy days
condemns me once again
labels me poet dreamer troubadour
unreal unworldly muddle-headed fool
while the trees nod and swagger
and the level sunlight flows.