« Older Home
Loading Newer »

Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow”

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable This is probably the Bible equivalent of Seth Godin’s works, or at least, a tidy book of psalms. At 137 pages this is one of several more compact books by Godin and this is the one that has “taken off” the most, with people in all kinds of roles in all kinds of businesses assessing whether or not their product, service, or company is a Purple Cow or not.

In the new milennium, Godin started writing shorter books composed of several dozen ”chaplets” of no more than 4 pages each. I love this much more digestible format because you know you’re going to be able to get through the book because each “chaplet” is a digestible idea and you know that you can get that idea in your head, close the book, and head off to sleep knowing that you can pick the book up the next day or several days later to get to these other mini topics.

If you’ve ever read the Tao Te Ching then you know the power of saying a lot with the least amount of words. Some folks might argue that some of Godin’s ideas are truly spiritual but I think he would modestly argue that he’s more interested in revealing the truth rather than a pathway for mortal souls. This 2003 book contains some summaries of previous Godin ideas (The TV Industrial Complex, Ideaviruses, Everyone Is A Designer, etc.) and it’s always wise to revisit those.

There are also many case studies that Godin uses to illustrate a particular idea. Sometimes I feel that this is a bit too simplistic and misleading.There was certainly more than 1/2 dozen paragraphs devoted to many of these business and marketing strategies. But really, you should want to know more than what Godin provides - he’s just identifying the idea and informing us about it.

There are many great messages in the book, many of them are “takeaway points” that Godin puts at the end of each chaplet, some of my favorites are:

“If you could build a competitor that had costs that were 30 percent lower than yours, could you do it? If you could, why don’t you?”

“Instead of investing in a dying product, take profits and reinvest them in something new.”

“It is useless to advertise to anyone (except interested sneezers with influence).”

“What would happen if you told the truth?”

Mark Hughes’ “Buzzmarketing”

Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff by Mark Hughes

Mark Hughes was a marketing executive for PepsiCo, and Pep Boys but he earned his laurels helping make Half.com a success with the now famous marketing move of getting a town called Halfway, Oregon, to change its name to Half.com, Oregon - wow, people really went for that?

Although this book is published in 2005 I found a lot of the examples to be incredibly dated for a book that touts: “Books like The Tipping Point and Purple Cow taught us that every company can thrive by creating buzz. Now Buzzmarketing teaches us HOW to make it happen in the real world with the six secrets of buzzmarketing.” I’m not sure what the book means to teach with some of these examples: Miller Lite, the “1984” Apple commercial, tie-dye, etc. that is applicable to business circa 2005. Between these historical artifacts and the somewhat overwrought recounting of Half.com’s success I was almost ready to put this book down but there are some discussion points that have merit.The “six secrets” are interesting and makes one wish that this chapter was available as a downloadable PDF. As Hughes describes them, the Six Buttons of Buzz:- the taboo (sex, lies, bathroom humor)
-
the unusual
- the outrageous
- the hilarious
- the remarkable
- the secrets (both kept and revealed)Each one of these “buttons” can be used to start conversation with potential customers, “the market”, and the press. You can use one or a combination of these buttons to get conversations going and to create “buzz” about your company, product, or service. At this point with my limited intellect, I can’t see using this beyond press releases or attitude when writing website copy, or designing some ads.The other chapter that was helpful was the description of the five most frequently written news stories: - the David-and-Goliath story
- the unusual or outrageous story
the controversy story
- the celebrity story
- what’s already hot in the media

This kind of insight makes it easier to pitch your story to media reps and I have had some success with this since reading the book. It also helps refine your elevator speech with customers if you have a widely understood angle – the specifics can come later.The problem is that these two chapters are the only ones that I felt I benefited from when reading this book. I don’t think that means the whole book is a waste of time to read, after all, if you learn just one thing from a book, then it’s supposed to be worth it, right? I just wish the ratio of value was higher, but at $15 and 240 pages this investment didn’t break the bank. 

 

Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing”

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers by Seth Godin

I’ve been doing a lot of reading to broaden my mind professionally over the last few months. I’m going to write a mini review for each book I complete because:

- to imprint the primary points of each book in my mind
- to improve my writing
- to help others who might read this blog identify books that they may want to read or avoid

I read a lot of Godin in preparation for a day-long Q&A session with him that I attended the first week of September in New York City. Permission Marketing frames a favorite Godin rule of current existence: marketing isn’t the way it used to be. Godin describes the history and evolution of mass advertising succinctly and with value. This evolution is referred to in many other Seth Godin books as well as regularly in his blog posts.

Companies can no longer guarantee increased revenues by simply increasing advertising. The ratio is getting too tight and the tipping point where revenues can’t cover increased advertising expense occurs sooner and sooner. Dumping money into marketing won’t solve a problem unless a new currency is recognized.

This new currency is the attention of potential customers. Potential customers are the exclusive holders of this currency - they are in complete control (to a significant extent). Godin illustrates the difference between old/industrial/mass advertising and permission marketing. The old way was “interruption” marketing, like television/radio/print commercials that disrupted the content of those media. After more than a half-century of this kind of advertising, humans have learned to tune out the vast majority of interruption messages so something new must be done.

The meat of the book is Godin’s definition of permission marketing and his explanation of the 5 levels of permission marketing (listed in order of importance):

1. intravenous
2. points
3. personal relationships
4. brand trust
5. situation

In going through these five levels, Godin goes on to describe the concept of permission - it’s value, it’s importance, how it can be abused, and how permission is an ongoing process that can be shut off/cancelled at any time by the customer.

Godin provides us with several examples of web marketing failures as well as a series of case studies. One must bear in mind that this book was published in 1999 - some of the examples of poor web marketing are shocking (”Did companies really expect that to work?”) and similarly, even what were ingenious examples about ten years ago seem a bit dated and simple.

The book closes well with a currently valid permission marketing evaluation self-exam as well as a FAQ, both of which are completely usable to date. Despite the dated case studies, this book is very much worth reading for the definitions of permission and the other sections cited above. Permission Marketing provides a good foundation for more current examples that might be found elsewhere in other texts or even in Seth Godin’s blog archives.

Notes from a Q&A Session with David Weinberger, author of “Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder”

Photo Hosted at BuzznetFacebook’s Marketing 2.0 group had a nice Q&A with David Weinberger on Wednesday. There was some discussion about David’s book and the tagging possibilites that are out there but not getting utilized.Here’s some chicken scratch ideas I collected during the Q&A:- Markets are conversations
- Marketing doesn’t have to be a conversation
- The future of the internet is in jeopardy due to controlling forces
- Companies are co-creating products with their customers much more than they used to and this benefits everyone.
- Conversation can be undermined by companies/entities paying people to say good things about them. - The conversation has to be transparent.
- The idea of advocacy marketing is coming about, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as everyone is honest about where they are coming from: who is the hired gun?
- Customers have learned to trust each other more than they trust the business.

3 Things to Work On:
- Specifications (the stats, the metadata, the bones of the product, the facts, stuff that you can be sued for)
- Advocacy Marketing (blogging, forums, lacing up the gloves and stating your case)
- Marketing Materials (is looking phonier and phonier: the challenge for marketers is to improve this)

- Marketing that is going to sound simplified is going to sound insulting.
- Marketers need to get as complex and interesting as the subject matter.
- Simplicity still has value: What is your product? What is your company? This basic message should be simple
- “Control of the message”: what’s left of the idea if someone was to take control of it? Marketing is _not_ in the control business, that’s a way to alienate your customers. Marketing/the Company should be a source of ideas.
- What if there was no marketing? Your employees are already talking, that’s a form of marketing and a potential area of focus.

 

Tour de France Summary

The fact that riders crossed the finish line I think was a success for the race. It seems like there is a concerted effort by the (European/French) media to snipe away at this race until they destroy it.

Yes, the testing protocols are flawed and the labs are messy and infiltrated by French media. Yes, both WADA and the UCI are uneven in their enforcement of penalties and punishment. Yes, the teams are not united in how to deal with staff or riders who are proved or suspected to be involved with doping. BUT, no other major sport is doing the testing and catching the cheaters and the media and public should support the sport and the clean riders.

The sport is being ridiculed and cut down because it is cleaning itself up? That doesn’t make sense. Let’s start applying the same testing regime on European soccer players, the MLB, NFL, and NBA - just wait to watch those multimillionaires turn up positive. What will happen then? Will these same editorialists and columnists villify those sports and their dopers or will they attack the testing system itself? Get off the high horses - support the sport that’s doing something about the rampant abuse happening in all professional sports, and advocate those programs for all sports.

Don’t Wear an iPod During a Thunderstorm

I initially thought this was more Apple bashing, but really, it’s just the media being a bunch of morons. Considering that there’ve been numerous people have been struck by lightning while talking on cell phones over the last few years. Dear CNN, why not complete the list? Don’t walk around during thunderstorms while carrying a lightning rod, digging bar, TV antenna, etc.

Lately I’ve been amazed at what people do during thunderstorms. We were having an extreme thunderstorm on Monday with straight-line winds that took down trees all over the place, lightning bolts striking, horizontal rain….. and I watch this guy soldier on, refusing to dismount his lawn mower, for at least a 1/2 hour during weather madness. Actually, he was probably being safer than if he was wearing an iPod since the rubber tires did provide some insulation.

Google Purchases Postini

Everyone is in a tizzy over the announcement of Google’s Postini purchase - huge list of posts over at Computerworld including an excellent one by my former boss and Excite co-founder Ryan McIntyre.

Ryan points out that the purchase was more than just about getting a better spam filter for Gmail which is good to know since $625 million seemed a little steep for that functionality, but unfortunately, unless you try to read further about this, the topical news summarizes the story rather badly. Congrats to Ryan!

Microsoft’s “entertainment and devices devision”

In reading up on all the articles surrounding Microsoft’s most recent failings with the Xbox, thenugget that came to light (for me) is that this particular division has already lost over $6 billion since 2002, not counting the $1+ billion that will be spent attempting to remedy the current issue.

Is there any other technology company that would allow such a loss to continue over time? Sure, there were some crazy investments during the dot com days, but was there any company throwing away over $1.3 billion per year (on average)? I’m not talking about automobile manufacturing or any other industries propped up by government subsidy. I also understand the idea of long term investment and patience for profitability but I don’t think that’s what is happening here. I think that what we’re seeing is a company that is paying for presence just for the sake of doing so.

While it’s true that there are other entities in the space that are struggling, none of them have the infrastructure or “machine” that the Microsoft division has behind it, a machine that should, while not guaranteeing success, should result in less loss. I guess a tactic could be to encourage Microsoft to continue this investment as it is an allocation of resources away from it’s monopoly.

Google in ‘Hot Water’

So now it’s old news that an ad sales planner for Google wrote an opinionated piece about Michael Moore’s “Sicko” film in the Google health care advertising blog. Is this the first time someone wrote something inappropriate on the company website?

First of all, Google has at least 50 corporate blogs - can someone tell me about another company that is more communicative than that?Secondly, evidently there is quite a bit of freedom as to what employees feel that they can write on these blogs. I’m sure that this employee is not the first one to write an opinionated post on a Google blog. I guess the big shock for the blogoshpere is that Google is not manned exclusively by hypergeek tree-hugging liberals. It’s a company made up of real people with diverse attitudes and opinions.

I’m not saying that what was written on the Google blog was accurate or in line with company policy or the company’s position on healthcare in the United States. The key point is that there isn’t an attitude of fear within the company about posting opinion or not being a liberal in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’m pleased to see that there hasn’t been any reports of Google firing the employee or censuring her - and they shouldn’t do that. They should provide some guidelines on opinion and/or a neutral space for them. Their dilemma is that they want the truth to be out there about health care (and other issues) and they want health care companies to buy Google AdWords also. They should be successful in both cases.

Ooooh, the Evil Land of Google

I saw this brilliant post the other day and just had to laugh.

From the opening statement that Microsoft “is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not” it’s a laugh a minute.

This post is supposedly the reposting of an interview with a former Google employee, now a Microsoft employee, to provide insight to Microsoft employees about Google’s environment.

Virtually everything mentioned in the interview that is cached in negativism would be considered a positive at any other tech company. It’s obvious that the interviewee and the interviewing entity are threatened by a progressive organization like Google, which is very very flat - you tell me, which is more progressive: layers upon layers of control and management structure vs. a flat field? They are extremes and both have their problems but one is definitely more progressive than the other.

My feeling is that in the business world, and particularly in technology, companies that fear progression will eventually go down and go down badly. They might maintain some control or corner some part of a market but they will die as a superstructure. Think of IBM, Xerox, or SRI, etc. They still exist in some form but because they embraced regressive control they lost. Is there any doubt that Microsoft is the Big Blue of today? I think this post just confirms the inevitable and it would be better for everyone if the collapse happened sooner than later.

As someone who worked for a number of years in the Google-esque environment at Excite, I am all too aware of the problems inherent with that organization type. The emphasis given to a Stanford degree, if that’s true, is rather unfortunate. It might prompt some to perceive Google as a kind of Ivy League boys club similar to insurance companies of 50 years ago. I don’t know how true that is though, since we had an intern from UMass Amherst last summer who was heavily recruited by Google. My feeling is that they’re interested in truly creative people, wherever they are from.

The most telling thing about this post is less the inane and myopic bitching from the interviewee creature and more the clamor of fear in the comments. Dear Microsofties, explain your transparency if you have so many people who are rabidly afraid of the repurcussions of posting this pathetic “interview”. The purpose of this interview, BTW, is to keep Microsoft employees in line. An organization who is eager to dole out terror, both internally and externally, in order to maintain its status quo does deserve the death and collapse that I hope is on its way in short notice.

I not sure that Google “is the answer” but I _know_ that Microsoft isn’t.