Tag Archives: Seth Godin

Seth Godin: “Blow up your home page”

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“Do you really need a home page? Does the web respect it?

Human beings don’t have home pages. People make judgments about you in a thousand different ways. By what they hear from others, by the way they experience you, and on and on. Companies may have a website, but they don’t have a home page in terms of the way people experience them.

The problem with home page thinking is that it’s a crutch. There’s nothing wrong with an index, nothing wrong with a page for newbies, nothing wrong with a place that makes a first impression when you get the chance to control that encounter. But it’s not your ‘home’. It’s not what the surfer/user wants, and when it doesn’t match, they flee.

You don’t need one home page. You need a hundred or a thousand. And they’re all just as important.”

This post by Seth Godin perfectly says what I’ve struggled to communicate to clients and friends as I try to steer them away from traditional “home page” websites… and toward blogs. It’s a hard sell because it’s easy to throw up some bull shit copy from those old corporate brochures we spent so much on, and really hard to engage with your customers in a fresh, timely and relevant way.

What are we going to build?

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“A huge portion of our lives (as marketers, as consumers, as voters, as citizens) has been dominated by the fact that there were three or twenty TV networks. That this was a scarce resource. It’s not. Not any more. So, if there’s unlimited real estate, what are we going to build?” – Seth Godin

During my years doing affiliate relations for our news networks, most (all?) of our programming decisions were based on what we thought we could convince radio stations to “clear.” Coming up with an idea that 30 or 40 radio stations (out of 60) might agree was worth putting on the air was daunting. Mr. Godin’s post brought this to mind:

“Why not start the Debate Channel? 20 hours a week of live debate available online. Get a cable network to run three or four hours of highlights every week as an inducement to the candidates, but it will really be about the Net. If a candidate doesn’t show up, the others get more time to talk.”

We still have to program for our affiliates but we are no longer limited by that. So, what are we going to build?

Good is not almost as good as great

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Seth Godin on good salespeople and great salespeople. The best sales managers know in their guts this is good advice. They just don’t have the stomach for it.

“The great ones reach out. They work the phones when they’re not first in line. They understand what a customer wants. They’re not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game.

My best advice: Fire half your sales force. Then, give the remainder, the top people, a big raise, and use the money left over to steal the best salespeople you can find from other industries or even from your competition. You’ll end up with fewer salespeople. But all of them will be great.

And the good guys? Have them go work for the competition.”

Seth Godin: Blogging makes you respectful and clear

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Seth Godin explains two of the biggest benefits of blogging:

“The act of writing a blog changes people, especially business people. The first thing it does is change posture. Once you realize that no one HAS to read your blog, that you can’t MAKE them read your blog, you approach writing with humility and view readers with gratitude. The second thing it does is force you to be clear. If you write something that’s confusing or in shorthand, you fail.

Respectful and clear. That’s a lot to get out of something that doesn’t take much time.”

I’ve been dealing with clients and customers for 35 years and there’s no question that the past five years of blogging has made me better at it.

Adding interesting ads to mediocre products

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Couple of bullets from a podcast with Seth Godin, during which he talks about ad agencies;

“What ad agencies ought to do, in my opinion, is not focus on selling ads anymore. And instead, focus on getting in deeper within the clients, and help the clients make products that people want to talk about.”

“The problem is that ad agencies have defined themselves as the people who take the mediocre products and add interesting ads to them, and washed their hands and say, we can’t do anything about what the factory brings us. And my answer is, of course you can, and the clients actually want you to, you’re just not working hard enough to get that piece of business.”

[via Learfield InterAction]

I’m sorry. So sorry.

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Seth Godin points us to this list of how to (and how not to) make an apology. During my years doing affiliate relations, I had to apologize many times. Didn’t matter who screwed up, I was the network as far as the affiliate was concerned. I quickly learned that weasel words and mealy-mouthed language (“We’re sorry you feel that way.”) didn’t cut it. And a sincere, heart-felt “I’m sorry” was really all most of them wanted.

I’m sorry for the way things are in China — John Denver

Seth Godin on the iPhone

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Seth says there are two kinds of people in the world:

“The folks that want (need!) an iPhone, and those that couldn’t care less. And of course it’s not just Apple and it’s not just phones. It’s every single industry in the world. You’re not likely to convert one group into the other. What you can do is decide which group you’d like to market to.”

There you go. I am in the first group and Jobs sold me in the first five minutes.

Favorite blogs and podcasts

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Henry wants to know my ten favorite podcasts and blogs. I read a lot more than 10 blogs a day, but if I had to pick 10, they would be:

Scripting News, Boing Boing, Dilbert Blog, Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis, Mark Ramsey, Micro Persuasion, Podcasting News, Seth Godin, and GrowLearfield.com + all of the Learfield blogs. Links to the right.

As for podcasts, I don’t think I listen to 10 on a regular basis, only because I don’t have time. I sample others from time to time bu the ones I listen to regularly are:

MacCast, Keith and the Girl, Podcast 411, This Week in Tech, Diggnation, NPR Technology, This American Life, Cutting Edge (Business Week).

All are weekly except Keith and the Girl which is daily. Usually an hour.