Words of wisdom from Seth Godin

Last week, I was able to hear Seth Godin give a keynote at a conference. I had read his book Unleashing the Ideavirus and have followed his blog for a number of years. Godin recognizes that changes that have occurred in marketing in recent years and the need to change our paradigm from shouting our message at everyone to getting people in our niche to spread our message themselves. He is using social networking tools to help successfully spread his message, so it's good to hear his thoughts and think about how we can follow in his footsteps.

Below are some quick notes from his presentation:

• "Ideas that spread win."
• "The people who don't know they have a problem aren't listening to you."
• "The spamming isn't working the way it used to." (Meaning that inundating people with messages isn't working.)
• "the amount of noise...is excessive."
• "Every Google is its own [media] channel."
• "Connect people who want to talk to each other."

Rather than finding customers for our products, we need to find products for our customers.

Rather than insisting on commitment before success, we need to have success before commitment.

The "marketing" cycle is now Be Remarkable --> Tell A Story to Your Sneezers (those who will spread your message) --> They Spread The Word --> Get Permission (from those who are interested in you) --> Be Remarkable {and the cycle continues}

There were four questions asked at the end of his presentation, and I asked one of them. I had read Unleashing the Ideavirus on my PDA and wondered what he had learned about the future of the book from that experience. Godin said that books have become souvenirs, memorabilia and artifacts. He originally disseminated Unleashing the Ideavirus as an ebook for free and it was quickly downloaded by thousands of people. After a while, people asked for a print version that they could have on their shelves and point others to. Do we use all of the books we own? Not really. In fact, he had just given away his entire business library because he found that he no longer referred to the hardcopy books. So what was the lesson he learned? Give away information. Write short books and given them away. Then have people pay for the longer version or a customized version of the book. He said he made more money on a free book, than many have on books that they sold in hardcopy. "Free" allowed his message to spread quickly and then got people to talk to him and hire him.

His talk was inspiring and full of useful ideas. Others blogged his speech (e.g., here) and I'm sure each of us heard something different. For me, the key thought was figure out what your customers want and deliver THAT.

[Most of the above also appeared in the SLA Blog.]

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Technorati tag: Marketing

Using hashtags in Twitter

Many tools have been developed for Twitter and one is the hashtag. The hashtag (#hashtag) provides a way for a tweet to be directed at a group and disseminated to people in that group. Daniel Lee has set up a Twitter account for the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference and a hashtag to go with it. Everyone who follows SLA2008 can have their tweets resent to everyone else who is following SLA2008 by using the hashtag #sla2008. This means I can tweet as I normally do, and only direct specific messages to my SLA buddies. Daniel has done a good job explaining this and providing additional resources for people to read. Now it will be interesting to see how this works at the conference!

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Technorati tag: Twitter

Blog post: When Micro-blogging Grows Up

I am now running into people who have heard of Twitter, but haven't used it. That means that micro0blogging is coming out of being a niche product. In this blog post, Ben Lorica writes about the trends he sees in micro-blogging. He notes that we still need more stable services and business models as microblogging grows beyond its current uses.

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Technorati tags: Twitter, Microblogging