All Marketers...
Not pregnant, just old
Rob Walker has a great piece in this weekend’s Times magazine
The 30 books, part 1
I’ve gotten more mail about my MBA post than any in weeks and weeks. And all the mail says the same thing:
"What are the 30 books?"
I’ve got three answers. Here’s the first one:
There aren’t 30 books. There is no tiny canon of the essential books, that once read, will transform you into Warren Buffet or Mark Cuban. There are 300 books, though, and choosing an appropriate variety from the 300 will work just fine.
The point of my post was that the knowledge required is pretty small. The will is hard to find, of course, but you don’t find will at business school.
Over the next week or two, I’ll try to give an answer that some of you may find more satisfying.
Good news and bad news
So, for 119 Harvard MBA students, the phone rings. "Buddy, you’re not going to be admitted to the MBA program because you decoded a poorly written website and found out your admissions status too soon." [This means, of course, that for the next two years, you don’t have to pay Harvard more than $150,000 in room and board and lost wages, and you can build your own business or join a non-profit or run for the Senate].
So what’s the bad news?
Plenty of handwringing about the ethics or lack thereof in this case (the media loves the turmoil) but I think a more interesting discussion is what a gift these 119 people got. An MBA has become a two-part time machine. First, the students are taught everything they need to know to manage a company from 1990, and second, they are taken out of the real world for two years while the rest of us race as fast as we possibly can.
I get away with this heresy since I, in fact, have my own fancy MBA from Stanford. The fact is, though, that unless you want to be a consultant or an i-banker (where a top MBA is nothing but a screen for admission) it’s hard for me to understand why this is a better use of time and money than actual experience combined with a dedicated reading of 30 or 40 books.
If this is an extension of a liberal arts education, with learning for learning’s sake, I’m all for it. If, on the other hand, it’s a cost-effective vocational program, I don’t get it.
Yes, I know what the Black Scholes equation is. No, I don’t understand it. And no, I don’t need it. Do you?
Link: PCWorld.com – Harvard Rejects Applicants Who Hacked Site.
All Marketers...
Do you believe blondes?
Who is this woman? Does she work at Sales Genie? Is she a customer? Does her excellent hairstyle and tailored suit have anything to do with the quality of these mailing lists?
Of course stuff like this works. Of course it’s a lie. It’s something that customers (of both genders, apparently) respond to.
Here comes Blog Spam
IF a computer can do it
AND someone can make money from it
AND they can do it anonymously
THEN it’s pretty clear it’s going to happen, even if it ruins a good thing for the rest of us.
Blog growth is accelerating. It’s now doubling every five months or so, with 30,000 new blogs coming every single day.
Except that’s not really good news, because a whole bunch of those blogs are being created with computers automated to spew out countless brainless blogs.
Here’s how it works: you create a program that develops hundreds or even thousands of blogs, all of which are busy referring to each other and to your products. Soon, you start showing up on automated services like google or technorati. You get more than your fair share of traffic.
Hey, it’s not against the law.
But yeah, it’s selfish and it denigrates a valuable resource that the rest of us depend on.
One more time, I’ll say it clearly: anonymity is bad for the net. Wouldn’t you like a switch that would prevent all anonymous email from showing up in your inbox? Or a similar switch in google, which would filter out anonymous trash sites? The Wikipedia would work even better if all its contributors were maskless.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The problem with anonymous (part VII).
Link: Fast Company | Change Agent — Issue 51.
Thanks to David Sifry for working so hard on the spam issue and for the incredible service technorati performs. Check out his blog for more on the rapid creation of new blogs: Sifry’s Alerts.
File under: stats that cannot be true
Jupiter just published a report that says that 10% of US Net users delete the cookies on their web browser every day and 40% do it (in aggregate) every month.
Let’s do a reality check here. This is the same population that can’t get rid of pop ups, repeatedly falls for phishing of their Paypal and eBay accounts, still uses Internet Explorer, buys stuff from spammers, doesn’t know what RSS is and sends me notes every day that say, "what’s a blog?"
Forgive my skepticism, but it’s inconceivable to me that 40% of the audience knows how to use their browser to erase their cookies.
The echo chamber effect on the Net is stronger than it is anywhere in the world. Yes, professional women in New York think that lots of women keep their maiden name when they get married (it’s actually less than 5%). Yes, people who work out all the time figure that most people do (they don’t.). People who run wineries figure that lots of people care about wine (they don’t.) But on the Net it is at its worst. The heavy users figure that everyone understands what we understand. (They don’t.)
My favorite bit of proof: One of the top 100 things searched for on Yahoo! was "Yahoo". Also on the list when I was there: "web" and "search".
People aren’t stupid. They just are too busy or too distracted to care as much as you do about the stuff you care about.
The Best Posts of 2005 (so far… 10 weeks, 10 posts)
For the infrequent visitor, here’s a quick look at what’s been happening at Seth’s blog since the beginning of the year. I picked them for variety, for the frequency of referrals and because they made me think.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Don’t Shave That Yak!.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The ever-worsening curse of the cog.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The persistence of really bad ideas.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The secret army of ad clickers.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Step by step.
Link: Seth’s Blog: What you need to know about BitTorrent (part 1).
Link: Seth’s Blog: More about words.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Numanuma
Link: Seth’s Blog: Care.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Mob justice
And two bonuses for you!
My new blog: Seth Godin – Liar’s Blog
and last year’s list: Seth’s Blog: The Best Seth Godin Posts of the Year (2004).
Very good is not nearly good enough
I ended my book Purple Cow with the admonition that "very good is bad." A few folks were confused by this, but a post on John Battelle’s Searchblog reminded of my point… it’s worth another look.
become.com is the brainchild of some of the founders of MySimon and other shopping sites. It is supposed to be the next big thing, a google-killer.
Become is very good. A quick bunch of searches demonstrates that it’s a totally fine alternative to Froogle or some other shopping engines.
But there’s no way in the world people are going to switch.
Customers don’t switch for very good. What they’ve got is already very good! Google wasn’t a very good alternative to Yahoo. It was something far bigger than that.
The only way to beat Google or Kodak or Fotomat or McKinsey or JetBlue or you name it is to be over-the-top better, to be remarkable, to change the game.
It’s a great time to be a consumer. And it’s harder than it’s ever been to create stuff worth switching for.
All Marketers...
Coffee Lies
It’s hard to remember back when a cup of coffee for a dollar was considered extravagant. When I was in college, my partner and I ran a coffee shop in the student center. We sold coffee for 50 cents and cleared thirty cents a cup. And sold thousands of cups a day, all outsourced.
Of course, no one buys coffee today. We buy an experience. We buy a story and the way that this story makes us feel. It’s a complex story, involving smells and tastes and the sound of the shop and words and more.
I’ve started a collection of bad photographs of coffee store menus. Here’s my first one.
The lesson? Your menu (whatever your menu is, and yes, you do have one) is at least as important as your beans or your bread or your spreadsheets. Not because I say so, but because your customers demand it.
All Marketers...
What happens next?
After everyone is safely in the ambulance, the accident scene people (and the lawyers) show up. They bring cameras and tape measures and little devices that measure tread wear and stuff. All so they can prove what happened.
Of course, if three people see an accident, there are at least three descriptions of what really happened. It doesn’t really matter what you can prove. What matters is the story I tell myself.
Smart lawyers win cases where the facts don’t back them up. That’s because smart lawyers know how to tell a story that people will want to believe. It’s a story that makes a juror feel competent and ethical and satisfied. It’s a story that has very little to do with the facts and a lot to do with the lies we insist on.
i think most marketers spend way too much time worrying about their version of the truth and not enough time be authentic and telling stories about what they’re up to.