Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults. Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs. Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages. One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from “you” to “me” to “us” to “the corporation”.
Seth Godin on Mass Marketing
28 August 2008
20 July 2008
Radio has great opportunity to transition into the internet. I would argue even more so than video. Why? Because you can keep it on in the background and still get stuff done. When people are huddled around a desk watching something on YouTube they need to be more engaged thus taking them away from other activities completely. Radio’s ability to be in the foreground and the background all at once is phenomenal.
Marketing Pilgrim on Radio
18 July 2008
In order to have a bestseller, you must reach the unreachable. Most of the people who buy a bestselling book buy no other book that month, or even that year. The very nature of the top of the list is that you’re reaching not just the frequent purchasers and the passionate, but those that only show up for the hits.
Seth Godin on Bestsellers
18 June 2008
The phrasing, “engineer word-of-mouth” is very interesting. Inasmuch as it suggests “force” or “manipulate,” I’d say that no company has ever successfully engineered word of mouth. However, for those companies that guide or inspire word of mouth by empowering consumers, respecting their opinions, thanking them for sharing their input, and making changes based on consumer counsel … in those cases, word of mouth marketing is successful all the time, every day.
Guy Kawasaki on Word of Mouth
14 June 2008
I think for most people, most of the time, we care a lot more about the effect and use of a product or service and less about who made it and why. We chose Converse because they get us a date, and we don’t change brands just cause Nike owns them now.
Seth Godin on Product Brands
26 January 2008
The creation of fake personas, carefully nuanced with mundane details and mediocrity, the fake ‘average guy’, when developed over a long period of time, can be an ingenious platform to scrape data, mine data, infiltrate social networks and communities.
Eric Rice on Social Hacks