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Rare Bird Blog

Seven ways to reinvent yourself from Seth Godin

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Admittedly, I'm a fan of Seth Godin. Of course, most marketers are. The interesting thing about Seth and the dozen or so books he's written is that each and every one follows a similar style:

• Identify the paradigm
• Demonstrate why and how it's broken
• Present an alternative
• Challenge you to either accept or reject his thinking

But the last piece of the puzzle is what you do with it. If you reject it, it's up to you to set out to prove you're right; to demonstrate through your own successes that his view might be myopic. Of course, if you accept his thinking-- which nearly always means that you'll expect more from yourself-- well, then, you have the challenge of actually going out and doing something new, something different, and often something terribly risky in order to demonstrate your faith in the new World According to Godin. There's no pass. There's no easy way out. You either do or you don't, and then the work begins.

He recently released a brief manifesto (freely available) titled "Brainwashed" that deals with the way that we've all been trained to be trainable. How the 'system' has been working to make us cogs in the machine because the machine needed as many cogs as it could get. It's probably no surprise to you that the machine ain't what it used to be, but the system is still spitting out as many cogs as it can, much to the detriment of our economy, our future, us all.

So, what to do? Godin offers some salient and cogent advice: reinvent yourself. Here's how.

Labels: big picture, email marketing, seth godin

How to communicate (even if it's bad news)

Monday, October 6, 2008

As a little sneak peek, I'm intending to write a web review article for the Indianapolis Business Journal on The Big Picture soon, but they came to my attention today in a way that can't be ignored.

A quick primer: The Big Picture is a photoblog hosted and maintained by The Boston Globe. Each day, Boston Globe web developer Alan Taylor compiles a set of photos related to something in the news and presents them with captions on the site. Big, amazing, high-resolution images that work hard to tell a compelling story. A very simple communication tool, beautifully realized.

Today I noticed, in addition to the recent photo additions, a message from Alan. "Just a brief note," he started, "three things to mention." Two of the three things were a new feature and a teaser for a very important upcoming entry. Sandwiched between them was this:

"A second ad position has been added (yes, I know, I know) but I wanted to be upfront about it, and not sneak an ad in. It's below the photos, above the comments - I'll never put ads in amongst the images - please feel free to give your feedback here in the comments. Just so you know the rationale: the bandwidth bills must be covered. In a single day, last month the entry on Hurricane Ike was served up over 1 million times. The 28 images on that page add up to a bit more than 5.2 megabytes. Multiply that a million times, and we (The Boston Globe) ended up serving nearly 5 terabytes of images for just one entry from one blog in less than 24 hours (not counting the HTML or the thousands of comments). And we topped one million daily pageviews at least five times last month."

Honest, transparent, succinct. Following a classic strategy too often ignored: "Here's what we did, here's why we did it, we hope you understand, tell us what you think."

Folks, it doesn't matter if you're running a Fortune 100 company, a newly minted startup, or a photoblog that just happens to be seen by millions. This is how you communicate.

Well done, Alan!

Labels: alan taylor, big picture, photos