Seth Godin and Tim Stay (with The Big Red Fez on his head).

I mentioned before that Seth Godin has had a big influence on our thinking at Know More Media. I have been especially impacted by his thinking.

Consider what I felt after reading Permission Marketing. Here was the revelation that Interruption Marketing was on a death march. Guess what I owned? A telemarketing company! The ultimate in interruption marketing. And as this vision opened before my eyes, I realized that I needed to sell my call center and move on to a different way of thinking and marketing. So, Seth, you are partially responsible for the change in my career. And guess what, this is so much better. I feel so much more liberated in my approach to marketing.

“If you don’t love what you do, how can they (your customers) love what you do?”

This quote came from Seth at a conference I attended yesterday in New York City.  Seth had a group of around 45 attendees of mostly CEOs and Senior Marketing Executives at his "Whiteboard Seminar". We had everything from the largest corporations (AOL, Yahoo, Nestle) to some companies that were only a few months old. Seth also provided, for free, a number of non-profits, including Unitus, the organization that Know More Media supports for making small loans to poor women in developing countries.

Seth gave a great overview of some of his main topics from some of his earlier books and teachings. These included:

Permission Marketing

You have to give something first to people before you ask for something from them.  You have to date first, allow each other to get to know each other. Does your business know how many people you have permission to talk to?   You REALLY need to know and track that number.

Is your product or service Invisible or Remarkable?

With all the clutter, the only lasting way to stand out among the noise is to be remarkable.  Remarkable means to have other remark about what you are doing.

What's Our Story?

All marketers are storytellers.  If you do it right, your product will be your marketing.   Do you know what your story is?

The Fashion / Permission Complex

• Be Remarkable
• Tell a story to your sneezers
• They spread the word for you
• Get permission to interact with them more

Ideas that Spread, Win

From a review on his book, Unleashing the Ideavirus, "In order to show how to make your idea infectious, the book examines what makes a powerful 'sneezer', how 'hives' work, and applies the concepts of critical velocity, vector, medium, smoothness, persistence, and amplifiers."

We need to think like magazine editors

Magazine editors find writers for their audience.  Know your customers and what they want (different from need) and learn how to adjust to give it to them.

Blogging

A blog is a device to tell the truth with an authentic voice to people who want to listen.  Make your blog posts short, add pictures, and make it more about the reader and less about you the writer or company.

The Funnel Flipping into  the Megaphone

The funnel is the process in which you gather and acquire customers moving them from prospects to customers.   If you do it right, by the time the customer gets through the funnel, he will want to become an evangelist for you and spread your message with a megaphone.  They become sneezers.

Do the Never

Find something so outrageous, so unbelievable, so unthinkable within your industry and your market and do it. Try it out.

Small is the New Big

This is actually the title of new book that Seth will launch shortly.    

• Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.
• Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.
• Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
• Small means that you can answer email from your customers.
• Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.

I loved the conference.  I came away with a dozen things I want to work on for Know More Media.

Here is my sneeze:

Read some of Seth's stuff regularly.  It will change how you do business.  For the better. You will be happier and more fulfilled (and maybe richer)!

(Thanks to David Shappell, author of the Unitus Blog on Microfinance, for the photos.  They are posted on Flickr.)

**Update** Seth talks about the conference here. There is a nice photo of David Shappell in his fez.  Mary Ann of Davistudio says this about the seminar.