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Interview: Seth Godin
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Seth Godin
Godin is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change. An author of twelve books that have been bestsellers around the world, his most recent include Tribes, The Dip, and Meatball Sundae. Others include Free Prize Inside, All Marketers Are Liars, Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, The Big Red Fez, Survival is Not Enough, and Purple Cow. He is a renowned speaker as well and was recently chosen as one of “21 Speakers for the Next Century” by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses. He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called “the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age” by BusinessWeek.
Here is an excerpt from my interview of Godin. The complete interview is also available.
Morris: Your blog, http://sethgodin.typepad.com, is one of the most popular and deservedly so. What do you know now about blogging that you wish you knew when you launched it?
Godin: I figured out most of what I know about blogging pretty early on. The thing that distracted me for a long time, though, was confusing noisy people with important people. I know how, for example, to write a blog post that gets a lot of traffic, a lot of discussion–but not necessarily the kind of people I want to reach or the kind of message I want to spread. So now, I write what I think needs to be written, not what the in-crowd necessarily wants to read.
Morris: Here’s a related question. What are two or three of the most common misconceptions about blogging? In fact, what is the reality?
Godin: Blogging isn’t tweeting. At least for me, blogging is an asynchronous essay, a chance to lay out a thought, gather direct, non-anonymous feedback and repeat. It’s not a conversation, because a conversation happens like a phone call–in synchronization–and it is almost between two people. I love the fact that I don’t have to wait a year for a book to come out in order to bring an idea to the world.
The fact that there’s no barrier to publication, though, makes a lot of people uncomfortable. That’s because they can’t hide. You just have to do it, no one to blame.
Morris: Robert Putnam has written that we are increasingly “bowling alone,” losing many of our voluntary associations with others. Yet, you have written of the rise of “tribes,” and described how people are finding each other and creating their own tribes. I agree. But can the interests and objectives of tribes be so narrow that their proliferation creates even more divisions within our society?
Godin: There have always been divisions. 150 people and [Robin] Dunbar says we spin off a new tribe. There was a division between the Lions and Kiwanis, between the Sharks and the Jets and between the Montagues and the Capulets. The thing about Tribes is that people desperately want to belong to them, and the problem with bowling is that there’s just too much overhead. Getting into a league as a trusted member takes about 1000 times as long as doing something similar online, and we just don’t think we have the time for that.
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If you wish to read the complete interview, please contact me at interllect@mindspting.com.
You are urged to check out the resources at these Web sites:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/about.html
http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/
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