Be Remarkable
Essentially Gladwell’s The Tipping Point with fewer pages, Seth Godin gives the word on product development and marketing today in a 2003 TED talk. It’s delightfully full of quips, including: Talk to those who listen. Safe is risky. The TV industrial complex is dead. Early adopters (Gladwell calls them Mavericks) are who you should focus on with innovative products, not average people and average products. A must watch:
Seth Godin is so great. I follow his blog but never heard him speak until now. I love his definition of remarkable (something worth making a remark about). One of the keys to success he mentions is that you have to make it easy for your audience to tell their friends, spread the word. I suppose that explains the popularity of the countless number of “Share on Facebook! Share on Delicious! Share on Twitter” buttons that have been popping up around blogs for the past couple of years.
Good point, Natasha, about the sharing links. Notice we don’t have any on this blog. I personally never use those links, or rarely do, because a) I don’t trust them, b) I’d rather be more personal with my social networking and c) I don’t think anyone uses them.
a) is not entirely rational,since I know technically how they work and that I don’t have to go through with it and I can confirm their behavior. I just really don’t like anyone attempting to speak for me on what I consider very personal sites with potentially critical fails.
b) I know I could customize what they say, but frankly, I always have Tweetdeck open. That makes copying, pasting, and typing a few words in my real voice takes faster than clicking the link, logging into the website with one of four twitter accounts or remembering my facebook email, confirming the content, and clicking OK. The ‘simple link’ is approximately 4x harder than my natural process and with worse results.
c) To test my theories, I added sharing links to another blog of mine, Friends of Type. We get good traffic, have lots of feed subscribers, and lots of twitter followers. Analytics show these links have resulted in driving only .33% of our traffic over a month, literally a drop in a fairly big bucket. There is nothing to say that these ‘sharers’ wouldn’t also share without the easy sharing links. Also, anecdotally, I asked Jason Kottke how sharing links have worked for him and he said they barely drive traffic.
I’m going to continue measuring and experimenting, but I thought you might find this interesting, thanks for the comment!
Aaron.