“Be remarkable,” advises Seth Godin at SLA
I would have blogged Seth Godin’s talk at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference live, like I’ve been doing with a lot of conference sessions, but Harvard’s blog server was down at the time.
Seth opened by explaining that things won’t succeed if people don’t get the message. “When everyone can set type type gets pretty bad”
Some Web videos and memes can reach millions of people in a week.
Seth Godin mentioned Sonos, a company dealing with audio stuff that has an office in the Boston area. Sonos’ approach is to be very direct. Librarians can learn from them. They see it as an investment, not a business cost or profit margin.
Beware of customers who complain via their own Web sites, blogs, YouTube accounts, etc. Word-of-mouth is very important. Little MissMatch markets their unique and cool socks by hoping their customers will go from person to person showing off their socks.
“If cat food were really cat food, it would come in mouse flavor.”
The new marketplace is all about the long tail.
People really want customization. Companies that do that will win. How can libraries and librarians adopt that? Look at Google and its options for customization and how popular they’ve become.
Anticipated, personal information has become very important to people. If we do that more, we could impress our customers. Imagine sending an email to everyone with the four things they need to know each day. Gatekeepers are out. Personal dissemination is in. It’s not about controlling eyeballs ’cause they’re everywhere. It’s about leading and getting information where it needs to be.
Zappos doesn’t sell shoes. Shoes is what you get as a result of using Zappos’ services. Customer service is magic. It’s a way for us to get and keep customers, expand our services, and market ourselves.
Threadless, the t-shirt company, has an interesting marketing scheme because they rely on people voting on t-shirts they should sell to buy other t-shirts on the site.
Be remarkable. Tell a story to your sneezers. And two other bits that flashed too quickly in the cycle for me to write them down.
Q: What do you think about the name of the association? It’s tied to a place, not the people the association serves.
A: [paraphrasing] I won’t comment on the name of the association that hired me to speak, but you make a brand for the name. The name doesn’t necessarily matter.
Q: What about librarian stereotype?
A: A librarian isn’t the little old lady who stamps books in the library. Change that. [lots of applause]
Q: Something about virus on PDA
A: I’ve gotten more money by giving away books than I have by selling them on Amazon. When you go to Disney World, you buy a shirt to have a souvenir, not because you’re cold. His library was about the nostalgia of having books, not about having the information on hand. When he realized he hadn’t touched a book in a year, he got rid of the library. People want things that are custom and/or fast. It’s worth paying for what people want. “The enemy of every author is not scarcity, it’s obscurity.” [someone's quote, I didn't catch the name]
You don’t have to like what I just said, but it’s true and you have to decide what to do with it.
