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If it’s not money or brilliant programming (see below) what will characterize the success of tomorrow’s Net?

1. Relentless execution. This is far and away the winner. Persistence and focus and consistency. We saw how this worked for Amazon and we saw how getting distracted hurt AOL and others. It’s far more important today, because markets at rest tend to stay at rest. Changing the market is hard.

2. Resistance to compromise. Because you can do so much, so fast using tools, and because it’s easy for non-experts to chime in, the temptation is to go for the middle, to compromise, to be all things. It’s the  Purple Cow thing again…

3. What you don’t do. This is a little bit like #2. Go take a look at an Amazon page. Now you can do a web search, search inside the book, order it new, order it used, on and on and on. The temptation is to do everything you can do (it might work for Amazon, but it’s not going to work for you!) The very best new Net companies understand in their heart and soul what they WON’T do.

4. Desire to be three steps ahead. One step is easy. One step isn’t enough. If you’re only one step ahead, you’ll get creamed before you launch. Two steps is tempting. Two steps means that everyone understands what you’re up to when you pitch them. Two steps means that you can get funded in no time. Two steps is a problem. It’s a problem because the smart guys are three steps ahead. They’re the groundbreakers and the pathfinders. They’re the ones inventing the next generation. It’s harder to sell, harder to build and harder to get your mother-in-law to understand, but that’s what’s worth building.

5. Doing something worth doing. Hey, nobody is going to switch to your service because you worked hard on it. Being a little better is worthless.

6. Connecting people to people. Over and over again, that’s what lasts online. Folks thought it was about technology and it’s not.

7. Monetizing from the first moment. Google without Adwords is worthless. So Adwords are built in to the experience. Not, “hey, we have to do this because otherwise we’ll go out of business” but “this actually makes the service better.” Given how cheap most online services are to build and run, you can’t charge money if the only reason you’re charging is to make a profit. Charging adds friction and selectivity. If those two elements are a drag on your service, you will fail. Hotmail’s founders missed this point. Banner ads made hotmail worse, not better, and because they didn’t build useful ads into the service from the start, they never could.

8. Not depending on a big, hairy partner. Sure it would be great if you could be on Yahoo’s home page every day, or built into blogger or featured on Fox every night. But it would be great if you won the lottery, too. That’s a wish, not a plan.

9. Ignoring the pundits. Including me. If I’m so smart, why don’t I go build your business?

10. Keeping promises. Even though the Net is here and it’s real, that doesn’t mean that the laws of business have been suspended forever. And those two words capture the best of what we’ve learned for four hundred years. Do what you say you’re going to do and the rest is a lot easier.

Source: Seth Godin

Tags: Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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1. Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.
2. Selling is personal. When I make a promise, I have to keep it. If you force me to break that promise (by changing processes, features or a rollout schedule) I will never forgive you.
3. Selling is interpersonal. I am not moving bits, I’m trying to change people’s minds, one person at a time. So, no, I can’t tell you when the sale will close. No one knows, especially the prospect.
4. I love selling. I particularly love selling great stuff, well marketed. Don’t let me down. Don’t ask me to sell lousy stuff.
5. I’m extremely focused on the reward half of the equation. Salespeople love to keep score, and that’s how I keep score. So don’t change the rules in the middle, please.
6. I have no earthly idea what really works. I don’t know if it’s lunch or that powerpoint or the Christmas card I sent last year. But you know what? You have no clue what works either. I’ll keep experimenting if you will.
7. There is no comparison, NONE, between an inbound call (one that you created with marketing) and a cold call (one that you instructed me to create with a phone book.) Your job is to make it so I never need to make a cold call.
8. Usually, customers lie when they turn me down. They make up reasons. But every once in a while, I actually learn something in the field. Ask!
9. I know you’d like to get rid of me and just take orders on the web. But that’s always going to be the low-hanging fruit. The game-changing sales, at least for now, come from real people interacting with real people.
10. (a bonus, switching points of view for a moment): I know that selling is hard and unpredictable. But if you’re going to be in sales, you’ve got to be prepared to measure and predict and plan. You need to give me sales reports and call lists and summaries. It does neither of us any good to keep your day a secret. If you don’t plan and organize, I can’t do my job of marketing.
11. (and bonus number two): The two worst pieces of feedback you can give me (because neither is really actionable or especially effective): a. lower the price and b. make our product just like our competitors.

Tags: Marketing, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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Perhaps it’s:

* perfect
* now
* cheap

that’s what they say, anyway.

I don’t think that’s what it is. I think we all want:

* interaction
* expectations exceeded
* respect

Do you think I`m right?

Tags: Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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 Here are ten secrets of the Marketing processes by Seth Godin. I found them really good. Try these 10 ideas to get you started down the path of scientific marketing tactics:

1. Don’t run out of money. It always takes longer and costs more than you expect to spread your idea. You can budget for it or you can fail.

2. You won’t get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted or scrapped. Count on it.

3. Convenient choices are not often the best choices. Just because an agency, an asset or a bizdev deal are easy to do doesn’t mean that they are your best choice.

4. Irrational, strongly held beliefs of close advisors should be ignored. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like your logo.

5. If it makes you nervous, it’s probably a good idea. If you’re sure you’re right, you probably aren’t.

6. Focusing obsessively on one niche, one feature and one market is almost always a better idea than trying to satisfy everyone.

7. At some point, you’re either going to have to stick to your convictions or do what the market tells you. It’s hard to do both.

8. Compromise in marketing is almost always a bad idea. Extreme A could work. Extreme B could work. The average of A and B will almost never work.

9. Test, measure and optimize. Figure out what’s working and do it more.

10. Read and learn. There are a million clues, case studies, books and proven tactics out there. You can’t profitably ignore them until you know them, and you don’t have the time or the money to make the same mistake someone else made last week. It’s cheaper and faster to read about it than it is to do it.

* Seth Godin

Tags: Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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Unless you just started, your organization is different than it used to be. It has evolved.

The marketing you do, the decisions you make, the hurdles you have to go through probably have vestiges of the old model. Sometimes, like the little feet on the back of a whale, it’s easy to ignore the vestiges. Other times, it’s entirely possibly that they prevent you from achieving your goals.

Example: years ago, Prodigy, the original big online service, reflected its origins from Sears, CBS and IBM when they unveiled chat and discussion boards. Every single message posted was read by a censor before it went online. At one point, they had literally hundreds of full time editors sitting in an office tower outside of NY, painstakingly reading every single post.

Example: the production values of an HD TV show are lost in the YouTube environment, yet plenty of studios and advertisers are having trouble giving up the staffing and hierarchy that served them so well in the other medium. So the vestiges remain, slowing down the entire process (and making it a lot more expensive.) 25 people to film a three minute clip is just silly, but it makes sense if you look back at how they got there.

Example: local banks with limited hours were the norm just a few years ago. The move to online hasn’t changed the way they all see the world… it’s a skeleton staff at night, because that’s the way it always was.

If you’re working hard to work around a vestige, maybe it makes sense to work just as hard to get rid of it all together.

* Seth Godin

Tags: Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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One popular method is to make a dollar in profit from each of a million people. Or a penny from a hundred million. This is the China strategy. It almost never works.

It almost never works because the challenge of reaching that many people is just too great. It’s too risky and too expensive. Doesn’t matter that you’re only hoping for a dollar or a penny. The price isn’t the challenge, it’s the difficulty in spreading your idea.

Far easier to make a thousand dollars from each of a thousand people, or even $10,000 from a hundred organizations. You can focus on a small hive of people, a group that talks to itself. You can push through a smaller dip and reach a level of recommendation and dominance that makes incremental sales far easier.

And you can learn much earlier in the process if you’ve gotten it right or not. Because you’re making more per sale, you can spend the time necessary to figure out what really sells and modify your offering sooner in the process.

The irony is that many products and services that have reached huge masses of people actually have significant margins (Windows, for example, or a cup of Starbucks). They got the best of both worlds because first they focused on winning small communities over and that led to the larger market.

* Thanks Seth Godin

Tags: Marketing, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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William Beatty was writing for amateur scientists, but it’s pretty global:

The road to failure often contains:
1. Secrecy
2. The conviction that someone is about to steal your idea.
3. Focus on selling your idea to the government or a big corporation.
4. Loss of humility and focus on fame
5. Belief that scientists and businesses (the smart ones) will hail your discovery.

BeeM`Goods : SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Rules for unconventional researchers.

* Credits : Seth Godin!

Tags: BeeMFacts, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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What I want is a service (€10 a month seems OK) that hooks up to a small box in my bedroom. It would have a wi-fi hookup to the Net, a speaker and a clock display.

I tell it what time I want to wake up in the morning. I use the web to teach it which information I’m interested in.

Then, every morning, it starts my day with a perfectly selected piece of music (picked by a program director, not me, based on my preferences). Maybe it wakes me up with Hannah Barbera sound effects on Tuesdays… Then it follows it up with the information I want to start my day–custom weather, or pollen count, or school closings or the Google news reports on the ten things I’m covering. Hey, if there’s bad traffic or weather, it could even wake me up earlier.

If there’s a power blackout, it reboots and has the right time. It doesn’t worry about Daylight Savings (did you remember?) If I forget to press the “I’m up” button, it calls me on the telephone…

By the time I’m done shaving, I’ve heard what I want to hear, even if it’s just the right music for today.

Wouldn’t that be better than Casey Kasem or some shock jock?

If you build one, let me know. Thanks.

Credits: Seth Godin

Tags: Business Ideas, Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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The best businesses are the ones where everyone benefits.

Robocalling is not one of these.

Robocalling is phone spam, protected by a loophole that allows politicians to evade the do not call list. Now, some states are trying to ban it, or at least make it less efficient by requiring a human operator to ask you if you want to hear the recorded vitriol before they play it for you.

Robert E. Kaiser, who runs a company that spams millions, doesn’t seem to get the whole idea of permission marketing. He’s quoted in the Times as saying that he should be allowed to continue this because, “You might not think there would be a segment of the public that would want the calls, but there probably is.” Fortunately for those of us in need of more negative, anonymous phone harassment by computer (even though we’re on the do not call list), Robert is working late to ensure that we can
be sure we’ll get our fill.

Media rule of thumb: if people wouldn’t miss your ads/content/noise if it went away, you should find something else to sell to advertisers. Not because it is ethically wrong to annoy people just because you can, but because in a world with a bazillion channels, people will just ignore you if they choose to.

Credits: Seth Godin

Tags: Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received.

No one “sends” an idea unless:
a. they understand it
b. they want it to spread
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits
No one “gets” an idea unless:
a. the first impression demands further investigation
b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time

* Seth Godin

Tags: Permission Marketing, Seth Godin by admin
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