Seth's Blog

How can you not love this!

Taste the Secret. Home of the meatshake.

Are you saying what you think?

Courtesy of Mark Hurst's thisisbroken, the truth about Japanese tattoos. Since I'm always looking for the bigger metaphor, here it is: sometimes your copy or your site or your packaging or your actions seem to be saying one thing, but the eye of the consumer is all that matters. If they think you're being foolish or selfish or silly or greedy, then you are.

I won't be there

If you're looking for me at future Purple Cow Roundup events sponsored by Corp-Net as seen on this site. I won't be there. The checks for my first two speeches for them bounced. Sigh.

The greatest thing...

Laura Scott was nice enough to send me this article (where do you people find this stuff!). In our seminar on Wednesday, I was riffing on both sliced bread and on the iPod, and here you go: The Morning News - iPod vs. Sliced Bread. My one cavil is that they forgot to mention that if you're lost in the woods, sliced bread has the advantage that you can leave it out and it will get moldy. I don't know if mold is like moss, but it might be, and that way you'd know which way is north. On the other hand, an iPod is better to trade to the local villager, who will then lead you out of the words in gratitude.

Are you thinking about RSS?

It's a tricky topic, but I'm going to start taking us through it over the next few weeks. Ken Schafer's Blog is way ahead of me.

fun facts about purple at kraft

Did you know they need 6,000 miles of string a year just for the animal crackers box?

Kraft Foods Inc. - 100 Years: Marketing

Lesson from yesterday's seminar

We had a great seminar at my office yesterday (details on the next one coming soon.)

A revelation for everyone there came near the end, when we were reviewing everyone’s website. I started each review with a few questions.

“Why did you build this page? What are you trying to accomplish? Who comes? Where do you want them to click? How do you know if the page is working? What do you measure?”

The real progress for most people came just in thinking about how they were going to answer the questions. Toward the end, though, one marketer showed us his site. He wanted the group’s advice on how to improve it. “Improve it to do what?” I asked him?

He didn’t know. He just wanted to make it better. “I haven’t updated it in a few years. How do I make it better?” He was looking for tactics, then he was going to invent a strategy to match. After a few seconds, he realized exactly what he was saying. Of course our tactics wouldn’t solve his problem because he didn’t know what his problem was!

Simple moral: if you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

Far Better Than I Could Have Said It

Chris Harris at First Marketing just sent me to Home Building's Purple Cow. I think the practical element of his take on remarkableness makes this far more useful than the vague pronouncements of a self-proclaimed guru.

Audio... the next frontier?

It's called Audiogenerator. Maybe it's not the next big thing. Worth a listen, though:

(PS 9/8... I've cancelled the service, so the link above is probably now broken).

Messages (and messengers)

Debbie Weil sent me a note about AudioGenerator. It's a neat idea (see my post on this) but I have to tell you, the site totally put me off.

The co-founder of the company is using every single direct mail/direct marketing trick in the book (the ps, the multiple links, the testimonials, the exclamation points, the user photos) and he's doing it so much that all I can ask myself is, "what's the scam?"

There's a very viral, very compelling technology at work here, but you wouldn't know it from the website. We need to remember that on the web more than anywhere else, first impressions are all that matter, because you don't get a second chance. By choosing the vernacular of the last-ditch, business opportunity direct marketer, he's missed his chance to be the Google/Yahoo/Shockwave/Amazon of audio on the web.