When New Marketing Fails: Who Wants a Meatball Sundae?
In his new book, "Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?" -- available on December 27th -- Seth Godin dissects the 14 trends marketers need to embrace to avoid eating meatball sundaes, which Godin explains as such:
A meatball is a worthwhile commodity. They are things we need and sold to everyone. The sundae is the hot fudge and the peanuts, the tactics of social media and the MySpace profiles. These things work but they work best when they're not on meatballs, but when they're on an organization designed to work with them.If you're anything like us, you don't want to wait until the 27th for a big gooey bite of meatball dipped in fudge. You don't have to. Today at 2:00, Seth Godin will do a special interview with WebmasterRadio.fm to discuss his book. Jody at SEO Space summarized a similar webcast with Seth Godin conducted in November, listing the 14 trends (linkage added by us):
1. Direct Communication - there is a trend towards an increase in direct communication between producers and consumers. More feedback mechanisms are appearing.
2. Amplifying the Voice of Individuals - power to the people. Everyone has become a critic. This can be a good thing. Viral is all the rage.
3. The Idea of having an Authentic Story - Seth mentioned the fact that there are scraps of material out there and the need for having an authentic story to tell.
4. Lack of Attention Span - have we trained people to have shorter attention spans? Seth reminisced about the fact that in the 40's commercials used to be 30 minutes long. Is the 30 second spot still an efficient way to educate potential prospects and consumers about your product and services? Just how successful are those Super Bowl commercials anyway? So long as the ads generate revenue, does it matter?
5. All About the Long-Tail- we've discussed the long-tail of SEO on numerous occasions. There is a definite trend towards long-tail and providing a choice for people.
6. Outsourcing - there is a definite trend towards outsourcing. Seth pointed out that "... it can be easier to change the manual than to change the people..."
7. Google and the Other Search Engines are "atomizing" the World - Seth also touched on the fact that bundling (all of your services) may not and does not always work.
8. Infinite Channels of Information - a.k.a. creating noise. I like to call this "touch points" or interception points. This creates the elimination of a bottleneck as you should build and create your own channels (and no I'm not talking about Yahoo Pipes).
9. Consumers Can Talk Directly to other Consumers - power to the people part two.
10. Shift in Scarcity and Abundance - stuff that used to be abundant is now scarce and vice versa.
11. Big Idea can reach a large number of people - a big idea is something that changes the world or the big idea's direct environment forever.
12. Shift of How Many to Who? - This is huge as "who" has become much more important than "How Many". Mass marketing is seeing a transformation.
13. Identification of who is wealthy and who is not - you cannot always predict who is who.
14. New Gatekeepers and No Gate Keepers - you'll have to read the book for more on this.
UPDATE: The WebmasterRadio interview began at 2:00 EST -- meaning right when this blog went up. We'll keep you posted on other opportunities to hear from Seth Godin.