Five Questions with Seth Godin

By Joe Pulizzi | Published: January 15, 2009

Lori Rosen, executive director for the Custom Publishing Council (a wonderful Junta42 partner), was nice enough to let us share this brief interview between her and Seth Godin. Thanks Lori and Seth.

1. Your new book is called Tribes – how do you define a tribe, and what is an example of a tribe in today’s social media landscape?

A tribe is a group of people connected by a culture, a language, a mission and probably a leader. Barack Obama built a tribe, so did Harley Davidson.

2. In what ways are marketers currently taking advantage of social media most prevalently?

“Taking advantage” is a dangerous phrase. Take advantage of this medium and the medium will shut you down. Instead, marketers feed it, take care of it, embrace it and make it work for their users and readers. So, threadless.com builds a huge t-shirt company, or littlemissmatch.com builds a $40 million retail business. And don’t forget the bloggers (which are rapidly closing the remaining gap with all but a handful of newspapers).

3. What are marketers not doing with regards to social media that they should be?

They are selfish. Short-sighted. Busy asking: how do I make this medium work for me? instead of asking, how do I work for this medium?

4. What are three trends in digital marketing that you believe we’ll see a lot of in the next 18 months?

Dramatic explosion in user generated pages and videos and blogs and Squidoo pages
Final fall out of display advertising online
Huge bloodletting among packaged goods companies that depend on the masses to watch mass media

5. Can you give an example of a company who has effectively avoided “the meatball sundae?” – meaning, who has effectively implemented the new marketing paradigm? What made their marketing stand out above the pack?

I don’t think anyone can argue with Apple’s success. And there are dozens of churches that get it, and one particularly famous political marketer who starts changing the world in January.

Do you agree with Seth?

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