All Marketers are Liars

"Take Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mark Twain." Jay Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing said. "Combine their brains and shave their heads. What's left? Seth Godin." Great remark— remarkable, even— and true. Seth is brilliant, insightful, funny, aware, perceptive, bold and... also human. And that's a formula when shaken, not stirred, which just may have produced the smartest marketing man alive today. This is my second interview with guru Godin. Both times I've learned lots. This one gets neck deep into network marketing. Fun-learning. Enjoy.

All Marketers' Are Liars. You don't really mean that. Actually, what I mean is all marketers are storytellers and that people tell themselves lies. Good marketing is about giving people a story that they want to believe, that they're glad they believed, and that the act of believing it made their lives better.

The consumers are telling lies to themselves. Is that what you said? It's impossible to know the truth about anything, particularly in our busy world. Most people don't even want to know the truth. We buy the bottled water because of the way it makes us feel not because we've done the chemical analysis of the mineral content and the molecular structure.

We go on vacation to places that aren't necessarily the best use of our money. We buy our house in a certain neighborhood, send our kids to a certain kind of school, buy a certain kind of car, all of the decisions we make in our life, business, social, charitable, aren't based on an exhaustive analysis of all the facts, they're based on the story we tell ourselves. The way that we talk to ourselves, our friends and to our family about what we are doing and why we are doing it.

Is this the essence of what people mean when they say we buy on emotion Seth? That's absolutely true.

We don't just buy on emotion, we do everything on emotion.

People like to talk about the stuff in their life. They like to talk about the products they're buying, the music they're listening to, etc. and that's all very emotional. It's very important to understand that just about every person in this country has everything that they need and that all the money we're spending is on stuff that we want.

And wants are very different than needs.

The first way you can tell is that needs are actually cheap.

Stuff like clean water and the food you need to survive isn't particularly expensive in this country. It's the stuff that we don't need, but want, like a Ferrari, that costs money.

If needs are very inexpensive, then those of us that are marketing anything else are marketing to people's wants, and if that's the case then one perspective has to say 'everything is discretionary spending'. Do you agree? That's absolutely true— your competition isn't another skin cream or another vitamin, your competition is the entire universe of things that make people feel good.

Those things can be anything from a massage to the peace of mind that someone gets from sending that $100 to a charitable organization that builds schools in Nepal. It's all about satisfying the same basic set of wants and desires and those all hook up to stories.

I think we've got to segue here for a minute and talk about the fact that not everyone wants to tell themselves the same story and that's what makes it interesting but also makes it difficult.

When we look at a population, everyone carries around what I call a series of 'worldviews'— the biases, the expectations and the beliefs you have before you encounter that next marketer, before you even hear the next story.

Two very simple but emotional examples here— When either John Kerry or George Bush was giving a speech last year, different people heard them say different things. The minute John Kerry opened his mouth some people would believe every word he said and give him the benefit of the doubt and want to hear his vision.

Other people decided before he said a word that they didn't like him. Well, obviously that's not an analysis based on rational thought or detailed thinking. It's just based on the worldview, the bias.

The same thing is true with, for example, network marketing. There are some people in the world who will not buy something from a network marketer, ever, if they can help it…

…before they even know if it's the right price, the right product, the right deal, the right anything, because that's their worldview, that's the way they're approaching it. They made that decision long before they met you.

What marketers have to understand is that if you're trying to change a worldview; that almost always means that you have to try to persuade someone that they are wrong.

Persuading somebody that they're wrong is really hard.

How do we discover a person's or a group of people's worldview, Seth? It's interesting. A lot of worldviews get linked together. The kind of person who owns an Apple computer is often the kind of person who likes recycling and who goes to certain kinds of conferences.

I've been at conferences that have had nothing to do with computers, nothing to do with design, I pull out my Powerbook and everyone else has a Powerbook too— whereas, I've been in certain airports where I had the only Apple in the whole building.

So, the first clue you've got is that certain worldviews travel together. We know, for example (because it works) that when it came time to sell cosmetics to middle-income and lower middle-income people that there was a good match there for direct selling and for this industry, because that kind of person seems willing to spend $6 on a cosmetic from someone down the street.

You can't do that with Tiffany Jewelry and you can't do that with cosmetics that cost $60 a bottle just because the worldviews don't travel. The kind of person who wants to spend $60 on lipstick is not usually the person who has a worldview that says "I'm likely to believe someone down the street that wants to sell me something." Is there a 'why' that you can say more about? I'm not certain that I understand why an individual giving me personal attention and more information couldn't sell me a $30, $40, $50 item, instead of the $6 item. Does that mean network marketing is made for the more inexpensive products? Let me start by saying that I'm not sure that people need to spend time on the 'why' discussion, because just knowing it's true frees you in a whole bunch of powerful ways.

It frees you to spend your time more productively; it frees you from being demoralized when you don't make a sale when the sale couldn't be made because the worldview was too strong.

The challenge of success in the network marketing world is not about 'how do I change the worldview of people who are biased against me?' it's 'how do I find the people who are biased for me?' because we haven't used those people up yet.

That said, it is endlessly fascinating to me to speculate about why certain worldviews travel in certain bunches and how you craft a story— and this is where I spend a lot of time in the book which says, not, "follow everybody and just do what's already been done because you're not creative enough to deal with different worldviews"— but instead figure out how to craft the way you tell a story about your product so that it matches certain worldviews.

Let's talk about Whole Foods Market. Whole Foods sells a lot of junk food. They sell chips, candy and they sell soda, but that 'junk' comes with a story and it's not a story of caffeine and cheap bottles of stuff. It's a story of putting it in a certain kind of packaging, giving it a certain kind of name, making the colas clear instead of brown, there are all sorts of ways you can tell a story that will give satisfaction to a customer who might be inclined to not buy it if the same product was in a convenience store in a different package.

Often, what happens in the network marketing world— in every world actually— is that people get lazy and they resort to the tried and true stories, which are everything from the way the brochures look to the way the salespeople dress to the cars they drive to the way the interactions go. Then someone comes along, like Pampered Chef, and they change the vernacular, they change the way the story is told. By doing that, Warren Buffet's company has figured out how to sell lots and lots of stuff to people who would never ordinarily buy from a 'Mary Kay' because they told a story in a very different way and they gave the audience a chance to believe something that matched their worldview.

If it's so difficult to ascertain what an individual's worldview is, do we just go and develop our own story? Oh, I don't think it's difficult at all. I think it's very easy to figure out a population's worldview in general. The Republican's did a brilliant job of that in the last election.

The Democrats were too arrogant to realize that no one cared about the truth and the facts and refused to tell a story. But the Republicans took a deep breath and said, we know exactly what story people want to believe so that's the story we're going to tell.

In a minute we'll talk about the very ethics of this, but first, I want to get back to your question.

The challenge is to tell a story that's authentic. You can't pretend to do one thing when you're doing another. If your story is inauthentic, it's not going to hold up over time because there is too much information online, there are too many people talking to one another, so if you're out there saying you live one life but acting another, you're going to get hurt.

Seth, give me a couple of examples of inauthentic stories. Sure. Look at General Electric who just spent 30, 40 thousand dollars on advertising to persuade people that they were environmentally sensitive. The problem with that is that for years General Electric has been fighting to not clean up the PCP's in the Hudson River near my house, so the ads don't work.

They can tell people that they want us to think of them this way, but there is already word on the street that it's not true. Their actions come back to haunt them.

Look at any of the companies, like Cingular Wireless— Cingular can spend all the time they want running ads and hiring smiley people to sell you their phone, but all you have to do is meet someone who's got a Cingular phone or get online and do a search on Cingular and you'll see page after page after page of horror stories about how bad the service is from Cingular.

The point is authenticity. Some people have interpreted my book to be saying, 'marketers should be lying scum who trick people into buying stuff they don't need' and I'm saying exactly the opposite. I'm saying that now that we have this incredible tool we have a responsibility and obligation to A. Tell the truth. B. Be authentic in the stories we tell, and, C. Not use this really powerful tool to give people something that they will regret later.

This is so important because there are too many people who think that their family and their career make it worth deceiving people. That's the mentality that says, "Well, you paid for it, sorry." There's no career there. Worse than no career there, there's no good night's sleep there.

The people that are succeeding in our world are succeeding in the long run because six months, two years, even five years after someone believed their story, there is still no regret. That's really important.

The Toyota Prius tells a brilliant story. The story is, "You are smarter than everybody else. You're smart enough to have a car that gets 50 miles to the gallon." And they do all sorts of subtle things like… 'I don't have to take the key out of my pocket to start the car, the car knows I have the key in my pocket and it just starts.' That's a subtle way of reminding me of their story.

If they did a great job with the story, but the car was lousy and I regretted buying the car, then they'd have nothing, but they were consistent and they delivered me a car that two years later I'm really glad I own. That is why they have a waiting list for their car.

Compare that to the Ford Thunderbird, which told a great story, a story of the 1960's, of freedom, of retro, and they had a waiting list of four months and now no one wants a Thunderbird, because the car doesn't deliver on the story.

When in doubt just be authentic? Always be authentic. The problem I have with a lot of products that are sold with network marketing is they are built to have a pyramid.

In other words, they are built to say, how can we have a product that will make it easy to have a downline? How can we have a product that will make it easy for us to recruit salespeople? Not... How do we build a product that contributes to a story that we can tell to the people that want to hear it? How do we build a product where once people hear that story they will be glad they did?

Let me dig down on that: There are network marketed products where the 'story' is built by the marketing department. An example of that might be a power drink of some kind coming from this particular plant and they blend in four or five or six constituent ingredients that give good research, that give good label. Now, that seems to me to be a story, and they are building a story, but it's not very authentic if what you're doing is to pop in ingredients, so you can trump your competitors on this particular quality, or this antioxidant or whatever. Well, let's think about that now. Let's say the person who's buying it, spending their money to buy this drink, is A— more likely to buy it because of these ingredients, B— more likely to have a positive attitude about it because of these ingredients, and C— a month later is glad they spent the money, perhaps because their workouts are going better, they don't get cramps in their legs anymore, they've lost weight and their heart is in better shape. Let's say all of these things are true. Then if one of those ingredients isn't necessary I don't have a problem with it because the consumer needs the story. If you just packaged the product in a cardboard box and left out the ingredients that made it taste better or made them think that it was going to help them, then they wouldn't buy it. So you've done that consumer a service.

On the flip side, it makes me really angry when I buy a loaf of bread and it says 'whole grain' on it, but it's not really whole grain because the Federal Government has no regulations to what that means. Or I buy a beverage that looks like it is spring water. but the new regulations say that spring water can now have sugar in it and it's really soda.

That really annoys me and when a marketer lies like that, and it is a fraud, it comes back to haunt them. Those are the differences.

The differences are— it's okay to tell stories as long as once the consumer knows the whole truth… all the details, they are not annoyed.

In network marketing— not exclusively, because many other businesses are like this— the person who owns the business is a huge part of the story. How do we look at more engaging or compelling ways to tell our own stories? We need to start by understanding that a lot of the people who sell in network marketing are selling to people that already know them and so, you can't change who that person is by suggesting new behaviors, because they're often dealing with others who have known them their whole life.

The authenticity becomes really critical here and that's where we get into an interesting paradox.

Consider, what's the worldview of the kind of person that signs up for most network marketing opportunities? Their worldview tends to be that they're an opportunity seeker, that they may jump from item to item, and from the statistics that I've read it seems that they sell to family and friends and once they do that they have to stop, because they don't know how to sell to people they don't know. Not all of them, just many.

Well, if you're starting with that worldview and that skill set it's going to be almost impossible to grow.

If I was starting a Network Marketing Company I would say, what's a different group of people that want to hear a story about how to succeed with network selling? What words, phrases and images do I use to help them understand what it is I have to offer?

Right? That's one of the things that Pampered Chef did, at least in the experience that my wife had.

They were busy recruiting people to run these parties who never, ever would have worked for Herbalife, just to pick an example off the top of my head, because one meant standing up and saying "I'm going to become a network marketing salesperson" and the other one meant standing up and saying "I'm going to have a couple of parties at my house." What do you see is the difference there? The difference is that the kind of person who responds to an ad in the back of Entrepreneur Magazine showing somebody who has made ten million dollars selling a nutritional supplement has a different goal, a different point of view, a different worldview than some woman who says, "You know, I'd really like to get some more of these nice place settings." and "My friends really enjoy it when I invite them over and do these parties so I'm going to do some more." So to position ourselves in Network Marketing would be to be something like Health/Wellness Consultants or Coaches to people who have a product like nutritional supplements? A coach is a great example. You and I and most of your readers know people who have set themselves up to be Career Coaches or Life Coaches, and those people, in my experience, tend to be better educated and less sales oriented than many of the people that I've met who sell network marketing physical goods that cost less than twenty dollars. The reason is, because the worldview spread (and nobody knows how), that being a "Coach" felt like a profession and it attracted people that were frustrated with the 9-5 world, but could use those very skills to succeed in this 'micro-business'.

So, what I'm getting at here is, if the network marketer, the person, the sales force, is the product, and in many ways it is, because products are all fungible as there are very few things that are sold in any retail market that you can't buy something just like it somewhere else in a different way, that's important.

But it's the sales force and the way the sales force tells the story that distinguishes one network marketing company from another. If I was thinking about this, from building a company or growing a company I'd say,

"How do we create a story that makes it easier for our sales people to talk to their mother-in- law? How do we make a story that makes it easier for our sales people to bring in new sales people that are the kind of sales person that we want?

What are the words we use, the compensation structure we use, the vehicles we use? How do we create that whole model, so that it's not about fighting regulations and trying to maintain the status quo, it's about growing into a totally different area with a different group of people who want to do this?

So a network marketer has a product line and brochures and the company has it's story... but it seems to me, although work is involved, this is marketing, network marketing, we can create our own story in and around what's provided for us. That's right! That's exactly right and so there are some organizations that keep a really strict handle on what you can say and do but there are others where you can take it and craft it and sell it in a totally different way.

That means you're going to be able to reach a group of people who's worldview causes them to see all of your competition as invisible, so that if you walk up to the average American and say, 'name five companies that sell this way in this field', they won't be able to name one.

If someone decides to ignore you, you're invisible, but if you can present your information in a different venue, in a different format, in a different way that matches their worldview, they see and hear you.

A trivial example; millions of Americans will buy a bag of peanuts at a baseball game, but they will not buy a bag of peanuts at the supermarket. Why is that? Because when you go to the baseball game a lot of things click in your head, a lot of them having to do with nostalgia, and buying a bag of peanuts is part of the way that you view that experience. I don't care how many details for people you have; I don't care how many sales people you've got, you can not get peanut sales in the supermarket to go up because those very same people will say, 'oh, I don't buy peanuts, I don't even like peanuts that much.'

Okay, how about stand-up displays with the local baseball team, even if it was the local college team, put some hats on it and put a stand of bags of peanuts and sell it that way? I don't think that's the answer, because they're not even going to see you. No one goes to the supermarket saying this makes me think peanuts.

That doesn't make it a neater story? I think you have to take a step back and either A— don't sell peanuts or B— if you've got peanuts, get them out of the supermarket and start selling them in a different venue.

Figure out how to get the 'habit' of buying peanuts to occur at NASCAR races in addition to baseball games. Figure out how to make peanuts the snack that you buy in totally different venues, because it's clear that it wasn't working in the supermarket.

Instead of insisting that your customers are wrong for ignoring the facts about how wonderful what you sell is acknowledge the fact that the customer has a worldview that means that they're not wrong. Their worldview view says,

"This is who I am, I've got too much information coming at me and I'm going to ignore you unless you're already matching the biases that I've got."

Therefore, you've got to figure out what worldview you can tap into to make your thing go to the next level. That takes creativity but it doesn't take a lot of risk. The risky thing to do is to spend a lot of money on the peanut display.

Let's shift to the product of the opportunity itself, which every network marketer has to offer. What kind of worldviews are we speaking to in terms of "selling" our business opportunity? In other words, you're a famous guy, you are connected, and you know a lot of people, so I'd like to offer you my business opportunity. I mean what a plum... Seth Godin in my organization! Right. Well, here's the problem. My worldview says, 'under no circumstances will I spend more than one second considering something like that, because I decided a really long time ago that I don't like network marketing and I'm just not interested. So, we never get to looking at the spreadsheet because my worldview says, 'You're a little sleazy, this is a little 'scammy' and I don't do that, I do something else.'

Man, there are a lot of people like you out there. That's right, because what happened was, in their rush to capture all of the people that had a different worldview, the optimist who always has the miracle view that there is always a way to make money just around the corner, alienated all the other people.

You are not going to be able to persuade someone that this business is different because they're never going to get that far with you. That's why there is this schism in the world. There is this schism between people that are doing it the 'old' way and people that are doing it the network marketing way.

The same thing is true in Hollywood... there are actors that only make 'A' movies and there are actors who are willing to make 'B' movies, but you're never going to get Brad Pitt to make a 'B' movie even if you pay him a little bit extra.

What you want to ask, if you want to use the math, the engines and some of the proven techniques of network marketing, and there's nothing wrong with that, but here's the question: "How do you turn that into a story, a structure, a feeling… that makes the person you're trying to work with, at least listen to you?

So is there any way that you would listen to a network marketer? Me, personally? This is interesting— PayPal built a company with billions of dollars and their offer was, "We'll pay you $5 for every person who becomes a PayPal customer because they met you." The $5 bounty was a really interesting thing, because it really wasn't network marketing, it wasn't a pyramid of any kind, it was just $5 and then it's over, you didn't get any more when the second person shows up. You know, the friend of your friend makes you nothing. There were lots of people who have eBay stores and other things who thought, "Well, nothing wrong with me making five bucks for each one of the 500 people I convert" and it felt different than network marketing and so it spread and now they have twenty or thirty million users.

One of the questions that I wrestle with as I launch online things for charity, is "How do you use a fundamentally different structure that still rewards somebody?" So, call it a co-op and make it a co-op and say, "You know what? I don't want you to get involved with this because you're going to make $82,000… it's a co-op, we give 80 percent of what we make to charity, the charity is Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, I know that's important to you and that's not a sort of a gimmick, that's the reason we do this.'. If someone did that and went through the community of parents with kids that have diabetes, I can see that a lot of them who would never do network marketing would sign up for this, because if they could help raise an extra $15 million doing this, then they are there. You are satisfying a totally different need for them.

So how do I ascertain when I'm dealing with a Seth Godin— who doesn't really want to know from network marketing at all— and the person who is open to that business opportunity? I think that there are probably some interesting questions you could ask somebody and find out in about two seconds what their bias is, but I also think it's these worldviews we talked about as we started this conversation that are all hooked up to each other.

People in certain zip codes, people in certain professions, and people with certain profiles probably have certain biases about network marketing. You could probably guess what it is and then confirm it really quickly.

Seth, your counsel is to find that out quickly and go to those people whose worldview is open to a business opportunity. That's right and if there aren't enough of them or you don't like that group then change the story, don't try to bully people into changing their worldview.

When you say change your story, again we're dealing with authenticity, the story has to be true. That's right; your story has to be true. Your story has to be consistent, from the people, the product, the payout… all those pieces have to be what you say they are.

It sounds to me a little altruistic on your part, but heartwarming, that you think that people telling inauthentic stories are eventually doomed to fail. I'm not sure if it's altruistic, but I'm very confident that the long-run keeps getting shorter and in the long run all those people keep getting nailed.

You can get away with it for awhile, but Enron didn't last that long and it's coming back to haunt GE. We've seen lots of telecommunications companies come and go because of lousy customer service. JetBlue makes an infinitely larger percentage of profit than American Airlines

You go right down the list and what we're finding is that people living and breathing their story are having a much easier time in the long run.

Starbucks is a great example. Nobody at Starbucks has to think twice about most of the decisions they make. They don't say, "We could make a lot of money at this but it would compromise our brand", Starbucks doesn't do that, Starbuck's still has health insurance for their part-time workers, they still refuse to cut corners on product quality and on and on because it's right in the middle of what they stand for, it's not a tactic, it is who they are and they're going to be around for a long time because of that.

So our own personal integrity is a huge benefit. I think so.

And you're out to prove it too. The Internet, does it impact everything like I think it does? Well certainly! Who were the first people who went onto the Internet and who are most of the people who are on there now?

They are the people likely to spend money on a new idea, the people who are most likely to spend money on something that they want as opposed to something they need, that's who this group was and Amazon proved it.

So if you're trying to grow a business or you're trying to launch something new, it's likely that the people who have the worldview that you want are the people who are online so we start there.

What we know is that the people who are online talk to each other all the time, so you can't successfully bribe them, you can't pay them off to tell people what you want them to tell people. What you can do is give them a story that they want to tell people. And they want to tell people because it will increase their authority and their power, not because it's going to make them a couple of bucks.

Is the Internet a place where worldviews change? For example, the worldview of a magazine is... 8.5 x 11, glossy, full of pictures, physical, etc. Let's take a minute for that. The meme of 'magazine' goes all the way back to the time when you were two-years-old and saw your first magazine.

A magazine, in just one word, explains an enormous number of attributes— from the tone of voice of your editorials, to the feel when you hold it, to the kind of advertising, to the kind of authenticity.

You can tell at a glance, just with one square inch if someone cut it out with scissors, you can tell the difference between Time magazine and Newsweek and Reader's Digest... from the paper and the colors and everything else. So there's a lot loaded into that idea.

To just say we're going to take a magazine and slam it into a digital format and call it a digital magazine? I don't think that flies, because there are way too many connotations, way too much baggage that you really can't do justice to when you translate it over.

I think there is online stuff that's coming— we saw it with blogs— where glossy, cool digital stuff is going to happen, but I don't think it's going to get advertised in like magazines do, I don't think it's going to get paid for like magazines do, and on and on.

So this digital magazine is doomed, eh? No, not at all. I just think you have to think about the business model.

I know that the guys at Absolut and all the other advertisers in the world have a knee-jerk reaction that says, 'Advertising in a magazine won't get you fired but advertising in something online might' and so you've got to start all over again when you talk about selling advertising. Pricing is weird...

Well I'm not using any advertising. If you're not using advertising then it's definitely not a magazine. Magazines always have advertising; it's an e-book, because books don't have advertising. It's an illustrated 'whatever you want to call it', but once you figure that out then you've got to say to yourself, 'How do I persuade people, in a world where almost everything online is free, to pay for what's in here. I don't think anyone has figured it out yet, but there are people who are getting it around the edges.

I think that digital stuff wants to be free and serves you well when it's free, but then you've got to make your money from consulting, souvenirs, conferences, something that has to cost money. If you could get 100,000 people to read your digital magazine every month and then you invited them to a conference that costs $1000 you would get 2000 people to come.

COMMENTARY:

I thought a little long, a tad hard, and spoke with a number of trusted friends and associates (as is my way) about whether to include this last bit about the magazine as part of my conversation with Seth.

First, I didn't want to distract you from his points of value about the marketing of your network marketing business. Second, I feared it was self-indulgent; interesting to me, not necessarily instructive for you. Authenticity prevailed. It happened, so, I included it. Besides, I tend to think of our subscribers as partners and investors in our success, so....

Okay, guru Godin says we're not a magazine. When this man speaks, books, blogs... I listen like a hawk. I'm still not convinced, and I am paying attention. Perhaps, I'm being naïve with...

TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com This changes everything....

Honest, I don't think so. I think it does change everything....

We're not a magazine. We're really a monthly ebook. At 200+ digital pages that makes sense.

No advertising, so no magazine. Well, every feature, article, review, story and column in the thing is an ad! They're all selling ideas. They each sell the author and his or her point of view— worldview, if you will— about the best way to do this business, and along with that his or her products. If you hum along with Tim, Kim, Randy... you'll be interested in finding out what else they've got you can learn from and prosper because of. Advertising at it's best... maybe.

Then there's "digital stuff wants to be free". Got that. And (fact), if you're spending the time it takes putting all the material in this magazine together... finding the articles, networking with all these authors, persuading them to part with audios and then giving them away for no pay... you're sure not out building a business.

Oh yes, audios. That's NOT a magazine either. That's a.... Nor for that matter is SAVE it and SEARCH it. That's a library, not a magazine. And SHARE it... Gah! Creative Commons License. Free reprints, emailed no less. Only in network marketing. Another not a magazine.

So, I guess Seth's right. TheNetworkMarketingMagazine.com cannot really be a magazine. Like a "magalogue" we're a magasomething. But what...?

Couldn't be a new worldview. That would mean we were making somebody(s) wrong. The good news is the Internet is over-flowing with mold-breaking, paradigm-busting, innovative early adapting adopters.

Whatever we are... thanks for subscribing to whatever this is you've subscribed to.

I appreciate you! — John p.s. And this that I've written here is like the COMMENTS we want to build in before year's end making the maga-whatever interactive with readers/ writing. So now, we're in even deeper dung, 'cause we're also a 200 page monthly blog.... Oy mama!

SETH GODIN is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and self-described "agent of change." He's written six books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change itself and work. Permission Marketing was an Amazon.com Top 100 bestseller for a year, a Fortune Best Business Book and it spent four months on the Business Week bestseller list. It also appeared on the New York Times business book bestseller list.

Seth was recently chosen as one of 21 Speakers for the Next Century by Successful Meetings and is consistently rated among the very best speakers by the audiences he addresses. He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by Business Week. Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry's leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998.

Seth's most recent book, All Marketers are Liars has already made the Amazon Top 100.

Be sure to visit Seth's weblog, here: SethGodin'sBlog ATTACHMENT CLASSIC | MARKETING | PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Unleashing the Idea Virus Stop marketing AT people. Turn your ideas into epidemics by helping your customers do the marketing for you. by Seth Godin Downloadable 197 page ebook PDF Here's the original, the single most downloaded ebook in history, more than 1,000,000 copies. The book was then made into a $40 hard cover and became a best seller. Seth was the first New York Times business bestselling author to release a book in its entirety as a free e-book online.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, wrote the forward, here:

The notion that an idea can become contagious, in precisely the same way that a virus does, is at once common-sensical and deeply counter-intuitive. It is common-sensical because all of us have seen it happen: all of us have had a hit song lodged in our heads, or run out to buy a book, or become infected with a particular idea without really knowing why. It is counterintuitive, though, because it doesn’t fit with the marketer’s traditional vision of the world. Advertisers spent the better part of the 20th century trying to control and measure and manipulate the spread of information— to count the number of eyes and ears that they could reach with a single message. But this notion says that the most successful ideas are those that spread and grow because of the customer’s relationship to other customers— not the marketer’s to the customer. For years, this contradiction lay unresolved at the heart of American marketing. No longer. Seth Godin has set out to apply our intuitive understanding of the contagious power of information— of what he so aptly calls the ideavirus— to the art of successful communication. Unleashing the Ideavirus is a book of powerful and practical advice for businesses. But more than that, it is a subversive book. It says that the marketer is not— and ought not to be— at the center of successful marketing. The customer should be. Are you ready for that?

Copyright info The copyright in this work belongs to the author, who is solely responsible for the content. Please direct content feedback or permissions questions to the author.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non- Commercial- NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this copyright license, click the CC Some Rights Reserved icon or link below.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ Or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.