A gift for business

INTERVIEW:The system we grew up with is a mess. It's falling apart at the seams and a lot of people are in pain because the things we thought would work, don't

YOU MAY not know the name, but his ideas will be familiar to you. That’s because Seth Godin is one of the most influential marketing thinkers in the world, and his thoughts about how the internet has changed the way we behave have been taken on board by an advertising industry grappling with the effects of structural change in the media.

His daily blog posts are devoured for meaning by the creatives and account executives that populate Madison Avenue and Soho Square, and was voted number one in the Power 150 list by industry bible Advertising Age. His books, such as Tribes, and All Marketers are Liars, sell in large numbers; his lectures are much copied and the list of companies seeking his advice lengthens by the year.

Seth Godin made money from setting up Squidoo, an innovation portal he sold to Yahoo, and has evolved into a one-man guide to the challenges of living and working in the internet era. "Seth Godin may be the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age," wrote Mary Kuntz in Business Weeknearly a decade ago. "Instead of widgets or car parts, he specialises in ideas – usually, but not always, his own."

Ideas are his thing and, appropriately his modus operandi is very Web2.0: his blog, sethsblog.com, sends out a daily message to its (free) subscribers, dropping into their inbox the thought of the day. It’s such as a pervasive tool that some have said it’s like having him in your head. This use of the blog as a strategic tool has, he feels, helped people see him as having something to contribute. But first we need to see the difference between giving and taking.

“Having thousands of friends on Facebook is worthless to an organisation,” says Godin. “That is not the point of social networking. Those people are not your friends, they’re people who didn’t want to offend you by pressing the ‘ignore’ button. If you have 5,000 people following you on Twitter because you tell a dirty joke every couple of hours, that’s not good for business either. The internet is a giant cocktail party, with all these people swarming around keeping score, ‘who likes me today’ and so on. But where are the real relationships? Networking is only useful when it’s real, and useless when it’s fake.

“The internet has allowed an enormous amount of fake networking to take place. We get so easily seduced by numbers, such as hits on a website, because it’s a way of thinking that we’re popular. It’s soothing when there’s a ticker going round cranking up the numbers. But are there people out there who will go out of their way for me? Yes. But you only do that by going out of your way for someone else, earning the privilege of one day having that connection that might then lead to something worthwhile.”

His latest book, Linchpin, is an attempt to apply what he knows about advertising on a personal level. There are, however, some familiar themes. The internet, when used properly, allows people to offer what he calls gifts. Only now are we seeing the real effect that this has on how businesses are perceived and how liberating it can be for the individual gift giver.

There are echoes here of Chris Anderson's book Free, and Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, both proponents of the free internet economy, which they claim changes the nature of the business-consumer relationship. Godin's particular take on this issue comes from the marketing perspective.

“In the linchpin economy, the winners are the artists who give gifts, because giving a gift makes you indispensable,” he says. He cites the example of Thomas Hawk, calling him the most successful digital photographer in the world. “He has taken tens of thousands of pictures, on his way to his goal of taking a million in his lifetime.”

Each of Hawk’s pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons licence and are freely shared with anyone, with no permission required for personal use. “Thomas Hawk is both an artist and a giver of gifts. The result is that he leads a tribe, he has plenty of paid work, and he is known for his talents. In short, he is indispensable.”

Part of Godin’s appeal is that he makes marketers feel better about themselves. They may spend their days flogging tyres, or life insurance, but somewhere there is a route out. The modern corporate life is miserable because it has taken away the human element of work, the ability to create and give stuff away.

“The system we grew up with is a mess,” says Godin. “It’s falling apart at the seams and a lot of people are in pain because the things we thought would work, don’t. Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. They’ve become victims, pawns in a senseless system that uses them up and undervalues them.”

There is a world of difference, he says, between those who are successful at creating and spreading ideas, compared to those who are “merely marketers”. We can all learn from actors, writers or athletes, in the way they devote their lives to their work, constantly seeking to get better.

“We’re not at all surprised when a craftsman sharpens his saw or an athlete trains hard,” says Godin. “But when an information worker develops her skills at confronting fear (whether it’s in making connections, speaking, inventing, selling, or dealing with difficult situations) we roll our eyes. But it turns out that digging into the difficult work, what we can call emotional labour, is exactly what we’re expected (and needed) to do. Work is nothing but a platform for art and the emotional labour that goes with it.”

Godin’s ideas, and those he’s borrowed from elsewhere, have made his career. The really clever bit is that every day he talks directly to people in the very industry, advertising, that has the capability of getting the word out there.

Right now, Seth Godin is a very spreadable idea.