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SETH GODIN: So they've provided
champagne, which I'm delighted.
Because a toast to all of you.
You guys have built something for the ages.
I'm quite intimidated to be standing here talking to you
at all, and to the people in New York who we
can't see or wherever.
Because I have no business telling you anything.
But I can give you a warning.
This is a key moment in the lifecycle of the company.
That, as the stakes keep getting higher and higher, and
the opportunities keep getting bigger and bigger, and the
number of smart people keeps increasing, so does the
competition, so do the stakes, so does the opportunity to pay
a $200 fine.
And what I want to do today is really place a stake in the
ground about a key conceptual underpinning that I want to
sell you on, and then try to outline why I think Google has
succeeded to date, and how repeating that could really
help you move forward.
I spent the weekend in Las Vegas.
And I want to tell you I spent a half an hour in a line with
nothing to do but watching this 52 year old woman play an
obscure form of poker.
And she was winning.
And what I noticed as I watched her was that her right
leg was over her left leg.
And every once in a while, her left leg would go
over her right leg.
But then she'd get really nervous and put her right leg
back over her left leg.
And she kept trying to get better and better at keeping
her right leg over her left leg.
Because you could tell that she had decided that right leg
over left leg was lucky, left leg over
right leg didn't work.
And that what superstition is is ascribing incorrect
behavior to certain outcomes.
And she had totally bought into the fact the placement of
her right leg was essential.
This is a picture of Gordon Bell.
He's wearing a baseball cap mounted camera.
He works at Microsoft now.
But some of you, if the engineers in the room may
know, that he's one of the people invented the
minicomputer.
And he sent me an email the other day, because he's
working on something interesting, and
the name rang a bell.
And I looked him up.
And if you look at what digital was doing when digital
was doing it, nobody had better
technology than they did.
And the question is how many of you have a digital computer
on your desks?
Not very many.
There is a belief among a lot of companies, especially in
the Valley, especially on this road, Amphitheater Road, that
technology wins.
And what I want to sell you really *** is not the
technology wins, 'cause I don't think it does.
I think what technology does is it
gives you shot at marketing.
And if you don't buy into that, then, I believe, the
company, sooner rather than later, is going to
smash into a wall.
This is Powerade in a fountain.
And right next to it is Minute Maid.
And if you look closely on the Minute Maid dispenser, you see
it says "Contains 0% juice."
Now the thing is Minute Maid's got no juice.
You guys have juice, lots and lots of juice.
The challenge isn't do you have enough juice?
'Cause you do.
The challenge is what are you going to do with it?
How are you going to market it?
Because if you market the juice properly, you won't end
up like digital or the long, long list of companies that
include Sun Microsystems that said, technology is going to
solve every problem.
The marketing will take care of itself.
I believe that the underpinnings and what made
Google work were some brilliant, maybe not
intentional, but brilliant marketing decisions.
And those decisions have allowed you the freedom to do
some really cool technology.
And the question I want to ask you is how are you going to
put it together?
April 1999.
This was Yahoo's homepage.
A quick count would show you about 175 links.
That same day, this was Google's homepage.
Studies have been done to show that if you show the average
person the results of a Yahoo search in those days and a
Google search in those days, formatted identically, they
couldn't tell which one came from who.
But it was obvious when you looked at the
page where you were.
What happened was geeks and nerds and early adopters and
people like me, the ones who are always getting bugged by
their friends on how to use the internet, like what's that
E thing with the planet circling around it mean?
We sent our friends to Google.
Because we knew they weren't going to come back
and bother us later.
Because if you sent someone to Google, they
knew what to do it.
If you sent them-- sorry--
to Yahoo, they had no clue.
So we stopped sending our friends to Yahoo.
And we started sending them to Google.
That was a really brilliant thing that you did, and
continue to do.
When I was at Yahoo, they built an amazing auction
engine, an auction engine that was better by every measure--
features, reliability, speed, user interface--
than eBay.
When was the last time you bought or sold something on
Yahoo Auctions?
Never.
Because eBay had something going for it that Yahoo
couldn't get.
And it had absolutely nothing to do with technology.
I'm talking about billion-dollar decisions here
that have nothing to do with really well executed Ajax.
So the two giant marketing wins that I want to outline,
you know what they are, but I want to describe them, because
they're at the heart of what I've been writing about for
seven or eight years is this.
The first one is look at the chart.
It's only two years.
That growth is spectacular.
That is organic growth.
No Super Bowl commercials.
No TV commercials.
No billboards outside of the Valley.
Where did it come from?
It came from the fact that people told their friends.
That is what made you grow.
Not the technology, but the fact that people chose--
probably because of the technology, in part--
to tell their friends.
Number two, this is a slide I use in almost every single
presentation I do where I really have to whap people
upside the head 'cause they believe in
their brand too much.
And the caption on the slide is, no one cares about you.
No one wakes up in the morning wondering about you.
No one cares about your stock options, your growth, or
anything else.
But I had to amend it for this company.
First time ever.
He cares about Google.
I have a Google shirt that one of your engineers sent me.
And I wore it to the Union Square Market in New
York city last year.
And I'm walking through the market.
And the woman selling peaches turns to me, and she said, do
you work at Google?
Google is my friend.
Google is my life.
And it's still true, even in the jaded Valley.
If you tell people you work at Google, you're guaranteed to
have an intelligent conversation, where they want
to ask you all these questions.
They want to touch the hem of your coat.
People care about Google.
That what happened is you made an
audacious promise to people.
You changed the way they interacted all day long when
they're supposed to be working.
All day long when they're surfing, you changed their
interaction.
And that interaction made them care about your brand.
And that means you have a platform to do some
spectacular things.
But if you blow it just a few times in a row, they won't
care about Google anymore.
And you'll be back to that slide, wherever it is.
That slide.
I'm hoping that we can stay on that one.
So what's number two?
Number one was organic growth, word of mouth, people caring
about a brand.
A brand that's like the Wizard of Oz.
A brand that means an enormous amount.
Number two, espresso machines.
Do a search on espresso machines.
845,000 matches.
But there, on the side, in blue, the engine of revenue.
Why did it work?
It worked for two really important reasons.
Reason number one is it delivers anticipated personal
and relevant messages to the people who want to get them
when they want to get them.
I do not want to see an AdWord for espresso machines when I'm
in the middle of driving down the highway.
I don't want to see it when I'm watching the Super Bowl.
But if I just type in espresso machine, I want to see an
AdWord for it.
It's about me.
It's about what I'm interested in right now.
And it's delivered in a format that I want to get it.
And as you try to exploit other ways to deliver revenue,
what's at the heart of that is are you delivering it in the
right place at the right time in a way that
people want to get?
And it's what I call permission marketing, the
privilege of marketing to people who want to be marketed
to, of selling to people who want to be sold to.
So when I look at some of the other initiatives that you're
going down the road with, they may be leveraging some of the
people who are used to paying you money.
But they're not about delivering that sort of
message in that sort of way to someone who wants to get it.
And that is at the core of what's driven the revenue of
this company.
The second reason that those ads work is that they used to
cost $0.05.
And the difference between the way Google put the wedge out
there to get people who didn't advertise on the internet to
advertise on the internet and everybody else is everybody
else hired a lot of really expensive salespeople and
tried to get Procter & Gamle to give them $1 million.
I was in that category.
I got Procter & Gamble to give my company almost $1 million
for advertising.
It takes years.
And they end up forcing you to make average stuff for average
people that doesn't work very well.
And then you got to go out and make more sales calls.
But you guys said, it's $0.05.
And some fringe person took you up on it.
And it worked.
And someone else came on.
He said, I'll pay $0.10 for that.
And then someone else.
And so now, an espresso machine an costs $5.82.
No sales force required.
Put those two pieces together, and you have
this magnificent engine.
And the challenge is how can you take care of the buyer and
the prospect in a way that makes them both happy?
So the new book-- the one you have a free copy of.
Free lunch, free scooters, free books, unbelievable--
is about cats.
I hate cats.
They just give me the creeps.
Big ones, little ones, all cats.
My son, Mo, his birthday was yesterday.
That's why we had cake to go with the champagne.
My son, Mo, made a contract with the people across the
street that he was going to take care of their cat.
And after a little while, it was a bit of
a pain in the neck.
And suddenly the cat was in danger, was going
to starve to death.
I had to take care of the cat.
I don't cats.
Turns out the cat only eats Fancy Feast cat food.
Fancy Feast cat food, three times the price, half the
size, super stinky.
First thing to understand about cat food.
Cat food is not for cats.
If cat food was for cats, it would come in mouse flavor.
Baby food is not for babies either.
But that's another story.
This flavor, my favorite one is this one.
It's grilled salmon.
Because of course, cats in the wild they hold out till--
You call your cat in from outside where it's torturing a
small rodent.
And you give it this stuff that costs $5 a can.
Why?
It's not for the cat.
It's for you.
Look what it says on the back of Fancy Feast cat food, and
on their website.
"Fancy Feast gourmet cat food is finely ground and smooth
like pate, offering a taste and texture to please every
cat's discriminating palate." Now, the cats in California
are really nervous about that new foie gras law.
So you're just going to have to leave the state
if you've got one.
But my point is that what the marketers at Fancy Feast
figured out how to do is tell a story.
When you buy Fancy Feast, you are not buying
sustenance for your cat.
You're buying well being for yourself.
How do I explain the fact that every day 30 million PET
plastic bottles end up in landfills in the United
States, when 30 years ago, there was zero market for what
we call bottled water.
The water in the United States is the best in the world.
And the stuff that comes out of the tap is free.
People don't buy bottled water because they need it.
We don't.
We buy it because we want it.
And what we want is the story we tell ourselves.
We tell ourselves this story about wellbeing and freshness
and portability and Christmas and all that other stuff.
And so, we're paying $6, $7, $8 a gallon for it.
Chanel No.
5.
No one needs that.
But it costs $25,000 a gallon.
And when we buy it, we're buying the story, the way it
makes us feel.
Well, here's the thing.
Back to that peach seller in Union Square.
Google makes people feel a certain way when they do it.
If all we had was the code on your servers, we might go sell
it on eBay for a couple hundred thousand dollars.
But the story that the stock market tells itself, the story
that users tell themselves, the story, to belief that
we've got when we use it is priceless.
And the challenge that you've got-- since every person in
this company's a marketer.
Some of them are marketers who code--
is to deliver on that story.
How many of you remember these when you were a kid?
You're all geeks.
You all remember this, right?
How many of you wanted a pair of x-ray specs?
I'm going to ruin the secret, just in case you were curious.
The secret of x-ray specs is the ad promises that when you
hold your hand up and you put on the glasses, you can see
the skeleton in your hand.
It turns out, you can.
Of course, if you hold up a book, you can also see the
skeleton in your hand or a cat, you can see the skeleton
in your hand.
Because on the glasses is etched a little skeleton of
your hands.
Now, these cost $1.
And if you're 11 years old, $1 is a lot of money.
So you mail out the $1.
And you already have your money's worth.
Because for two weeks, you're dreaming about the power
you're going to have when you have the glasses.
For two weeks, you're imagining the havoc you're
going to be able to wreak at school.
Then, you get 'em.
You're heart broken for like 10 seconds.
And then you say, who can I fool?
And you get two more weeks of joy for $1.
That's what we're doing here.
That's what we do with almost everything we make, unless
it's about feeding people or sheltering them.
We're giving people stuff they want, a story they can tell
themselves.
What marketers do for a living, traditionally, if they
have a funnel.
They dump stuff in the top of the funnel, people.
Most of them fall out.
But every once in a while, someone comes out the bottom,
and it's paydirt.
And the reason AdWords works so well is that you've got a
really efficient funnel.
You're able to sell people who are already halfway down the
funnel, 2/3 of the way down the funnel.
If I want people who type in experimental kidney cancer
treatment, that person isn't way up at the top.
They're down here.
And they're worth more.
And the thing about funnel marketing is it's getting more
and more expensive to put people in on the top.
And what my new writing is about is about taking that
funnel and flipping it onto its side and
turning it into a megaphone.
That what helped Google grow is not that you paid a lot of
money to put a lot of people in the top, which is what
started Amazon.
But instead, what happened is you flipped the funnel.
And you figured out a way to get people like me to tell 100
people or 1,000 people what you had.
And when I see a new Google thing coming down the road, I
can look at it and I can tell-- so far I haven't been
wrong once--
whether it's going to spread or not, whether it's going to
succeed or not.
And it's all about does the funnel get flipped?
The Gmail marketing was brilliant.
The limited number of people going in.
People being able to trade entry things.
Selling them on eBay for lots of money.
What was that?
That wasn't Google talking about Gmail.
It was other people talking about Gmail.
So this is a picture I show a lot.
This is a product right there, a pain reliever.
Brand manager spent $100 million last year trying to
interrupt me.
$100 million on coupons and shelving allowances and TV ads
and magazine ads and SPIF's, so that when I went to the
deli, I would buy her product.
Because it's 4% better.
And if I could just buy her product, she figures I'm with
it for life.
And the problem is I don't have a pain reliever problem.
I solved my pain reliever problem 20 years ago.
I buy the stuff in the yellow box.
So why should I switch?
She's invisible.
She doesn't exist.
And what I say to most organizations is whatever
you're marketing, whatever you're selling,
you're the blue box.
You're busy talking to people about a product that they're
not interested.
Again, I apologize.
It's fuzzy.
I had a bad cold when I took it.
But the point of the slide is you have to decide when a new
product comes along, when a new opportunity comes along,
is it a blue box?
I don't have an auction problem.
And solving my auction problem is going to make it really
hard for me to pay attention.
I'm not going to pay attention to you.
Because it's not on my list of things I'm
really worried about.
Craigslist didn't come along and say, we're going to solve
your eBay auction problem.
They solved a totally different problem that people
were happy to hear about.
So as you go down the list, the question you offer these
things is are we offering a blue box?
So where do you go from here?
Well, it starts in France.
My wife, who some of you have met, has transportation
narcolepsy.
She falls asleep in any moving vehicle, unless there's a
really good movie on the plane.
And the four of us planned a long trip to France.
And we missed a flight.
We missed a connection.
17 hours.
16 and 1/2 hours, my kids have been making a ruckus.
And my wife has been asleep.
And we're almost there.
We're driving through this pasture.
The sun is shining.
The sky is blue.
And I noticed it's quiet in the backseat.
My kids aren't making any noise at all.
I look in the rearview mirror, figuring they're still asleep,
or they are asleep.
They're not asleep.
They're looking out the window transfixed, staring at this
perfect specimen of a cow.
For about five seconds, and then they went
back to making a ruckus.
Because cows are boring.
If you've seen one cow, you've seen five cows.
Five cows, you've seen 100 cows.
Because all cows are the same.
But what if it had been a purple cow?
What if out the window there'd been a real honest to goodness
purple cow?
I would have pulled over.
My wife would have woken up.
She would have take some digital pictures.
I would have called people at home, told them I was looking
at a purple cow.
My kids would have jumped out of the car, run across the
street, hopped over the fence, and rubbed the cow to make
sure it was really and truly purple so they could tell
their friends that they had touched a purple cow.
Because a purple cow is remarkable.
And what I wrote about in that book, Purple Cow, is what
remarkable means.
And it doesn't mean beautiful, or ideal, or perfect.
It only means one thing.
Worth making a remark about.
And the challenge is, if you're going to bother doing
something, is it worth talking about?
And the amazing thing about the thousands of you here is
you keep doing it.
You keep making stuff worth talking about.
I'll show you a couple examples.
Hummer and the Mini.
The Mini, small enough to put in the trunk of the Hummer.
But they had a lot in common.
For four years, they sold at full retail.
For four years, they made a profit.
For four years, they had a waiting list. Because they
were on the edges.
General Motors loses money on every midsize car they sell.
Because if you want to buy a midsize car, just buy a Toyota
or Honda, the cheapest one.
It's at the edges that the people wait in line.
It's at the edges that people will notice you.
And as this company gets bigger, there's going to be
more and more pressure to be safe, to be in the middle.
So you just show 'em this one's slide. this is how much
money, to scale, BMW spends marketing each car sold in the
United States.
And that's how much money Lincoln Mercury spends.
Because Lincoln Mercury makes average cars for average
people and spends the money hyping them.
And BMW has a marketing department called engineering.
And they keep making stuff that people
choose to talk about.
This is the Hummer SUT concept car.
The cool thing about this is the tires
are designed by Nike.
Big orange stripe on 'em.
Now, you could say, Nike tires are not going to get me from
here to San Francisco any better.
And I would say, neither is a Hummer.
That no one buys a Hummer to get to San Francisco.
They buy it to tell a story, to talk to their friends, to
tell themselves a story, to have a message.
It's the free prize, the bonus, the extra, the thing
we're really paying for.
Tiffany's gives the jewelry away for free.
The box is what they charge for.
'Cause if you give somebody jewelry from Tiffany's, all
they talk about is the box.
That's what you're paying for, that you care enough to pay
five times more than you should have. And that model,
that story, there's nothing wrong with it.
Tiffany's doesn't pretend.
They say, if you pay this much, you get the blue box.
And that's why-- you can do this
experiment and you'll see--
out a Google logo on somebody else service and test 'em.
And see if they like it or not.
And they're much more likely to like it. 'Cause they tell
themselves a story when they see it's from you, at least
for now, if you keep it up.
So we get into this era of emotional marketing.
If you want me to talk about something, you better deep
down love it, or else why should I?
And it's become very easy as the pressure goes on to put
out something that's good enough.
And it's just good enough, I'm going to notice.
And I won't tell anybody.
So you're in the fashion business, just like George
Armani, just like Tommy Hilfiger.
You change things a little, just enough to make them worth
talking about.
Does the average consumer really need 2.7 gigs of
storage on their email account?
Probably not.
But it adds to the story.
It's the fashion.
It was something worth talking about.
So a couple examples from the non-online world.
If you decided to enter the sock business, you could say,
what do socks do?
And the answer would be they get rid of odor and they keep
you from having blisters.
And you can go to China.
You can get these socks made for $0.12.
You could sell 'em to WalMart for $0.20.
That would be the end of that.
Or you could do what this little company in Westchester
called Little Miss Matched did.
They make 133 styles of socked aimed at 11 year old girls.
And you can't buy a pair.
They only sell 'em in odd numbers.
The 11 year old girl goes to school and says to the other
11 year old girl, wanna see my socks?
Wanna see my socks?
What a great marketing strategy.
Because that 11 year old girl goes to the next 11 year old
girl and she says, I gotta get some of these things.
And the next think you know, everybody in school's wearing
socks that don't match.
We didn't need more socks.
But we wanted them.
We wanted the story that goes with it.
This, on the other hand, is a picture-- a bad one--
of chocolate-covered pickles.
So I want to just spend one minute talking about what I've
been working on for the last six months, and then wrap
things up, and make sure I have
plenty of time for questions.
I don't think people surf the web.
I think that this whole idea of surfing the web is a little
bit of a fraud.
Because when you surf, you're--
if you were good at it-- effortlessly going from side
to side, thing to thing.
That's not what really people do.
What they do is they poke.
They poke around a lot.
Poking in, poking out.
So if you went to that espresso machine thing, what
you'd probably do is click on one, realize it
was SEO, back off.
Click on one of the ads, oh yeah, click back.
Click on another ad, click back.
Which is good for you because that's $20 of revenue if they
do it four times.
But back and forth and back and forth.
And then finally, what you've done is you've established all
these clues.
You've gotten all these little things that you needed.
And the problem with clues is they're too slow.
The problem is that, yeah, you could find 1.9 million matches
on almost any one or two word search, which is what almost
everyone does.
And you could poke and you could poke and you could poke
and you could poke.
And then, you're going to give up, or finally, you're going
to have meaning.
If you sat down in the cockpit of the Concorde, and someone
held a gun to your head and said, launch this plane in the
next 10 minutes, it wouldn't be easy.
There's no way you're just going to flip the first switch
you come to.
You're going to take a few minutes.
You're going to look around.
You're going to try to make sure you understand the big
picture before you fire up the engines.
That this search for meaning is the opposite of what most
people experience when they're online.
They are really trapped.
They're stuck.
You can't get someone to be a happy surfer until there's a
sense of meaning, until they get this big picture.
And I think the next frontier--
and the project I'm working on is called Squidoo, if you want
to check it out.
But the idea is how do you put, in one place, enough
clues that in one second I get the big picture?
I have enough meaning to actually go and take action?
So I'm going to close by showing you two charts and
telling you one story.
This is what brought us Revlon and Procter &
Gamble and even Cisco.
Step number one, buy ads, hire a sales force
to interrupt people.
Buy Super Bowl ads, TV ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads,
radio ads, SPIF's.
All those things.
Interrupt lots of people.
If you have money, you can interrupt people.
Once you do that, you're going to get more distribution.
This is what happened to Revlon in 1946.
That distribution's going to help you sell more stuff.
And then, if it was 20 years ago and you were really smart,
you'd take all the money you made and
interrupt more people.
And around and around and around it goes.
And any of you who have been on a sales call or taken in
incoming from someone in the outside world understands that
this is still the way most people think.
Anyone asks about CPM, this is what they're thinking.
Anyone whose website is the same for all the keywords they
buy, this is what they're thinking.
This mindset is why Web 1.0 didn't work.
Because everybody was busy doing this until the price of
banners went down to $0.01.
The alternative is what I call the
fashion permission complex.
Step number one, make something worth talking about.
If you can't do that, start over.
Step number two, tell it to people who want
to hear from you.
And step number three, they do what other people used to
think of as marketing.
They're the ones who spread the word.
They're the ones who interrupt their friends.
And then, the hardest part-- and this is where Google
Toolbar comes in-- is get permission from these people
to tell them about your next fashion.
So as your asset base grows--
think about the iPod.
Think about 60,000 people turning into a webcast of
Steve Jobs' keynote speech.
Think about 60 million Amazon customers who get
email and read it--
you have the ability to launch new fashions.
And you don't have to start from scratch every time.
And you end up not trying to find customers for your
products but finding products for your customers.
So where all this leads is to the Hallmark
card and gift stores.
There's 1,000 Hallmark card and gift stores
all around the country.
This story's true.
If it wasn't true, I would make it up.
But it's true.
1,000 card and gift stores around the country.
Hallmark has a group of people they call their heavy users.
The average Hallmark heavy user buys 52 greeting cards a
year, not counting Christmas.
And the problem is in July.
Unless you're stocking up for your Labor Day wrapping paper
or your Rosh Hashanah gift, there's just not a lot of
reason to go to a Hallmark store.
So they were pretty slow in July.
And this guy named Don comes up with an idea.
Collectible Christmas ornaments.
$10.
Limited edition.
Only in July.
So if you're a heavy user, you stumble into the store July,
you've given a level permission to the clerk.
She says to you, have seen the new
collectible Christmas ornaments?
And now, our conversation takes place built around the
brand, built around interaction that leads to that
person seeing the Christmas ornaments.
And in that moment, she gets $10 worth of joy before she
even bought it. $10 thinking about how her
family's going to feel.
Thinking about being in on the ground floor.
Thinking about selling her whole collection
just before she dies.
Thinking about the whole family feeling
the beautiful tree.
She buys a Christmas ornament.
And on the way out, the clerk says, can I have your name and
address so I can send you an anticipated personal and
relevant postcard next year when the new Christmas
ornaments are ready?
Sure.
And then she takes a Christmas ornament home and
puts it in the attic.
Because it's July.
And it stays in the attic until December.
Then, they put up a tree.
And they take the Christmas ornaments down.
And they decorate it.
And people come over.
Blanche, what a lovely tree.
Betty, do you like it?
They're my new collectible Christmas
ornaments from Hallmark.
Whole conversation takes place that Hallmark didn't pay for.
If this sounds like Google it's 'cause it should.
Hallmark did paid for by making something worth talking
about in the first place.
But now, here's the missing link.
At the end of the conversation, Betty says to
Blanche, next year, when I get the
postcard, we'll go together.
And year after year after year, with no advertising at
all, they built this business of people who wanted to get
the postcard.
And in 1999, The Wall Street Journal wrote a detailed
article about it.
And it turns out that on July 17, Don sent the postcard to
the people who wanted to get it.
And in one 24-hour period, he sold $100 million worth of
junkie Christmas ornaments and made $92 million in profit.
Which is about how much you guys made on July 17.
But still.
And here are the two questions.
Question number one, is it time for Don
to ask for a raise?
The answer is they made him the chairman of the board of
Hallmark two years ago.
And question number two is when are you going to build an
asset like that one?
Right now, you have no idea who I am, you have no idea
what I search for, you have no permission to talk to me
directly, and I want you to do all those things.
But you can't do it unless you ask first.
And the opportunity-- the opportunity with the Toolbar,
the opportunity with the interactions, the opportunity
with Gmail, with all the other things you're building--
is to start now before it's too late to build in a
permission asset, to build in the ability to have people
want you to be a closer partner.
To be there so you can make them the next fashion and
they'll listen in one day.
And then you can get to the next thing.
Building that asset has eluded almost everybody who's ever
been on the net.
The notable exceptions are Amazon and eBay.
And what the opportunity here is to keep building remarkable
stuff, but to build it with the compass that says, if we
build stuff that people want to hear about in a way they
want to hear about it, they'll want to keep
interacting with us.
So I'm going to stop there.
I got about 10 or 15 minutes for questions.
And I know Katina is going to hit you upside the
head if you ask them.
I'll answer them.
Or you can answer them.
KATINA: [INAUDIBLE]
SETH GODIN: Oh, I hate dashes.
KATINA: OK.
All right.
We can go.
SETH GODIN: 'Cause everyone will leave. And then I'll feel
really bad.
OK?
So you can't leave until you ask questions, Who's got any?
I'll call on people.
I've done it before.
Yes, please.
AUDIENCE: You talked about the blue box.
The Google Mini, the product I represent, is a blue box.
What advice do you have for me?
SETH GODIN: I'm sorry.
I didn't hear.
The Google?
AUDIENCE: The Google Mini.
It's a search appliance for small and medium businesses.
So it's Google.com technology.
SETH GODIN: Right.
So the question is--
I'm sorry.
What's your name?
AUDIENCE: I'm Patsy.
SETH GODIN: Patsy markets the Google Mini, which
my wife has a Mini.
And I'm visualizing this orange convertible.
It searches.
So the Google Mini is a search appliance for small and medium
sized business.
She thinks she's got a blue box.
I think she doesn't
And I think you don't because you're falling into a fairly
common trap, which is it's really important to you.
And you know how great it is.
And you know that if everyone understood how great it is,
they'd all line up to buy it.
The problem is A, most people don't have a
search appliance problem.
They don't wake up in the morning and say, how am I
going to solve this search appliance problem?
And because they don't have it, you are stuck.
So when you said blue box, I would have thought you meant
the Tiffany box.
You're the other blue box.
AUDIENCE: It is a blue box.
SETH GODIN: We agree.
Yes.
You're that blue box.
So the challenge you've got is that small businesses rarely
tell each other about these sort of successes.
So if I bought one and it worked, I would not tell my
friend who also has a small business, you
got to get this thing.
So it's a problem.
It's not entering a marketplace that's geared to
have these conversations.
So as an organization, you need to help them have the
conversations.
That by bringing these people together, the ones who have it
and the ones who don't, by figuring out platforms where
it's easy for people to talk to each other, they're more
likely to talk about it.
You can't say, everyone in the room let's talk about the
Google Mini.
But what you can do is share a couple case studies, then get
out of the way.
And let 'em tell each other the truth.
And that, as you build these communities of people who talk
to each other, things happen.
So if I'm a Yellow Page ad salesman, a very best thing
that could happen to me is I get to talk to
the Chamber of Commerce.
'Cause one third of the people there have had success with
the Yellow Pages.
Then, I leave. And those one third of the people stand up
and start talking to the other 2/3 of the people.
And this idea of sneezers, the powerful ones.
I'd go find people who have really successful blogs who
are small business people, like the guy who runs FogBugz.
And I'd give him one.
And I'd say, no strings attached.
Here it is.
And if he starts liking it, and he writes about it, you're
flipping the funnel.
You're giving him a megaphone where he can talk to other
people about how it has helped him.
And so that's why blogs are really a powerful tool in
making this work.
So again, it's thinking about not that you deserve the
conversation, with regards to how good it is, but how can
you cause conversations to take place?
Does that make any sense?
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: I'm just wondering when remarkable becomes too
remarkable?
I think that's something where Google is [INAUDIBLE]
newspapers every single day.
You start to see the [INAUDIBLE] changing.
So it's not so much about love.
It's about what you're doing well.
SETH GODIN: Yes.
AUDIENCE: I'm wondering how do you manage that?
SETH GODIN: That's a great question.
We have to distinguish between brand conversation and product
conversation.
The brand conversation of Google has a lot of ennui
starting to happen.
Because we've heard it before.
We don't want to hear how much the stock is worth.
And we don't see those two guys any more, even when there
are three of them.
We just don't want to see that anymore.
And that happens to every single brand
there's ever been.
It's going to happen here.
That's different than the product conversation.
So Ferraris have been around a really long time.
But when the new Ferrari comes out, we want to see it on the
cover of Road & Track.
So that's not a conversation about Ferrari.
That's a conversation about the Modena.
And the challenge you guys have is yes, Gmail 1.93 is a
little better than 1.9.
But we're not going to talk about that.
What we are going to talk about is how cool
Google Earth is.
For a little while anyway, until we realize, for most
people, I can't spend my whole life on it the
way I can with Gmail.
So the challenge you've got is how do you keep creating new
fashions, Giorgio Armani style, four times a year, on a
schedule that works for people?
That keeps expanding the conversation?
And at the core of it-- and I've been talking to my
friends at Mozilla about this is--
the best ones are ones that work better when your friends
use 'em too.
So the reason eBay grew is because eBay sellers told lots
of prospective buyers, go check out my auction.
So there's certain things you guys are launching that work
better, like Video, if lots and lots of people use 'em.
So it's easy to talk about those. 'Cause there's selfish
motivation.
But there are other things you're launching that don't.
And those aren't going to get talked about nearly as much.
And so, you need a blend.
You need to have utility in there, like the Google Mini.
There's nothing wrong with that.
But if you want to grow, the real growth is going to come
from things that work better when my friends get 'em too.
And I will selfishly tell my friends to go do it.
Yes, please.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SETH GODIN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
SETH GODIN: They find you.
OK?
So the question is, where you find the first group of people
to tell your story to?
The answer is they find you.
That if your product is really going to be remarkable to
them, they're out searching.
They've got that otaku.
They're always looking for the next Ramen noodle shop that's
better than any other Ramen noodle shop there ever was.
And so, the people who are in the fashion business don't
have to run lots of TV ads to [INAUDIBLE]
which is worth more than Vogue without the ads.
'Cause they're paying attention.
So the beauty of it is you already have the attention of
millions and millions and millions of people.
The challenge is not to bludgeon all of them when you
have something that appeals to a small number.
That instead, it's about slicing the group into their
real desires and obsessions, and then talking to the
smallest possible group, overwhelming that group with
the goodness of it.
My favorite example is Napster.
Napster could have launched in nursing homes.
The problem is that nursing homes don't have speed net
access and they're not that interested in new music.
But the real problem is that people in nursing homes don't
know many other people, whereas people on college
campuses know 50 other people.
So you could persuade one person in one nursing home.
But she'd only tell three people.
Persuade one person at the University of
Michigan, he tells 50.
And they tell 50, now you're at 2,500.
So it's going to grow much faster.
So Napster only needed to persuade 50 people before it
got to 5 million all by itself.
And that's the best kind of idea viruses, the ones where
you just need a tiny group of people who are already
interested.
You don't have to twist their arm.
Yes.
AUDIENCE: So one thing that's really popular right now for
certain kinds of products, like video games and
electronic gadgets, is to hire people to go into forums and
do buzz marketing for you, right?
And infiltrate the secret society and tell people how
great your product is.
How does that play into the permission model?
And is that a genuinely way 'cause there's a certain
element of not-genuineness to it?
When people find out, they feel cheated.
SETH GODIN: Well, there's a certain element of ***,
fraud, deception, lying, deceit.
And I think you always get caught.
And Sony got totally hammered with the graffiti
campaign they did.
And there's not a lot of patience in communities for
being used.
So there are always people who are willing to come and pour
pesticide into the pond.
And the rest of us have to suffer.
But the people who are in it for the long haul don't
succeed by doing that.
You can't.
Because the beauty of the net is it's 360.
And people can look behind and at the side.
And what I say in All Marketers are Liars is the
worst thing you can do is be a fraud.
That the reason Ford Motor Company laid off 25,000 people
is that for seven years, they defrauded people about SUV's.
For seven years, they told us that SUV's were reliable and
efficient and safe.
When, in fact, they lead to wars and people dying in
traffic accidents.
And if they had told us a true story, they'd still be around.
But instead, people all of a sudden one day realized what
was going on.
And if you look at Ford Explorer sales, they went like
this at the same time that car stuff went like this.
Because people find out the truth.
And once they find out the truth, they never forgive you.
And if you don't believe me, ask someone who works for a
tobacco company.
Thank you for bringing that up.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: So do you think we'd be better off launching 1,000
remarkable ideas but each worked so-so, because we don't
have the resources to work them thoroughly?
Or focusing on 10 remarkable ideas and executing them
perfectly, giving them all the attention they deserve, but
then we can only do 10 instead of 1,000?
SETH GODIN: Well, see I think the Mythical
Man-Month comes up here.
Nine women working in perfect harmony can't
have a baby in a month.
And so I'm not sure that it's a fair trade of 10 perfect
ones versus 1,000 half-assed ones.
I think, instead, what works is saying, strategically where
are the places where we're most likely to be able to have
the right combination of sneezers and permission and
people who are obsessed with a product that wants to spread?
Verses how do we do all the things that pop into people's
heads that can be done?
And so, when we look at fashions that succeed, the
"Numa Numa" song all the way up to a car design that was
done by one guy in one night, it doesn't usually have a lot
to do with the last 500 people who perfected it.
It usually has a lot to do, instead, with it being in the
right place at the right time with the right story.
And so, I don't think it has anything to do with how many
you launch.
I think you just have to take a deep breath and spend an
hour to say, what's our story?
And should we cancel this right now
before it's too late?
Because there's a lot of things that come out--
not necessarily from here, but in the world--
'cause you can do 'em.
When if, instead, you said, there's no story here.
We're only doing to because we can.
You're much better off not.
That's really where I'm coming out.
Thank you, Alex.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you had an opinion on what
we've done wrong with Google Maps.
It was really amazing when it came out two years ago or
something, and has like, spread among all of nerdom.
But my sister visited me over the weekend, and
had MapQuest maps.
And it's just a dagger through my heart.
And now, Yahoo has scrollable maps, Microsoft
has scrollable maps.
And we've got this cool thing.
But it seems like nobody really knows about it.
SETH GODIN: OK.
So I do have an opinion.
I have an opinion on everything. and I don't know
what I'm talking about.
Those are just two caveats.
Problem number one is when you launched Google Maps, for most
people who need to get to their hotel, they didn't have
a map problem.
Digerati had an Ajax map problem.
There wasn't one.
But I didn't have a directions map problem.
And the amazing thing about Google Maps, when you first
looked at it after you realized how cool it was, is
it was really hard to print and really hard to get the
driving directions so I could take 'em with me when I went.
So it was really cool and fun to do and to look at my
backyard with the satellite.
And so, the Digerati, the Boing Boing people, we all
went crazy.
And it made it to The Times yesterday with The Sopranos.
Really cool gimmick.
And it's worth talking about, but not aggressively.
Because I'm not solving anyone's problem.
It's an entertainment vehicle.
And so, the challenge there is, if it's going to grow,
it's going to grow because lots of people put in their
sig, here's how to get to my office.
They put in their Squidoo lends, here's my Google Map
ready to go.
They put on their company website, follow us Google Map.
And that's blocking and tackling.
Because real radio doesn't feel broken.
It is broken, but it doesn't feel broken.
And if it doesn't feel broken, you're not going to dig deep.
So what did they do that was brilliant?
They broke radio by taking Howard off.
And when you take Howard off radio, to millions of people,
radio is now broken.
So they got to go figure out how to fix it.
And the problem is maps weren't broken.
You can't break them.
And so, it's really hard to figure how you can monetize
and grow that in the face of competition that can copy you.
And sometimes have to say, we can't win that one.
It's going to be a tie.
AUDIENCE: Well, also Yahoo advertises.
And there are TV ads for Yahoo.
SETH GODIN: There are TV ads for Yahoo.
They don't pay for themselves, but they exist. And so, if you
want to measure traffic, they're always going to win if
they're willing to lose money on getting the traffic.
You could also get more traffic if you used your
homepage and put a big Maps button there.
But it would cost you a lot.
It's not worth it.
So again, back to my challenge.
If I'm looking at Google 10 years from now, Google wins
because 50 million or 500 million people all around the
world have said, watch me search.
Watch my life, make it better.
And if that was happening, then all of a sudden, you know
that I'm staying at the Artisan Hotel in Las Vegas.
I don't have to go to Google Maps and type it in.
It just shows up in my RSS feed ready to go, directions
from the airport to my hotel.
That's what I want.
Not Ajax.
Thank you.
I got time for you, and I think I'll stop.
AUDIENCE: All right.
SETH GODIN: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: Related question is with these products that have
network effects, there's an advantage for the first mover.
If we launch them early, we get a lot of users, right?
Are we better off launching them early, and then maybe
adding the remarkable later?
So we get users, and, at some point, we get the resources to
put in the ***.
Or do we wait to launch these products until we have
something that's amazing at the risk of the competition
launching something else before we do, and being eBay?
SETH GODIN: So here's my answer.
On the Westside Highway at 54th Street in New York,
there's a really funny billboard.
How many of you have seen it?
Exactly.
It's invisible to you.
It doesn't exist. And the same thing is true for most people
and Delicious.
The same thing is true for most people in lots of things.
EBay wasn't the first auction site.
EBay was the first auction site that figured out how to
get its story straight and delivered on its promise in a
way that was easy to scale.
And so, you don't have to invent the next thing that has
network effects.
What you have to do is tell the story to the right people
on the right day in the right way so that they can quickly
go and use it.
And that's different.
Does that make sense?
So I think it's a mistake the launch something fast to be
first if it's not good.
I think it's got to be good.
It's got to scale because your brand can't afford for you
guys to launch stuff that's not good.
But what you can do is take a look and say, wait a second.
In just a few weeks, that thing is happening.
How fast can we use that and put it out better, good
enough, worth our brand?
And it's not a year.
It's eight to 12 weeks because that's how long your
competition is going to take to put
something like that out.
But if the mindset is we're Google.
It must be flawless.
Then, you're never going to be able to have a purple cow.
Because all the Digerati have seen it before.
And if we've seen it before, and you're the me-too copycat
company, then you become like a company up the coast a
little bit.
And you don't want to be them.
So I'll quit while I'm ahead.
Thank you again for your attention.
Keep up the great work.
I'm a big fan.