Seth Godin’s ‘Poke The Box’…

April 9, 2011 By

I’ve been lucky enough to get a free copy of the new book, ‘Poke The Box’ by Seth Godin (I’m doing well at the moment after also getting a copy of Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Enchantment’ earlier this year). I’m going to try to look at the book itself seperately from The Domino Project – Godin’s attempt to disrupt the publishing model with support from Amazon and a team of very nice people. It’s a project that I wholeheartedly support as an example of someone going out to do something different and disruptive, rather than just talking about it…

'Poke The Box' by Seth Godin

My review of Poke the Box by Seth Godin:

Like most people with any interest in digital marketing, I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s books and blog as a fan for several years now. It’s safe to say that he’s been a significant inspiration and influence on a lot of the practitioners and commentators on the future of marketing, business innovation, and the disruption of the traditional way of doing business – and it’s also been interesting to see how he’s used social networking as a tool. For instance, he’s avoided Twitter for various reasons and disabled comments on his blog, but was actively involved in a closed social network created for purchases of his Tribes book, for example.

Poke The Box is the first ‘manifesto’ published via The Domino Project, and like most Godin books, it’s fairly short, punchy and aims to provoke and inspire you to action with a mixture of examples and prompts. Running at 85 pages, it’s true to the Godin style of proposing an idea or statement, backing it up with an example or anecdote and then moving onto the next idea in pretty short order, and concenrates on inspiration rather than prescribing practical applications – which is a logical approach given that it’s aimed at getting you ff your backside and producing something. It’s a book you could get through in a couple of hours, and then follow the instructions at the end to pass it on to colleagues and friends.

Whether or not I’d recommend you purchasing it really depends on whether or not you’ve read the last couple of Godin books, Tribes and Linchpin. At just £5.49 for the hardcover (also available for Kindle and in audio editions), it’s a very affordable espresso shot of inspiration for aspiring entrepreneurs, or those wanting to innovate within larger companies. But at the same time, I have to admit I didn’t see a lot which hasn’t already been covered to some extent by Tribes and Linchpin. Both of those books dug deeper into becoming someone who initiates and delivers on change, and although some of the examples are new in Poke The Box, many of the suggestions, and the overarching ideas, are pretty much the same.

Where it succeeds is as an introduction to those ideas – if it had preceded the earlier two books, or if you’re looking for an inspirational, idea-generating primer, then it’s a good choice. Or if you want to inspire a friend or colleague, and suspect that the other books are a little too lengthy, then it’s a great choice.

Having browsed through the fairly exensive Godin section on my bookshelf, if you’re looking for something more in-depth in marketing, then I’m a big fan of Unleashing The Ideavirus (There’s something very odd with one of those Amazon listings – as much as I like the book, and know Seth often does very special editions and offers, I’m not sure the paperback listed at £114 is right). The Big Red Fez is also a good choice for the specifically digital marketer. And in terms of innovation, disruption and changing your personal circumstances, the aforementioned Tribes and Linchpin are definitely worthwile. I’d actually say either of them make a good accompaniment to Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment - Seth inspires you to not only start making changes but to deliver on them, and Guy provides some more detail examples about how you might become the type of person who can engage and enchant the people you will be interacting with to make it happen.

And rather than following up with books that aim to tell you exactly what you should do to create a Facebook page or a Twitter account (If you really want people to give you a supposed recipe for success, you’ll find countless blog posts via Google with the same info), I’d complete the set with some practical guides to either the mechanics of business, or the mechanics of measuring and analysing what you’re doing to allow you to work out quickly and effectively what you’re doing (Start with Web Analytics an Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik).

I said that I’d try to seperate The Domino Project from reviewing Poke The Box, but it’ll be really interesting to see the second manifesto appear, which is entitled ‘Do The Work’ by Stephen Pressfield, who previously wrote ‘The War of Art‘. The electronic version is actually available to pre-order for free for a limited time, if you don’t mind downloading the Amazon Kindle software for your device (If you don’t already own a Kindle/Kindle App). It’ll be interesting to see how other authors adapt to the manifesto length and format.

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

My new motto

October 23, 2009 By

Despite previously ranting about ‘personal brands‘, I figured it was worth sharing a new motto I’m going to be adhering to, from this day forth.

It paraphrases two people who are notable for imparting great wisdom – Seth Godin, and Randall Graves. And obviously there will be a full press conference and press release available shortly for the official unveiling.

So here it is:

‘Ship, or get off the pot’.

I thank you all for your interest. If you have any questions please email them to an address which will be mostly ignored, or occasionally checked by someone who won’t care unless you work for a national newspaper.

For a more eloquent, thoughtful and reasoned bit of thinking, check this video of Seth Godin out:

HT – Simon Andrews.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Thoughts on the Online Community Building Manifesto

December 18, 2008 By

Despite a very kind email from the author, Rich Millington, I’ve been a bit remiss in not posting about his Online Community Building Manifesto (link to the PDF). (As a bonus, he’s also on Twitter).

It’s a call to change the way we think about online communities, and one that’s shared by a few people, myself included, but Rich has expressed it with a nice clarity.

We know about technology and we love the internet, but we (in general) don’t know half as much about the people forming communities and about ways to get a better understanding of what they’re doing and what their needs are.

He also raises good points about balancing what we learn about technology with other disciplines including psychology and sociology (with some helpful links to some interesting sources) – I won’t say any more in an effort to encourage you to go read it and leave him some comments.

He’s not alone in his thinking, but the benefit of the manifesto will come if it helps to join some of the minds in this space.  I’d include people like Dave Cushman, Mark Earls, Neil Perkin, and others who regularly appear in my RSS feeds but whose names have deserted me for the moment…which I shall rectify with a bit of an overhaul of my link lists shortly. It’s something that has been implemented in Seth Godin’s private Triiibes group (somewhere I need to spend more time if I can).

And there’s a real tangible personal benefit to social media/community/tribes people – technology is constantly shifting, and being an expert in Facebook or Twitter will start as an asset, become normal and then be old-fashioned and replaced by something new – but the lessons learnt about people will transfer to every network and device. They’ll evolve, but the changes with each evolution will work across platforms and devices and won’t rely on php, flash or javascript!

That’s why I posted on ‘Why Belief Matters‘ back in November, and used football and motorsport as examples. It’s the ‘why’ and the ‘what for’ of any community, and it comes from the people, not from the technology!

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Two good excuses to invest in printed materials…

November 13, 2008 By

It’s very rare I purchase a book. The last two were Tribes by Seth Godin, and Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur by Richard Branson, both of which have a lot to teach anyone in business and in social media marketing.

(Incidentally, after writing about Business Stripped Bare, here, a nice young lady named Natalie emailed me to say that there’s a widget to display the first 43 pages of the book, which you can see here. Meanwhile, my thoughts on Tribes and how to get it for free, or just 95p on iTunes are here.)

Anyhow, if you prefer to read from a printed page than a computer screen, then there are two more additions that I can recommend investing in.

The first is Dave Cushman’s The Power of the Network, which collects his white papers and more into a single download for 49p, or in printed form for £4.98 via print-on-demand site Lulu. (Disclosure – Dave is a former colleague and friend of mine – enough that I’m credited in the book!). Well worth reading – or buying for someone who is interested in how social media is changing. It’s particularly interesting due to Dave’s lengthy experience as a print journalist and sub-editor before his ever increasing adoption and insight into the changes multimedia is having on everything around us. He’s running a blogger review programme – and also giving any profits to Kiva, which allows you to fund people to change their lives and make their own way out of poverty.

The second is Jonathan MacDonald’s Every Single One of Us: Vol 1 The Communication Ideal, which looks at the underlying principles and makes bold predictions for the future advertising, marketing and personal brands – and is relevant for anyone in the media, internet and mobile industries. (Disclosure: I’m a very small part of a distinguished list who were involved in supporting and helping it’s creation). Jonathan’s CV speaks for itself! Plus he’s probably the closest thing to a legitimate social media rock star, thanks to his musical talents. It’s a £2.99 download or £14.95 for the print edition, and all the money is going into a collective pot to continue the concepts he’s building as part of a group. You can see it explained in a far better way, here.

Actually, cobblers to it and I’ll add a couple more – Joseph Jaffe is offering a very special deal for people buying certain amounts of his books Life After the 30 Second Spot and Join The Conversation  (I’m a big fan of Join the Conversation), ranging from signed copies to a day’s consulting. Take a look at the offer on his blog, Jaffe Juice.

Now I know a lot of people reading this will probably have heard of these people, read their blogs and be familiar with their work (or at least you should!), but the print editions are perfect educational materials for anyone who still associates a ‘blog’ as being something where a geek talks about how he sits at home on his Xbox, talking to his virtual friends. This might help them realise that in the modern world, everyone is doing it via mobile, internet, their console – and that to really be a geek you’d have to go much further. That’s why I love the fact that Seth Godin references the term Otaku, which I’m familiar with due to my love of video games and Japanese culture. It’s for anyone with an almost obsessive interest in something, whether that’s social media, videogames, motorcycling, football or anything else.

There’s a great William Gibson quote from the Observer used at the end of the Wikipedia article:

‘The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age’s embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku -hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.’

So go and buy some presents for the Otaku who don’t realise that’s what they are, and how the web can empower their interests, specialities, and dreams.

(And seeing as I’ve got the books, I’ll have a smart phone, a net book, an MP3 player and a new car stereo please!)

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Belonging to Seth Godin’s ‘Tribe’

October 29, 2008 By
Seth Gogins Tribes available to pre-order

I’ve been a bit remiss in not blogging about Seth Godin‘s latest book, promotion, and social experiment until now. Mainly due to the hundred and one things I’m thinking about – but I have no excuse as my pre-release copy came yesterday as a special gift given to everyone who pre-ordered and signed up for his Triiibes social community.

So far, I’ve got about halfway through in an evening and found it pretty inspiring and hard to put down. In addition, I’ve met some new people, learned some new things, and somehow volunteered myself for a couple of small projects via Triiibes – talk about building engagement right in! And what’s interesting is that although Seth is the nominal root of the community, he’s not putting himself up as the leader, but watching what evolves and responding where needed. I would link, but I’m afraid it’s still invite only.

On the bright side, you can get a free audible version of Tribes, read by Seth Godin himself, for a limited time. You can also get Tribes on iTunes for 95p. There’s also his Tribes presentation on slideshare, and the Powerpoint file to download with accompanying notes.

There really is nothing to stop you becoming inspired to lead your Tribe. And if you still would like the dead tree version: Tribes is available on Amazon for pre-order.

That is probably enough of the Seth worship for one week, but then I saw this great post: ‘Failure as an event‘  which describes the potentially career-ending mistakes and failures which have occurred during his career, and how he’s used them to learn from, and not succumbed to fear. And he’s published it in the middle of a book launch!

Genius!

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Are web companies as bad as Hollywood with releases?

August 15, 2008 By

It’s easy within the Web 2.0 technology bubble to poke fun at other industries that don’t get it – for instance, Hollywood complaining about piracy, and yet still releasing films in different countries at different times.

And yet there is still a huge U.S. bias in software online. I know a lot of the big online brands are U.S based, and we still talk about Silicon Valley and San Francisco in reverential terms (But at least the UK has London, Brighton…and maybe one day, Peterborough!). But surely global online brands should understand it’s a global marketplace better than anyone, and either launch a new product in a Beta for people to test, or go global straight away?

For instance, I like the idea of Amazon’s new universal wish list, and really want to see how it compares with sites like Stylehive and ThisNext. All three use bookmarklet tools to let you save items from wherever you see them on the internet, and then either list them for people to buy for you (Amazon), or share them with other people to establish yourself as a trendsetter (Stylehive,ThisNext).

But obviously I can’t try it yet, because I’m not in America (Unless I go to the time and effort of spoofing my address and going through a proxy server of course!)

Instead, an enquiry to Amazon got a polite response:

‘This feature is currently only available on Amazon.com and unfortunately we are unable to highlight a date when this feature will be used on Amazon.co.uk.’

As a bonus, some publisher/Amazon confusion also saw UK pre-orders for Seth Godin‘s new book (pre-ordering was also a condition of joining his invite-only Triiibers group) all cancelled.

This isn’t just Amazon, of course. They just stick in my mind because both these things happened in the space of a week. Twitter hasn’t managed a mobile phone deal for SMS tweets in Europe, Pandora stops outside the U.S., etc, etc.

Is there some kind of trade embargo I wasn’t aware of? Or is medieval Europe just not keeping up with the Americans?

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Post man flu quick catch-up…

October 5, 2007 By

I can finally sit and type long enough without sneezing to start catching up….so…

Something worth plugging is the ‘One Child, One Laptop‘ initiative, which has had fun poked at it, but is now here. $200 gives one laptop, and from November $400 gives a laptop, and gets you one for your own kids…or yourself… The great thing, as Seth Godin points out, is that a child in the 3rd World with access to knowledge can start contributing in millions of different ways and changing things, whether it’s using a website to diagnose a family illness, or new agricultural techniques. Or realising how loans have crippled their country…

Less worthy, but also getting attention, is the post by Jason Calacanis defining Web 3.0 in his opinion. Which appears to also be a definition of Mahalo. Could this be a lovely wind-up? See the follow-up…Or Techmeme

Finally, does anyone else have problems with the Java image upload on Facebook, if you use Firefox? IE runs perfectly…

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,