Meatball Sundae For Web Developers

What is a Meatball Sundae?

Meatball Sundae is Seth Godin’s latest attempt at convincing the rest of the world that “Old Media” is dead.

Godin makes the argument (in many of his books) that interrupting people used to be very successful. If you had a well designed ad and a decent product you could market your way to riches by interrupting as many people as possible.

Godin argues we’ve created so much noise we’ve desensitized ourselves to this type of marketing. So much so that we’re spending more money with less customers converted.

Marketers are scrambling to make up the slack. Many have decided New Marketing is the way to advertise. So they pay people to create buzz on blogs and they pull gimmicks to get their commodity product (their meatball) noticed.

Godin argues they’re doomed for failure because their product (the meatball) doesn’t fit with New Marketing (the sundae).

Why is this Important for a Web Developer?

This is good news because you don’t have to align your product/service/company to fit with New Marketing. You can design it with this in mind from day 1.

This means going the extra mile to wow your users. Building excellence into your website from the beginning so users stay and bring others.

As Godin says, give your customers a megaphone then get out of their way.

If you follow Godin’s blog, you may be able to skip this book as there weren’t as many “a-hah” moments as in his previous books (at least for me).

If you haven’t read Permission Marketing, Purple Cow or Free Prize Inside–you’ve got some homework to do.