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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.
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This isn’t exactly about building a successful website, but it is related.
I just finished my first week on the job as a programmer at TownNews. TownNews is a company that helps newspapers make the transition online. We do this by offering a completely customizable solution for papers to extend their business to the Internet with full support for our products.
We have a sales team that trains customers for selling ads online and a complete design and development team all in-house. We also have systems administration and customer service divisions, all under the same roof.
This allows us to offer a complete package you won’t find many other places.
Now am I praising TownNews just because they’re my new employer? Of course not–TownNews was my first pick for employment here in the Quad Cities. They are bringing innovation to a declining market, which from a business perspective I find fascinating.
The founder, Marc Wilson, started the company way back in 1989–before the Internet hit its growth spurt and saw an opportunity for existing papers before the medium was fully established.
That takes an amazing ability to see a vision before all the pieces are complete, something I’ve been working towards developing lately.
The people I’m working with are all very talented and passionate about what they do–and it shows by their work. I’m extremely lucky to work in a field I love and for a company thats passionate about what they do.
I won’t be posting too much more about TownNews here, but I wanted to give a small update and talk about an opportunity I have to see an innovative technology company first hand.
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I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. One of the books I finished was Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. Seth is a well known marketer here in the Blogosphere, but I’ve only read one other book of his: Permission Marketing. I thought it was good, but I already understood what he was talking about. I thought this meant I knew everything Seth was talking about, boy was I wrong.
Free Prize Inside goes to another level for me. It talks about how because of more noise, traditional marketing is failing. And because of that, remarkable products are the only ones that succeed. Stop spending money on marketing and start making your products remarkable. A remarkable product markets itself.
He then goes into the idea that having a remarkable idea is not enough. You need to champion your idea so that it catches on. He talks about a number of ways to do this–but he emphasizes how important this part is.
The last part of the book talks about how to find remarkable ideas by going to the edge. Being a fast company doesn’t get you talked about, being the fastest does. Having good customer service doesn’t get you talked about–remarkable customer service does. He stresses that going 90% of the way isn’t enough, you need to go all the way to the edge.
This is a short summary of what the book talks about–but I found the idea of "going to the edge" fascinating. He argues being good in multiple areas is worse than being phenominal in one.
Pick an edge and get as close to it as possible.
Food for thought. That Godin knows what he’s talking about. He runs a great blog.
Meatball Sundae is Seth Godin’s latest attempt at convincing the rest of the world that “Old Media” is dead.