Seth Godin

A few months ago, I traded emails with best-selling author Seth Godin on the subject of marketing inside small businesses. Here's the interview:

Q: What marketing mistake do most small businesses make?
A: They believe in the mass market instead of obsessing about a micro market. They seek the mass market because it feels harder to fail—there's always one more stranger left to bother. It's the small, the weird, and the eager that will make or break you.

Q: What's the right mix for social networking?
A: Comment less, contribute more, retweet none. We need you to be generous, not Dan Rather.

A few years ago, I heard marketing uber-guru Seth Godin speak about business growth through innovation at a conference hosted by my friend and mentor Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO of SalesOpShop.com.

I ran across my session notes from that conference recently and decided that Seth's ideas were definitely worth sharing:

1. Invent a New Market Segment

Position your product or service at the "logical extreme" of some aspect of your product category. For example, if the typical product in your market is expensive but comes with free service, make your product free and charge a subscription fee for the service.

Can you come up with five points where your customers would regard you or your organization as being different from everything else they see in the marketplace?

Copyblogger is a great writing advice website I've discovered recently. It's focused on advice for crafting effective business and marketing copy online, and I've found most of the articles to be wonderful, insightful and absolutely worth reading for anyone whose job is meaningfully intertwined with writing.