seth godin: so they've provided champagne, which i'm delighted. because a toast to all of you. you guys have built somethingfor the ages. i'm quite intimidated to bestanding here talking to you at all, and to the peoplein new york who we can't see or wherever. because i have no businesstelling you anything. but i can give you a warning.
this is a key moment in thelifecycle of the company. that, as the stakes keep gettinghigher and higher, and the opportunities keep gettingbigger and bigger, and the number of smart people keepsincreasing, so does the competition, so do the stakes,so does the opportunity to pay a $200 fine. and what i want to do today isreally place a stake in the ground about a key conceptualunderpinning that i want to sell you on, and then try tooutline why i think google has
succeeded to date, and howrepeating that could really help you move forward. i spent the weekendin las vegas. and i want to tell you i spenta half an hour in a line with nothing to do but watching this52 year old woman play an obscure form of poker. and she was winning. and what i noticed as i watchedher 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 reallynervous and put her right leg back over her left leg. and she kept trying to getbetter and better at keeping her right leg overher left leg. because you could tell that shehad decided that right leg over left leg was lucky,left leg over right leg didn't work.
and that what superstitionis is ascribing incorrect behavior to certain outcomes. and she had totally bought intothe fact the placement of her right leg was essential. this is a pictureof gordon bell. he's wearing a baseballcap mounted camera. he works at microsoft now. but some of you, if theengineers in the room may know, that he's one of thepeople invented the
minicomputer. and he sent me an email theother day, because he's working on somethinginteresting, and the name rang a bell. and i looked him up. and if you look at what digitalwas doing when digital was doing it, nobody had better technology than they did. and the question is how many ofyou have a digital computer
on your desks? not very many. there is a belief among a lotof companies, especially in the valley, especially on thisroad, amphitheater road, that technology wins. and what i want to sell youreally hard on is not the technology wins, 'causei don't think it does. i think what technologydoes is it gives you shot at marketing.
and if you don't buy into that,then, i believe, the company, sooner rather thanlater, is going to smash into a wall. this is poweradein a fountain. and right next to itis minute maid. and if you look closely on theminute maid dispenser, you see it says "contains 0% juice." now the thing is minutemaid's got no juice. you guys have juice, lotsand lots of juice.
the challenge isn't do youhave enough juice? 'cause you do. the challenge is what areyou going to do with it? how are you goingto market it? because if you market the juiceproperly, you won't end up like digital or the long,long list of companies that include sun microsystems thatsaid, technology is going to solve every problem. the marketing will takecare of itself.
i believe that the underpinningsand what made google work were somebrilliant, maybe not intentional, but brilliantmarketing decisions. and those decisions have allowedyou the freedom to do some really cool technology. and the question i want to askyou is how are you going to put it together? april 1999. this was yahoo's homepage.
a quick count would showyou about 175 links. that same day, this wasgoogle's homepage. studies have been done to showthat if you show the average person the results of a yahoosearch in those days and a google search in those days,formatted identically, they couldn't tell whichone came from who. but it was obvious whenyou looked at the page where you were. what happened was geeks andnerds and early adopters and
people like me, the ones who arealways getting bugged by their friends on how to use theinternet, like what's that e thing with the planet circlingaround it mean? we sent our friends to google. because we knew they weren'tgoing to come back and bother us later. because if you sent someoneto google, they knew what to do it. if you sent them-- sorry--
to yahoo, they had no clue. so we stopped sending ourfriends to yahoo. and we started sendingthem to google. that was a really brilliantthing that you did, and continue to do. when i was at yahoo, theybuilt an amazing auction engine, an auction engine thatwas better by every measure-- features, reliability, speed,user interface-- than ebay.
when was the last time youbought or sold something on yahoo auctions? never. because ebay had somethinggoing for it that yahoo couldn't get. and it had absolutely nothingto do with technology. i'm talking about billion-dollardecisions here that have nothing to do withreally well executed ajax. so the two giant marketing winsthat i want to outline,
you know what they are, but iwant to describe them, because they're at the heart of whati've been writing about for seven or eight years is this. the first one is lookat the chart. it's only two years. that growth is spectacular. that is organic growth. no super bowl commercials. no tv commercials.
no billboards outsideof the valley. where did it come from? it came from the fact thatpeople told their friends. that is what made you grow. not the technology, but thefact that people chose-- probably because of thetechnology, in part-- to tell their friends. number two, this is a slide iuse in almost every single presentation i do where i reallyhave to whap people
upside the head 'causethey believe in their brand too much. and the caption on the slideis, no one cares about you. no one wakes up in the morningwondering about you. no one cares about your stockoptions, your growth, or anything else. but i had to amend itfor this company. first time ever. he cares about google.
i have a google shirt that oneof your engineers sent me. and i wore it to the unionsquare market in new york city last year. and i'm walking throughthe market. and the woman selling peachesturns to me, and she said, do you work at google? google is my friend. google is my life. and it's still true, evenin the jaded valley.
if you tell people you work atgoogle, you're guaranteed to have an intelligentconversation, where they want to ask you all thesequestions. they want to touch thehem of your coat. people care about google. that what happenedis you made an audacious promise to people. you changed the way theyinteracted all day long when they're supposedto be working.
all day long when they'resurfing, you changed their interaction. and that interaction made themcare about your brand. and that means you havea platform to do some spectacular things. but if you blow it just a fewtimes in a row, they won't care about google anymore. and you'll be back to thatslide, wherever it is. that slide.
i'm hoping that we canstay 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 likethe wizard of oz. a brand that means anenormous amount. number two, espresso machines. do a search on espressomachines. 845,000 matches.
but there, on the side, in blue,the engine of revenue. why did it work? it worked for two reallyimportant reasons. reason number one is it deliversanticipated personal and relevant messages to thepeople who want to get them when they want to get them. i do not want to see an adwordfor espresso machines when i'm in the middle of drivingdown the highway. i don't want to see it when i'mwatching the super bowl.
but if i just type in espressomachine, i want to see an adword for it. it's about me. it's about what i'm interestedin right now. and it's delivered in a formatthat i want to get it. and as you try to exploit otherways to deliver revenue, what's at the heart of that isare you delivering it in the right place at the righttime in a way that people want to get?
and it's what i call permissionmarketing, the privilege of marketing to peoplewho want to be marketed to, of selling to peoplewho want to be sold to. so when i look at some of theother initiatives that you're going down the road with, theymay be leveraging some of the people who are used topaying you money. but they're not about deliveringthat sort of message in that sort of way tosomeone who wants to get it. and that is at the core ofwhat's driven the revenue of
this company. the second reason that those adswork is that they used to cost $0.05. and the difference between theway google put the wedge out there to get people who didn'tadvertise on the internet to advertise on the internet andeverybody else is everybody else hired a lot of reallyexpensive salespeople and tried to get procter & gamleto give them $1 million. i was in that category.
i got procter & gamble to givemy company almost $1 million for advertising. it takes years. and they end up forcing you tomake average stuff for average people that doesn'twork very well. and then you got to go out andmake more sales calls. but you guys said, it's $0.05. and some fringe persontook 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 machinean costs $5.82. no sales force required. put those two pieces together,and you have this magnificent engine. and the challenge is how can youtake care of the buyer and the prospect in a way thatmakes them both happy?
so the new book-- the oneyou have a free copy of. free lunch, free scooters, freebooks, unbelievable-- is about cats. i hate cats. they just give me the creeps. big ones, littleones, all cats. my son, mo, his birthdaywas yesterday. that's why we had cake togo with the champagne. my son, mo, made a contractwith the people across the
street that he was going totake care of their cat. and after a little while,it was a bit of a pain in the neck. and suddenly the cat wasin danger, was going to starve to death. i had to take care of the cat. i don't cats. turns out the cat only eatsfancy feast cat food. fancy feast cat food, threetimes the price, half the
size, super stinky. first thing to understandabout cat food. cat food is not for cats. if cat food was for cats, itwould come in mouse flavor. baby food is not forbabies either. but that's another story. this flavor, my favoriteone is this one. it's grilled salmon. because of course, cats in thewild they hold out till--
you call your cat in fromoutside where it's torturing a small rodent. and you give it this stuffthat costs $5 a can. why? it's not for the cat. it's for you. look what it says on the backof fancy feast cat food, and on their website. "fancy feast gourmet cat foodis finely ground and smooth
like pate, offering a taste andtexture to please every cat's discriminating palate."now, the cats in california are really nervous aboutthat new foie gras law. so you're just going to haveto leave the state if you've got one. but my point is that what themarketers at fancy feast figured out how to dois tell a story. when you buy fancy feast,you are not buying sustenance for your cat.
you're buying well beingfor yourself. how do i explain the fact thatevery day 30 million pet plastic bottles end up inlandfills in the united states, when 30 years ago, therewas zero market for what we call bottled water. the water in the united statesis the best in the world. and the stuff that comesout of the tap is free. people don't buy bottled waterbecause they need it. we don't.
we buy it because we want it. and what we want is the storywe tell ourselves. we tell ourselves this storyabout wellbeing and freshness and portability and christmasand 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 buyingthe story, the way it makes us feel. well, here's the thing. back to that peach sellerin union square. google makes people feel acertain way when they do it. if all we had was the code onyour servers, we might go sell it on ebay for a couple hundredthousand dollars. but the story that the stockmarket tells itself, the story that users tell themselves,the story, to belief that
we've got when we useit is priceless. and the challenge that you'vegot-- since every person in this company's a marketer. some of them are marketerswho code-- is to deliver on that story. how many of you remember thesewhen you were a kid? you're all geeks. you all remember this, right? how many of you wanted apair of x-ray specs?
i'm going to ruin the secret,just in case you were curious. the secret of x-ray specs is thead promises that when you hold your hand up and you puton the glasses, you can see the skeleton in your hand. it turns out, you can. of course, if you hold up abook, 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 etcheda 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 haveyour money's worth. because for two weeks, you'redreaming about the power you're going to have whenyou have the glasses. for two weeks, you're imaginingthe havoc you're going to be able towreak at school.
then, you get 'em. you're heart broken forlike 10 seconds. and then you say,who can i fool? and you get two more weeksof joy for $1. that's what we're doing here. that's what we do with almosteverything we make, unless it's about feeding peopleor sheltering them. we're giving people stuff theywant, a story they can tell themselves.
what marketers do for a living,traditionally, if they have a funnel. they dump stuff in the topof 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 sowell is that you've got a really efficient funnel. you're able to sell people whoare already halfway down the
funnel, 2/3 of the waydown the funnel. if i want people who type inexperimental kidney cancer treatment, that person isn'tway up at the top. they're down here. and they're worth more. and the thing about funnelmarketing is it's getting more and more expensive to putpeople in on the top. and what my new writing is aboutis about taking that funnel and flipping itonto its side and
turning it into a megaphone. that what helped google grow isnot that you paid a lot of money to put a lot of peoplein the top, which is what started amazon. but instead, what happened isyou flipped the funnel. and you figured out a way to getpeople like me to tell 100 people or 1,000 peoplewhat you had. and when i see a new googlething 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 ornot, whether it's going to succeed or not. and it's all about does thefunnel get flipped? the gmail marketingwas brilliant. the limited number ofpeople going in. people being able totrade entry things. selling them on ebayfor lots of money. what was that?
that wasn't google talkingabout gmail. it was other people talkingabout gmail. so this is a picturei show a lot. this is a product right there,a pain reliever. brand manager spent $100 millionlast year trying to interrupt me. $100 million on coupons andshelving 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 herproduct, she figures i'm with it for life. and the problem is i don't havea pain reliever problem. i solved my pain relieverproblem 20 years ago. i buy the stuff inthe yellow box. so why should i switch? she's invisible. she doesn't exist.
and what i say to mostorganizations is whatever you're marketing, whateveryou're selling, you're the blue box. you're busy talking to peopleabout a product that they're not interested. again, i apologize. it's fuzzy. i had a bad coldwhen i took it. but the point of the slide isyou have to decide when a new
product comes along, when a newopportunity comes along, is it a blue box? i don't have an auctionproblem. and solving my auction problemis going to make it really hard for me to pay attention. i'm not going to payattention to you. because it's not on mylist of things i'm really worried about. craigslist didn't come along andsay, we're going to solve
your ebay auction problem. they solved a totally differentproblem that people were happy to hear about. so as you go down the list, thequestion you offer these things is are we offeringa blue box? so where do you go from here? well, it starts in france. my wife, who some of you havemet, has transportation narcolepsy.
she falls asleep in any movingvehicle, unless there's a really good movieon the plane. and the four of us planneda long trip to france. and we missed a flight. we missed a connection. 17 hours. 16 and 1/2 hours, my kids havebeen making a ruckus. and my wife has been asleep. and we're almost there.
we're driving throughthis pasture. the sun is shining. the sky is blue. and i noticed it's quietin the backseat. my kids aren't makingany 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 windowtransfixed, 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'veseen 100 cows. because all cows are the same. but what if it had beena purple cow? what if out the window there'dbeen a real honest to goodness
purple cow? i would have pulled over. my wife would have woken up. she would have take somedigital pictures. i would have called people athome, told them i was looking at a purple cow. my kids would have jumped outof the car, run across the street, hopped over the fence,and rubbed the cow to make sure it was really and trulypurple so they could tell
their friends that they hadtouched a purple cow. because a purple cowis remarkable. and what i wrote about in thatbook, 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'regoing to bother doing something, is it worthtalking about?
and the amazing thing about thethousands of you here is you keep doing it. you keep making stuffworth talking about. i'll show you a coupleexamples. hummer and the mini. the mini, small enough to putin the trunk of the hummer. but they had a lot in common. for four years, they soldat full retail. for four years, theymade a profit.
for four years, they had awaiting list. because they were on the edges. general motors loses money onevery midsize car they sell. because if you want to buy amidsize car, just buy a toyota or honda, the cheapest one. it's at the edges that thepeople wait in line. it's at the edges that peoplewill notice you. and as this company gets bigger,there's going to be more and more pressure to besafe, to be in the middle.
so you just show 'em this one'sslide. this is how much money, to scale, bmw spendsmarketing each car sold in the united states. and that's how much moneylincoln mercury spends. because lincoln mercury makesaverage cars for average people and spends themoney hyping them. and bmw has a marketingdepartment called engineering. and they keep makingstuff that people choose to talk about.
this is the hummersut concept car. the cool thing aboutthis is the tires are designed by nike. big orange stripe on 'em. now, you could say, nike tiresare not going to get me from here to san franciscoany better. and i would say, neitheris a hummer. that no one buys a hummerto get to san francisco. they buy it to tell a story, totalk 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 jewelryaway for free. the box is what theycharge for. 'cause if you give somebodyjewelry 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 shouldhave. and that model,
that story, there's nothingwrong 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 somebodyelse service and test 'em. and see if they likeit or not. and they're much more likely tolike it. 'cause they tell themselves a story when theysee it's from you, at least
for now, if you keep it up. so we get into this era ofemotional marketing. if you want me to talk aboutsomething, you better deep down love it, or elsewhy should i? and it's become very easy asthe pressure goes on to put out something that'sgood enough. and it's just good enough,i'm going to notice. and i won't tell anybody. so you're in the fashionbusiness, just like george
armani, just liketommy hilfiger. you change things a little, justenough to make them worth talking about. does the average consumerreally need 2.7 gigs of storage on theiremail account? probably not. but it adds to the story. it's the fashion. it was something worthtalking about.
so a couple examples fromthe non-online world. if you decided to enter the sockbusiness, you could say, what do socks do? and the answer would be they getrid of odor and they keep you from having blisters. and you can go to china. you can get these socksmade for $0.12. you could sell 'em towalmart for $0.20. that would be the end of that.
or you could do what this littlecompany in westchester called little missmatched did. they make 133 styles of sockedaimed at 11 year old girls. and you can't buy a pair. they only sell 'emin odd numbers. the 11 year old girl goes toschool and says to the other 11 year old girl, wannasee my socks? wanna see my socks? what a great marketingstrategy.
because that 11 year old girlgoes to the next 11 year old girl and she says, i gottaget 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 storythat goes with it. this, on the other hand, isa picture-- a bad one-- of chocolate-covered pickles.
so i want to just spend oneminute talking about what i've been working on for the lastsix months, and then wrap things up, and make sure i have plenty of time for questions. i don't think peoplesurf the web. i think that this whole idea ofsurfing the web is a little bit of a fraud. because when yousurf, you're-- if you were good at it--effortlessly going from side
to side, thing to thing. that's not what reallypeople do. what they do is they poke. they poke around a lot. poking in, poking out. so if you went to that espressomachine thing, what you'd probably do is clickon one, realize it was seo, back off. click on one of the ads,oh yeah, click back.
click on anotherad, click back. which is good for you becausethat's $20 of revenue if they do it four times. but back and forth andback and forth. and then finally, what you'vedone is you've established all these clues. you've gotten all these littlethings that you needed. and the problem with cluesis they're too slow. the problem is that, yeah, youcould find 1.9 million matches
on almost any one or two wordsearch, which is what almost everyone does. and you could poke and you couldpoke and you could poke and you could poke. and then, you're going to giveup, or finally, you're going to have meaning. if you sat down in the cockpitof the concorde, and someone held a gun to your head andsaid, launch this plane in the next 10 minutes, itwouldn't be easy.
there's no way you're just goingto flip the first switch you come to. you're going to takea few minutes. you're going to look around. you're going to try to make sureyou understand the big picture before you fireup the engines. that this search for meaning isthe opposite of what most people experience whenthey're online. they are really trapped.
they're stuck. you can't get someone to be ahappy surfer until there's a sense of meaning, until theyget this big picture. and i think the nextfrontier-- and the project i'm working onis called squidoo, if you want to check it out. but the idea is how do youput, in one place, enough clues that in one secondi get the big picture? i have enough meaning toactually go and take action?
so i'm going to close by showingyou two charts and telling you one story. this is what brought usrevlon 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, youcan interrupt people. once you do that, you're goingto get more distribution. this is what happenedto revlon in 1946. that distribution's going tohelp you sell more stuff. and then, if it was 20 years agoand you were really smart, you'd take all the moneyyou made and interrupt more people. and around and aroundand around it goes.
and any of you who have beenon a sales call or taken in incoming from someone in theoutside world understands that this is still the waymost people think. anyone asks about cpm, thisis what they're thinking. anyone whose website is the samefor all the keywords they buy, this is what they'rethinking. this mindset is why web1.0 didn't work. because everybody was busy doingthis until the price of banners went down to $0.01.
the alternative iswhat i call the fashion permission complex. step number one, make somethingworth talking about. if you can't do that,start over. step number two, tell itto people who want to hear from you. and step number three, they dowhat other people used to think of as marketing. they're the ones whospread the word.
they're the ones who interrupttheir friends. and then, the hardest part--and this is where google toolbar comes in-- is getpermission from these people to tell them about yournext fashion. so as your asset base grows-- think about the ipod. think about 60,000 peopleturning into a webcast of steve jobs' keynote speech. think about 60 million amazoncustomers who get
email and read it-- you have the ability tolaunch new fashions. and you don't have to startfrom scratch every time. and you end up not trying tofind customers for your products but finding productsfor your customers. so where all this leadsis to the hallmark card and gift stores. there's 1,000 hallmarkcard and gift stores all around the country.
this story's true. if it wasn't true, iwould make it up. but it's true. 1,000 card and gift storesaround the country. hallmark has a group of peoplethey call their heavy users. the average hallmark heavy userbuys 52 greeting cards a year, not counting christmas. and the problem is in july. unless you're stocking up foryour labor day wrapping paper
or your rosh hashanah gift,there's just not a lot of reason to go to ahallmark store. so they were prettyslow in july. and this guy named don comesup with an idea. collectible christmasornaments. $10. limited edition. only in july. so if you're a heavy user, youstumble into the store july,
you've given a level permissionto the clerk. she says to you, haveseen the new collectible christmas ornaments? and now, our conversation takesplace built around the brand, built around interactionthat leads to that person seeing the christmasornaments. and in that moment, she gets$10 worth of joy before she even bought it. $10 thinkingabout how her family's going to feel.
thinking about being inon the ground floor. thinking about sellingher whole collection just before she dies. thinking about the wholefamily feeling the beautiful tree. she buys a christmas ornament. and on the way out, the clerksays, can i have your name and address so i can send you ananticipated personal and relevant postcard next yearwhen the new christmas
ornaments are ready? sure. and then she takes a christmasornament home and puts it in the attic. because it's july. and it stays in the atticuntil december. then, they put up a tree. and they take the christmasornaments down. and they decorate it.
and people come over. blanche, what a lovely tree. betty, do you like it? they're my new collectiblechristmas ornaments from hallmark. whole conversation takes placethat hallmark didn't pay for. if this sounds like googleit's 'cause it should. hallmark did paid for by makingsomething worth talking about in the first place.
but now, here's themissing 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 businessof people who wanted to get the postcard. and in 1999, the wall streetjournal wrote a detailed article about it.
and it turns out that on july17, don sent the postcard to the people who wantedto get it. and in one 24-hour period, hesold $100 million worth of junkie christmas ornaments andmade $92 million in profit. which is about how much youguys made on july 17. but still. and here are thetwo questions. question number one,is it time for don to ask for a raise?
the answer is they made him thechairman of the board of hallmark two years ago. and question number two is whenare you going to build an asset like that one? right now, you have no ideawho i am, you have no idea what i search for, you have nopermission to talk to me directly, and i want youto do all those things. but you can't do it unlessyou ask first. and the opportunity-- theopportunity with the toolbar,
the opportunity with theinteractions, the opportunity with gmail, with all the otherthings you're building-- is to start now before it'stoo late to build in a permission asset, to build inthe ability to have people want you to be acloser partner. to be there so you can makethem the next fashion and they'll listen in one day. and then you can getto the next thing. building that asset has eludedalmost everybody who's ever
been on the net. the notable exceptionsare amazon and ebay. and what the opportunity here isto keep building remarkable stuff, but to build it with thecompass that says, if we build stuff that people wantto 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 minutesfor questions.
and i know katina is goingto 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 willleave. and then i'll feel really bad. ok? so you can't leave until you askquestions, who's got any? i'll call on people. i've done it before. yes, please. audience: you talkedabout the blue box. the google mini, the producti represent, is a blue box.
what advice do youhave for me? seth godin: i'm sorry. i didn't hear. the google? audience: the google mini. it's a search appliance forsmall 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 marketsthe google mini, which my wife has a mini. and i'm visualizing thisorange convertible. it searches. so the google mini is a searchappliance for small and medium sized business.
she thinks she'sgot a blue box. i think she doesn't and i think you don't becauseyou're falling into a fairly common trap, which is it'sreally important to you. and you know how great it is. and you know that if everyoneunderstood how great it is, they'd all line up to buy it. the problem is a, mostpeople don't have a search appliance problem.
they don't wake up in themorning and say, how am i going to solve this searchappliance problem? and because they don't haveit, you are stuck. so when you said blue box, iwould 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 isthat small businesses rarely tell each other about thesesort of successes. so if i bought one and itworked, i would not tell my friend who also has asmall business, you got to get this thing. so it's a problem. it's not entering a marketplacethat's geared to have these conversations.
so as an organization, you needto help them have the conversations. that by bringing these peopletogether, the ones who have it and the ones who don't, byfiguring out platforms where it's easy for people to talkto each other, they're more likely to talk about it. you can't say, everyone in theroom let's talk about the google mini. but what you can do is share acouple case studies, then get
out of the way. and let 'em tell eachother the truth. and that, as you build thesecommunities of people who talk to each other, things happen. so if i'm a yellow page adsalesman, a very best thing that could happen to meis i get to talk to the chamber of commerce. 'cause one third of the peoplethere have had success with the yellow pages.
then, i leave. and those onethird of the people stand up and start talking to the other2/3 of the people. and this idea of sneezers,the powerful ones. i'd go find people who havereally successful blogs who are small business people, likethe guy who runs fogbugz. and i'd give him one. and i'd say, no stringsattached. here it is. and if he starts liking it, andhe writes about it, you're
flipping the funnel. you're giving him a megaphonewhere he can talk to other people about how ithas helped him. and so that's why blogs arereally a powerful tool in making this work. so again, it's thinking aboutnot that you deserve the conversation, with regards tohow good it is, but how can you cause conversationsto take place? does that make any sense?
yes, sir. audience: i'm just wonderingwhen remarkable becomes too remarkable? i think that's something wheregoogle is [inaudible] newspapers every single day. you start to see the [inaudible]changing. so it's not so muchabout love. it's about what you'redoing well. seth godin: yes.
audience: i'm wondering howdo you manage that? seth godin: that'sa great question. we have to distinguish betweenbrand conversation and product conversation. the brand conversation of googlehas a lot of ennui starting to happen. because we've heard it before. we don't want to hear howmuch the stock is worth. and we don't see those two guysany more, even when there
are three of them. we just don't want tosee that anymore. and that happens toevery single brand there's ever been. it's going to happen here. that's different than theproduct conversation. so ferraris have been arounda really long time. but when the new ferrari comesout, we want to see it on the cover of road & track.
so that's not a conversationabout ferrari. that's a conversationabout the modena. and the challenge you guys haveis yes, gmail 1.93 is a little better than 1.9. but we're not going totalk about that. what we are going to talkabout is how cool google earth is. for a little while anyway, untilwe realize, for most people, i can't spend mywhole life on it the
way i can with gmail. so the challenge you've got ishow do you keep creating new fashions, giorgio armani style,four times a year, on a schedule that worksfor people? that keeps expandingthe conversation? and at the core of it-- andi've been talking to my friends at mozillaabout this is-- the best ones are ones that workbetter when your friends use 'em too.
so the reason ebay grew isbecause ebay sellers told lots of prospective buyers, gocheck out my auction. so there's certain things youguys are launching that work better, like video, if lots andlots of people use 'em. so it's easy to talk aboutthose. 'cause there's selfish motivation. but there are other thingsyou're launching that don't. and those aren't going to gettalked about nearly as much. and so, you need a blend.
you need to have utility inthere, like the google mini. there's nothing wrongwith that. but if you want to grow, thereal growth is going to come from things that work betterwhen my friends get 'em too. and i will selfishly tellmy friends to go do it. audience: [inaudible] seth godin: yeah. seth godin: they find you. so the question is, where youfind the first group of people
to tell your story to? the answer is they find you. that if your product is reallygoing to be remarkable to them, they're out searching. they've got that otaku. they're always looking for thenext ramen noodle shop that's better than any other ramennoodle shop there ever was. and so, the people who are inthe fashion business don't have to run lots of tvads to [inaudible]
which is worth more thanvogue without the ads. 'cause they're payingattention. so the beauty of it is youalready have the attention of millions and millions andmillions of people. the challenge is not to bludgeonall of them when you have something that appealsto a small number. that instead, it's about slicingthe 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 exampleis napster. napster could have launchedin nursing homes. the problem is that nursinghomes don't have speed net access and they're not thatinterested in new music. but the real problem is thatpeople in nursing homes don't know many other people, whereaspeople on college campuses know 50 other people. so you could persuade one personin one nursing home.
but she'd only tellthree people. persuade one person atthe university of michigan, he tells 50. and they tell 50, nowyou're at 2,500. so it's going to growmuch faster. so napster only needed topersuade 50 people before it got to 5 millionall by itself. and that's the best kind of ideaviruses, the ones where you just need a tiny groupof people who are already
interested. you don't have totwist their arm. audience: so one thing that'sreally popular right now for certain kinds of products,like video games and electronic gadgets, is to hirepeople to go into forums and do buzz marketingfor you, right? and infiltrate the secretsociety and tell people how great your product is. how does that play intothe permission model?
and is that a genuinely way'cause there's a certain element of not-genuinenessto it? when people find out,they feel cheated. seth godin: well, there's acertain element of scum, fraud, deception,lying, deceit. and i think you alwaysget caught. and sony got totally hammeredwith the graffiti campaign they did. and there's not a lot ofpatience in communities for
being used. so there are always people whoare willing to come and pour pesticide into the pond. and the rest of ushave to suffer. but the people who are in itfor the long haul don't succeed by doing that. you can't. because the beauty ofthe net is it's 360. and people can look behindand at the side.
and what i say in all marketersare liars is the worst thing you cando is be a fraud. that the reason ford motorcompany laid off 25,000 people is that for seven years, theydefrauded people about suv's. for seven years, they told usthat suv's were reliable and efficient and safe. when, in fact, they lead towars and people dying in traffic accidents. and if they had told us a truestory, they'd still be around.
but instead, people all of asudden one day realized what was going on. and if you look at ford explorersales, they went like this at the same time thatcar stuff went like this. because people findout the truth. and once they find out thetruth, 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.
audience: so do you think we'dbe better off launching 1,000 remarkable ideas but each workedso-so, because we don't have the resources to workthem thoroughly? or focusing on 10 remarkableideas and executing them perfectly, giving them all theattention they deserve, but then we can only do 10instead of 1,000? seth godin: well, seei think the mythical man-month comes up here. nine women working in perfectharmony can't
have a baby in a month. and so i'm not sure that it'sa fair trade of 10 perfect ones versus 1,000half-assed ones. i think, instead, what works issaying, strategically where are the places where we're mostlikely to be able to have the right combination ofsneezers and permission and people who are obsessed with aproduct that wants to spread? verses how do we do all thethings that pop into people's heads that can be done?
and so, when we look at fashionsthat succeed, the "numa numa" song all the wayup to a car design that was done by one guy in one night, itdoesn't usually have a lot to do with the last 500 peoplewho perfected it. it usually has a lot to do,instead, with it being in the right place at the right timewith the right story. and so, i don't think it hasanything to do with how many you launch. i think you just have to takea deep breath and spend an
hour to say, what's our story? and should we cancelthis right now before it's too late? because there's a lot ofthings 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 tobecause we can. you're much better off not.
that's really wherei'm coming out. thank you, alex. audience: i was wondering ifyou had an opinion on what we've done wrong withgoogle maps. it was really amazing when itcame out two years ago or something, and has like, spreadamong all of nerdom. but my sister visited meover the weekend, and had mapquest maps. and it's just a daggerthrough my heart.
and now, yahoo has scrollablemaps, microsoft has scrollable maps. and we've got this cool thing. but it seems like nobodyreally 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 youlaunched google maps, for most people who need to get to theirhotel, they didn't have a map problem. digerati had an ajaxmap problem. there wasn't one. but i didn't have a directionsmap problem. and the amazing thing aboutgoogle maps, when you first looked at it after you realizedhow cool it was, is it was really hard to printand really hard to get the
driving directions so i couldtake 'em with me when i went. so it was really cool and funto do and to look at my backyard with the satellite. and so, the digerati, the boingboing people, we all went crazy. and it made it to the timesyesterday with the sopranos. really cool gimmick. and it's worth talking about,but not aggressively. because i'm not solvinganyone's problem.
it's an entertainment vehicle. and so, the challenge thereis, if it's going to grow, it's going to grow because lotsof people put in their sig, here's how toget to my office. they put in their squidoo lends,here's my google map ready to go. they put on their companywebsite, follow us google map. and that's blockingand tackling. because real radio doesn'tfeel broken.
it is broken, but it doesn'tfeel broken. and if it doesn't feel broken,you're not going to dig deep. so what did they do thatwas brilliant? they broke radio bytaking howard off. and when you take howard offradio, to millions of people, radio is now broken. so they got to go figureout how to fix it. and the problem is mapsweren't broken. you can't break them.
and so, it's really hard tofigure how you can monetize and grow that in the face ofcompetition that can copy you. and sometimes have to say,we can't win that one. it's going to be a tie. audience: well, alsoyahoo advertises. and there are tvads for yahoo. seth godin: there aretv ads for yahoo. they don't pay for themselves,but they exist. and so, if you want to measure traffic, they'realways going to win if
they're willing to lose moneyon getting the traffic. you could also get more trafficif you used your homepage and put a bigmaps button there. but it would cost you a lot. it's not worth it. so again, back tomy challenge. if i'm looking at google 10years from now, google wins because 50 million or 500million people all around the world have said, watchme search.
watch my life, make it better. and if that was happening, thenall of a sudden, you know that i'm staying at the artisanhotel in las vegas. i don't have to go to googlemaps and type it in. it just shows up in my rss feedready to go, directions from the airport to my hotel. that's what i want. not ajax. thank you.
i got time for you, andi think i'll stop. audience: all right. seth godin: thanks. audience: related question iswith these products that have network effects, there's anadvantage for the first mover. if we launch them early, weget a lot of users, right? are we better off launchingthem early, and then maybe adding the remarkable later? so we get users, and, at somepoint, we get the resources to
put in the bang. or do we wait to launch theseproducts until we have something that's amazing at therisk of the competition launching something else beforewe do, and being ebay? seth godin: so here'smy answer. on the westside highway at54th street in new york, there's a really funnybillboard. how many of you have seen it? exactly.
it's invisible to you. it doesn't exist. and the samething is true for most people and delicious. the same thing is true for mostpeople in lots of things. ebay wasn't the firstauction site. ebay was the first auction sitethat figured out how to get its story straight anddelivered on its promise in a way that was easy to scale. and so, you don't have to inventthe next thing that has
network effects. what you have to do is tell thestory to the right people on the right day in the rightway so that they can quickly go and use it. and that's different. does that make sense? so i think it's a mistake thelaunch something fast to be first if it's not good. i think it's got to be good.
it's got to scale because yourbrand can't afford for you guys to launch stuffthat's not good. but what you can do is take alook and say, wait a second. in just a few weeks, thatthing is happening. how fast can we use that andput it out better, good enough, worth our brand? and it's not a year. it's eight to 12 weeks becausethat's how long your competition is goingto take to put
something like that out. but if the mindsetis we're google. it must be flawless. then, you're never going to beable to have a purple cow. because all the digeratihave seen it before. and if we've seen it before, andyou're the me-too copycat company, then you become likea 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 foryour attention. keep up the great work. i'm a big fan.