Seth Godin argues ideas spread when they're worth spreading, not through social media tricks. He uses Gangnam Style and Tom's Shoes as examples of products people wanted to talk about. The key is practical empathy: understanding your audience doesn't share your knowledge and teaching from where they actually start.
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Hi, I'm Seth Godin. I'm the founder of the Alt MBA and the author of a book called this Is Marketing. So some people will tell you that the way to make your idea spread is to come up with just the right Twitter strategy and put just the right little icon on the page and optimize for posting on Tuesday afternoons and all that stuff. No, the way you make your idea spread is you make an idea worth spreading. It seems super simple, but it's worth doing. So if we think about Psy, the most viral video for 10 years, doing the Gangnam Style dance, he wasn't a brilliant social media maven. He just made the right video for the right people in the right way, on the right day. He made something people wanted to talk about. So when we think back to the fax machine, the fax machine worked because you can't send a fax to yourself that if you need a fax machine, you need other people to have one too, so you can send them a fax. So you told them about the fax machine. It works better if I talk about it. Same with Tom's shoes. Tom's shoes work better if I talk about them. It's really interesting. If you think about a university, like on Tufts, the back window, you get a sticker. What's the sticker for exactly? The sticker is, college is better if you're sending your kids to college, if you can talk about it. And so built into the culture of our fabric, if you look at lots of different industries, is it better if you talk about it? There's a company that makes Caps Love youe Melon. And their idea is that they can put these hats into the world in a way that raises money for kids with cancer. Well, that's a great cause. But lots of people have a great cause. What's the difference? The difference is you're not buying a cap. You already have a cap. Your head is not cold. Why did you buy this? You bought it so you could tell other people about what it was. When it's sitting on your head, right next to your face and there's that big square on it, people. What? What's that? And you get to say, I'm a better person than you because I bought this cap. You should buy one, too. So we gave people something to talk about. But you must begin with the product, not with the gimmick. So here's a big idea, which is, it is impossible to be an effective marketer without practical empathy. So what is practical empathy? It's not, oh, I feel bad for you. You must be having a bad day. Practical empathy is, I don't know what you know. I don't want what you want. I don't believe what you believe. And that's okay. If you can't say and that's okay, then you can't make any connection. But if you can, then you can say to yourself, but if you learned what I want to teach you, maybe you'd get happier because then you could start engaging with what we built for you. So now I'm a teacher and you're enrolled in what I'm teaching because I have empathy for where you started. And so those steps have to happen. We're not in charge that in the old days when there were three TV networks, you could buy an ad on all three at the same time, you were in charge. Not anymore. It is entirely possible that advertising will help what you do. And there are two kinds of advertising. Brand advertising and direct response advertising. Direct response was tiny. Direct marketing, tiny. When I came up, you know, see ads in the back of a magazine, 800 numbers, that was it. But Facebook, Google, those are direct response media. You can measure them. Direct marketing is measured marketing. Brand marketing, on the other hand, is unmeasured. And that's okay if you're trying to sell a brand of vodka, because no one clicks on an ad and gets vodka delivered to them. That's not how vodka works. What happens instead is drip by drip, no pun intended, you learn to have more esteem for this brand of vodka. So when we think about, for example, a podcast, it's a mistake to sponsor a podcast and have the host read out and visit blah, blah, blah, slash, whatever, as if you're going to track it. They're listening in their car, they're listening while they're jogging. It's not going to work. But a sponsorship can work great because it can raise my esteem for the brand. So if you have the money and the patience, advertising can pay off. If you are specific and if you are one of the few people, few organizations that can profit from direct response advertising, go do it. Because every ad pays for itself by infinity. But that's rare. It's not the normal. Well, what we're saying to people when we show up as a marketer is, I will change you. And what we mean by that is, if you're the kind of person that wants this and you're the kind of person that believes that my thing, my service, my product will get you this. So we have to be very specific about the who. If you're the kind of person that wants this, if you're the kind of person that believes this, so so many examples I can give you. If you're the kind of person that loves old movie musicals and would really like a night out, you're that kind of person. Our showing on Saturday night of the wizard of Oz, outdoors in the park will make you feel like you're part of something. That's a marketing promise. That's not. Send an email to everyone saying, wanna come see the wizard of Oz. Totally different ways of talking to people, the right people about the right thing. And the mistake we make is we get inconsistent. We say we're talking to these people, but we make something that these people would prefer. And when they're not in alignment, it doesn't work. Hi, it's Seth Godin and I'm here on the HubSpot Academy channel. If you're into marketing like I am, subscribe and you'll learn more.
