At this point, Seth Godin is the equivalent of a horoscope. (Actually, I prefer Holiday Mathis.) Workplace angst is a renewable resource, and the Godin daily post exploits it, addictively — a chiding, bracing shot of bravery that turns out to be purely theoretical, vanishing five minutes after your first visit to the reconstituted coffee machine. But at least you don’t have to pay for it, right? Or go outside to Cosi?
And so a guru is born — sententious, hortatory, with a quasi-spiritual edge and a tone just short of condescending. Or maybe it is condescending, and that makes it more appealing, because you hate yourself too much not to crave his disapproval. Sort of like Hugh Prather back in the day. It’s morning again, and there’s another shot of Seth, perfect for that early morning clarity before the to-do list, when you really feel like you could break away and become…like him.
He’s written some classics — Be Careful of Who You Work For will rip you open every single time — but lately his writing just sounds like something Seth Godin would say, for fear of saying anything else and spoiling the franchise. Like he just decided to combine the last four things he saw online into a post, just to see if he could do it and still sound like himself. The Luddite insistence on sticking with Typepad, that Gandhian, ostrich egg of a head that just screams (or is it gleams?) “thinker” — suddenly no longer cute. Suddenly annoying. Funny how quickly that happened.
The uproar in the non-profit marketing world over his screed a few days ago against the timidity of non-profits is just dying down, and more diligent professionals than I have taken him to task. Suffice it to say that it’s breathtakingly dismissive and shallow and arrogant — everything Seth Godin was not supposed to be.
A tiny problem with the subsequent debate is that it’s still too much about the eternal breast-beating of non-profit marketers and not about the hypocrisy of Godin. There’s a video (above) of Godin talking with Tom Peters about social networks and media. In it, he says point-blank that Facebook and Twitter are worthless to business, a “useless distraction” to the business of building real relationships.
Fast forward to this week, and here’s Godin on his blog, frothingly mad at the failure of non-profits to penetrate the online space, saying that getting Dugg and being in the top 100 of Twitterers are ultimate measures of relevance and courage for charities. I’d like to show him the time-spent-on-site for the average Digg and Twitter referrals to my company’s site and blog…but they’re so small, he couldn’t see them, even with those big Swifty Lazar glasses of his.
And I shouldn’t have to show them to Seth Godin, anyway, right? Wasn’t he the evangelist for deep interaction? When did he get sloppy? When did he start posting about putting aside righteous indignation and then, a few days later, indulging in it so much? Was it all just another sell job? (Well, of course it was…)
There’s another video, too, from the same conference, in which he says something fantastically useful about the ethic of blogging
It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you’re going to say.
Close your eyes, and you can almost remember what it was like to hear Seth Godin saying stuff like that. And you believing it.
Posted via email from Bob Lalasz: Surplus to Requirements
