Friends know that I am not a big fan of business books. In fact, one of my favorite business books every is the The Witch Doctors, which talks about why most business books are nonsense. That said, I do read them - one must keep up, right - and sometimes they are valuable. Meatball Sundae is one of those useful ones.
Why? First, because it’s a very, very quick read. And while there are all kinds of interesting observations and anecdotes in it, there’s also one big and important idea: you can’t stick social media on top of old-style products and expect good results.
Godin is of course overly dramatic about it and makes lots of sweeping statements for emphasis, because that’s his style; reality is not quite as clean-cut as he makes it sound. But for anybody who’s been asked, “But how can I use social media to sell more of my toilet paper,” it’s a good read. Take it on your next plane trip (but not an international flight, because you’ll finish it long before you get to your destination).
A question for readers: does anyone use Squidoo? Godin flogs it quite a bit, as he does in a lot of his writing, and I’m just curious what real experience folks have had with it.
February 23rd, 2008 at 9:33 am
I’ve seen the toilet paper example before, and I grok social media for consumer goods. Does Meatball Sundae offer similar lessons/advice/thoughts for b2b? The audience is much smaller, much more focused, much more limited.
That said, to some extent we *do* use social media (responding on Society of Petroleum Engineers forums, communicating on well-used internal discussion boards, etc.) Will this book help a b2b marketer? I do not see our CEO blogging anytime soon (egads, would that be a disaster), but I’d love to blog about new technology or cool operations… just not sure it’s worth the effort: would our customers take the time to read it, or just our competitors?
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I think it depends to some degree on how much your audience has adopted social media use. People do look to their peers when making technology purchase decisions, so if you can build a community in a way that’s useful to participants and which illustrates your expertise, that’s good.
CEO blogging - sometimes useful, but I think it’s rarely the first thing to be doing. Step one, I would say, would be joining the conversations about your organization and industry (with complete transparency about who you are and your affiliations) so that whatever discussion is taking place, you are part of it and you are learning from it.