Seth Godin On Marketing Yourself: What Promises Are You Making And Can You Live Up To Them?

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Seth Godin is a bestselling writer, with 18 books and another one coming out on November 13, 2018. His books address various aspects of marketing, advertising, business venturing and leadership. He is also a successful entrepreneur, marketer and public speaker, who became well-known for public speaking when he uploaded his e-book ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus’ and made it available for free.

He obtained his MBA degree from Stanford Graduate School of Business and worked as a software brand manager before he started ‘Yoyodyne’, one of the first Internet-based direct-marketing firms. The publicity of his firm compelled big companies like Volvo, Microsoft, Sony Music, etc. to associate with it and in a few years ‘Yahoo!’ bought the company, keeping Godin on as a vice president of permission marketing. Since Seth was last here his altMBA program has graduated over 1000 people. He has also written a new book, This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See, which will be available on November 13.

Whether you realize it or not, you are always marketing yourself. You will be judged by everyone who interacts with you. Based on your appearance, your attitude, how you tackle a project, etc… This is why it is so important to market yourself intentionally.
Historically, people worked at the same location for 40 years and you could get to know people slowly over the years. Now, people are on various social media platforms, they are working virtually with people around the world. This requires people to constantly be aware of how they are perceived.

Seth says it is the wrong approach for organizations to tell their employees to be authentic and transparent, because essentially it is a lie. He says, “We make choices all the time of things we can and cannot do. I don’t even know what authentic means. I know what consistent means – you made a promise of how you will behave. But you really can’t do whatever you want.” For example, you can’t just show up to work wearing footie pjs and take a nap from 11am-1:00pm, even if that is authentically you.

What is a better approach rather than saying ‘be authentic’? Seth says it is about making promises and keeping them. Remove the ‘marketing language’ of be authentic because it doesn’t work. “It’s not a family, it’s work.” Be clear– words matter because they remind us of other things. One example, people have different interpretations of the term ‘family’ so it might not be best to use the word family to describe the workplace environment.

How do you start how to market yourself? First you need to answer the question, what promise are you willing to keep? Make a promise to a partner or boss that you are eager to keep and consistently live up to it. This guarantees you a successful career – or relationship.

What You Will Learn In This Episode:

● What Seth has been up to in the year since he was last on the show
● Why he has 233 Grateful Dead albums
● Why telling employees to be authentic is not the right approach for organizations
● How we market ourselves
● Seth’s experience working with science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov

Link from the episode:
sethgodin.com

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