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The Unreal Universe
A Book on Physics and Philosophy

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Pages: 292 (282 in eBook) Trimsize: 6" x 9" Illustrations: 34 (9 in color in eBook) Tables: 8 Bibliography: Yes Index: Yes ISBN: 9789810575946

How to write like Seth Godin

1)      Tell some folksy anecdote or recollect something about the day

2)      Ask a generic question about customers, staff, marketing, etc

3)      Close it up with the point of what you were saying but still be a bit vague about it all

Let’s take this post: Mowing the Lawn

Now to follow the formula:

Scaring the cows

I used to scare cows.

Growing up on a farm meant that I had to spend my time moving cows from one paddock to the next so they’d eat down the grass. The paddocks were surrounded with barbed wire that the cows quickly learned to keep away from and there were gates connecting the paddocks. One gate was small and when I opened it, the cows would keep back until I walked further away. Then they’d trot through. One gate was enormous and the cows would happily walk through with me standing at the end of it.

Sometimes I had to scare the cows to push them through a gate and they’d run.

I wonder how your customers feel?

Does it show?

If you are too close to your customers as they move around your business then they’ll shy away or bolt through and disappear. Open up the gates they move through and look for any areas that are particularly spiky and painful for them to encounter. Directing customers is a good thing – making them panicked or using spiky deterrents like high fees, small print and the like is bad.

Anecdotes are not Evidence

I’ve been entertained and educated and informed by Seth Godin for a while now and I often agree with what he is saying but lately I’ve been getting the feeling he’s phoning it in with this-by-the numbers structure. His style of writing has the ring of truth about it, the feeling of being true but it’s mostly anecdotal.

Applying Science to Godin

How about attempting to transform his blog posts into testable hypotheses? For the Mowing the Lawn post I think the main point is: Customer service people get a lot of useful information directly from customers about your product/service and it doesn’t go to marketing, sales, product design or other jobs that influence customers directly therefore if you want that information, these groups need to do the customer service job.

This suggests to me the following areas to investigate:

1)      Customer service suck at passing on information or are prevented in doing so

2)      Customer service are good as passing on information but it is ignored

3)      Nothing can replace direct exposure to customers so if you want good results you need direct exposure.

To go a bit deeper into it, I think this post is really suggesting that direct exposure to customers can’t be replaced by any other method. So there is our experiment: testing direct exposure vs. other methods.

Experiment:

Divide marketing, sales, product design into three groups who will in one week present suggestions for improvements to product/service/system.

Group #1 will not talk to customer service or customers but will only talk amongst themselves and come up with ideas.

Group #2 will talk to customer service and ask questions but cannot have direct customer contact.

Group #3 will have direct customer contact but will not talk to customer service.

My prediction?

Group #1 will come up with cosmetic changes to the product/service/system.

Group #2 will have some very specific solutions, some of which will be based around making your staff happier, rather than your customers happier. Some of the suggestions will do both.

Group #3 will have some specific solutions but because of their short exposure time to customers will have less useful answers than group #2.

Analysis

Where I think Godin falls down in his original post is that it doesn’t take into account the sample of customers that the marketing, sales, product designers, etc would be encountering. I think there would be a significant bias toward annoyed/angry/frustrated customers calling customer service. If you’re a Telco with tens of thousands of customers then if might be perfectly fine to receive 150 annoyed/angry/frustrated customer calls per day. If you’ve only got one hundred customers than clearly even one or two a month is unacceptable.

So if you follow Godin’s advice and get your marketing people talking to angry customers will they forget that you’ve got 98% satisfied customers and 2% unsatisfied customers? Will they blow the problems out of proportion and alter your service so suddenly you annoy 30% of your customers?

Contradictory messages

If you read Godin long enough you’ll start to notice that some of his advice appears to contradict other bits of advice.

See this post “The Customer is Always Right”

It talks about firing the 1% of customers who cause 95% of the pain. Focus on those who you can keep happy. If I mesh this post with Mowing the Lawn I get a clear instruction for everyone to have direct contact with customers presumably to make changes to product/service … but fire customers who complain too much or with whom your business is always in the wrong.

What should you do? Listen to those customers or get rid of them?

How about “Treating different customers differently”

Sprint will cancel your service if you call customers service too much to complain. Message: get rid of complaining customers and spend your time focussing on the ones you can keep happy.

By suggesting sales, marketing, product design get on the phones with customers, it seems Godin is saying that changes should be made in your service/product/system based on the direct contact with these customers. But what about ignoring them or firing them? Where does that fit in?

The Guru is never wrong

Some wise person says some vague things and all the novices nod and smile and then head off to action. The Guru has spoken so vaguely that if it doesn’t work then you must have misunderstood it and if it does work, well, that’s why they are the Guru and you’re the novice.

Godin as Guru

One of the good things about being a Guru is that you don’t have to provide evidence for what you say. You trade on experience or status in one area which allows you to make statements in that area and others. A quick examination of Godin’s posts finds some statements that could do with some evidence:

“In most endeavours, a small increase in risk can double the reward. It’s the second doubling of reward that brings serious risk with it. But the first leap is relatively painless.”

Um … evidence? How would you test that a small increase in risk can double reward? How would you test that a subsequent doubling brings serious risk with it?

“There is always a gap between the short-term results of a well-polished system and the first results of a switch to a more efficient one.”

Evidence? How would you test this?

“The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does.”

How the f*ck do you test this? You’re selling software everyone wants so you’re making a giant pile of money. There are some free software people edging into your area. Some time in the future they may destroy your industry by offering excellent software for free. So … Godin says … destroy your current business before you are destroyed. Hmm. How about … they won’t destroy your industry for five years so make money while the sun shines? How about work on making such an amazing paid product that no one will use the free product?

“Big marketing breakthroughs always come from doing something that everyone else says is off the table.”

So I should hire a team of tattooists to kidnap kids and tattoo my competitor’s brands across their foreheads before letting them go? How would you test Godin’s claim? What evidence would you gather to test that breakthrough can come from following quite standard processes?

The Answer to Gurus

Try to transform what they say into a testable hypothesis. Imagine trying to build an experiment to actually test out their ideas and get hard data. In doing this you’ll see through the shallow and may be able to extract the good, if there is some of it there.

And finally …

This post is a bit harsh on Godin but as I said before I have been educated, informed and entertained by him and I generally think he’s doing a pretty good job. He’s prodding people to think which is very good. As for all those tools I run into on Twitter who style themselves as Gurus … fuck off. Just fuck off now please. Your ham-fisted attempts to copy Godin are so utterly stupid and you should quit.

(Oh yeah, I realise that Godin actually has a few formats for his posts but this is the one I decided to pick on because it is the one I see most copied. Ah, but is it? Evidence anyone?)