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November 06, 2009
50 books in 50 days! #1: Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
I hate lazy authors, who cut up a bunch of blogs or columns, paste them together and put a cover on it. The result isn’t a book; it’s a mishmash. It’s a mess.
For exhibit A, I bring you Seth Godin and his so-called book Meatball Sundae. This volume has been in my pile since it was published in January 2008; every time I try to pick it up, I put it down again in frustration.
But this time, with my new mission in mind (50 in 50!), I persevered. And I discovered that if I plowed my way through Godin’s mismatched collection of columns (which, BTW, offer somewhat contradictory advice), and got to the center of the book, there was hidden some useful information: 14 trends that are transforming marketing and communication.
For example, Trend 4: “Extremely short attention spans due to clutter.” Writes Godin, “The death of mass marketing is partly due to the plethora of choices and the deluge of interruptions. As a result, complex messages rarely get through.”
Or here’s Trend 7: “Google and the dicing of everything. Google and the other search engines have broken the world into little tiny bits. No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore—they walk into the back door, to the page Google sent them to. By atomizing the world, Google destroys the end-to-end solution . . . replacing it with a pick-and-choose, component-based solution.”
These may not be completely new, but Godin describes them in a compelling way. And he offers lots of examples for how companies are capitalizing on these trends to get customers’ attention and build business.
So what’s my bottom line? If you see this book in a library or someone’s office, by all means take a quick look at the center section. Otherwise, save your time and money.
Posted by Alison Davis at November 6, 2009 02:56 PM
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