Yesterday, I traveled to Salt Lake City for the Seth Godin speaking event.

Our president, Steve Spencer, who operates our Salt Lake City office, joined forces with WordMob to bring together the necessary number of people and dollars to get Seth Godin there to speak to roughly 300 Utahans about his book, The Dip.

The attendees were there because of their collective interest in strategy, marketing and new media, as well as gathering new ways of looking at the direction of their businesses. The crowd was quite lively, and the questions at the end sparked some even further discussions, which were equally interesting.

Seth covered a wide array of topics, but his primary message was knowing when to quit and when to push through. “There is nothing wrong with quitting,” he said; “in fact, we are all quitters,” he added. For example, how many of us still play the musical instrument we learned when we were little? Another example Seth used was - how much time, effort and money would Microsoft have saved if they had realized the Zune could never compete with the iPod and just quit? Seth gave countless examples and metaphors, but the main premise was think of the opportunity cost of not quitting.

On the flip side, he also talked about knowing when to push through. Seth said, “the world needs more superstars.” Why? Because people are often afraid, lazy, or unaware of their true strengths, and so they give up. The ones that truly succeed do so because they persevered even through the hardest times. How to know? Metrics, market analysis, and knowing oneself. He dovetailed this into a discussion on the Long Tail.

The Long Tail and the ability for individuals to reach a global audience offers us more opportunities than ever before. There are countless niches to fill, and if your idea is powerful and creative enough, you can own it and be a superstar.

Within Seth’s main messages there are always underlying messages and interesting tangents.    

One example that stung a little was the mention of the MBA. I have one, and because of my prior liberal arts background, I find it quite useful. But Seth seemed to think my time would have been better served taking risks working, for instance, for a nonprofit. A marketing professor in the audience followed up on this comment with a question: What then are the top three things I should  be teaching my marketing students? Seth said to tell them:

1. That nobody cares about them. (I and the rest of the audience thought this was very funny and realistically rather true.)
2. You’ll learn more about marketing through trading on eBay.
3. Get really good at storytelling.

After the presentation, the audience was treated to a little stunt thought up by the folks at WordMob. Two of the guys, Phil Burns of TagJungle and Ash Buckles, had Seth shave their heads. It was hilarious and, of course, I had to take a picture.

All in all it was a great event, and I hope the folks in Salt Lake will continue to push these events. I suspect that between WordMob and the Utah Tech Spotlight they will.

tags: seth, godin, the, dip, salt, lake, city, wordmob

This entry was posted by Robert Payne on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Company News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.