He’s the most popular blogger on the planet, a former Yahoo! executive, a successful entrepreneur and one of America’s most sought-after and entertaining speakers. He’s sold more books than just about anyone who hasn’t written about teenage wizards and won acclaim from critics and fans around the world. His Free Prize Inside book was a Forbes Business Book of the Year in 2004, Purple Cow sold over 150,000 copies in more than 23 printings in its first two years of release and Unleashing the Ideavirus is quite likely the most popular ebook ever written. He’s the man Google turn to when they want advice and if you want an opinion on marketing, you won’t find a more well-rounded one than his. Godin’s latest book Tribes is on the shelves now.

Zakazuka Zoo wanted to ask him six questions and here’s what he had to say:

You’ve been blogging for a while now. What have been the highlights for you?

The external highlight is smart mail from people who have changed their lives. They blame me, but of course it was them. I’m happy with partial credit.

The internal highlight, the real highlight, is that every day my blog helps me think more clearly.

It’s 1982. You just awoke from a dream about your future where you were filling out the little card they give you when you enter a new country. What did you put in the occupation field and what was the country?

I hate those dreams. But the occupation has always been ‘agent of change’. The country, my favorite, Canada.

If a smart person told you in 2004 that by 2009 almost no-one would be using Microsoft Word anymore because there would be free alternatives that were just as good, would you have believed them?

Hey, I *was* that smart person.

It’s almost exactly 200 years since Charles Darwin was born and as the world heads deeper into financial crisis, a lot of companies are facing extinction because they failed to adapt. Your work is part motivational text, part business theory; what advice would you give to the small ‘mom and pop’ businesses out there who are about to be fossilized?

Mom and pop have never, ever had a better future. There are more tools, there’s more leverage, more opportunity. Small is the new big.

The phone rings. It’s the White House. They’re putting you through to Obama in two minutes. What do you say?

Ah, remember this: the purpose of a conversation with a new friend is not to sell something. It’s to have another conversation.

Tell us a bit about your new book Tribes, and what’s in it for marketers?

Marketing has become leadership. You don’t market by interrupting, you market by connecting like minded people and taking them somewhere they want to go. The purpose of the book is to sell you on some flavors of leadership and to beg you to do what we so desperately need you to do: lead us.

Five hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety six things happened to other people last week that had absolutely no impact on this blog. Luckily, four things happened to me that did.

1. I was unpacking in my new apartment and found my old ‘little black book’ from back in my journalist days. It was full of lots of interesting and important phone numbers from 2001, none of which are relevant anymore because all the people would have moved on, but it was a fascinating collection nonetheless. The fact that most of them had fax numbers and very few of them had email addresses says it all really.
2. I was in a business meeting and, describing my background to someone, Gino (the other half of DP Dialogue) referred to me as a ‘journalist with a lot of digital experience’.
3. Al Jazeera called and wanted an interview with me for a current affairs program on their English news channel. They’d read a piece I’d written on the Israeli military’s use of YouTube and the Palestinian response. I researched them, threw out my ill-informed assumptions and said yes.
4. Kate from Marketing mag called an wanted an interview on social media marketing. The last question she asked was about my opinions on the future of ’social media’. I responded by saying that my opinion doesn’t really count for much, but if you look at what Rupert Murdoch has been doing and saying on the subject you can learn a lot.

I started this blog seven months ago to write a lot and ideally learn a lot more. I think I’ve achieved both and the feedback from people around the world has been amazing. I’ve had arguments with English football fans about sports sponsorship, caused heated debate in America about the future of wine journalism and been interview on Arabic television. All in all, it’s been a great seven months and a fun 20,000-odd words.

Enough then, from me. At least for a little while. If you want my opinion on something marketing-related it’s almost certainly here in Zakazukha Zoo, there’s a table of contents organised by category on the right and search box up there at the top will guide you if you get lost. I don’t think I need to write much more about social media for the moment, but I’m hardly going to put this baby to sleep.

In fact, to the contrary, I’m dusting off the notepad and starting a new little black book. Stand by for a series of interviews with people I think can contribute something more important than I can to these pages. Screw what I think, let’s see what people smarter than me have to say. I think it will be a fun ride and you’re cordially invited.

‘Six Questions with…’ will be the title. First cab off the rank is Seth Godin. Queue the opening credits, launch title sequence, lights down, and we’re on in five. Four. Three…

We had a meeting with the bank earlier this week. We knew they were interested in the whole social media thing or they wouldn’t have asked us back. We also knew they were going to struggle to see value in monitoring social media channels when they could easily setup Google alerts for their brand and catch anyone having  a sneaky whinge. We knew Google alerts were only half the story though; if you want to engage people, you need to meet them. It’s hard to meet people when you only know them as just ‘levinator25′ or ‘ID203′ in a database. So this is what we did…

Two of my best mates have both just got back from holidays on seperate coasts of the United States of A. (Interestingly both of them are marketing geniuses in their chosen (search-related) fields, but neither of them have a Twitter account or a Blog. That’s beside the point of this article, but it’s interesting nonetheless).

Both of them have spent extended periods of time in America before but they said buzz surrounding Obama’s inaugaration was deafening. I was lucky enough to be in the US during the 2004 election and that was an amazing experience in itself, but I get the feeling, as I’m sure you do, that the country is currently going through a once-in-a-lifetime process of change.

If you’re media-savvy you’ll know all about Obama’s use of social media channels throughout his election campaign, but it seems even CNN have seen the light at the end of the modem and in a move that seemed to come from left field, the global news giant teamed up with Facebook to provide cross-channel coverage of the inauguration via Facebook Connect. I hadn’t heard anything about it, but according to my two sources, it was all over the press in the US. I have no opinion on the subject, but it’s a really interesting marriage, particularly given the convergance of marketing, journalism and social media communities in Australia.

Read the Facebook blog if you’re interested in what they got up top and why, or check out this nice summary from The Guardian.

On Wednesday at 11am I have a meeting with the head of marketing at one of the major Australian banks. My company and I are going to put some pieces of paper on the table with a list of their 200 most powerful, most active online influencers. They will be ranked in terms of industry, brand and social authority and we will have their contact details, their cities, in most cases their photos, and in some cases, their addresses, all taken from the public domain. They will have all talked about the banking sector in some way in the last 12 months and we will have judged that they have a high propensity to engage others in dialogue. Their potential reach will have been measured, analysed and calculated. We are a marketing firm; this is what we do.

What would you do with a list of 200 people whose opinions could shape the way a bank did business in 2009?

What if you were on that list?

What if the bank cross-checked that list against their own customer database?

Welcome to your future.

I’m not sure what line alarms me most about this staff warning notice which was on display in the juice section of Coles New Farm, rather conspicuously underneath the type of product it is referring to.

1. “Potential Micro Contamination” (’micro’ as in; ‘alarmingly deadly little micro bacteria fuckers which are so small they can burrow undetected into your brain and eat your soul’, or ‘micro’ as in the potential chance of contamination is next to none, but we just wanted you to know you’ve got your back in case)

or

2. “Do not sell this stock or put it on show” (Umm, that looks like stock on show up there, I’ve kind of read the sign and are you sure you know what you’re doing?)

I’m guessing there was a potentially bad batch of juice in circulation and this notice was warning staff not to put it on the shelves with the good stuff, but I’m also guessing The Original Black Label Juice company (who were, up until now, my preferred orange juice brand) wouldn’t be happy if they knew customers were seeing this sign, let alone the whole world. Too bad about that whole Internet/social media/blogger thing.

Fail.

“Tegan,” from Australia is actually a digital project manager at Cummins Nitro, the Brisbane agency behind Queensland Tourism’s best job in the world campaign and the tattoo is quite clearly fake. Discerning YouTube viewers picked up on the facts pretty quickly (for goodness sake, fresh tattoos bleed, you don’t walk out of the shop with a pristine design), yet the video has had more than 60,000 views so far and considerable traditional media attention from around the world.

Who looks dumber, AAP and the major news outlets who ran with the story, or Qld Tourism who used it as an example video without a disclaimer?

Either way,  nice acting Rhiannon. Are the freckles real?

UPDATE: It seems Tim Burrowes over at MumBrella actually beat me to the punch on this story - for further reading and a response from Tourism Queensland, make sure you check out his blog post.

I’m a terrible fisherperson. I’m a terrible fisherperson because I’ve got the same shit rod that I stole off my brother when he was 10 and when I go fishing it’s in the middle of the day, after a few beers, at a spot that no self-respecting sea creature has visited since the last ice-age, the hooks are rusty, blunt, older than me and the bait I use was bought from the servo last Christmas and has been left in the freezer for 18 months. If you want to be a good fisherman you need a carbon fibre rod, you need to get up very early in the morning, you need to spend a hell of a lot on your bait and you need hooks that have been chemically sharpened. A good boat doesn’t help either.

No surprise then, that if you invest $150,000 on the expedition and cast off into the middle of a calm, hungry media pond after a minor war has gotten boring and before a new President takes office, you’ll get a few bites. So many bites in fact, your website won’t be able to cope with the load.

Brilliant stuff.

My last post of last year was about the Israeli Military’s use of YouTube as a propoganda tool in their current war on Hamas. Given that it was new years eve it slipped under the radar a little, but the gist of it was:

“Allowing the world to see ‘Hamas members’ loading ‘rockets’ onto the back of a ute from the sights of an Israeli helicopter gunship is a compelling bit of propoganda. Of course, they won’t show you the attacks that miss their target (stand by for the Hamas channel, coming soon) and you have to treat each video in context as a biased historical document, but it’s a sign of the times that the Israeli military are using social media to give credence to their cause. They need to be careful though, they’re not allowing comments on their videos, and like any corporation who tries to control the dialogue, their message is likely to backfire on them. It won’t be long before Palestinians start using social media to show their side of the story.”

Well, as predicted, it didn’t take long at all before Palutube emerged - Hamas’s own dedicated video channel. It’s all written and presented in Arabic, but you’ll get the idea. Key theme: “The Zionist Holocaust against The Gaza Children of 2009.”

Using the media as a propoganda tool is nothing new of course, but it’s interesting to see a social media channel like YouTube being used in this very real, very relevant way. Watch it. It’s a hell of a lot more important than dancing cats. Yes, it’s propoganda, yes it’s biased, but it’s an insight into the lives of the people living on the Gaza strip you won’t get on CNN, from the Israelis, or anywhere else, but a social media channel.

Last Sunday I counted the number of ads I saw in a day. The number came to 1,033. I wanted to wait a little while before I tried to recall them, just to see what stuck out and what didn’t. This is what stuck out:

1. The Ford logo on the Cricket score popup TV thing (but only because I blogged about it)
2. The 3 logos on the Australian players chests (paging Dr Freud)
3. Emirates was mentioned somewhere
4. BMW,
5. Mini,
6. and Lexus signage on the various car dealerships near work, although, I may only remember them because I see them every day
7. Visa signs on shop windows in the mall. I can’t visualise Mastercard signage, although I know it was there
8. Some posters for an event, but only because I took a photo of them, even then, I can’t remember the event’s name
9. There was a radio ad for those people who promise longer lasting censored, but I don’t know who they are without looking them up, and even then, I was only interested because of the billboard fracas (no, really)
10. There was probably a KFC ad on the cricket, but I can only vaguely recall it.

That’s all. I’m racking my brains, but seriously, that’s all.

Total brand recall: 1%

Total relevance of those ads I do recall to me

1. I won’t ever buy a Ford, unless it’s a vintage Mustang. Relevance Score: 0
2. I’m a happy (enough) Optus customer for now on a 24 month contract. I’m not switching to 3. Relevance Score: 0
3. I’m not going anywhere overseas for a while, but I would definitely consider Emirates. Relevance Score: 1
4. BMW, meh. I’ll buy one when I have children who won’t fit in a sports car. That will be a while. Relevance Score: 0.03
5. Mini, meh. I’ll buy one when I’m a real estate agent. Relevance Score: 0.
6. Lexus, meh. Relevance Score: 0
7. Visa; I have one, don’t need another one and don’t see any difference between them and Mastercard. Relevance Score: 0
8. Event posters I can’t name. Enough said. Relevance Score: 0
9. Longer lasting censored; doing quite well thanks. Relevance Score: 0
10. KFC. Would rather lick the floor outside a Brunswick Street kebab shop at 3am on a Saturday morning. Relevance Score: 0

Total relevance: 1.03/10

Add that up, and out of the 1,033 ads I saw that day, 1.03 of them were relevant. Which is, conveniently, 0.1%.

Very, Very Slightly Scientific Conclusion

The average consumer is exposed to around 1,000 ads a day. Out of those, only a handful, perhaps 1% will be remembered, and out of those, perhaps only 10% (0.1% of the total) will be relevant to that consumer. In other words, 99.9% of ads are irrelevant.

I can’t stress enough how unscientific this process has been, but surprisingly, the results have mirrored other slightly more scientific studies I have come across. Look out for more detailed results in Marketing Mag soon. In the meantime, start thinking of better ways to promote your product than advertising.