When I was telling my friend about the book, she asked me why she should read it? This book applies to everyone. Not just entrepreneurs and social networking mavens. Because it talks about creating change and leadership. One of the most useful subjects he touches on in this book, is leading in the workplace, especially the concept of leading from the bottom. Whether you work in a 5 person startup or in a 100,000 person megacorp.

Seth tells a great story about how in his youth, he couldn’t get approval from his boss to work on a particular project that he was very interested in. So he did it in his spare time, and he started an internal newsletter about it. As people became aware of what he was doing, and became interested, they donated their spare time to help out, and soon enough most of the project team had defected to Seth’s project (in their own spare time, of course), until the management realized the power of this new idea and made it official. Creating a newsletter

helped create a tribe around this project, and helped Seth become a leader and create the change he wanted.

Yesterday, Seth and Robert Scoble, who became famous first as an internal blogger at Microsoft, had a great livecast about Tribes. Scoble mentioned how he had created change at Microsoft by creating a place for thought and conversation for people in the company internally. At Microsoft. A mega giant corporation. Who would have thought one man could influence change in upper management, from the bottom? The reason it worked, is that Scoble wasn’t acting alone. By creating a place for like-minded individuals to gather and talk, he started conversations, internally, externally, everywhere. Conversations that led to change.

Seth and Scoble both talked about how the increase in communication capabilities on the Internet and within companies creates a flattening of hierarchy that makes leaders out of everyone. You just have to seize the opportunity. What does it mean to lead? To create internal change, to reach out to your customers, to create communities you’re passionate about, both within the company and outside it. One thing Seth said during the podcast was really powerful, so I’ve transcribed the quote here. It’s important enough to be in bold.

Ultimately everyone is self employed. Ultimately, you cannot say, oh I work at General Motors I’ll just do what the boss says and everything will be fine. If you think you work at a company that will not let you lead, I think you’re wrong, and I think that you are hiding, but it’s possible that you’re right. If it turns out that you are right, you should leave. And the best way to find out if you’re right is to lead and see what they do. [...] To work at a place where you are afraid to stand up and lead in any way is an incredible waste. You will never get better at what you do, you will never extract value from what you do, you will merely be a replaceable cog in the machine. [...] You have to decide, before the week is over. I don’t care what the economy is like — the kind of person who can lead, who desires to lead, who insists on leading, will always be able to find a great job.

The bit that Seth really drives home is that no one is preventing you from being a leader. If you work in an organization that you think would frown upon you leading, whether it means talking to your customers and creating passionate tribes there, or even informally leading groups within your own company to create change, you are probably wrong. To give a small example, think about so many old school megabrands who are just completely stuck right now. They don’t know how to embrace communities, how to build tribes. They are used to old school unidirectional marketing. They don’t get that traditional advertising is not working. They don’t know how to create conversations.

But it’s not that these companies lack talent and knowledge. That talent and knowledge just happens to be locked up in what’s likely to be the lowest tier of the company workforce – the smart, new media savvy crowd, coming straight out of college, having grown up on the Internet, YouTube, microbrands, and the Long Tail of everything. Given no official power to create change, these people need to lead from the bottom to create internal tribes that can create the change the organization needs to create passionate external tribes.

Speaking of the Long Tail, it dawns on me that what Seth is talking about in his book is the Long Tail of Leadership. A leader isn’t just the head of a country, organization, or team. As communication increases, hierarchies flatten, employees and customers can talk directly, niche communities are created around the most obscure interests, leaders of all shapes and sizes must rise up to facilitate the tribes that form. In their podcast, Seth and Scoble both emphasize that leaders aren’t special, they are every day people who rise up to become facilitators of their tribes.

The Tribes Q&A document is a free resource that is a great accompaniment to the book. It’s written by members of Seth Godin’s own tribe, from their personal experiences with leadership. It’s a great lesson and an illustration of the very point of Tribal leadership itself.

How many times have you cold called someone about IT services and they said “oh yes, that’s perfect! I was just thinking of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on outsourcing and I’m glad you called because I’m just going to hand that over to you.” How likely are you to convince me in a cold call that I should choose you over thousands of your competitors?

Cold calling is over and done with. Your competitors are a Google away. You cannot win me over by cold calling without any idea of who I am or what I do, or without respecting my basic privacy preferences. Here’s the only reason I would choose your company, if I even needed the resources it provides: reputation. Learn to treat your prospects with respect, and make yourself known by reputation and eminently findable on Google, and you will never need to cold call again.

Just my two cents.

Or, you could reply right away and say “Sorry, I don’t know the answer right now, but I’ll get back to you in a couple [hours,days,weeks]“. Which do you think makes the customer feel better?

Savvy companies know that the psychological need for immediate gratification is at an all time high, especially in this age of Internet-driven attention deficit. So please, don’t keep your customers in the dark, panicked, growing more disgruntled by the moment. Turn their concern with your products into their delight with your customer service by promptly answering all emails. It’s that easy to turn potential detractors into your best supporters. All it takes is a customer service culture that makes this concept a number one priority.

Twitter’s very nature attracts chatterboxes, connectors, social sneezers. Twitter has become a social network of influentials precisely because these people understand the value of being heard, and conversely the value of being up to date with the latest trends.

It’s just a natural extension of blogging. The same people who derided blogs for being a waste of time (after all, who wants to hear about your whiny thoughts) are once again entirely missing the value of this tool. Everything I wrote about why you should be blogging applies to twitter, except with a higher sense of immediacy.

If your company is not twittering about product releases, you’re missing out. If you’re not using twitter to engage your userbase directly in conversation, you’re missing out. If you’re not using twitter to complain about bad customer service, you’re missing out. And if you’re captured in an egyptian jail and you don’t have twitter you’re missing out.

By now it should be clear, twitter is not just a place to tell people about what you ate for breakfast, but a very significant tool for businesses and individuals looking to build social capital and engage in the most direct form of marketing currently available on the web.

So coming back to the revenue issue…clearly twitter is a very valuable service for companies like Southwest, Zappos, and Woot. They are making money from twittering by attracting new business. So why shouldn’t twitter share a piece of the pie? Facebook’s dismal CPM rates and the research findings that suggest that most ad clickers are middle aged women imply that ad revenue on twitter will likely be largely irrelevant. But I bet Southwest, Zappos, and Woot would be more than happy to pay for a premium service. Twitter should come to these companies with a log of outbound clicks and show them all the business they’re driving. I bet that’s worth something. Hmm….


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Newsflash guys: this is the Internet. Just because your store is ‘closed’ doesn’t mean you can’t accept email. Asking your customers to re-submit an inquiry is plain silly. How about a nice friendly “We’ve received your email and we will get to it as soon as we get back.” What is the world coming to?

In January, Hasbro, the North American distributor of Scrabble, announced plans to sue Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the creators of Facebook’s most popular application: Scrabulous 

So…instead of embracing an application that’s bringing together millions of Scrabble fans, Hasbro has decided to alienate their own userbase and try to shut down something that could easily be making them money right now.The freakonomics article also points out that their scrabble branding seems to have a (particularly stock photo looking) picture of a woman and a baby. While infants playing scrabble is cute, these two items taken together tell me that whoever is in charge of marketing there should get a clue (reference to the Hasbro game of the same name not intended).Incidentally, Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae is out.