Reading Seth Godin’s blog
October 29th, 2011 at 12:52 pm ETI read Seth Godin’s blog every day. I’ve been roundly mocked for this by at least three smart young people (all of whom, I note, are themselves pushing thirty at this point and so may well soon be out of touch with the actual young people, but that’s another story), but I persist.
Twenty years ago, as Godin was starting to gain his public following, I absolutely could not stomach the guy. I’ve never much liked trend-forecasters, fame-chasers, or the irrepressibly optimistic. I prefer my Singularity-talk in science fiction, not on the business shelf.
Godin’s books often feel like compilations of obviousness and empty exhortation, his online personality gratingly self-promoting, he shows up everywhere like Forrest Gump. (As they say in Spanish, “A vos cualqier colectivo te deja bien,” i.e., “any bus will take you.”) The people I knew 15 years ago who were most into him were the people I respected least for their creativity and originality: the online used-car salesmen, the desperate dreamers, the confused followers of cultish hope dealers.
But persistence matters. And Godin has seen enough and been through enough self-reinventions over the past two decades to have been part of every Internet marketing trend there is. Not to mention that the Seth Godin marketing machine, still going strong 20 years later, is itself something to learn from.
Besides, just because something’s obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t true. In a distracted and distractable world, Godin does have a knack for getting to the root of things, and all of us could do worse than to do more of that in our daily lives. So I keep reading.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
