double POSITIVE Marketing Group, Inc.

If you have 48 minutes to kill (and who doesn’t have 48 minutes to kill), this video is a must see for anyone who wants to understand the intersection between marketing and technology. Seth Godin, author of “All Marketers Are Liars,” recently spoke to an audience of marketers at Google about what, from his perspective, makes so many Google services so popular. When it comes to Adwords, Google has figured out the ultimate way to do permission marketing. Some selected quotes…

“[Remarkable] doesn’t mean beautiful or ideal or perfect. It only means one thing — worth making a remark about.”

“Does the average consumer need more than 2.7GB of storage in their email account? Probably not, but it adds to the story, it’s the fashion, it was something worth talking about…”

“The fashion permission complex… Step 1 – Make something worth talking about. If you can’t do that, start over. Step 2 – Tell it to people who want to hear from you. Step 3 – They do what other people used to think of as marketing. They are the ones that spread the word and tell their friends. Step 4 – The hardest part… Get permission from these people to tell them about your next fashion.”

“(Talking to Google…) Right now you have no idea who i am. You have no idea what I searched for. You have no persmission to talk to me directly. And I want you to do all these things. But you can’t do it unless you ask first. The opportunity with the Google Toolbar and Gmail and all the other things you’re doing,  is to build in a permission asset. No one has done this on the Internet with the notable exceptions of eBay and Amazon.”

Of particular interest to me what the concept of “flipping the funnel,” which sounds like it could be a riff off of “The Long Tail.” Traditionally, marketers dump everything they can drive via broadcast, print, outdoor, direct mail, etc… into the funnel, and what comes out at the bottom is paydirt. But someone who is searching for “espresso machines” on Google is already way down in the funnel. A billboard on the highway doesn’t drive espresso machine sales. An ad on the radio or television won’t do that either. But paid search — ahh yes, that is where you can reach out and tell the person who is proactively expressing interest in espresso machines that you have something for him. But if you can flip the funnel on its side and turn it into a megaphone, well then you let other people tell your story and you get out of the way. Blogs, message boards, instant messaging — these are all ways people can tell the story on your behalf.