As usual, I can’t remember where I came across this one (if it was in your feed, let me know and I will send a virtual shout-out), but it’s a great clip of legendary management theorist Tom Peters and marketing guru Seth Godin (who looks a lot like a “house elf” from the Harry Potter movies, but maybe that’s just me) talking about the usefulness of blogs as part of a panel discussion at the Inc 5000 conference. I would have embedded the clip but there was no embed option available. So I took a minute and transcribed what they had to say. First up was Seth, who said:
“Blogging is free. It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. What matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the meta-cognition of thinking about what you’re going to say. How do you explain yourself, to your few employees, or to your cat, or to whoever’s going to look at it? How do you force yourself to describe, in three paragraphs, why you did something? How do you respond, out loud?
If you’re good at it, then people are going to read it. If you’re not good at it and you stick with it, you’ll get good at it. This has become much bigger than “are you BoingBoing” or “are you the Huffington Post” — this has become such a micro-publishing platform that basically you’re doing it for yourself, to force yourself to become part of the conversation, even if it’s just that big (holds two fingers about an inch apart). And that changes an enormous amount.”
Followed by Peters, who said:
“My first post was in August of 2004. No single thing in the last 15 years professionally has been more important to my life than blogging. It has changed my life, it has changed my perspective, it has changed my intellectual outlook, it’s changed my emotional outlook, and it’s the best damn marketing tool by an order of magnitude I’ve ever had. And it’s free.”
The clip itself is here and there are more clips from their talk here.
