local media blog

This chart is from Godin’s presentation today showing the Old Ways and the New Ways.

Here are the trends Godin talked about during his Meatball Sundae presentation.

1. Direct communication – if you have a phone tree, you’re behind the curve.

2. Amplification of consumers – everyone is a critic and has the ability to share their critiques with 1 or 1 million people easily.

3. Authentic stories -being the brand you say you are (can’t give different messages to different groups).

4. Speed – if you’re competition is faster, they win.

5. Long Tail – Amazon gets 1/2 their revenue on books that Barnes and Noble doesn’t even carry. Choice creates new audience.

6. Outsourcing – if certain costs go to zero, you can change the business you’re in.

7. Dicing of everything – Google molecularized the Internet. You don’t have one front door anymore.

8. Infinite Channels – to talk about what you do and if you don’t like any of them you can create your own.

9. Consumer to Consumer – no middle man.

10. Scarce & Abundant – the two have flipped-flopped in some cases and if what you sell used to be scarce (NEWS) and now it’s abundant, you need to change what you do or how you do it because things in abundance don’t make money.

11. Big Ideas – is the product.

12. Permission – collect people who want to hear from you every day and complain when they don’t. Daily Candy is a good example.

13. The New Rich – what people are willing to spend money on today is surprising.

There were 14 but I missed one. If someone knows the 14th trend, please share.

Godin’s theory in summary — Carve out your niche by connecting people to each other.

Some examples: threadless.com, replacements.com, zappos.com.

The Newspaper Association of America commissioned a report on successful online marketing and I wrote a column highlighting ten takeaways for the association’s monthly magazine, Newspaper Marketing.

I wish the report had more specifics, but it was a good read nevertheless. You need to be a member to get the full report.

Here’s my column: Quick Facts about Online Marketing (pdf version)