Today, SES Chicago keynote speaker Seth Godin spent an hour dishing out his marketing wisdom on a webcast with our own Kevin Ryan. He expounded on the ideas behind his new book, Meatball Sundae.
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What is a meatball sundae? According to dedicated live-blogger Lisa Barone, Seth described it this way:
A meatball is a worthwhile commodity. They are things we need and sold to everyone. The sundae is the hot fudge and the peanuts, the tactics of social media and the MySpace profiles. These things work but they work best when they’re not on meatballs, but when they’re on an organization designed to work with them.
Seth also offered 14 trends to help organizations avoid ending up with the meatball sundae. Jody Nimetz at SEO-space has a good recap of those.
Specifically for search marketers, Seth advises ditching the reactionary moves to find the latest and greatest tactics to place well in the search engines, and focus on real marketing:
What he’s trying to say to the search engine optimization world is that SEO has traditionally been a tactical minute-to-minute game. It’s been about figuring out what the search engines want right now and tweaking sites to meet that. That’s over.
What we want to do now is to change the very nature of what SEOs do so that regardless of what tactics are hot at the moment, the engines will want to find them because the stuff they’re doing matches the strategies the engines are always going to have.
You should print that little bit out and stick it on your wall. If this wasn’t a free event, that would have been worth the price of admission right there.
If Lisa and Jody’s great coverage is not enough, you can also find more insight from Josh Bernoff, David Dalka, and Darren Barefoot.