We started the afternoon off meeting the voice of Siri, Susan Bennett, and no she isn’t receiving any royalties from Apple.

Opening Keynote with Seth Godin

The Internet is a connection machine. It connects people to ideas and other people. There is no way to cut through the clutter, you don’t have a big enough budget, so don’t try. Seth Godin talks about Detroit as the home of the American dream, but also the factory mindset of faster, cheaper, that then affected our entire system — The industrial revolution. We now have our own revolution, and we’re in the right place at the right time.

• Changing from scarce resources and information to leading to a world of abundance.

• People are going to go around you. It’s not how cheap, but how competent can you be. Why do they connect with you now?

• Generosity and art
  • Art defined as what is real.

• Remarkable – Worth making a remark about; it’s not up to me and you, it’s up to the person and then it grows – this is digital marketing. You need a megaphone strategy, which is given to the fans.

• What the Internet has done is make it easy to be weird. If you want to be persist in making average stuff for average people, the Internet is not your friend, you’ll be in a race to the bottom of price.

• Be something people are choosing to search for. I’d hope that if my blog was gone tomorrow, people would wonder where it went. It’s about being worthy of being sought out.

• If you don’t have enough good ideas it’s because you don’t have enough bad ideas.

• It is super important that Detroit, again, is the center of universe because everyone is just a click away from you. The smallest possible group of people is the group of people you need.

• What was Seth’s worst day ever? He spoke of the day he got kicked out of AOL, or not being able to make payroll for 40 employees.
  • If there’s a failure you have and you survive it, it’s a gift. The right answer to a critic is… thank you.

• Discussing The Future: Twenty years ago Seth told client
  s, one day most people will have an email account — no there’s people with an email account and smartphones but not running water.
  

• If you have enough people trust you in the right thing, you will never have a problem making money.

• What is a brand? It’s an expectation of the promise we’re going to make and if we’re going to be able to keep it.

• If you’re in a high-growth industry, how do you identify your tribe? The question should be which tribe will I serve?

• On leadership:
  • Managers – Tell us what to do
  • Leaders – Go places together

• It was simple in the Mad Men days, “buy more ads.” Now we’re responsible for everything.

Most marketers challenge is what we’re marketing – what about non-sexy marketing?

It is entirely possible to take ordinary, and tell a story to make it meaningful for the person using it. The first 20 years, Amazon was just a bookstore, but it felt different.

What we are asked to do as marketers is create new ideas. We will fail, but do it anyways and do it with focus everyday. It’s not our job to be liked, it is our job to say things that haven’t been said before, or to see things that haven’t been seen before.

Seth’s Recommended Books:

• Pema Chodron – Any book by her. Be mindful of what is going around me without commenting it, see the world as it is, instead of how we’d like it to be.
• The Art of Possibility
• The War of Art

If you remember in the epic scene of singing in the rain, he had an umbrella the whole time, he just never used it. The rain is the point. We learned so much from Seth we decided this presentation needed its own blog. Stay tuned for our Day 1 Afternoon Summary at Digital Summit Detroit.