September 11, 2005

Knock Knock & Who’s There

Written by Brian Turner

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting!

New Seth books disappoint

Seth Godin has released a pair of new books online for free - Knock Knock and Who’s There - but unfortunately both disappoint.

Knock Knock

Seth forwards his usual ideas - make customers into friends - and also raises various points about good website presentation.

But, really, there’s little more to the book we haven’t already seen in better works such as The Big Red Fez, and “Knock Knock” essentially becomes “Seth Discovers AdWords”.

The Big Red Fez is only a short book, but makes a clear point - consider your visitors, and how you want them to react. “Knock Knock” makes a weak echo of that plea, and then discusses that AdWords could be really useful for marketing.

This isn’t anything new, which leads to the question of who actually needs to read that book (other marketers with no understanding of the internet to any degree?).

Additionally, though there are only 40 pages of large format text and graphics, you have to scroll past 5 full page ads for his other works. Whilst Seth is more than welcome to advertise his other works in his free ebook, the experience is somewhat in-your-face and feels more like the literary equivalent of adware.

Overall, there seems little point in reading “Knock Knock” unless you have no idea about marketing online and you’ve never heard of AdWords. And, really, if you’re in that position, you really need to look at The Big Red Fez for website presentation tips, and SEO Book for your primer to using AdWords and other PPC instead.

Who’s There

“Who’s There” follows after “Knock Knock” and this time addresses blogs, and continues to distribute an already somewhat contentious meme that essentially distils to “bloggers can be important to other bloggers”.

While traditional media is indeed under threat, this is more specifically due to the fragmentation of the traditional markets that they fed. However, though internet markets can feed fragmented markets well (as Amazon has proven), blogs are still lacking in editorial credibility in general.

Yes, there are industry leading blogs - but what we effectively have is the diffusion of the newspaper columnist from the traditional print media to the online publishing platform that is the blog.

And though I agree that blogs can be a real treasure for marketing purposes, Seth’s message seems an otherwise obfuscated blogs are important…because.

A particular problem may well be that Seth is addressing shirt and tie guys who leave internet work to their secretaries and juniors - however, in using an online distribution method alien to these people, he may well be hitting the wrong targets.

“Who’s There” is a simple short read that emphasises that the internet is with us for marketing, is important for marketing purposes, and that blogs can form a valid marketing media platform. But he’s not really telling us anything else here, and there’s nothing new either.

Knock Knock and Who’s There - overall

For those who follow the internet, who market on the internet, and follow the latest marketing news, Seth falls surprisingly far behind on this pair of eBooks.

Seth Godin is one of the new marketers, and normally that means he has something to teach from the frontiers - but these books seem to be little more than Seth musing about what has been happening the past few years. Which if you are there, you have already seen, and should be aware of.

Overall, Seth has taught us well before - but in these instances, is left preaching to the choir.

Filed Under Reviews