In 2008, I brought my team to see Seth Godin speak at an event in London. There was a Q&A at the end, and someone asked Seth how he found time to do all the things he did — write so many books, keep a daily blog, and personally respond to every email he receives.
Seth’s answer left an impression on me. He replied something along the lines, “I don’t go to meetings and I’m not on Twitter.”
At the time, Twitter was just a year or two old, and it seemed like anyone with aspirations to build and connect with an audience was on Twitter, incessantly.
Seth was the most well-known thinker in marketing How could he eschew such an emerging platform?
But he described Twitter as a distraction. And instead he decided to focus on a few things that made Seth uniquely Seth — including his daily blog he started in 2002. That’s a rare feat of continuity, made possible to choosing not to do other things that it seemed like everyone else was doing.
I think of that exchange whenever I see cookie-cutter advice on how to be a thought leader. Or how to build and grow an audience. The advice often focuses primarily on the where and how (which platforms and what frequency of posting are essential) rather than the what (the message you’re actually trying to convey).
Some of the expectations for “feeding the beast” on content creation are super-human, as Mark Ritson described recently:
“What is a marketer to do in the face of such numbers? Spend the next 10 years in their underpants trying to come up with something – anything – to say across various platforms every few minutes, while adding inane comments to as many other posts as possible?”
This of course is where AI promises to help, And yet the content creation arms race is just part of what Mark Schaefer once described as “content shock”: “the emerging marketing epoch when exponentially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it.”
Or as Mark Ritson put it:
“The digital snake eats its own pixelated tail.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
