According to Seth Godin, it’s easier than ever to be a leader, thanks to the internet.
You used to have to have to have money or connections to be loud enough to be noticed. Now that’s not true. If you have access to a public library with the internet, you have same platform as everyone else. That’s really bad news for people who used to have power. Really bad news for people who relied on money to get the word out there. It’s really great news for people who have something to say.
Seth is the author of several business and marketing books, most recently, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. With the Obama presidency set to begin, and as Parliament prepares to sit again, Nora interviewed Seth about Tribes and how leadership is changing in the internet age.
A shorter version of this interview will air on the January 21 episode of Spark, but you can hear an extended version below, or download the MP3.
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January 15th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Nora, and the team Spark are demonstrating best practices regarding the use of social media. To be invited to participate in developing questions and then receiving advance notice of the long form interview featuring our questions certainly makes us fans of twitter.com and spark.
I’ve heard lots of interviews with Seth, particulary over the past year and tried to get my question asked numerous times before. Thankfully, I was able to hear my question and an outstanding answer.
I think Spark is on the leading wave of the current best future for journalism and I look forward to the day more media outlets really interact with their fans.
cheers!
January 15th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
@toddlucier
Thanks, though I have to say, we really have a smart and supportive group of participants in the Spark community. It’s easy to incorporate smart questions.
As to your point about MSM, I think it involves two things: one is changing the idea of what media you’re producing. So, not thinking “I make a radio show and then we promote it online” to “I do technology analysis using a bunch of different media and formats.”
The other thing is a deeper rethinking of the relationship between media and the community of people who engage with it. That’s why I find the term ‘user generated content’ so problematic. It doesn’t really address the idea of ‘media as conversation’, as the saying goes. (It’s also kind of patronizing).
That all said, the resource aspect of it is a challenge, as is the ‘attention splitting’ aspect.
January 15th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Just finished this lovely interview. Really Really Great.
I was typing an email to a friend trying to recount one of the ideas in it and found myself writing: “people get distracted by their medium”. As Seth said in the interview, The Newspaper folks thought they were in the buisness of selling newspapers, when they were really in the buisness of delivering information.
Anyway, typing the word medium got me to thinking about Marshall McLuhan and his aphorism, “the medium is the message”. Which then made me think that the tribe metaphor has some serious implications for McLuhan’s work. If anything, Seth’s ideas could be formulated as “the message is the message” or even “the act of communicating the message is the message”. Is it possible that McLuhan is that outdated already? Granted, it is a pretty vague sentiment on McLuhan’s part, but as Nora put it in relation to spark, “I do technology analysis using a bunch of different media and formats.” The tribe metaphor seems to allow for any number of mediums. The common experience of the tribe is what allows the message to work. Anyway, I guess I have some more thinking to do, but I thought I’d put that out there in the world.
January 24th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
The term “tribe” is misleading and false. My tribe rejects modern-day aposty and sticks to the facts.
Truth has no race or gender. Let’s do a DNA analysis of these so-called tribal leaders.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
[...] staff or leads teams. Not that I think leadership is reserved only for managers, in fact, as Seth Godin spoke about in his recent interview with Nora on Spark, anyone can be a “creative [...]