Telling a story about telling a story

by Chris Dawson

This post was written in June 2007; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

Why did so many people go to what may be the most popular session of eBay Live! even including the keynote speech from Meg? A short thin bald man who stood up and enthralled the audience for an hour?

The answer is in the title of this post, Seth Godin is a story teller who manages to captivate the audience. His content was aimed at getting more traffic to your listings, and what’s popularly called “Permission Marketing”. Buyers are fed up with retailers marketing to them, it might be legal to email existing customers but that doesn’t mean they want to hear from you. As Seth stated emails should be “Me Mails” and not about the seller. New tools like blogs, Squidoo and social networking are the way of the future.

The main thing I took away from this session is the oldest eBay adage in the book - if you want to be successful go niche, look for products no one else is selling, build a story about the products that no one else can reproduce, or if they try they’ll be so far behind you it’ll be impossible for them to catch up. Capture a market with buyers that actively want to hear from you and you’ll succeed.

Back to Seth however, what makes him complusive listening? Well if you want to know more you should read his books, but he doesn’t even want you to pay for them. Go to Seth’s Squidoo lens and you can download many of them for free as e-books.

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Author: Chris Dawson
Posted at: Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Filed Under Uncategorized
 

Comments

2 Responses to “Telling a story about telling a story”

  1. Do you know my name? : TameBay on June 26th, 2007 1:23 pm

    [...] Seth Godin summed it up nicely at eBay Live! If you’re going to use email marketing it shouldn’t be email about your company - It should be “Me Mail” that I actually want to read. That goes whether it’s eBay email marketing or an email marketing list that you have for your off eBay business. Permission marketing is all about prospective (or existing) customers actually wanting to receive your email. If you upset a company there are plenty of competitors out there waiting to take your business. [...]

  2. Pokemom sells cards for $142 : TameBay on August 30th, 2007 3:47 pm

    [...] Dawn Meehan is a mother to six kids, aged 1 to 12 years. She comes from Illinois, she has a blog, but most of all, she knows how to tell a great story. Why were buyers prepared to pay $142 for a $10 pack of cards? Because they wanted to be part of that story. [...]

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