Today Seth Godin announced his candidacy for President of the United States of America. And then seven paragraphs later he stepped out of the race. It was a good run and he had a strong message worth reading.
If you know Seth Godin (any self-respecting marketer should) then you know that Seth is all about connecting with people using meaningful, relevant messages. He's not about the traditional interruptions of advertising and has written book after book on how to build lasting relationships without it.
The point of his blog post touches on a place in Internet marketing so many of us neglect - specific, focused messaging. It's easy to get caught up in who your message will appeal to and how broad a stroke you can make with your content to grab the widest audience. Because the widest audience means the most potential leads, right? Not likely.
Instead, we need to focus on the group that is interested. This allows us to engage with them at a deeper and more meaningful level which eventually creates a relationship based on interest and commonality. This is how we build our constituency. It may not be as fast as a broad, generic, wide-reaching stroke but the relationships we build will be longer lasting and far more valuable down the road.
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