Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The Best 17:27 of Your Day: Tribes We Lead from TED

As you will soon learn, we believe that TED is one of the most amazing organizations around. For those of you unfamiliar, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design. It has grown from an annual conference to become a global movement. We find time each day to seek out one of the thousands of great (and free) talks. Today we bring you a classic. Seth Godin gives us the best thoughts on shared ideas and how we lead in the internet age. Fun and inspiring thoughts on how we form tribes and why it should be incredibly important to all of us, especially those of us who market.

The Cobbler's Kids Have No Shoes


That is a phrase that I was told long ago, in an advertising agency far away. It was a reminder that in our business, we usually get around to marketing ourselves last. At the time I was working for a large independent agency that seemed to have more staff and more resources than it knew what to do with. Gettin' Jiggy Wit It owned the airwaves, and come to think of it, radio was still something we actually listened to... on a radio. Thus the line took on a relative different meaning for me. It stood as a symbol that we should look to the client work first and disregard our own marketing. It was a pride point.

Now, here we are so many years later. I have now come to realize that having no shoes is not a pride point. Having no shoes makes your journey incredibly difficult, not matter how much talent and skill you have. That brings us to the reason, if not the objective of this blog. The objective is to provide a location for great ideas to be distilled, distributed and discussed. The reason for this blog is so that our little company may take another step toward actually possessing the things we create on a daily basis... a story about who we are and what we stand for.

So, as I continue to cobble shoes here, while still making beautiful kicks for our clients, we hope you will join us and add commentary and ideas to our little project.

Thank you.