Appearing on many best seller lists nationwide, the book Tribes by Seth Godin was published in 2008.
Godin himself is the writer of one of the most popular blogs on the web as well as some of the best selling marketing books of this decade, Seth Godin has revolutionized the way in which people of today think about marketing and public relations. With 11 books under his belt to date, he has earned international fame. He even has his own “marketing guru” action figure.Godin graduated from Tufts University in 1982 with a degree in computer science and philosophy, he would then attend the Stanford Business School where he earned his MBA in Marketing. After completing his education, Godin worked for Spinnaker Software for about three years. He left Spinnaker Software in order to start his own book packaging company. It was here that Godin met Mark Hurt and together they founded Yoyodyne, which was one of the first online marketing companies. Where they would use gimmicks such as contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market their clients to online users. In 1998, Godin sold Yoyodyne to Yahoo! And became Yahoo!’s vice president of direct marketing. He held this position until 2000. In 2004, with the help of a few interns, Godin launched Change This which is a website that is aimed at spreading ideas through the use of PDF files. By 2005, Change This would become the leading distributor of business literature in the United States. In 2006, Godin along with some help launched Squidoo which is a community website that allows its users to create pages for subjects that interest them. Today, Squidoo is one of the top 500 most visited sites on the World Wide Web. In 2008, Godin offered his own alternative MBA program out of his office in New York. Choosing nine “students” this group would go on to “graduate” in the summer of 2009.
This book focus on leadership in today’s society by using real life examples of how one person or idea can influence a mass of people in order to create movements. He refers to these groups as tribes. a tribe as “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea” and in order for a group to become a tribe they must have both a shared interest and a way to communicate (Godin, 2008, p.1). He goes on to explain that these tribes were once very localized. However, since the dawn of new technologies, especially the World Wide Web, these groups are easier to find and geographically dispersed. In this book you realize that the leaders of today’s society are not that special. They are regular people who just had an idea and acted upon it. An idea of change that brought about followers. The point is that you and I both have the opportunity to become an agent of change in today’s world, thus transforming into a leadership role. Bring about the movements that cause change to happen. Thanks to the World Wide Web, we have the tools to follow whatever we believe in or to change other people’s beliefs. Using known and less unknown examples from our current society Godin encourages the reader to find, set up a tribe, and lead it.
These examples ranged from the Grateful Dead and President Obama to the less unknown leaders of today’s society such as Mitch Matthews who inspires a team at Microsoft and Nathan Winograd who has made it his mission to stop the number of dogs put to sleep at animal shelters nationwide. Godin’s flat out use of examples is what surprised me most about this book. By utilizing examples that were relatable, in order to explain the concepts throughout the book, made it easier to not only comprehend what he was trying to explain, but also spiked my interest which made this book an easy read. His concepts were logical, yet remarkable at the same time. To think that in today’s society I have the opportunity to “lead” people from across the globe is astonishing. In the past, communicating with a mass of people in order to create a nation wide movement ,such as the civil rights movement, were almost beyond belief. In today’s society that is not only easily obtained, but so are world wide movements. Now that I have read this book, I am very interested in investigating the communication process that are behind creating a world wide movement. In particular, I am interested in whether a language barrier or anything else has either hindered or helped progress. I would definitely recommend this book to not only business and public relations majors, but also anyone who is starting a business or is the president of a group.
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