Dave Haynes

I read Seth Godin’s wisdoms every day at his particularly excellent blog. He gives these wisdoms for free. There’s payback though, I’ve also bought some of his books. And although I got a freebie the last time I saw him speak (pictured in the cheesy snap!) I would probably pay to see him again next time he’s in London. Seth is definitely a source of constant inspiration and guidance.

So my first piece of advice is that you should stick his blog in your feed reader.

My second piece of advice is that you should wait until his new book Linchpin comes out in January, buy it, and add some other titles like ‘Tribes’ or ‘Purple Cow’ at the same time.

My third piece of advice is to go and download this amazing free e-book that he’s compiled called ‘What Matters Now’ and then go and tell your best friends and colleagues to do the same. Here’s an extract that struck a particular chord with me. Hopefully I’ve done a reasonably good job in 2009 of sticking to advice like this and will get even better in 2010:

When the economy tanks, it’s natural to think of yourself first. You have a family to feed a mortgage to pay. Getting more appears to be the order of business. It turns out that the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct. Instead, we’re rewarded for being generous. Generous with our time and money but most important generous with our art. If you make a difference, people will gravitate to you. They want to engage, to interact and to get you more involved. If you make a difference, you also make a connection. You interact with people who want to be interacted with and you make changes that people respect and yearn for. Art can’t happen without someone who seeks to make a difference. This is your art, it’s what you do. You touch people or projects and change them for the better. This year, you’ll certainly find that the more you give the more you get. - Seth Godin ‘What Matters Now’

Remember domain name parking? - when someone registers a useful domain, sits on it but frustratingly isn’t even using it.  Or when someone registers a domain that they think someone else will find useful in the hope of selling it to the highest bidder or making money from affiliate links. It’s annoying, but it’s become quite a norm, making it almost impossible to register a domain name using normal english dictionary words.  Domain names are valuable. One of the first things I did in my recent week of paternity leave was to register my son’s domain name. He’ll thank me for it one day!

Now there is a new phenomenon, Twitter Parking. I need a Twitter account for a few charity projects that I’m involved with this year. I resolved to lookup the names and register them as soon as possible and finally got around to it this morning. I wasn’t surprised however to find that all of them were taken… parked! Most had no activity updates at all and none were in regular use. The example below was even totally upfront about holding their username.

And unlike domains you don’t even need to get the credit card out to park your username.  All you need is the ability to setup a new email address for it. It looks like Twitter is more than aware of this of course and it looks like they have quite a progressive attitude towards the issue (although not without controversy). It is possible to claim inactive usernames as your own if the account has remained inactive for nine months and I’m sure we’ve seen some cases of celebs claiming fake accounts back as their own though I haven’t got any specific examples as I type this (please link up in the comments if you have).

So what are the lessons here? Twitter is crossing over to the mainstream. Your username is valuable. If you have a band, artist name, company, brand, meetup, idea, team, nickname… make sure you register the Twitter username. Before somebody else does!

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Here’s a fascinating and thought-provoking insight into how the pro’s turn their video’s viral. These tips could easily relate to marketing your latest music video. The piece is written with a brutal honesty that makes for a very refreshing read.