Sorry Seth, I Have to Disagree…

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One of my favorite authors in my known galaxy is Seth Godin. He’s a proliferate pontificate on marketing, life, and other good stuff.

Today marks the first day in my LIFE that I think the man is stright up wrong and needs a brick upside his head.

And that could just be because my life experience is markedly different than his. Who knows.

In a recent post about why you should, or shouldn’t write a book, Seth makes a fatal generalization.

He says “Out of context, a 140 character tweet cannot change someone’s life.”

WRONG and WRONG.

I have never felt my skin crawl faster. And I LOVE Seth’s work. Really. I do!

I have read brilliant tweets. Short snippets from friends and strangers that have made course corrections in my own life.

Some had only the context of knowing the author (thank you @unmarketing, @chrisbrogan, @lkr, @elizabethPW, @tomziglar) – so by knowing them to some degree, I suppose that changes the “context” of things.

But others (because I occasionally DO read my ‘all tweets’ stream) were random people that I may or may know have any inkling of that said something funny, emotionally charged, or just made a life-altering statement.

Usually in 120 characters or less, because that way you can re-tweet.

And dear Mr. Godin, if you ever USED twitter, you might understand that.

I guess the thing that irritates me is also the salve to soothe me. See Seth has never used twitter, so his sideways assessment makes sense. He’s a writer/blogger at heart, so of course he’d make the assertion that blogs impact lives.

But to summarily write off a medium you’ve never used (except to broadcast his posts – I’ll get back to that in a minute), is a disservice to his readers.

One of the things that set me apart early on as a coach was that I didn’t spout off about things I didn’t understand. If I didn’t have wordpress experience, I didn’t talk about how great it was to my clients. I stuck to what I knew. When I fell in love with twitter, I shared with my clients how I was picking up THOUSANDS of dollars in my business because of it – and HOW I was doing it.

But NEVER (at least not that I can recall) have I ‘coached’ someone to do something that I hadn’t tried myself in some way.

And sorry, Seth, but I think this is a place where you have no leg to stand on. You’ve never used twitter as more than a placeholder or a broadcast mechanism for your blog – which is like being part of the twitter counterculture.

That said, I also want to point out how your one tweet (which was nothing more than a broadcast of your latest blog post), which included a link DID change me. your shiny veneer isn’t quite what it once was. Now, you could assert that because it was a blog link, that there’s a context to it, and that’s true. Perhaps if you actually used twitter, I could comment more accurately.

But there are other folks, like @ThomScott or @sundaycosmetics, @retrobakery who I either barely know or don’t know at all that just happened to post a thoughtful tweet one day, intrigued me, and pulled me into their universe. That’s the grand design of twitter. How can you say that DOESN’T change your life? I purposely linked to these folks because chances are good most of my readers have never heard of them either. Heck, I just read my first post by @retrobakery this morning. But it was enough to engage me and change me.

And yes, you could say that I’m spouting off about the value of my medium (twitter), just as Seth is spouting off about his medium (books). The difference is I’m not slamming his – even incidentally. And I HAVE written books. Working on two new ones now.

Seth is correct that “you must create enough leverage to make things happen” But it’s erroneous to assume that everyone needs a counterweight the size of Mount Olympus to move the load. Some of us can get by with less than 140 characters.

It depends on your definition of “enough”, I suppose.