How to market yourself

Marketing guru Seth Godin had a piece on his blog I found insightful regarding political advertising. I like Seth because he's smart, and has a great barber.

TV is over. If people are interested, they'll watch. On their time (or their boss's time). They'll watch online, and spread the idea. You can't email a TV commercial to a friend, but you can definitely spread a YouTube video. The cycle of ads got shorter and shorter, and the most important ads were made for the web, not for TV. Your challenge isn't to scrape up enough money to buy TV time. Your challenge is to make video interesting enough that we'll choose to watch it and choose to share it. Marketing is tribal. Karl Rove and others before him were known for cultivating the base. This was shorthand for a tribe of people with shared interests and vision (it included a number of conservatives and evangelicals). George W. Bush was able to get elected twice by embracing the base, by connecting them, by being one of them. Attack ads don't always work. There's a reason most product marketers don't use attack ads. All they do is suppress sales of your opponent, they don't help you. Since TV ads began, voter turnout has progressively decreased. That's because the goal of attack ads is to keep your opponent's voters from showing up. Both sides work to whittle down the other. In a winner-take-all game like a political election, this strategy is fine if it works.
So why didn't the ads work this time?
The tribe that Obama built identified with him. Attacking him was like attacking them. They took it personally, and their outrage led to more donations and bigger turnout. This is the lucky situation Apple finds itself in as well. Attacking an Apple product is like attacking an Apple user.

So if you want to help someone get elected in 2010, or even 2012, now is the time to start building that tribe. Video can be an inexpensive way to start marketing yourself, or a candidate, but take warning!

Your video must be awesome! If it's just ok, not only will people not forward it, they will not open future videos. This may be painful for some of you, but I saw Frank Lutz on Fox News explain that after surveying hundreds of people, this is the best commercial of the last election. Watch it and learn.