An interview with Seth Godin – PR not publicity

Seth Godin - www.flickr.com/photos/joi/4035933108/

Seth Godin is a perceptive individual. He spots things the rest of us are too busy to see, and then lets us know about them in an easily-digestible format. Sounds like a cracking formula for a best-selling author if you ask me... and of course he is.

With a dozen titles to his name, including Tribes, Meatball Sundae, perhaps most famously Permission Marketing, and most recently Linchpin, interviewing Seth was always going to be both entertaining and insightful.

Interview with Seth Godin

Seth packs in several super observations in just ten short minutes.

Describing PR, historically, as "a human form of spam" is always going to grab your attention, but Seth doesn't dwell on the negatives for long. Rather, he is upbeat about the prospects for public relations in re-establishing itself as the profession responsible for forging relationships, for listening and conversing, and for caring for reputations, thereby differentiating itself clearly from publicity.

And it seems the PR profession is starting to attend to its own reputation. When talking with the teams at the CIPR and PRSA for example, I'm seeing action and results in putting clear blue water between the PR profession and what the popular press loves to call "spin".

I've never felt a connection between what I do and "spin", so the sooner perception catches up with reality the better. And if that means leaving an assortment of practitioners behind, or more specifically in the publicity camp, then let's simply keep making that distinction.