Googling Seth Godin

When you step into the world of blogging it’s nearly impossible to avoid tripping over Seth Godin’s name. There’s even a WordPress plugin entitled ‘What Would Seth Godin Do’, which incidentally has great reviews and has been downloaded almost 15,000 times.

Some very unscientific data analysis involving typing in his name in Google and then recording the number of returns shows 1,320,000 search results. That number is increasing by 10,000 a day (at least it did from Wednesday to Thursday.) To give this analysis more credibility, I created a pie chart (pie charts can make anything look more important than it actually is.)

After recently reading the interview he gave to the Archie McPhee blog last November I was shocked that his reproduction as the Marketing Guru action figure has gotten such a small slice of the pie. Particularly given the amount of returns involving his name plus ‘god’, ‘hero’, or ‘genius’.  It’s possible that people just aren’t as open about talking about their action figure collections online as they are about the real person. Archie McPhee reports that the Marketing Guru was one of the strong sellers among the action figures last year although still not coming close to Nancy Pearl as the Librarian. (To be fair, the librarian has much better accessories and even makes a shushing motion which may be giving her an unfair advantage.)

Even more startling in this study is the number of returns for ‘Seth Godin mismatched socks’, a key feature of the action figure and presumably Seth himself, since at least two of the only 422 returns were posted by him. Clearly he puts a greater emphasis on this than do his followers and even shares his sock source in the interview.  The pie chart indicates that he gives an awful lot of interviews, but I’m guessing this is one of the more esoteric  ones. I suspect that he might share the sentiments of the statement attributed to another guru, Carl Jung, “Thank God I’m Jung, and not a Jungian.”

You can get a virtual marketing  guru moment on Business Week where the action figure imparts random wisdom with Seth Godin’s voice. I’m not sure if rubbing the bald head of the action figure will bring more visitors to your blog or not, but it might be worth  a try…