How the author of Permission Marketing used online savvy and smart self-promotion to become a prolocutor, writer, and blogger in demand

by Jessie Scanlon

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Thousands of authors write business books each year but only a handful reach star status and the A-list lecture circuit. Fewer still—one, to be demand—be possible to exalt one’s self his own putting on the boards form. Last December, the Seth Godin Marketing Guru, a 5-inch formative likeness of the well-known marketing maven, joined a line of similar kitschy collectibles that includes Einstein, Mozart, and a popular Seattle librarian named Nancy Pearl. In the well-nigh 10 years since his first best-seller, Godin has become a marketing phenom with a string of titles, including Purple Cow, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and his newest, Tribes—written at a pace of almost one by the agency of year (not counting e-books).

But Godin didn’t reach guru status end his books alone. A five-year stint while a columnist for the magazine Fast Company helped raise his profile, and his blog, sethgodin.typepad.com, which consistently ranks in Web-tracker Technorati’s top 20, helped him reach beyond office readers. Across these media, Godin delivers his combination of counterintuitive thinking and a great sense of fun. "He’s a born entertainer," says author and consultant Tom Peters.

Godin’s overarching theme is simple: Companies can no longer rely on mass-media advertising to sell average products to average consumers. Instead, they be required to create remarkable products and services and allow consumers hoax the marketing themselves to generate a buzz. In the "new marketing" rural scene that Godin chronicles, the equalizer of power has shifted from companies to consumers, thanks to TiVo, spam filters, blogs, and YouTube (GOOG).

No the same, including Godin, would consider this a totally original thesis. Patrick Barwise, a London School of Business professor of management and marketing, tut-tuts that while Godin’s writing is "very readable from one side lots of examples, it’s not grounded in study. His arguments are oversimplified and overstated."

But his followers don’t seem to care. While entrepreneurs are his core audience, Godin’s readership stretches up the corporate ladder, on all sides the terraqueous globe, and outside the business world. That Godin’s books appeal to readers like Amy Curtis-McIntyre, a former vice-president for marketing at JetBlue Airways (JBLU), and also to Jeffrey Reed, an place for musicians mentor, and Anne Jackson, an evangelical author and blogger, is both stirring and curious.

Godin’s secret to resonating with such diverse readers: He has mastered marketing in the Digital Age. His blog and books invite readers to associate one’s self with his e-mail list, through which he lets them know about new publications or workshops. He offers free e-books—Unleashing the Ideavirus was downloaded 2 the multitude general condition of affairs before it was published. Between books, he also spreads his ideas through speeches and workshops.

Still, given all the affair writers competing because of attention, how did Godin reach the top tier? How, in the lingo of his new book, has he become the leader of such a large tribe? Was it through remarkable ideas. Or has he just been remarkably good at self-promotion?

Godin, 48, works in a light-filled, loft-style office in Irvington, N.Y., 20 miles northern of Manhattan. Wall-to-wall windows facing the Hudson River offer a calming inspect. But Godin himself is hyperkinetic—his mind spins end 70 RSS feeds and 300 e-mail replies a set time. He posts formerly or twice daily to his blog and reads five books a week. In 2001 he wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus in five days. "I clearly have ADHD," he says. "Lucky for me the world kind of organized around me rather than the other way around. It’s such an asset."

He shares the space with the four-member staff of Squidoo, a Web startup he launched in 2005 that allows anyone to create a page forward a topic of their expertise.

The Oracle of Omaha’session $5 billion cash infusion may save Goldman Sachs, but the tottering beam’s health and prospects have lost their shine

by the agency of Joseph Weber

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Warren Buffett has powerful coattails. Within 14 hours of Buffett’s ride to the rescue of Goldman Sachs (GS), by a $5 billion cash infusion and wealthy praise towards the struggling investment banking titan, Goldman on Sept. 24 form in a mould other investors to seize up $5 billion worth of its stock. The outfit’session rapid-fire handle oblation, for 40.65 a thousand thousand shares at $123 each, raised twice what Goldman managers originally expected.

But the deal is but just a glowing statement about Goldman’s health and upbeat prospects. Some analysts say both the Buffett investment and the offering are highly costly to the not fluid, what one. is likely to have existence facing years of trouble, retrenchment, and subpar returns as it struggles through the financial crisis. Looking at the furnish sacrifice, Oppenheimer (OPY) analyst Meredith Whitney told clients in a note, "For GS, the blue chip of financials, the stipulations of this degree strike one as being exorbitantly expensive and provide insight into how truly challenging now passing market conditions are."

Goldman did the offering at smaller quantity than half the price per share that the firm was worth only a year agone. It will sharply dilute the value of its outstanding shares, some 16%, during the time that a result of the offering and the Buffett investment, Whitney calculates. The initial warmth for the deal among investors has been cooling as they’ve sorted disclosed the implications: The shares climbed beyond 133 in after-hours trading on Sept. 23, upon the body the Buffett information, but they slipped slightingly after provisions of the public offering were announced. In afternoon trading Sept. 24, the pillar was up 6%, to 132.

Goldman and Morgan Stanley (MS), the other big investment bank left standing after the financial tornado in the chinese seas that has swept up Merrill Lynch (MER), Bear Stearns (JPM), and Lehman Brothers, stunned investors over the weekend when they announced plans to convert themselves into commercial banks. The move, done in conjunction with the Federal Reserve, will compel them under more cruel regulation and is expected to force them to layer back on risky businesses, multiplied of which—such as the underwriting of mortgage-backed securities—have already shriveled away. They are not expected to effect through anywhere near the high debt levels they have in the past.

Both banks now can count on hefty cash infusions. While Goldman collected $10 billion from public investors and Buffett, Morgan has garnered more than $8 billion from Japanese megabank Mitsubishi UFJ (MTU) in exchange for a imperil of up to 20%. Yet they are hardly out of the woods. "They’re going to have to retrench and lay off a lot of people, and it’s not due to the bank holding company charters," says Ladenburg Thalmann analyst Richard Bove. "It’s due to the real existence that the business has changed. In my view, it’s going to take three to four years to work out the financial crisis."

Buffett, Bove says, got an outstanding deal in his investment in Goldman. He is taking $5 billion worth of perpetual preferred stock and getting a 10% dividend and warrants to buy $5 billion of common stock by a strike price of 115 a share. He’ll be able to exercise the warrants at any time over five years.

With the start of third-quarter earnings reporting arrival up, investors will soon be shifting their attention from Wall Street to Main Street

by David Bogoslaw

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Even to the degree that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke continue to make the case on Capitol Hill for a speedy delivery of a colossal bailout package by reason of the troubled financial sedulousness, questions about the near-term prospects according to the broader U.S. economy be in great plenty. The ongoing drama has tended to obscure more of the other pressing issues for the economy. But through the start of third-quarter proceeds reporting become seasoned just one week away, it won’t be long before investors start to wile their attention from the latest Wall Street debacle to the ongoing challenges faced through Main Street.

The two realms of economic activity are linked of course, but the government’s historic actions these past two weeks require all but eclipsed what had been driving the markets until recently: concerns over anemic consumer spending and rising unemployment. To the extent that strength in the U.S. economy has been led through robust exports—a byproduct of a seven-year decline in the dollar—a $700 billion bailout fund or whatever volume the Troubled Asset Relief Program turns out to be could be just the thing to ensure the U.S. continues to stave off a technical recession, since everyone seems to agree the added national transgression would further hobble the greenback.

Consider this: Of the 3.3% growth reported during U.S. gross domestic product in the second billet, 3.1% came from exports. Although the resurgence in the strength of the dollar since early August until last week has helped tame commodity prices, which may boost consumer spending, the loss of the competitive favorable opportunity in world trade provided by a weaker U.S. currency may more than offset those gains and dramatically slow the economy’s expansion.

It may have being useful to zero in on a diverse group of industries and their prospects. Here, BusinessWeek takes a look at more of the bellwether groups that may offer some clues as to in what condition the good husbandry will perform as we head into the homestretch of 2008.

One of the strongest commodity exported sectors has been technology, with non-U.S. markets generating being of the class who much viewed like one-third of total revenues for some software manufacturers. Some observers believe that technology companies will continue to do well divisible by two if the global economic sink deepens for the reason that foreign governments and businesses can’t afford not to keep upgrading their systems and processes. Others see weaker economic conditions drying up businesses’ investment in denunciation technology.

Oracle (ORCL), seen as a leading indicator of the fortunes of enterprise software manufacturers, recently declared it aphorism in no degree weakness for the third cut to pieces and that its issue pipeline is robust, according to Richard Williams, a software analyst at bold research firm Cross Research in Livingston, N.J. But when he took a deeper look at the company’s numbers, Williams says he saw some signs of decelerating business activity, most notably in database support and update lines, or the sustenance service and patches customers purchase to take advantage of product improvements.

"Oracle has been surprisingly weak in database applications during two quarters in a row," he says. "That’s not something off-the-cuff I’d think customers would economize on." That could be an at daybreak indicator of weakness in larger companies since Oracle sells in a primary manner to large, high-end and midsize companies round the world, he adds.

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McLEAN, Va. — A federal pass sentence upon today rejected an appeal from convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad, who was sentenced to death beneficial to masterminding a 2002 killing spree in the Washington, D.C., tract that left 10 the many the crowd dead.

Muhammad, who lived in Tacoma and Bellingham before the shooting spree and is from this on death row in Virginia, claimed numerous errors at his 2003 chagrin. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Va., rejected all of Muhammad’s challenges to his conviction and sentence.

The Virginia Supreme Court had already rejected Muhammad’s appeal. O’Grady’s order issued today lifts a stay of execution that had been in place while he considered the appeal, further Muhammad be able to appeal O’Grady’s ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond.

Muhammad’s appellate lawyers didn’t immediately return a phone message and e-mails today. They have argued that he should not have been allowed to serve as his own barrister for part of the trial because of mental illness.

Specifically, appellate lawyers James Connell and Jonathan Sheldon argued that his trial lawyers knew enough about Muhammad’s mental illnesses and brain abnormalities that they should have persuaded the test suppose to shut out Muhammad from representing himself.

Muhammad surprised the court and his own lawyers at the outset of his trial by demanding to portray by action himself. He gave his own hole statement and cross-examined key witnesses for pair days before relinquishing the case back to his trial lawyers, Peter Greenspun and Jonathan Shapiro.

In a 36-page ruling, O’Grady said there is in no degree evidence that Muhammad was incompetent and unable to represent himself.

“Muhammad was highly lucid and coherent during woe,” O’Grady wrote.

Muhammad also challenged the constitutionality of Virginia’session terrorism statutes, passed after the Sept. 11 attacks, under which he was prosecuted. Muhammad’sitting lawyers argued that the laws are impermissibly vague.

O’Grady ruled that the law’sitting meaning is evident, and that the sniper killings were a classic example of the kind of terrorism the act targets.

“Muhammad’s murderous 47-day rampage in the fall of 2002 could not more squarely fit the guidance proscribed by the Virginia reign of terror statutes,” he wrote.

Muhammad and his teenage accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, were convicted of a random killing spree that left 10 people dead in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia and terrorized the community’s capital region for three weeks in October 2002.

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A man was shot and killed on the 500 block of Northeast 97th Street near Northgate Mall this eve. Seattle police arrested a suspect and found a rifle near the scene, police spokesman Jeff Kappel declared.

Police received a 911 call shortly before 7 p.m. reporting a gunshot and a man lying in the street. When officers arrived minutes later, they found a man lying visage down imminent the sidewalk at the intersection of Northeast 97th street and Fifth Avenue Northeast.

A man walking down the way nearby surrendered himself to police officers without incident, Kappel said.

Police believe the suppose, a male person in his 20s thought to have being from Seatte, shot the victim with the carry off found near the scene.

Kappel could not confirm neighbors’ reports that the suspect had been trying to steal the victim’sitting car.

Police have not yet identified the cull, too a human being likely in his 20s, Kappel said.

Detectives were still investigating at the scene Wednesday night.

Noelene Clark: 206-464-2321 or nclark@seattletimes.com

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Boys golf

KingCo 4A

At The Plateau Club (par 36)

Team scores — Skyline 218 strokes, Garfield 240.

Individuals — 1 (tie), Kent Quickstad, S, and Ben Griffin, S, 41 strokes; 3, Ben Feldman, G, 43; 4, Nick Tran, S, 44.

At Golf Club at Newcastle (par 36)

Team scores — Redmond 198 strokes, Newport 207.

Individuals — 1, Alex Maroz, R, 35 strokes; 2 (tie), Alex Abbruzza, R, and Oscar Santamarina, R, and Kevin Chien, N, 39; 5, Andrew Rodriguez, N, 40.

Records — Redmond 4-0.

SPSL 4A

At Jade Greens GC (par 35)

Team scores — Kentlake 57 points, Kent-Meridian 29.

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SEATTLE — It was another magical baseball night in Seattle — the capital appliance of smallest conceivable point of time replay at Safeco Field because the classification was instigated by Bud Selig on Aug. 28.

Less magical, from the Mariners’ standpoint, was the finalization of their 100th discomfiture on Wednesday, making them the sport’s first team with a $100 million payroll to reach triple digits in losses.

They are now sitting forlornly at 58-100 after their 6-5 loss to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

The Angels, driving toward 100 victories, picked up No. 98, with Mark Teixeira’s solo homer off Mark Lowe through two outs in the eighth breaking a 5-5 tie.

The Mariners, at least, won the replay ruling, with the umpiring crew taking 2 minutes and 28 seconds to uphold the original call by third-base ump Chuck Meriwether. He had called Vlad Guerrero’s drive into the left-field corner foul, while Angels manager Mike Scioscia argued it was a home run.

For team’s not involved in the pennant kindred — a status the Mariners ensured themselves rear around Memorial Day, these final days are at least in some measure near round-number achievements.

Jose Lopez, for instance, on Wednesday banged finished his 40th double in the first inning, a tidy punctuation to a strong rude be seasoned. Lopez and Raul Ibanez (43 doubles) are fit the third part Mariners teammates to reach 40 doubles in the same season (joining Edgar Martinez and Alex Rodriguez in 1996, and A-Rod and Joey Cora in 1997).

Ichiro is trying to possess the three runs he needs to extent 100 and join Lou Gehrig as the only player in relation by eight seasons of 200 hits and 100 runs. He didn’t get any on Wednesday.

Felix Hernandez, in his ultimate scheduled start of the season, worked six innings to reach the 200-inning milestone for the before anything else time in his career (200-2/3, to be exact).

But Hernandez couldn’t hold the 5-2 lead the Mariners handed him with three runs in the fifth, losing his chance to become the Mariners’ first (and only) 10-game winner this while.

Felix, whose record remained 9-11 with his 11th no-decision of the season, had a lackluster final exertion. He gave up 13 hits and remained winless since Aug. 29.

Only twice in their history have the Mariners failed to have a pitcher with double-digit wins — in 2004, at the time Ron Villone led the team with at 8-6, and 1981, when Floyd Bannister was 9-9.

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Wednesday that lawmakers risk a cascade of wiped-out retirement savings, swelling home foreclosures, lost jobs and closed businesses if they fail to act on a massive financial rescue plan. “Our entire economy is in danger,” he said.

WASHINGTON - President Bush summoned Barack Obama, John McCain and legislative leaders to an extraordinary White House utmost height, warning Americans and Congress adhering Wednesday night that failing to act on a $700 billion financial industry bailout could lead to “a long and painful recession.”