I enjoyed Godin’s Meatball Sundae and highly recommend it, with a few disclaimers. It is intended for marketers only, not just anyone who’s interested in social media. It would also be helpful to have a little bit of a background in social media before you read it.
The subtitle to Seth Godin’s book is “Is Your Marketing Out of Sync?” That’s really what the book is about, Godin points out that the world’s economy has favored meatball producers over the last 50 years. In this case a meatball is a mass produced item that’s designed to be universally popular. Ford, GE, IBM even Dell and others have become accomplished at producing these items at low cost. While there’s nothing wrong with this in Godin’s eyes, the meatballs do not lend themselves well to the new social media and web 2.0 marketing environment (the sundae). On their own whip cream, chocolate sauce and meatballs are all good things, but they’re not intended to be combined. Godin suggests ways you can change your company (or start a new one) that’s more like ice cream and fits well under the sundae.
His exploration of the concept is interesting. It reinforces one of the golden truths of technology, “you can’t just add a transformational technology to your portfolio.” Meatball companies that hire a couple “social media consultants” and build a Facebook page are destined to fail, but their failure is similar to many adoption failures. The same principle applies to people who tried to virtualize their servers on VMWare without changing how they delivered IT services failed. The same principal applies to people who try to add a collaboration tool (e.g. wiki or even IM) without changing the way their business operates. Does anyone know of a book that’s written about this concept? One that details what makes up a “transformational” technology and a generic formula for how to identify and implement them?
