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Comment by Ardit20 | Hacker News Reader

So this guy is a marketer. His posts are no longer than 500 words. So he sits on his computer for 20 minutes has a rant and he gets on the front page of hacker news. Has he said anything?

Oh I just work here, he sounds like a 10 year old kid having a rant about his friend.

Let me refute him. I used to work in a call centre. Some people there were pretty irresponsible, like not taking someone off the list when asked. I just did my job and got paid, so if someone wanted to be taken off the list and not be called I was glad to do it. So, I am me, I am not my company, I am an individual, and I take responsibility for my own actions, not the companies action, unless I am the CEO.

Now, what can be done about these marketers?

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Godin isn't writing about some call centre. He isn't writing about people working at some random company. He's writing about people working at a brand. And he provides a reason for why that brand may be failing. For anyone working to establish or consolidate a brand, this is a valuable insight: your employees are an important part of your brand. Make sure they care.

This partly holds for any company: if a colleague of mine delivers bad work, people will throw nasty glances at me when they hear I work at the same company. Now you can go all "they shouldn't do that" on me, but that's just sticking your head deeper in the sand and refusing to acknowledge this reality, in which you live with people that think and judge that way. Therefore, I will criticise any colleague whose work isn't up to par.

IMHO, if the brand you work at wants you to take responsibility for the actions of any and all other people and other departments at the brand, they should pay you accordingly. But they don't ever do that, do they?

However you look at it, the responsibility is with the board and top management. Not the people who "just work there" and are neither paid nor trusted with the kind of responsibility that Seth Godin is talking about.

I think Seth has a good point here. Employees should, at least to a degree, feel a pride in the company they work for, and if they do not they should find somewhere else to work (or at least try to.)

But more than that, when you are doing something on behalf of and in the name of a company then you are that company's representative, its "face" to those you are dealing with. As such, you can expect to receive both credit and blame for everything attached to that company and you are responsible for doing everything within your authority to fix problems. That limit may be nothing more than putting the person you are dealing with in the correct department, but if that is it you should pass along the contact information (in both directions!) respectfully and courteously, not dismissively with "I just work here."

As a manager, I would be unhappy to ever hear one of my employees say that no matter what their job. If it was a customer facing employee, then (depending on the nuances of the circumstances) it could easily call for a formal reprimand for damaging the companies reputation and being dismissive to customers.

Employees should, at least to a degree, feel a pride in the company they work for, and if they do not they should find somewhere else to work (or at least try to.)

I think he meant people working for companies who actually have a bad name. If you know the company you work for engages in some shady practises, you shouldn't dismiss that with "I just work here", but consider finding another workplace instead.

I know a guy who works for Halliburton. He's a geologist in Wyoming. He catches a ton of flack for even being associated with them.

I could picture this comment chain almost as soon as the story was posted. I'm with Ardit20, had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant, but when people see sethgodin.typepad.com, it becomes a valuable insight.

had anyone else posted the story, it would have been dismissed as a rant

And that would have been a mistake, because this isn't really a rant. Its formal structure is that of a complaint, but in fact it is a short essay, in complaint form, about the nature of branding and company culture.

Why doesn't this count as a rant? There's no hard and fast rule. But one sign is that the company is unnamed and unidentifiable. There is a very good chance that it is fictional, or that it is a composite archetype that doesn't correspond to any specific company. None of which would change the meaning of the essay in the least.

Stop playing semantic games and just agree that this post by Godin sucks.

In fact, I think that on HN a sethgodin post is more likely to piss people off.

BTW, I think that it's a bad sign how quickly these shallow dismissive comments rise to the top here. If you prefer arguments to be presented in a a logical form fine, but the information remains the same. It's not patentable, but it's worth thinking about if you feel like thinking about that sort of thing. Here's the translation:

A brand is presented as a brand. A way of of thinking about a collection of things (people, products, procedures, history) as a single thing. It is the psychological equivalent to a legal entity. A kind of Anthropomorphism. You can say: "Apple (the brand) did X" when obviously the reality is that a bunch of people or policies 'do'. This is a useful metaphor for letting customers interact with you. When you leverage a brand, you are working this metaphor to your advantage. But you can't say we (the brand) have excellent customer service & still say they (individuals making it up) are responsible for that bad product.

In that case, would it be fair to say that Seth knows how to build a brand? :)

I rarely learn something deep or insightful from his posts, except perhaps the power of a consistent message. But you can't deny that, at least when it comes to promoting the brand Seth Godin, he's pretty good.

Had anyone else posted this story, then nobody would make such silly accusations as suggesting that another commenter responds in a particular way merely out of adoration of the author of the story.

For the record: before I started reading Hacker News, I didn't know who Seth Godin was. I've never read any of his books and I haven't read any of his blogs besides the ones linked here, nor do I intend to. I'm not really interested in marketing and I share the general adverseness programmers feel versus 'marketing types'.

All of that doesn't mean that the guy doesn't make sensible points. It certainly doesn't mean we should deride him for stating 'obvious' things in a ranting manner, where we would loudly applaud the exact same behaviour in a software engineer. Hell, we do that half the time when Linus goes batshit again.

And that's a problem with us, not with the valuable rant. This will get philosophical, sorry.

When we hear a "wise person" say something, we assume it has meaning, no matter how meaningless it may seem. This is why Zen koans are meditated upon, while incoherent babblings of toddlers are not. This says nothing about the objective value of the koan or the babbling, but rather the subjective value it holds to the listener. The "wisdom" metadata, the color of the text if you will, makes it valuable in that it forces our brain to create an insight for itself that could be rationalized to fit the content of the rant. It becomes a sounding board, a way of finding inner knowledge you weren't consciously aware of. This is valuable, at least to me.

There's a difference being unable and powerless to do something and coming across as if you just don't care. Saying that you're just doing your job and not attempting (or even pretending) to do something about it it comes across as the latter and a major turnoff to both your customers and business partners.

In this case it sounds like this company was asking Godin for a favor - sure you could call it a rant, but it's also pretty fair given that it's not like he went to them, they went to him (which would make the attitude especially galling).

When you start saying stuff like 'it's not my department' when you're asking for a favor from someone else, it's also saying that you have little to no pride about the company that you work for and I think that's his point. If you care so little, life's short. Why wouldn't you find somewhere better to work (or better yet, start your own business that you can be proud of)?

I often interact with people who work for corporations like that. They usually don't care about the company because the company won't acknowledge any extra effort on their part. All that's expected from them is to comply with what they are asked to do.

If person A calls me to do X, from the point of view of the company all that matters is that X is done. If A comes back with a complaint from me about Y, from the point of view of the company A is wasting her time.

He says "if you are not proud, go somewhere else" but that's wrong. She may need the salary and be satisfied with her conditions. Who says she has to be proud? He's the one with the problem. Seth, if you are not happy then do business with a different company.

Which is exactly the point. I don't think this essay is aimed to employees. It's for employers.

It's aimed at both. The people he was talking to shouldn't have said "I just work here"; they should have said "I'm sorry about that; I can't fix it, but I'll try to make sure that the people who should be able to fix it hear that you're not happy about it." Even if they dropped it from that point, it would have left a better impression of the brand on Seth than the "I just work here" did.

Me? I suspect that the brand is Real. I never get unsubscribed from their "game" spam despite having submitted about 20 unsubscribe requests.

Damn straight about this. Last week I went through hell talking to Acer about the battery on my A1 netbook. Their script-driven customer service had no flexibility and has cost Acer a customer for life -- and any recommendations that I'd ever have for their products. They simply told me "no one in the company can do [what I asked, which was quite reasonable]".

Later, after I got someone who wasn't based in India (or somewhere like that), I learned that they couldn't do what I wanted because they had eliminated the positions that would have enabled it. If the humandroids in the first customer service had demonstrated any creativity or flexibility to find out why, I wouldn't be as angry at Acer as I am. As it is, they've demonstrated that as a company they care nothing about customer service.

This is why I feel that Godin is a niche marketer. When he posts these 'gems', he's speaking to a narrow demographic. Those people who have some sort of vision and are 'still' trying to change the world. Most people are content with their jobs, the security it gives, and the money they take home. Seth is speaking to the ones who want to work for something they believe in and actually do choose what company they send resumes to because it matters to them who and why they will lend their talents to.

This is where I'll sound like a Sethapologist: Some say anybody could have written this and that anybody could have ranted and been voted down here, but since it's Seth then the we pay attention. But has anybody really 'ranted' with the kind of consistency and proven results like he has? That's why people listen, and tho it's easy to dismiss what he says as 'just common sense', there will always be those who look to him and his words as inspiration and would have a seed of good management planted in them by it. In that case, he's already done his job and achieved the goal of his post. Something few of us can say we've done.

It's been more than a decade since I was in my 20's working a job because I needed the money yet still trying to hang on my ideals for dear life. Sometimes that's what it takes, someone to remind you that it still matters.

Your blog, your tweets, your linkedin profile: your personal brand.

I'll take a punt and say nearly everyone here (or at least those involved in a startup) is a marketer in some capacity.

You've contradicted, not refuted, him. And you're wrong.

In each and every external interaction you are the brand. If you're speaking directly to me you might as well be CEO because I couldn't care less if you're the tea lady - your job to delight me. When you fail I'll blame the brand. I might even post a rant about it.

Heh, when I used to cold call for some crappy call centre they told us NEVER to take the names off the database.

However I could see the damage this caused so I deleted from the db whenever I could see that further calling the said individual would result in "rage".

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