I admit it. I cringe when reading novels or non-fiction riddled with errors. (I find it hard to ignore spelling and grammatical bloopers on menus, too, but that’s another story.)
Lesson: allow time and money in your project for editing and proofing!
Now here’s something fascinating: Brand Tags. As the site says:
The basic idea of this site is that a brand exists entirely in people's heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is.
What comes to mind when you see the logo for Harley Davidson or Texas Instruments or Saturn? Check out Brand Tags for yourself and you’ll grasp the idea immediately.
When I spot a creative and yet so very simple tool like this, I wonder about using it internally as an adjunct to an employee survey. Some corporate communicators actually do want to know what employees think of the company and its products, as well as its internal programs. Can you imagine a corporation employing something like Brand Tags to gauge employees’ gut feel?
Hat tip to Michael Seaton of the Client Side Blog, who pointed to a post by Seth Godin. Funny enough, I do subscribe to Seth’s blog, but hadn’t read it in a while (did I say that out loud?). Fortunately, I can count on my network – which includes Michael – to point me to the good stuff.
New and would-be podcasters often ask me if running an ad on their show is a good idea. As Shel Holtz would say: “It depends.”
Before you can answer the question for yourself, you have to step back a minute: What is the purpose of your podcast? Do you want to educate your clients? Garner new prospects? Build your professional reputation? Entertain the masses? Or what? If you become a podcaster simply to make a buck, you may be disappointed.
A recent blog post by Eric Eggertson raises the issue of advertising on podcasts.
I am a fan of For Immediate Release and a friend of Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson. As I said in a comment to FIR a while back, I often enjoy the Custom Scoop Media Monitoring Minutes that appear on FIR, and I like some of the creative Ragan spots. Those that aren’t creative are at least informative (especially if you’re in the communications field). So do I mind Shel and Neville running these spots? Not at all. Do I think it’s a good idea for them to earn a few dollars from their podcast, to at least cover some costs? Yes, of course. As a podcaster, I know how much time and energy it takes to produce an information-rich show, which FIR is. I derive lots of value from their twice-weekly podcast, so it’s a fair trade-off to ask me to consume a few short sponsored spots.
I also think that the content of the spots on FIR is aligned with the core message of the show; it’s all about communications. If they were running ads for cars or shampoo, I’d feel differently, I’m sure.
What about ads that aren't short? I agree with Eric on this one. Longer, highly produced spots are a distraction, and devoting even more talk time to discussing the ads on the show (under the guise of being conversational) is even worse. I’d probably fast-forward through them. If they annoyed me enough, I’d stop listening to the podcast in question. I’ve dropped a few shows from my iTunes directory for this very reason.
So let’s get back to the podcaster who’s trying to decide whether to run an ad. Ask yourself this: Is the money you’d earn worth the risk of alienating your listeners? Are the ads relevant to your audience? Is the time devoted to ads just a small slice of the running time of your show? Overall, what do you gain and what do you lose?
When people ask me why I don’t accept ads on the Trafcom News Podcast, my answer is always the same: I am the sponsor of my show. I don’t earn cash from my podcast, but it has opened up many opportunities, helped me to meet some very interesting people, and has indeed generated consulting business for me over the last almost-three years. So, yes, a podcast can be profitable, but not necessarily because of ads.
As Joe Thornley says in his blog post, measurable results in the realm of social media are hard to come by. But guidance is at hand. At the Third Tuesday Toronto meetup on May 20, you can learn from a panel of measurement experts, who’ll tackle this tricky concept: Measurement queen Katie Paine, President of KD Paine and Partners and author of Measuring Public Relationships; Marshall Sponder, the Chair of the Web Analytics Association’s Community and Social Media Committee; and Marcel Lebrun, President of Radian6.
The panelists will be coming to Third Tuesday straight from the Roundtable on Social Media Measurement and Metrics, which Joe has spearheaded.
Visit the meetup page for details. See you there!
Nobody does simple explanations as well as Lee LeFever at Common Craft. If you’re perplexed by podcasting, watch this video for a clear overview of what it’s all about. Then check out the other videos at Common Craft. Pure brilliance.
Terry Fallis of Thornley Fallis and the Inside PR podcast has won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for his novel about Canadian politics, The Best Laid Plans.
Why is this something I’d blog about? Well, Terry has become a friend of mine in Toronto’s social media world. And, he self-published the book after he couldn’t get a publisher to bite, then he podcasted podcast the novel, a chapter at a time, making it freely available. So if you’re trying to get your novel out there for the world to notice, take a page from Terry’s book (OK, not literally).
I loved the story, which I consumed over the Christmas holidays, laughing out loud at times.
Congratulations, Terry! Three questions: When will The Best Laid Plans become a major motion picture? What’s your next book about? Why does everyone think Dave Jones is the funny one on Inside PR?
Now that I can peek out from under the pile of work to be tended to in yet another post-conference period, I can fully reflect on my experience in California last week.
Jen McClure and the team at the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), who ran the New Communications Forum in Santa Rosa, did a wonderful job. In particular, Jen was everywhere, making sure we were all busy, happy and well fed (including this picnic lunch in the garden). Thank you, SNCR!
I can only imagine the difficulty in trying to come up with a program to satisfy everyone, especially when the crowd represents a mixed bag of seasoned social-media pros who are familiar with all the shiny toys, and newbies who aren’t blogging, haven’t heard of Twitter, don’t know how to download a podcast, and aren’t yet monitoring their presence on the Internet.
Phil Gomes, one of the people I finally met in person (along with his lovely wife Leticia), wrote an interesting post about NewComms Forum attendees not seeing the doughnut for the hole: ignoring big-picture issues (like net neutrality) in favour of tactical stuff like the social media news release. Phil is a very smart guy, and I see his point. But let me look at this from another perspective. I too am keenly interested in the issue of net neutrality, and try to keep up to date on its developments in my online and mainstream reading. But I didn’t fly across the continent to learn about net neutrality.
Someone like me, a small-business owner who has to plan for a month to get away from the office (and home!) for a full work week (including two days of travel), wants to come away from a conference with information I can use – not necessarily immediately, but soon. Agency types who have to justify the expense of a conference may be in the same boat. A session like Shel Holtz’s, on “Employees are the Brand,” was perfect in my view, because Shel presented a trend and then backed it up with solid examples. And then there was the panel with Mike Manuel, Jeff Rubenstein and Patrick Seybold, on “An Inside Look at Bringing the Sony PlayStation Blog to Life.” Again, a well-executed talk that was presented as a case study. Great stuff. Ditto Francois Gossieaux’s session on “How to Measure Progress and Success in Business Communities.” A little more esoteric than the others I mentioned, but interesting and valuable.
Attendees like me, who came away from some sessions scratching their heads, might have been confused by the names of the sessions listed in the program. If I’d known that “Using Social Networks to Build Your Professional and Personal Brand” was actually “LinkedIn 101,” I would have skipped it. Perhaps we need longer blurbs to explain what the sessions are about, to help us choose from among five tracks. Overall, there was a lot of excellent content, but it was hard to decide where to go at any given hour.
Everyone talks about the real-life networking at these events. And it’s true. I loved catching up with people I’ve schmoozed with before, and meeting the faces I only know online, like Kami Watson Huyse, Jim Long, Joseph Jaffe, and, at long last, “Professor” Sallie Goetsch, someone I’ve been acquainted with online for about three years (pictured in her Podcast Asylum coat). I won’t name the other people I was delighted to meet, because I know I’ll leave someone out.
Others more erudite than I have reported on the conference. If you’re a conference organizer, I’d love to hear your take on designing sessions to meet broad audiences, and on writing program copy.
When I first started podcasting, I was concerned about my RSS feed and whether it was valid, especially for iTunes. Fortunately, there's a handy tool called Feed Validator that can flag problems in your feed. (Of course, you have to know how to fix them!) If you're using the combination of TypePad and Feedburner, as I am, the whole feed business is actually pretty straightforward.
Most of the time.
Yesterday I posted episode 74 of the Trafcom News Podcast. I was pleased with the interviews in it, and eager to get it online, so I did my usual series of steps after editing and mixing:
So I was done. Or so I thought.
Later in the day, Corey Taratuta, who produces the Irish Fireside Podcast, sent me an email to say that he had seen my blog post, but that my podcast wasn't yet available in iTunes. Thinking that iTunes was slow, I pinged them. (If you don't know how to do this, read these simple instructions.) Still no go. Then I noticed that the Blubrry player on my site and on the Blubrry site wasn't featuring my latest episode either.
So I went back to basics and validated my feed. I couldn't remember the last time I'd validated it. For months and months, I had really forgotten about the good ol' feed. Well, after running Feed Validator, I discovered an error in my code. A very silly mistake: an extra space in the file name for my MP3 file. It was odd because you could still click on the link and retrieve the MP3 file, but iTunes and Blubrry didn't like the invalid feed. So I quickly fixed it and thought everything was fine.
But the podcasting gods were conspiring against me (and every other podcaster on TypePad!). Today either TypePad or Feedburner experienced some kind of outage that caused my feed to run all of two lines. That's a little short!
The fix is now in progress. By the time you read this, all should be well.
Lesson one learned: Always validate your feed!
Lesson two learned: Podcasting friends are terrific because they look out for each other. Thanks, Corey!
