Socialmedia.biz Archives: September 2009

September 30, 2009

The Top Five Misconceptions About Social Media

The Social Media Campaign by Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth 2008

Ayelet NoffIn the years that I’ve been involved in social media, I have heard so many mis­con­cep­tions and myths about social media that I am cer­tain this arti­cle is long over­due. Here is a list of the top five mis­con­cep­tions regard­ing social media:

Mis­con­cep­tion #1: Social media is only right for cer­tain brands

Often peo­ple ask me: “Is social media only right for web ser­vices or for ‘cool’ prod­ucts?” The answer is no. Social media is right for every brand as long as the brand is able to find its tar­get audi­ence within a cer­tain plat­form and converse/interact with it in an effec­tive man­ner. Of course it may be excit­ing to do a mar­ket­ing cam­paign for Apple than for Charles Schwab but for either one of those brands a tar­geted social media cam­paign within social net­works and the blo­gos­phere can bring amaz­ing results as far as: Brand aware­ness, Over­all buzz around the brand, traf­fic, cus­tomer loy­alty and ulti­mately revenue.

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September 28, 2009

Premiumcast: Making Money from Podcasting

Paul Colligan, CEO of Premiumcast

Paul Col­li­gan, CEO of Premiumcast.com

David SparkThis inter­view is part of my series “Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing” (read sum­mary “9 Suc­cess­ful Tech­niques for Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing”) where I inter­view pod­cast­ers who are actu­ally gen­er­at­ing rev­enue from their pod­casts. There are many tech­niques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s mak­ing money from podcasting.

Build an audi­ence and sell pre­mium podcasts

Paul Col­li­gan is the CEO of Premiumcast.com, a com­pany that builds and sells an RSS-subscriber man­age­ment tech­nol­ogy. It’s dif­fer­ent than tra­di­tional pod­cast­ing in that Pre­mi­um­cast cre­ates per­son­al­ized RSS feeds. With tra­di­tional pod­cast­ing, the pod­caster sends out a sin­gle RSS feed that every­one sub­scribes to. The pub­lisher has no con­trol over that rela­tion­ship with that lis­tener. The lis­tener is in com­plete con­trol, choos­ing when to turn you on and off.

PremiumcastWith a per­son­al­ized Pre­mi­um­cast RSS feed pod­cast pub­lish­ers can con­trol the rela­tion­ship with every sin­gle lis­tener. And one of the pri­mary things you can do with that con­trolled rela­tion­ship is charge for the pod­cast. Since it’s per­son­al­ized, you know the sta­tus of every sin­gle sub­scriber. For exam­ple, if sub­scriber #423 is up for renewal and they don’t pay, you can turn off their spe­cific feed, but keep #424 going since they did renew.

Pub­lish­ers also have con­trol of how pod­casts are deliv­ered for new sub­scribers.  With tra­di­tional pod­cast­ing, when a per­son sub­scribes, the first pro­gram they get is the one that’s most recently pub­lished. With a Pre­mi­um­cast, when you get a new sub­scriber, you can begin their pod­cast feed at episode #1 and deliver it sequen­tially over time — once a week, once every day, whatever.

Inter­view (Time: 12:37)

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There’s a whole host of other per­son­al­ized con­trol mech­a­nisms you can deliver or impose in terms of types of con­tent (e.g. audio, video, PDF) and tim­ing of the con­tent. It’s essen­tially up to the pub­lisher how they want to man­age their ser­vice for their customers.

Pre­mi­um­cast does not man­age the publisher’s pay­ment nor take a per­cent­age of what the pub­lisher charges. Pre­mi­um­casts are sim­ply a flat fee. The cost is $97 a month for the stan­dard ver­sion and $147 a month for the unbranded ver­sion. The unbranded ver­sion means you can erase all men­tions of Pre­mi­um­cast on your feed and on your site, and make it appear 100 per­cent your own.

How to cre­ate a pod­cast that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for

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September 23, 2009

Duct Tape Marketing: Making Money from Podcasting

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

David SparkThis inter­view is part of my series “Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing” (read sum­mary “9 Suc­cess­ful Tech­niques for Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing”) where I inter­view pod­cast­ers who are actu­ally gen­er­at­ing rev­enue from their pod­casts. There are many tech­niques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s mak­ing money from podcasting.

Build your brand to sell your services

Duct Tape MarketingJohn Jantsch is a mar­ket­ing and dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy coach and author of “Duct Tape Mar­ket­ing”, which is also the name of his pod­cast and his com­pany. He started the Duct Tape Mar­ket­ing brand, a tem­plate for small busi­ness mar­ket­ing, about seven years ago and two years after that, launched his pod­cast. Jantsch is amazed how just hav­ing a show, even though com­pletely unknown at the time and with very few lis­ten­ers, gave him tremen­dous access to well known peo­ple and authors. It was a great way to make an intro­duc­tion. He sim­ply sent an email that said, “Inter­view request.” Not know­ing who Jantsch was at the time, many well known peo­ple, includ­ing social media lumi­nar­ies such as Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, agreed to be on his pod­cast. Those inter­views ini­ti­ated rela­tion­ships that resulted in both Godin and Kawasaki con­tribut­ing to Jantsch’s book.

Inter­view (Time: 9:51)

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September 23, 2009

The new Second Life reinvents itself

What an amazing space to have a conversation
Lin­den Lab CEO Mark King­don and me chatting

Second LifeChris AbrahamAt the end of this past June, I wrote a sim­ple blog post for Dig­i­tal­Next address­ing why I per­son­ally believe that the cur­rent hype around Twit­ter will be more sus­tain­able than the short-lived Sec­ond Life craze. Bot­tom line, “Twit­ter is light, cheap, open and per­ma­nent, whereas Sec­ond Life is heavy, expen­sive, closed and ephemeral.

Twenty-one com­ments and a series of response posts later, I was invited by Sec­ond Life roy­alty to return to the same vir­tual world that I stopped vis­it­ing back in 2007. My com­plaint, and the rea­son why I never returned, is that the client (the “viewer” in SL par­lance) was too resource-intensive and quite incom­pat­i­ble with my exec­u­tive lap­top that favored light­weight and slim­ness over horse­power and graph­ics cards. Not to men­tion it required too much band­width, prefer­ably a LAN con­nec­tion instead of Wi-Fi.

Well, after vis­it­ing the site sev­eral times, noth­ing has changed in terms of the resource-intensity. How­ever, this post is not going to be about the bar­ri­ers to entry but rather what one finds once inside the walled gar­den of Sec­ond Life.

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September 21, 2009

The Social Media Marketing Handbook

http://oreilly.com/catalog/covers/9781593271992_cat.gifChris AbrahamWhen I started my social media mar­ket­ing firm three years ago I had an advan­tage. By autumn, 2006, I had passed through New Media Strate­gies as Tech­nol­ogy Strate­gist and Edelman’s elite Pub­lic Affairs Online Advo­cacy team. Even so, my busi­ness part­ner, Mark Har­ri­son, and I made a lot of mis­takes, walked through mine fields, and even­tu­ally started tak­ing more hills than we lost.  I started Abra­ham Har­ri­son almost exactly three years ago and I would have really appre­ci­ated Friends with Ben­e­fits: A Social Media Mar­ket­ing Hand­book by Dar­ren Bare­foot and Julie Szabo. Actu­ally, I am kind of bummed that I didn’t write this book myself because I cer­tainly could have and should have — but I didn’t. (Via Mar­ket­ing Con­ver­sa­tion)

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September 21, 2009

Helping a reporter out is big business for HARO

Chris AbrahamBril­liant inven­tions are usu­ally both sim­ple and ele­gant. Cre­at­ing and main­tain­ing a daily spon­sored email newslet­ter that reaches influ­en­tial movers and shak­ers is noth­ing new — it has com­fort­ably existed since the early 90s. What Peter Shankman did, in cre­at­ing Help a Reporter Out (HARO), was some­thing supremely sim­ple, grace­ful and gen­er­ous, meet­ing a need that nobody even knew was so lack­ing in an envi­ron­ment where busi­ness as usual wasn’t work­ing any­more.  Just add HARO, where work­ing jour­nal­ists are con­nected with experts in a num­ber of fields to the tune of almost 100,000 sub­scribers and growing.

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September 21, 2009

Survival Guide Chapter 5: Podcasts, vidcasts and Webcasts

survival-guide-toDeltina Hay Here is part 5 of the series I will post over the next few months based on chap­ters from my new book, A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion.

This book is meant to be a guide to build­ing an opti­mized foun­da­tion in social Web for begin­ners and advanced users alike.

Chap­ter 5 of the book dis­cusses in detail pod­casts, vid­casts and Web­casts, includ­ing what they are and how to cre­ate and pub­lish your own. This chap­ter pro­vides tips for prepar­ing a script and key terms, as well as tips for opti­miz­ing pod­casts for search engines and pod­cast directories.

The fol­low­ing excerpts are from A Sur­vival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Opti­miza­tion: Strate­gies, Tac­tics, and Tools for Suc­ceed­ing in the Social Web by Deltina Hay

Cre­at­ing pod­cast episodes

Prepar­ing the Script and Key Terms

Below is a typ­i­cal pod­cast script. You can get royalty-free music for your pod­cast episodes at a num­ber of sites on the Inter­net, such as Pod­safeAu­dio. Always make sure that the music you use is royalty-free and offered freely for use in pod­casts, and give the author credit. This script out­line can also be found on the resource CD.

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September 19, 2009

Pregtastic: Making Money from Podcasting

Royce Hidreth, producer of the Pregtastic podcast

Royce Hidreth, pro­ducer of the Preg­tas­tic podcast

David SparkThis inter­view is part of a series “Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing” (read sum­mary “9 Suc­cess­ful Tech­niques for Mak­ing Money from Pod­cast­ing”) where I inter­view pod­cast­ers who are actu­ally gen­er­at­ing rev­enue from their pod­casts. There are many tech­niques, and here’s one person’s tale of how they’re mak­ing money from podcasting.

Get your own sponsors

Pregtastic podcastRoyce Hil­dreth is the pro­ducer of the Preg­tas­tic pod­cast, the weekly audio pod­cast by preg­nant women, for preg­nant women. While he works with Wiz­zard Media, a pod­cast­ing ad net­work, which can sell adver­tis­ing for his show, he pri­mar­ily seeks out his own spon­sor­ships. Hil­dreth and I talked about how he goes about land­ing adver­tis­ers and what tech­niques work the best.

In gen­eral, adver­tis­ers want exclu­siv­ity on the pod­cast, and they want more pres­ence than just a pre-roll ad or an in-show insert ad. Podcasting’s inter­ac­tiv­ity is often what attracts adver­tis­ers to the medium. The for­mat allows for some give-and-take play with the hosts, and that adds dynamic value for the spon­sor. It’s unlike other stream­ing media such as radio or TV, which are still often stuck on just sell­ing inter­sti­tial advertisements.

Inter­view (Time: 12:44)

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Hil­dreth says he’s look­ing to build long term part­ner­ships, ide­ally as long as a year. He wants to move beyond the sim­ple CPM (cost per thou­sand) model and offer more value to adver­tis­ers such as putting employ­ees on the pod­cast, and pos­si­bly pro­duce videos of the sponsor’s prod­ucts that would live along­side the podcast.

Beyond seek­ing spon­sors, Hil­dreth also uses the beg­ware model, which used to gen­er­ate $150 a month in rev­enue. Unfor­tu­nately, and pos­si­bly because of the econ­omy, that’s dropped to a much lower level. In an effort to bring those dol­lars back up, hosts have stopped say­ing the show is free and they’re now say­ing that the show costs a donation.

Hil­dreth doesn’t make much money from the pod­cast. The spon­sor­ships and dona­tions are only off­set­ting costs, such as Web host­ing and hir­ing a baby sit­ter for when he and his wife need to go to the stu­dio to pro­duce the podcast.

Lis­ten to my inter­view with Hil­dreth as he talks about main­tain­ing the cred­i­bil­ity of the con­tent of Preg­tas­tic while also seek­ing out sponsorships.

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September 18, 2009

Social journalism: Using social networks to build community

JD LasicaHere’s the slide pre­sen­ta­tion I gave yes­ter­day at the Pacific North­west News­pa­per Asso­ci­a­tion Sum­mit of news­pa­per pub­lish­ers and ad man­agers. My talk turned out to be 80 min­utes long.

A half dozen news­pa­per exec­u­tives thanked me for the pre­sen­ta­tion after­ward, so the mes­sage of change is res­onat­ing in some quar­ters. The ques­tion is whether enough pub­lish­ers will have the courage to turn their bat­tle­ships into speed­boats and green-light the whole­sale exper­i­men­ta­tion needed to help news­room jour­nal­ists engage with their communities.

So far, no media com­pa­nies have con­tacted Socialmedia.biz for con­sult­ing work (yes, we’re very busy with clients in other sec­tors), so I’m doubtful.

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September 18, 2009

AP News Registry aims at most flagrant infringers

AP IP

More details about Asso­ci­ated Press’s move to pro­tect its con­tent unveiled at Seat­tle summit

JD LasicaI left the Pacific North­west News­pa­per Asso­ci­a­tion Sum­mit of news­pa­per pub­lish­ers and ad man­agers yes­ter­day just as two exec­u­tives from the Asso­ci­ated Press were wind­ing up their pre­sen­ta­tion on the new AP News Registry.

The new ini­tia­tive, announced in July, con­tains two key components:

• All AP sto­ries will be released online wrapped in a new microso­for­mat that includes rights info, who cre­ated it, etc.

• The wrap­per also will carry a built-in “dig­i­tal bea­con,” or tracker, to mon­i­tor use of the con­tent by oth­ers to track usage and com­pli­ance. (As I under­stand this, the con­tent is not encrypted but car­ries a light­weight bug technology.)

As a social media con­sul­tant and jour­nal­ist who spoke at the sum­mit just an hour ear­lier, I asked whether the dia­logue and AP’s plans were pub­lic infor­ma­tion, and Kevin Walsh, AP’s Kevin Walsh, Vice Pres­i­dent of Mar­ket­ing, responded, “It is now.”

AP’s plans were met with the pred­i­ca­ble neg­a­tive reac­tion in the blo­gos­phere (see, for exam­ple, the com­ments at bot­tom of this arti­cle). But AP should be cred­ited with its trans­parency dur­ing this process, and from what I heard at the sum­mit, its plans make a lot of sense. Thou­sands of sites are unfairly pig­gy­back­ing off the work of jour­nal­ists, and if news­pa­pers and news orga­ni­za­tions like the AP are to sur­vive, there has to be a mech­a­nism for compensation.

As an inter­nal AP doc­u­ment titled Pro­tect, Point, Pay – An Asso­ci­ated Press Plan for Reclaim­ing News put it: “The evi­dence is every­where: orig­i­nal news con­tent is being scraped, syn­di­cated and mon­e­tized with­out fair com­pen­sa­tion to those who pro­duce report and ver­ify it.”

Fair use won’t be easy to define

It’s a topic I have some famil­iar­ity with, hav­ing writ­ten Dark­net and reported on Hol­ly­wood stu­dios and media com­pa­nies’ reluc­tance to embrace their dig­i­tal future. At the time I wrote the book, there was wide­spread music file shar­ing (there still is) but also an increas­ing recog­ni­tion that the orig­i­nal Nap­ster was mis­guided and the music indus­try needed to devise legit­i­mate forms of com­pen­sa­tion for the artists. (Apple’s iTunes and Rhap­sody are among the com­pa­nies still try­ing to cre­ate a fric­tion­less busi­ness model.)

My view on the new AP ini­tia­tive is sim­i­lar: Some reuse of AP’s con­tent is socially and legally accept­able, but there needs to be lim­its. What will mat­ter, in the end, is how this plan will be car­ried out by AP and the cooperative’s mem­bers. If they go too far and claim “all rights reserved” around the first two sen­tences of every AP arti­cle, the blow­back will be enor­mous. Fair use exists, and in the past the AP has paid too lit­tle heed to those con­cerns — even though AP reporters rely on the same fair use doc­trine in their reports nearly every day. (For exam­ple, I didn’t get the AP’s per­mis­sion to use the graphic at the top of this post.)

Todd B. Mar­tin, AP’s Vice Pres­i­dent, Tech­nol­ogy Devel­op­ment, reas­sured the pub­lish­ers in the room that the intent of the news reg­istry isn’t to go after every blog­ger who bor­rows a snip­pet of an AP news story.

“We’re focused on remov­ing the ambi­gu­ity around the use of our con­tent.”
— Todd B. Mar­tin, VP for tech­nol­ogy, AP

Instead, Mar­tin said, “We’re not going to stop a blog­ger from cut and past­ing an arti­cle. But we are giv­ing you vis­i­bil­ity into the 20,000 other domains where your con­tent appeared and the top users and where it was mon­e­tized. So you can get a list of the top 100 [infring­ing] sites with over 100,000 views, and then facil­i­tate busi­ness devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties” with the sites in ques­tion. The reg­istry, Mar­tin said, would help cre­ate new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties and prod­ucts and also but­tress more rig­or­ous legal enforce­ment of the AP’s intel­lec­tual property.

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JD Lasica
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