In 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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Paul Colligan, CEO of Premiumcast.com

This 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.

With 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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John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

This 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

John 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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Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon and me chatting

At 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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When 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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Brilliant 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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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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Royce Hidreth, producer of the Pregtastic podcast

This 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

Royce 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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Here'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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