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

I 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.

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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