Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Syndicate Wed. Afternoon: Building a Business Case for Podcasting

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Building a Business Case for Podcasting. Eric Schwartzman, moderator. Panel: Heather Green, BusinessWeek, Mikel Ellcessor, WNYC, and Jeff Burkett, Washingtonpost.com.

Podcasting: "Makes sense. Do we do it now or in 6 months?"

Schwartzman’s opening remarks are on his blog.

This panel did a great job covering how clued-in big media companies can integrate podcasting (and blogs) into their mix.

Mike Ellcessor from WNYC covered how his station saw podcasting as a response to the increasing fragmentation of radio. They initially viewed as podcasting as an experiment. They had a number of programs that they thought might reach beyond the usual geographic WNYC audience; in particular, On the Media, nationally syndicated by NPR, is produced by WNYC.  They also podcast segments from some of their daily talk shows. Primary goal was to increase their 1:1 relationships with their audience, which makes sense for viewer-supported television 🙂

Jeff Burkett manages the online properties for the Washington Post, Newsweek and Slate. His group builds online vehicles that must meet the needs of both the edit and advertising sides of the business, so figuring out how to do advertising within the podcast was one of the objectives.  He commented that he is in the mass media (versus long tail) so a different set of economics applies.

[Comment:  In fact, all three of the panelists here are mass media. They have both different resources and requirements than an entrepreneur or hobbyist considering a podcast as a revenue or brand opportunity or just something fun to do.]

Back to the panel. Burkett says that they just appended traditional radio and tv spots to the pod- and vid- casts, a solution that he hopes to replace with something more tailored to the new media as time goes on.

Heather Green from BusinessWeek,one of the co-authors of the well-known May 05 BW cover story on blogging,  then talked about her involvement with blogs and podcasting. Since she is on the editorial side of the book, her perspective was slightly different from the previous two speakers. . The economics, at least vis her own podcast,  aren’t  her main interest [Comment: although it might be the publisher’s 🙂 ] For her, podcasting is an experiment; "you have to try it." She considers podcasting a disruptive technology that changes the landscape whether or not it has a business model.

Schwartzman asked the panelists how they built the business case for podcasting.

Ellcessor said they knew there was interest outside the NY area for their radio programming. Podcasting was cheap and easy for them. They also kept it in an experimental context, which let it succeed without high expectations.

Burkett related much the same thing — podcasting was considered an experiment.

Green didn’t have to build a business case. She talked about how she viewed the three publishing vehicles she has available for her content: her blog, her podcast and the print publication. She mostly uses the blog for random stuff that doesn’t fit into the print story and to report on interesting  "meet and greets" that don’t fit into any current projects. On the podcast, she interviews interesting people, including past interview subjects. One dilemma: how much does she hold back for a story, how much does she put out there.

The entire panel talked a bit about the valuation of podcast advertising.  Prevalent models,  CPM and sponsorship. Green said she thought podcasts will be sold as part of a package of multiple media. This makes sense to me. She also commented that very few people are going to make any money at podcasting. My opinion: I think it will depend on how you define "make money." If we define it as purely ad-supported, she’s probably right. If we look at podcasting as part of a larger package (or brand), I think it can substantially contribute to revenue. Just hard to measure.

Questions from the audience.

Sam Whitmore asked if they knew what percentage of audience listened on an iPod or MP3 player versus a computer? No one did, but there was a lively exchange about the value of knowing how the audience is listening. The iPod listener is potentially more valuable than the multi-tasking PC listener.

Someone asked WNYC, how do they prevent podcasting from damaging their fundraising efforts. The answer was pretty much, we can’t completely, but we went into it with our eyes wide-open, and try to live by the creed, "first do no harm."

What’s the ideal length? No answer to this one, not even from these experts. The WNYC podcasts are created from radio inventory; On the Media is its normal 59 minutes and the talk show segments range from 20-40 minutes.

For Burkett (WaPost)  it depends on what the podcast is about. For example, he hates that Onion Radio News is only 30 seconds, feels it should be 5 minutes.

What instincts do you have about the listener, common traits? Mike: time pressed; Jeff: agreed time pressed, therefore harder to reach on radio and TV; Heather: classic early adopter, highly educated, high income/net worth, more women than we thought.

Finally, can the little podcaster compete with mainstream media? Panel thinks yes. Mike: talent will prevail, as long as you master the basics, offer a certain level of sound quality. Jeff: it is all about people and their passions.

The last question was an off-topic question for Heather Green related to a recent article "Is it 1998 again?"

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More Syndicate coverage: Syndicate and me. Syndicate and marketers.

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Home stretch. Before I get to the Wed. afternoon sessions, a word about why I attended Syndicate.

To start with, I was  personally interested in the topics, especially podcasting. So when Corante issued the call to its blogger partners to attend Syndicate and blog the event, I jumped on it. As a small business, I can afford the trip to NY or the conference registration, but not both. Covering the event was a win-win. I covered my trip, but didn’t have to pay for registration. I’m very grateful to Corante and IDG for the opportunity.

In return, I am taking the commitment to blog the event very seriously. I didn’t miss many sessions and hope that my marketing and PR colleagues are enjoying the reports. Given comments about how few marketing and PR folk (versus tech) attended the show,  I’m glad someone with the marketing perspective is writing up the event in detail. Why? 

Because change is a slow process. Marketers and PR folk who haven’t yet made the leap into the blogosphere may be thinking hard about it, but still reluctant. For whatever reason. They aren’t going to attend a conference about syndication, ’cause it just doesn’t seem relevant  in their day to day jobs. Probably isn’t. Even if they are blogging or podcasting, the conference definitely has the feel of a tech (versus marketing or business) oriented event. Cause it kind of is…

But… many of the topics that were discussed are relevant to the  issues on the marketing and communications plate. I hope that my blog entries about it may spark someone — to try something new, attend the next conference, start their own conference, push hard at their industry associations, maybe even just to finally start their own blog.

So, if client work willing and the creek don’t rise, I’ll get the rest of my summaries up by the weekend.

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Syndicate Wednesday Morning

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First things first, my number one fan says maybe I was too hard on Amanda Congdon in my post about Tuesday’s keynote session. Which was not my intent. I enoy Rocketboom, think she is tremendously talented and wish her and her colleagues all the success in the world. I just didn’t get a lot out of her session, and thought it was a bit basic for the Syndicate audience. But she clearly has a lot of passion for what she is doing, and others did enjoy it, so there you have it.

On to Wednesday’s sessions.

Steve Gillmor’s "It’s the Gestures, Stupid" — The title of this session is homage to James Carville’s "It’s the economy, stupid" phrase from the first Clinton election oh so many years ago. As Gillmor pointed out, Carville’s "stupid" (and his as well presumably) was self-reflective — a reminder to himself of what was important, not a commentary on others. Nonetheless, there were quite a lot of us in the room with looks of total incomprehension during Gillmor’s talk. Who all felt a lot better when Doc Searls commented in his closing session that even he doesn’t fully understand what Gillmor is talking about.

So, I am not even going to try and summarize what Gillmor covered in his session, other than to tell you that I *think* the gestures concept and Gillmor’s Gesture Bank (www.gesturebank.com) is an open source model for the aggregation of meta data. I’ve signed up for the public beta because I am now curious. I’m sure more than a few folks did the same. And perhaps that was the primary goal all along. We don’t get it yet, but we will…..

Gillmor was followed by Steven Schwartz of Reuters, "Syndicating the Publishing World." This was a typical polished corporate presentation, with slides and all, that might as well have been titled "Why Reuters loves the Web."  Schwartz was extremely good at staying on message — I lost track of the number of times he told us that Reuters is the "world’s largest news agency" 🙂 

Thinking about it afterward, the two sessions – Gillmor and Schwartz – couldn’t have been more different. The contrast between Gillmor’s informal style and Schwartz’s corporate demeanor was marked. I didn’t understand everything (much!) of what Gillmor said, but I got the gist that there were some important ideas lurking in "gestures." Whereas, I understood pretty much Schwartz’s whole pitch, but I could have gotten the same information from a Reuters fact sheet.

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More Syndicate Tuesday

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Stormhoek Sauvignon Blanc is nice, but the Pinot Grigio is FINE. The wines were served at KnowNow’s reception tonight (and a later party which I intended to go to but just crashed). I wish I could figure out a reasonable party for a Stormhoek gig, Wonder if they’d go for a non-geek dinner…..I could definitely do a a dog show thing….

The Edelman session this morning was by far the best today, at least for a marketing/comms person. Here’s the summary of the other sessions I attended today.

Building Brands Through Compelling Podcast Content, Paul Gillin (moderator), Scott Sigler, Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger (Mommycast.com) and Audrey Reed-Granger (Whirlpool). Overall this was an interesting session, but the thing that sticks with me the most is Reed-Granger’s narrative of how she got the podcast approved. The critical elements: the trust (and good track record) she had established with corporate leadership combined with a clear editorial calendar and vision for the podcast. The discussion on how to include/integrate corporate interests/sponsors was also interesting; the podcasters clearly came down on the side of a clear separation between church and state. I was also impressed by the passion they all had for podcasting.

Grokking the Big Picture, Paul Gillin (moderator), David Geller, Mike Davidson, Dave Sifry, Eric Elia. Most of this session just seemed a rehash from other conferences, other arguments. Interesting if you’ve never heard or read it before but otherwise ? Blah blah blah. Most interesting comment: Mike Davidson’s that RSS was missing the "oh wow" factor, perhaps part of the reason for slow uptake. Not to mention RSS is still too hard for the average bear. See what I mean. Nothing that new.

Sifry did announce a deal with Paramount for Technorati to aggregate the conversation around selected Paramount films, which will be hosted on the Paramount sites. This sounds very interesting, plan to keep my eye on it. Then there was a long discussion of full versus partial feed.Yawn. Nothing new. There are arguments to be made for both. It’s an easier decision for full feed if you are not trying to monetize the blog.  When they got to questions the sessions turned into "speaking from the floor"  and I got kinda bored. Sorry 🙁 

This session did spark my interest in clarifying the differences among all the different news aggregators (Techmeme, Digg, Newsvine et al), so watch for that this month.

David Weinberger, Tagging. I enjoyed this session, which was held more as a conversation than a presentation. Gist: The power of tagging isn’t in the self tagging that an author does of his/her own material. That is just simple metadata. The richness comes from users tagging material that they find interesting in ways that are meaningful to them using social networking tools like flickr and del.icio.us. Because the tagging is public, we get the social effects — others use the same tag for similar but not necessarily the same type of content and tag the same content with additional tags meaningful to them. Clusters develop around tags, and so forth. Suddenly, your tag for an article introduces you to all sorts of other material. Subscribe to the tag and you get a steady stream of stuff that you might never find in normal reading of Web sites and blogs.

Short story: this session cleared up a lot of my confusion about the value of tagging. Things to ponder: the ownership of content changes now that folks can classify things the way they want (bottom up versus top down). How other people tag our content can start to define, even change, our online personas.

Halley Suitt, Top Ten Sources. This session was mostly an introduction to Halley’s new venture Top Ten Sources. She talked a little bit about the issues raised when they launched the site re: syndicating other bloggers’ content and answered questions about their business model. She also read two past blog posts, one written when her father died and another on alpha males.

Amanda Congdon, Rocketboom. I didn’t get too much out of this session. I sense that Amanda is more comfortable in front of the camera than behind the podium. The content was also wrong for the Syndicate audience — there was nothing that most didn’t already know.

Seen today: Fellow Corante bloggers Vin Crosbie and Tish Grier, Brian Oberkirch, Tom Biro, Paul Gillin, Dana McCurley, Eric Schwartzman, Joel Richman and Josh Hallet

Shopping accomplished: a pair of cute sandals on sale at Coach (hotel is on Madison Ave.)

Wednesday: the bad boys of PR and more.

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Live from New York… it’s Syndicate

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Here we are in the lovely Terrace Ballroom at Syndicate.

Unfortunately, I missed Jeff Jarvis‘ opening session — heard it was great and look forward to reading about it in other blogs.

Came in during the Richard Edelman interview. As many in the blogosphere know, Robert Scoble was unable to come due to his mother’s illness; the assembled group had a moment of silence at the end of the session for the Scoble family and others who may be facing similar life situations.

Eric Norlin conducted the interview instead. Here is the report:

I came in on a round of laughter from all assembled about how every company on the planet is the leading provider of X. No one ever fesses up to being number 2. The conversation then moved to the deconstructed press release. Edelman described the "press release of the future" that has been so often discussed in marketing and PR blogs: info with tags so reporters can use it the way they want. Rather than a standard generic format that is supposed to meet everyone’s needs and possibly meets no one’s. (Comment: I’m not convinced of this yet –while I think it applies to tech and perhaps Fortune 500, I’m not sure all reporters are ready for this new format… yet.  More on this later this week.)

They then discussed the new PR dynamic: that a 12 year-old blogger can just as easily break news as the New York Times. Edelman’s take (not unsurprisingly) was that we have to listen to all the voices — not just the usual suspects. Traditional "authority" doesn’t tell the whole tale. The example was the Dove "real women" campaign, which got a great deal of its media traction from exposure in Gawker. The net: it is important to monitor blogs.

Edelman then mentioned briefly a joint project with Technorati to monitor blogs in multiple languages. Pretty sure I heard it would be available publicly as well as to Edelman staff. I’ll dig into this and let you know more in a follow-up. As far as the agency’s current blogging focus, Edelman said a large part of it is persuading clients to show beta products to bloggers. He indicated some success in this area, notably the X-box.

Next topic was Wal-Mart. Nothing new here, repeated the idea that perhaps PR agencies should be more clear with bloggers in the rules of engagement, vis using PR materials verbatim. The gist; credit the source or use your own words.

Edelman on what PR will look like in five years:

  • Deconstructed press release
  • PR hopefully have a role earlier in a product’s life, not just brought in for the press conference.
  • PR more robust role in the corporate suite — Chief Listening (or Learning) Officer
  • Does not see PR being disintermediated
  • Hopes PR doesn’t have the negative connotations it currently has (spin, flack etc.)
  • "I hope PR people have the balls to say what they know." Give good advice based on listening to a wide variety of sources.

On why he blogs. Because "you can’t be an evangelist unless you do it yourself." Cited advice from Linda Stone and David Weinberger. He also claimed to be one of the few PR people who blogs. True enough, if you only consider big agencies, and certainly true in terms of the total numbers employed in PR. He deserves tremendous credit for leading the way as a big agency CEO blogger. But also a bit of a false impression IMO, when you consider that there are 400-plus PR bloggers on Constantin Basturea’s PubSub list.

Plan for the coming year for Edelman and blogging: retraining people, getting the numbers of bloggers up at agency (currently about 30 bloggers and only 15-20 percent of staff in regular touch with bloggers). He is making investments (Technorati project); the teams have to follow. His motto for the year will be: Be tough — with colleagues and himself to get the most out of new media.

Some of the more interesting audience questions were about metrics. How will Edelman gauge success in the blogosphere? One metric will be how many real relationships Edelman people have with bloggers. This will be assessed by survey and listening. Someone else asked if they were modelling network effects. Answer: not enough data yet. (Comment: sounds like they are gathering it though).

His take on the best consumer brand vis blogging: Unilever. He also (unsurprisingly) endorses executive blogging, if the exec has an interesting voice and wants to do it. Doesn’t have to be the CEO. One of the biggest values of the c-level blog is commnication with employees. Let your employees be knowledgable sources about your business.

That’s pretty much it on the Edelman panel. More on the other sessions I attended later. Right now I am in Halley Suitt’s session on the Sins of Syndication, and I want to pay attention 🙂

Seen so far: old pal Sam Whitmore (we go all the way back to 1984 and the inaugural year of PC Week), David Parmet and Mike Manuel.

Other sources: Here is Edelman’s blog entry on the session. David Weinberger transcribes.

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