Browse > Home / Archive: October 2006

| Subcribe via RSS

Refresh Dallas tonight!

October 18th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Events and Speaking

If you’re in Dallas, be sure to stop by Refresh tonight. It’s going to be a good event:

U Media – Being your own media

Big media has finally realized that their monopoly on our attention has weakened to the point that they will never recover. Big Media is attempting to make the drastic changes necessary for their survival, but they are about as agile as a battleship.

Enter U media. Hear how some well known citizen journalists began blogging and podcasting and created their own media outlets when the big boys scoffed and kept on serving us dog food.

Big in Japan’s Fancast Service

October 18th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Projects

If you’ve noticed my blogging slowing a bit lately, it’s because we’re starting up a new project for Dirt (the upcoming FX show). This project is a continuation of our work with FX using our Big in Japan Fancast system.

Fancast is one of the Big in Japan social tools that gives users and brands a unique way to connect to each other. The Fancast system is based on the highly popular PodServe podcasting platform, and combines a highly scalable Ruby on Rails application framework with a VoIP-based traditional phone system capable of handling more than 30,000 traditional telephone connections.

This summer the Big in Japan team began working with the producers of nip/tuck, the Golden Globe winning drama, on their community interaction efforts. The show is cable’s top-rated series among adults 18-49, and has a reach of more than 2.6 million viewers.

When viewers visit the nip/tuck Fancast, they’re able to leave a display name and their phone number. In less than a minute, they get a call on their phone inviting them to participate with the nip/tuck Experience. From here they can do one of two things:

  • Interview one of the show’s stars – Each week five of the best questions are selected by FX and presented to that week’s star to answer. The questions and the answers then get mashed up by the Fancast system into one audio file and becomes available to download via a podcast or accessible for online listening.
  • Leave feedback, comments, and theories – nip/tuck fans are never afraid to tell you what they think about the show or what they think will happen next week. Now they can hear what other fans are thinking too – again, via podcast or listening on the nip/tuck Web site.

FX promoted the launch of the nip/tuck Fancast primarily using television advertising. Check out the screen shot of the section with the Fancast system. Kimber (Kelly Carlson) is waiting for your question, what are you waiting for?

fancast_kelly.jpg

Does it work? According to Arbitron/Edison Media Research more than 27 million Americans have listened to a podcast, half of whom are under 35 years old. Using the Big in Japan Fancast, the nip/tuck producers can empower their own community of 2.6 million viewers to deliver content via iTunes to more than 30 million iPod listeners. Converting just 2% of those iTunes users would deliver 600,000 viewers to the program. Additionally, FX has the option of inserting advertising into the consumer generated content as they moderate and process it allowing for additional marketing channels for their advertisers.

For more info on Fancast, drop me an email or visit the Fancast pages:

links for 2006-10-17

October 17th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Daily Links

The opportunities of podcasting

October 17th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Blogging/Podcasting

I came across an interesting article on podcasting tonight and thought I’d share.

Scott Gatz from Yahoo was in town for the BlogOn conference and he stopped by our offices to talk about a survey done in August about RSS and podcasting that Yahoo recently released.

Other bloggers covered the RSS results, but I was intrigued by the results on podcasting…..28% of the people surveyed were aware of podcasting, but only 2% actually listened to podcasts.

I asked Gatz, so is this a bubble? And he said, nope, an opportunity. He pointed out that this survey was done before Yahoo this month released its podcasting service. The difference between those who had heard of podcasts and those who had used them actually reflected the fact that the tools for finding and listening to podcasts were too hard to use. With their podcasting service, Gatz said, Yahoo planned to make podcasting as accesible as it had done with RSS.

Yahoo does seem to have had real success by embedding RSS within My Yahoo, so well that most people don’t even know their using RSS. Gatz said that a few million people (under 10 million was the guidance he gave) now use RSS on My Yahoo, up from 6,000 in January.

Even though this article is old, and even though numbers for podcasting have risen, I still think this is an interesting point. What is "podcasting", really? It’s not about an iPod and it’s not even about downloading to a mobile device. To me, podcasting is about making cool audio content easy to create and easy to access. If that means it can be quickly moved to an iPod, great! But that’s only one part of it.

That’s actually the premise we’ve built the Big in Japan Fancast system on – ease of use for all involved. Audiences can use a traditional phone to record content. They can listen to the content online or on your iPod (or other music player). And organizations can easily moderate content to ensure a positive, yet honest flow of content.

links for 2006-10-16

October 16th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Daily Links

When technology hates you

October 16th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Events and Speaking
"I can’t get my presentation to display because my computer is having trouble"

These are the words that no presenter wants to utter in front of a packed house. Last week I had to do that very thing when I gave a "Social Media 101" presentation to the DFWIMA. This was to be the first presentation since making the full-time switch to a Mac, and honestly I was looking forward to it. I had played all afternoon with Keynote, the brilliant Powerpoint replacement from Apple. Two great features – the ability to see a running timer as well as the next slide on your computer screen while the projector output shows the actual presentation.

Alas, I was never able to use it. Unfortunately, my MacBook Pro had an apparently common problem – it refused to wake up from sleeping. "Why not just power it off and restart it?", you may be asking. Good question, especially considering the Mac restarts in a matter of seconds. Well, I was a bit thrown off by the handheld mic that refused to stop giving angry feedback no matter where in the room I stood.

Despite feeling like an ill-prepared jackass, I pulled it together and did a decent job of staying on point, sans-presentation (and sans-notes, since I forgot to print those out like I normally do). The worst part was that Mike Murphy from Facebook spoke after me and was a fantastic speaker. He had videos, a great presentation he’d given several times, and a easy manner about him. Yeah, felt like a jackass.

Afterwards, several people complimented me on the recovery. It made me realize that this is a fairly common problem, and I now feel fortunate that this is the first time this has happened to me.

And just in case you don’t believe there was a presentation, here’s a photo I took before putting the computer to sleep…

BiJ Podcast: Bob Langert

October 15th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Blogging/Podcasting

The McDonald’s Corporate Social Responsibility team recently launched their "Open for Discussion" blog, and not surprisingly were quickly caught up in controversy. The key issue was that the comments weren’t being moderated very quickly, and as such the blogosphere assumed that McDonald’s was taking a hard line against actual open discussion. Turns out, the real issue was a lack of moderation resources to actually moderate the comments.

Recently I had a chance to chat with Bob Langert, the McDonald’s VP that leads the CSR team, and one of the key bloggers on the site. I’ve posted the interview in the Big in Japan podcast. Grab the BiJ podcast feed or download directly here.

Big thanks to Bob for spending the time with me!

The value of community

October 15th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Business Strategy
John Windsor has an interesting discussion happening on his blog about the YouTube purchase. John suggests that without community your company has issues, whereas one of this commenters challenges him with a question: "how exactly do you value a ‘community’?"

After posting a comment there, I thought it would be worthwhile to expand that comment.

How do you "value" community? Well… how do you value ethical business practices? A friendly handshake at the beginning of a sales call? A willingness to pass along a sales lead for a friend?

Value of community is like value of anything else in business – pointless to discuss without appropriate context. Community value is, or at least should be couched against the larger business objective. Google has a desire to connect the YouTube content to the larger picture of their desire to connect all pieces of Web content. Why did they buy Blogger? Because it connects them to successful content. That success is largely community based.

Before we start talking about the value of community, we must first determine what "community" means in our context. Community can be a destination or it can be a feature. For instance, Facebook is a community. Its main purpose is to build and support social connection. It directly and solely helps support my definition of community. YouTube, however, has incredible community features that support its primary focus of uploading and sharing video. While it may seem like a minor difference, it’s a crucial one for the discussion of "value".

And what does a discussion of "value" really equate to? That right, the concept of Return on Investment (ROI). Many clients have asked many agencies how to  calculate and support blogging/community/social connection ROI. Like the introductory handshake, it’s hard to calculate but easy to feel when it’s working.

ROI and value in the context of community can only be calculated if you first determine what’s important to your business first. There is no one size fits all solution to the ROI discussion. Communities are based on something specific, someting personal. Even between similar community concepts, ROI can be radically different. Think about using a single metric, say total users, when comparing MySpace "value" against Facebook "value". Total users works wonderfully for MySpace, since they make money through sheer volume of site usage that supports ad rates. But Facebook makes money by putting marketing campaigns in front of a truly receptive audience. They charge more for less, and it works because their audience knows that they’re seeing the campaign because Facebook knows they’ll have interest. If you were to judge "value" of Facebook based on the metric that works for MySpace, your results are pointless.

But aside from measuring value based on the proper metric, I’m interested to see when we can stop having this discussion. We asked the same questions when the Web was new and people had to justify the costs of building a new fangled Web site. But these days, no one asks whether there’s an ROI to having a Web site -  it’s just part of the marketing mix. Hopefully soon, we can stop having the ROI discussion about "community"… which really equates to asking if building projects that allow users to contribute and participate is worthwhile.

links for 2006-10-14

October 14th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Daily Links
  • “NationStates is a free nation simulation game. Build a nation and run it according to your own warped political ideals. Create a Utopian paradise for society’s less fortunate or a totalitarian corporate police state. Care for your people or deliberately
  • Cool Mac OSX application that saves your favorite web comics for review later. Very slick!
  • “With Scrapblog, you can easily create stunning multimedia scrapbooks featuring your photos, videos, audio and a bunch of creative elements. We made Scrapblog drag-and-drop-easy so that everyone can tell their stories and share them online or turn them in
  • Interesting article about a cool business targeted at limited-edition art toy collectors.
  • Fantastic example of using your web site to actually support your TV program. All too often the sites offer nothing other than a brochure for the movie. This site provides real content to support the concept of the show.

Marketing Luncheons for next week

October 13th, 2006 | Comments | Posted in Business Strategy

Turns out the next week is the week of marketing luncheons. On Monday it’s the BMA. On Wednesday it’s the AMA.

Come out, join me!