My goals for the class are to acquire an understanding of:
• the principles classic economics theory
• how the dynamics of net-centric economics conform to and diverge from the principles of classic economics
• specific reasons, related to the above principles and dynamics, why various net-centric business models have succeeded or failed
• the strengths and weaknesses of networked production models

And:
• enhance my ability to evaluate the viability of net-centric ventures, especially the ones that pop into my head
• get over my proprietary resistance to the concept of user-generated content (specifically in advertising) and identify opportunities to harness it for the benefit of my clients and my business

My primary attraction to this class is that, among the varied the topics pertaining to digital media, economics is where the rubber meets the road. Digital media is upending many paradigms of communication, business, entertainment and social engagement, but the ultimate, even Darwinian, test of whether a new way of doing anything endures is how well it does in the marketplace.

And while I’ve seen the economics of the advertising/marketing communication profession change dramatically and impact my personal bottom line, my perspective has always been reactive. At best, I’ve stayed abreast of how digital properties and business models are succeeding or failing at monetization. And while I’ve observed and experienced the disruption and opportunity resulting from the new economic rules, I’ve not approached topics nor comprehended the forces in the context of classic economics. Monday’s class felt like a first step for me toward establishing that perspective.

Drew’s lesson on doing a critical review was very helpful, especially on defining what the review should accomplish. The advice to put on the reviewer’s hat from page one is a good discipline for me, especially with reads like “Long Tail” which are entertaining and thus make it easier to fool myself into thinking that it’ll be easy to go back later and take real notes.

Final reflections on Podcasting for Business.

To answer, in a word, the classic class evaluation question:” What did I get out of this class?

Demystification.

I entered the class as a social-media knuckle-dragger, with nothing more evolved than a whispy presence on LinkedIn. A skeptic who’s been watching the blogisphere pass me by, while I wondered, Who has time to write all these blogs, and especially, who has time to read them?

I asked the same questions about podcasting, but that medium has always had more natural appeal for me.  Podcasting looked like more fun than blogging, surely because I write for a living. Whenever I’ve previously contemplated blogging, my first thought was that the last thing I needed was another rapidly looping writing deadline.  Podcasting at least involved audio recording, something I’ve done for fun in the past and at which I have some proficiency.  But the obstacle to tackling a podcast until now has been that rapidly looping deadline, because the essential characteristic of both the blog and the podcast is regularity.

It turned out to be quite illuminating for me to simultaneously tackle the group podcast and my personal podcast. A fundamental discipline of my profession —  advertising — is to try to make every pixel of communication speak to what the customer wants, in the effort to position the widget I’m flogging as the thing that can satisfy that want.  Our group podcast, the South Lake Union walking tour, effectively had two audiences: Vulcan Real Estate, to whom we’d theoretically be pitching the project, and the prospective tenants, businesses and visitors to the neighborhood who would be consuming the end-product podcasts.

While our proposal necessarily involved an evaluation of the feasibility of producing the concept on a regular basis, our primary focus was on satisfying the wants of Vulcan and their prospects.

I initially approached the personal podcast with the question: What does my potential audience want? What could I do that could possibly acquire a listenership? My first inclination was to do the obvious attempt at “thought leadership”: a business podcast about the business of advertising.  I’d found a few ad podcasts out there while surfing the podcast ocean, but none that I’d listened to more than once. Yes, I could do better, I believed.

Then came the real question:

Even if I could do better, will I want to do it again and again and again?  Hell no! It will quickly become the relentlessly looping deadline I dread.  I’ll be the mailman eternally going for a walk on my day off.

I realized that, for once, I had the opportunity to say “The audience be damned.” This being the early, wild-west days of podcasting, the audience is nothing more than a concept. Podcasters have the precious luxury of being able to fail with abandon until an audience finds them.  Production and distribution of the product are dirt cheap — an unprecedented creative advantage in the history of multimedia.  Podcasters, whether focused on personal or business objectives, can pay most of their attention to developing a concept that meets the essential prerequisite of podcasting, which also pertains to blogging:

Will I want to do this again and again and again?

If a podcaster can’t answer that question emphatically in the affirmative, all other criteria are irrelevant.  Without sustainable, core enthusiasm for the concept and the process, no amount of discipline will prevent the podcast from succumbing to creative fatigue.  Like the untold numbers of zombie blogs out there that haven’t been refreshed for months, a podcast undertaken with more consideration for the potential audience than for the soul of the podcaster is doomed to be abandoned, like the puppy that seemed like a good idea at the time but soon started snarling at the kids.

Another agreeable characteristic of podcasts over blogs is that they are just enough trouble to produce that I’d never be tempted to churn out “podtent” they way many bloggers feel compelled to spew forth regular content, whether they have something worth posting or not.  The effort required for podcasting is a gatekeeper of sorts. This may explain why I always feel more optimistic about what I’m about to hear when I click on a new podcast than I do when I look at a new blog.

The production hurdle is also just high enough that it has sobered me up from the initial enthusiasm I had for recommending podcasts to my clients.   What was I thinking?  I can barely stay awake through a meeting with this guy, and I was going to recommend that I produce a bi-weekly podcast with him as the star.

The ultimate upside of demystification is realism. I’m confident that I will produce a business podcast for a client any day now.  And quite confidant that, when I do get around to it, I’ll still be producing it six months later.

Terry Short’s Podcast Proposal

Podcast Title:
The Delacourte Report

Categories:
Entertainment, Comedy, Humor, News, Current Events.

Concept Summary:
The Delacourte Report is a personality-based perspective on the news, taking pages from predecessors as diverse as Paul Harvey and Steven Colbert. The podcast is hosted by ostensible newsperson, T.R. Delacourte (as played by myself) and features both sober and humorous commentary on news and topical events, spoof news items a la SNL’s Weekend Update and Leno/Letterman monologues, interviews with real and fictional newsmakers, and topical songs, a la Tom Lehrer and “That Was the Week That Was,” the topical satirical show of the 1960s.

T.R. Delacourte is a news personality who, not unlike Steven Colbert, straddles a fine line between dead-serious and over-the-top to make listeners wonder, “Is this guy for real?” and “Did he really do that did he make it up?” For example, the pilot podcast concludes with Delacourte playing what he says is a song by a Folklife busker that he recorded, and then purchased all rights to by tossing a dollar in the busker’s guitar case. As it’s recorded here, most listeners will figure out that the premise is a ruse before the song is over, but the “is this for real” ambiguity could be exploited with all of the podcast’s segments, from the news headlines to the interviews.

Objective:
Initial objective is to use The Delacourte Report as a showcase for my creative capabilities and feature it on my soon-to-be overhauled advertising portfolio site at www.cornerofficecom.com. I would be credited as “Writer/Producer,” and would aim to make it a fun point of engagement with prospective clients, who, I’d expect would quickly figure out that T.R. Delacourte is my alter ego. Any blue-sky objectives beyond this, e.g., sponsorships, content licensing, commissions to write a topical musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber, etc. will not be entertained until I have at least a dozen episodes in the can.

Target Audience:
News and current events junkies of all ages and ideologies. A potentially good audience is adolescent and teen-aged males who read Mad Magazine and who might be a very receptive and viral audience for the topical songs.

Promotional Campaign
Initial strategy is to link The Delacourte Report to the primary podcast hubs, guides and communities such iTunes, Podcast.com, Podcast Alley, etc. By including a content summary or excerpts in the show notes featuring names and events in the news, and with proper tagging, I hope to have some SEO success. Homerun attempts would be to get it featured on the NY Times Laughlines http://laughlines.blogs.nytimes.com and mentioned in the Huffington Post. A second-tier campaign would be to actively comment on news-related blogs. The podcast also gives me a good incentive to more aggressively promote my portfolio site where the podcast will be prominently featured.

Concept Viability and Production Challenges:
A bi-weekly production schedule is ambitious but achievable and, I believe, the minimum frequency for a topical news podcast of any stripe. A length of 4 to 6 minutes with at least 4 rotating features (news headlines, commentary, interviews and topical songs), would be a flexible format that would prevent what I suspect is a frequent podcast-killing mistake: format rigidity that results in the producer growing bored, burdened and uninspired.

The obvious challenge with this concept is quality control: being consistently entertaining, with the added challenge of maintaining non-wince-provoking production values for the musical and interview components.

I undertake it while being fully mindful of the theatrical axiom: “Satire is what closes on Saturday night. “

Link to The Delecourte Report

(Creative Commons license on site)

Business, humor, comedy, news & politcs, technology, society and culture

I’ve been effectively cross-marketed into purchasing a subscription to Business Week magazine.  I subscribed to the magazine’s podcast several weeks ago and liked it — a “behind the cover story” concept in which the magazine’s editor discusses the weeks lead story with the author(s).  The latest cover story is entitled: “Beyond Blogs: What Business Needs to Know. “

The story’s authors, Stephen Baker and Heather Green, had written an article in 2005 entitled, “Blogs Will Change Your Business.”  Their key message in 2005 was: “Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out.  Catch up or catch you later.”

In the recent podcast, Editor John Byrne, said that Business Week for the first time in its history decided to update an article.  The 3-year old “Blogs Will Change Your Business” was still one of the top hit-getters in the magazine’s online archive, but, as co-author Baker put it, a lot has happened in three years, including the success of YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace.  When the article was written, Friendster, was the closest thing to a hot social networking site. Tempus fugit, indeed.

He summed up the message of the updated article as “Social Media Will Change Your Business.”

I made a mental note to buy that issue of Business Week the next time I passed a newsstand. A few days after listening to the podcast, I received an old-fashioned subscription offer from the Business Week — not the first time — and it was a slam-dunk.  So, Business Week, if you’re wondering how to “monetize” your podcast, I am evidence that it sells subscriptions.

After sampling a number of business-related podcasts and failing to find one that inspired my loyalty, I heard The Skeptics Guide 5×5 and shouted Eureka!

The Skeptics Guide 5×5 is a weekly production of the New England Skeptical Society. I think that it does almost everything right:

Title and tag line:  The Skeptic’s Guide 5×5: “Five minutes with Five Skeptics.” The title caught my eye and correctly led me to believe that this would be a skeptical inquiry into a topical story involving religious, paranormal, pseudo-scientific hokum.  The weekly topics that appear in the title are also irresistible:  Man regenerates finger, Surgery under hypnosis, Ghost photographs, Steven Spielberg to create paranormal online community.   The tag line, “Five minutes with five skeptics” is in the first sentence spoken by the host, and tells me that I only have to invest five minutes — a major attraction for my limited attention span, and a benefit I’d like to incorporate into my own podcast title or tagline.

Concept viability:  The Skeptics Guide hasn’t missed a week since it debuted in January of this year and the dozen episodes that I’ve listened to have all featured the same 5 skeptics who are identified only by their first names. A major strength of the concept is that there is no shortage of preposterous paranormal stories to debunk. In world where an appearance of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich makes the front page, The Skeptics Guide 5×5  will never be in danger of running out of material.

Audience targeting:  Perfect for the secular humanist such as I who is exasperated by the popular willingness to suspend disbelief over the latest miracle, ghost story, UFO sighting or Virgin Mary appearance. An important ingredient of The Skeptics Guide is that it’s both sober and entertaining.  It doesn’t shoot fish in a barrel. The panel is scientifically savvy and examines the story at hand with dispassionate analysis. No matter how ridiculous the reported event is, they debunk without disparaging the perpetrators or the nitwits who are falling for the story.

Promotion:  A banner for The Skeptics Guide 5×5 is featured on the organization’s home page along with their “main” pod cast which features longer interviews.  As a non-profit probably operating on a shoestring, they probably don’t have the budget for off-site promotion.

Production.  Overall, very good.  The five panelists are professionally mic-ed, their voices are distinguishable from each other, and there’s rarely any cross-talk. The theme music is original and appropriate, which just a hint of sci-fi. The one significant flaw is the absence of title artwork, which, to the skeptical podcast surfer, signifies that this production is probably in the home-made category. It definitely is not.

The Skeptics Gude 5×5 archive

Bob Garfield is a senior editor of Advertising Age, one of the two leading magazines that track the advertising industry, the other being Adweek. Garfield is also co-host of NPRs, On the Media, which I subscribe to in podcast form.  He’s generally regarded as the industry leading ad critic. A positive review of your campaign by Garfield is something to include on your resume.

The main blogging challenge for a critic would seem to be in making it significantly different than your regular column, which, by nature, is similar to a blog in that it’s a forum for your personal opinions.

Garfield generally succeeds by consistently using his blog in two ways that are distinctive from his columns. One is to comment on a range of topics related to the ad industry, such a the recent suicide of a leading creative executive at the agency, DDB.  The other technique is to deliver mico-critiques, such as a recent post that pointed out that Bud Lite’s campaign featuring a guy who responds to series of situations with the single word, “Dude” is virtually identical to a campaign for the Ford Focus that ran 8 years ago.

This is an example of what I value most about the Bobosphere: Garfield’s long-term perspective on an industry that seems to be perpetually undergoing radical change for all the obvious Web 2.0 reasons. For me, a middle-aged guy who’s paddling fast to stay current in a youth-crazed industry that’s seems to be having a panic attack as it tries to convince clients that it still has the answers, Garfield is a refreshing and reassuring voice of reason. He knows from whence we came and uses his blog to remind us that the media may change, but the principles of good branding and effective persuasion never go out of style.

Visually, there’s nothing in the masthead of the Boboshere other than the title and subhead that distinguish it from Garfield’s regular column.

My main gripe with the Bobosphere is the irregularity and infrequency of it.  The last two posts were April 29 and March 2, which suggests that Bob isn’t exactly embracing the concept of having yet another deadline.  I’m hoping that he’ll blog about the pain of having to blog because your editor said you have to now. As a writer who is still reluctant to launch my own blog for fear of taking on another deadline, I’ll keep tuning in to the Bobosphere to see how Bob is feeling my pain.

The Bobosphere

I have a client who’s warming up to the idea of doing a podcast and I referred him the CommonCraft tutorial. It answered the “What’s a Podcast?” question for my client far better than I had. I remembered Lee mentioning in his presentation that they use the “It’s kind of like this….” approach to explaining things — a technique that I favor in especially when selling he merits of technology products. I used it this morning in web copy about the music, video and photo capabilities of Windows Mobile phones: “It’s like having a media center in your pocket.”

I like what I call the “simile strategy” so much, I recently based an entire web video campaign for Safeco Insurance on it. The campaign is intended to give consumers useful nuggets of insurance knowledge without directly selling Safeco. It features brief monologues by four characters who each explain their topic by comparing it to something they’re very familiar with in their work.

Here’s one example: