Category archive: Podcasting

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Commission Junction University

I spent more than 12 hours at ValueClick‘s Commission Junction University event today, watching loads of presentations and talking about blogs, RSS, and social media for around 15 minutes. I need to process my notes and write properly about the event (not to mention sleep off the champagne I had during the last couple of hours of CJU...), but I want immediately to thank Alison Guise and Tina Judic for bringing me in to take part in CJU. Big thanks also to Susan Kingston for introducing me to Alison, Tina, Gary Goodman, Carl White, Steve Winterhalter, Ben Kopetti, and other enthusiastic, clever people from the ValueClick group of companies.

Pictures from CJU - which I will finish tagging and organising after some kip - are already on Flickr. More tomorrow…

Saturday, May 13, 2006

They're all in the ad business now

When the demand side of a voluntary exchange starts supplying itself, the traditional suppliers are going to get scared. To wit, all of the exploding business models around us (newspapers, music, movies, and TV just for starters).

The same fear is being felt by companies when it comes to their ads. This is, of course, because it’s so cheap and easy for people to bring to life their own creations - people who are connected to the most powerful distribution network in history.

These companies usually aren’t connected to that network, though they think they are. 

"They're all in the ad business now" continued...

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Who's online? Not just 'geeks'

Adriana Cronin-Lukas, who is a member of the Engagement Alliance advisory board, uses the social bookmarking tool Furl to flag up this Center for Media Research item on internet radio listeners:

A new study by Arbitron and Edison Media Research finds that the weekly Internet radio audience increased by fifty percent from 2005,(satellite radio awareness tops sixty percent of the U.S. population, while the AM/FM radio audience remains strong. The report chronicles this expansion of the radio market and its implications for advertisers and media planners.

The monthly audience of Internet radio tops an estimated 52 million; an increase from 37 million people in 2005. The weekly Internet radio audience also increased 50 percent over the past year, with 30 million listeners last year.

Adriana comments:

So much for those who say that internet is for geeks and not their main customer base. Also, it is worth noting that “Online radio listeners are 36 percent more likely than the average consumer to live in a household with an annual income of more than $100,000.” Now tell me that it’s not worth making full use of the internet communication potential!

The Economist: Among the Audience (redux)

Cluetrain co-author David Weinberger says he thinks of ‘user-generated content’ as ’us-generated content‘. I like.

David also links to the Economist article, Among the audience, which Tomi mentions below. Great quotation re Barry Diller:

"What an ignoramus!” says Jerry Michalski, with some exasperation. He advises companies on the uses of new media tools. “Look around and there’s tons of great stuff from rank amateurs,” he says. “Diller is assuming that there’s a finite amount of talent and that he can corner it. He’s completely wrong.” Not everything in the “blogosphere” is poetry, not every audio “podcast” is a symphony, not every video “vlog” would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Economist: Among the Audience

This week’s Economist (April 22, 2006 issue date) has an excellent 16 page special report on new media, called Among the Audience. It covers much similar ground as we did in our book, Communities Dominate Brands, such as having two pages on blogging (we did a chapter) or including the Ohmy News case like we did as a case study, etc.

The story is a particularly good read for anyone involved in the “content side” of old media. It helps explain the roles of blogging, wikis, and user-generated content. I think for covering new media, it does leave the real innovations - user sharing, engagement, and the role of advertising/marketing in that space - at too little coverage, but it perhaps was not the purpose. Certainly the Economist article is well researched and covers many of the new media phenomena such as pointing out that podcasting is not quite the same to radio, as blogging is to print media; for one thing podcasts cannot be delivered in real time (you cannot cover breaking stories efficiently with podcasts) - so podcasts are more time-shifting media; and unlike blogs, you can’t link from one podcast to another.

For anyone who reads our blog, I urge buying this week’s Economist and reading that special report. It is definitely worth reading!