If you want your favorite blogs to be ultraportable, check out Feedjournal. It makes an old-school newspaper out of your RSS feeds.
Here’s today’s Christopher Penn morning paper. (PDF, 292 kb)
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A recent question sent into Marketing Over Coffee – what metrics matter for podcasters to measure their success, a la the ADM?
Ultimately, traffic metrics are only the top of the funnel – they’re the raw number of eyeballs in, and that in itself isn’t worth much except for general trends.
No matter what statistic you use – file downloads, Feedburner numbers, etc. the main value of basic traffic statistics is trend growth – does your show have more audience this month than last month? Does your show have more audience this year than last year, and what kind of growth are you looking at – 1%? 5%? 50%?
It’s more important to use a consistent growth metric than a standardized one – if you consistently measure on Feedburner numbers, then you have a baseline to measure growth. If you consistently use files downloaded with status code 200 from Apache, you can measure based on that.
Having two statistics – Feedburner + Apache – is good for ensuring that trends are consistent. If Apache completed downloads are radically different than Feedburner numbers, you need to investigate why. Is it a spambot scraping your content? Is it people listening straight off the web site without a download? If metrics matter, your chosen benchmarks should move in tandem – 10% growth in Apache is 10% growth in Feedburner.
I think it’s vitally important for podcasters to also chart out their funnels, even for shows with nothing to sell. For example, Marketing Over Coffee right now doesn’t have a revenue model per se, at least in the sense of a widget for sale. But we do have conversion metrics we want to examine – blog comments, subscribers to the feed, etc. and rolling forward, we’re almost certainly going to put out a newsletter. We may even be able to measure our success by speaking gigs, etc., but unless you’re living in a CPM advertising world, eyeballs and ears don’t count for much.
The Student Loan Network measures the Financial Aid Podcast by both growth of the house list and loan volume – two very clear, revenue-generating sales metrics. Those count for a lot more than eyeballs and ears.
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Want some of the best advice about being a trade show exhibitor? The Ronin Marketeer, John Wall, has it all for you.
For more of John, check out Marketing Over Coffee, too.
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I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about this little machine ever since Podshow’s sponsorship of it with a few prominent podcasters I listen to, like CC Chapman and Julien Smith. Yesterday I got to play with one of the boxes, courtesy of Peta Andersen, and I think one of these is in my future soon.
Why?
Take a look at this picture. What do you see?
That’s an n810, and it’s running terminal.
The n810 is a Linux box. Yes, it comes with all the shiny applets and stuff, but it also comes with a Linux distribution called Maemo. Maemo makes the n810 a big deal because it’s a variant of Debian Linux, and that means you get a command line.
Poking around a little more, that terminal is running bash, and apt-get is installed on there.
apt-get, if you’re unfamiliar with Debian Linux, is a package manager that lets you download and install packages from the command line. To install, say, wget, you’d type apt-get install wget when you’re online and the service would do the rest.
Why is this a big deal? Unlike my iPod Touch, which I still love, the n810 is a true portable computer. The existence of a bash shell and apt-get means that I can run most of my marketing software (a lot of the stuff I do is on the command line on my Mac, such as wget, perl, bash scripts, etc.) from a microcomputer in my pocket. That plus a large, tactile keyboard makes this little device a winner.
Now if only I could get a better price than $400…
If you’re a podcaster promoting your show’s coupon codes, you are welcome to post the codes in the comments.
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I read with dismay this story on MSNBC about people breaking into their retirement funds to pay for housing and other debts they’ve accrued.
Now, understand that I work for a financial institution, a lending company. It is in my short term interest and financial welfare to recommend that people should always pay their debts, and for the most part, if you have the ability to repay, you should.
However, in cases like the story above, sometimes the responsible thing is to walk away.
Which is worse?
Which is worse?
The logical conclusion, the business conclusion, is to walk away from your debts. Don’t think that businesses don’t make that decision every day. Sallie Mae (ticker:SLM) lost a deal with JC Flowers – they walked away. There were consequences, but the consequences of walking away were weighed by JC Flowers and they decided that walking away made the most financial sense.
There’s a culture encouraged by financial institutions that there’s a moral penalty for walking away, and that moral pressure is one of the many forces used by companies to keep individuals in obligations, whether or not they have the ability to repay.
Here’s the problem with that. It’s short term thinking. For the citizens in the MSNBC story, it is in my long term interests as a taxpaying citizen of the United States for that borrower to walk away. Companies come and go, but that citizen, if he depletes his retirement, will be dependent on me and others for a subsistence lifestyle. Just as he’s trading his future for the present, so are financial institutions trading America’s future for the present if they continue to encourage debt holdings by consumers who simply cannot pay and will not be able to pay.
Conclusion: if you’re a financial institution with a consumer who cannot repay, that loan is going to decay sooner or later anyway. (unless it’s a student loan which can never be forgiven or written off by the consumer) Write it off now, preserve that citizen’s retirement and savings, and help them be able to buy your services later on down the road. Think long term, think big picture.
I’m pleased to see the ever continuing evolution of PodCamp as a community gathering. It’s amazing to see how people adapt PodCamp to fit what’s appropriate in their communities and local cultures, and I hope we continue to see new innovations. I wanted to clarify something that occurred to me on the drive into the office this morning:
Keynote speakers are a violation of the PodCamp rules.
Now, the most recent PodCamp to have keynote speakers was PodCamp Nashville, and I want to be perfectly clear this is not saying their event was bad or their organizers did something wrong – they did not, and from those who attended, it sounded like a great PodCamp. This is an opinion and a request going forward.
Here are the Six Rules of PodCamp:
The reason why Keynote speakers are a violation of the PodCamp rules relates to rules 1, 3, and 4.
Rule 1. Keynote speakers are by default not equal to other participants. They’re placed in a position of prominence above other participants.
Rule 3. Keynote speaker slots are likely not going to be put up for general availability. The whole reason to have a keynote speaker is to select someone special, so it’s unlikely that anyone can speak at the keynote.
Rule 4. Keynotes typically have nothing going on alongside of them, which means participants have no other content options, and therefore cannot exercise the Law of 2 Feet.
Of the three rules, #1 is the most important. PodCamp is built on the foundation that all participants are equal.
When Chris Brogan and I set out our own guidelines at the first PodCamp for the UnKeynote, we agreed:
Like I said at the beginning of this post, this is relatively uncharted territory, but important to address now. No one in the past did anything wrong, but I’d like this guideline to be in the minds of organizers from now on:
Keynote speakers are NOT okay at PodCamps.
What are your thoughts?
Here is a dead simple solution for foreclosed houses: offer these at cut rate auctions to affordable housing developers like CASCAP in Cambridge, MA. These agencies can use the properties, otherwise fated to decay, for affordable housing for the poor and homeless.
Why we won’t embrace this solution:
Few businesses understand the sunk cost fallacy. Banks and mortgage holders cling desperately to assets that continue to decline in value in the vain hope that they’ll be worth something close to what they paid.
Remember this: a bag of gold, no matter how valuable, will kill you if you’re trying to stay afloat.
Jeff Pulver’s hosting Spring VON.x in San Jose the week of March 17. While I can’t make it, if you have any interest in voice or video online, you should.
Top 5 Reasons to go to VON.x
With luck, you can make it to VON.x. Wish I could! Register here.
Joseph Jaffe was kind enough to send me a review copy of his latest book, Join the Conversation. It’s a really, really LONG book, weighing in at 300 pages. I managed to get through it in about two weeks of sporadic reading.
The Good
The Bad
Overall
It’s hard to actually review this book because it’s in sort of a grey zone for me. Is it a good introduction to conversational marketing? Not really, at least not for the beginner, because there are very few clear takeaways or plans to begin implementation. For the advanced new media marketer, the book doesn’t break a lot of new ground in ways you can disrupt the marketplace with marketing – it’s more of a series of case studies than it is a blueprint for your next marketing Death Star.
Join the Conversation is probably best suited as an idea book – the kind of book you pick up from time to time when you need to leaf through a few examples to generate ideas. Get inspiration from how people have done things or glean lessons from how NOT to do things based on missteps of the past.
Would I recommend it? If you’re at the journeyman stage of new media marketing, I think Join the Conversation is a worthy addition to your bookshelf. For those who haven’t played Sid Meier’s Pirates!, that’s the second of four stages:
Join the Conversation fits for those no longer new to new media marketing, but haven’t developed an arsenal of their own yet. It’s also probably too long for most executives to plow through, except maybe in audiobook format, but it’s still a good resource if you’re needing inspiration for your new media marketing campaign.
Join the Conversation is available for sale here on Amazon. (disclosure: 5% commission goes to my employer, the Student Loan Network)
Give people about a month after their subprime mortgage payment balloons to obscene proportions and it’s not hard to guess that in some cases, that will lead to divorce and broken homes. The next big wave of resets begins in March 2008, based on the CSFB data in the chart above.
Buckle your seatbelts and unplug the popcorn machine. 2008 is going to be a rough year.
