Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

  • The Long Tail Will Kill You, Jeff Pulver

    I read an interesting comment on Jeff Pulver’s blog tonight about Internet TV:

    “Seems to me that this is a classic long tail play. The long and simple of it.”

    The context of the comment led me to write this quick blog post. The Long Tail is a great play if you’re an aggregator. If you own the network, if you own all the content or the distribution channels, if you own the database, the Long Tail is a payday because it’s one person to a million items over and over, instead of ten thousand people to one item.

    The Long Tail is, as Seth Godin proclaims somewhat loudly and quite correctly in his new book, The Dip, a death sentence for the individual. There is only one you, and only 24 hours in your day. If you try to create as much content as possible to capture a Long Tail-esque traffic surge to your properties, you’re going to die tired.

    The Short Head – be #1 at SOMETHING – is the only place where the individual truly prospers, unless you’re in charge of the network. If you’re Osama bin Laden, the Long Tail works for you because there’s an unending supply of angry young men who are more than willing to die for the cause, but there’s still only one bin Laden. Lots of deputies may run the franchises, but there’s only one CEO.

    To answer Kfir’s question – why aren’t more people watching? Simple (reminder, simple != easy) Long Tail quagmire: with a million channels on, how can you even find something to watch? Who is the Short Head of TV Guides for Internet video that can connect the average TV viewer with new media? When that guide becomes available and is easy to use, integrated with the living room instead of the desktop, Kfir’s mom will probably tune in.

  • PAB Meme

    PAB Meme

    Bob Goyetche tagged me in this round.

    1. Why are you coming to PAB?

    I’m coming to PAB because I suddenly found a sizeable chunk of time that was relatively free, and PAB has a great reputation as one of the paid podcasting conferences worth attending.

    2. A little homework now: Which PAB registrants would you like to meet? Why?

    Well, I think I met nearly 3/4 of PAB registrants at PodCamp Toronto or PodCamp Boston, so I’m definitely looking forward to reconnecting with folks.

    3. Who is your “dream interview” for your podcast? Why?

    It’s not who so much as how. I’d love to be able to shadow someone really successful and powerful for a day or so, like this guy I heard about named Larry. Larry has juice – one call from him can get situations moving that would otherwise be total losses. I’d love to know how Larry accumulated his juice.

    4. Who would you like to interview at podcamp?

    Umm, don’t you mean PAB? And honestly, I don’t really want to interview anyone at PAB. I just want to show up and have a good time.

    I’m amused, however, that this PAB meme was clearly from a PodCamp one 🙂

    5. What is your, “Can’t miss it” session at podcamp?

    It’s not sessions – there are can’t miss people at PAB. And no, I’m not going to name names, because I don’t want to slight anyone else.

    6. What is your favorite podcast?

    Mine. If it wasn’t mine, I would stop doing my show. I have to love the show I do.

    7. What is your favorite web resource?

    Google.

    8. Who is your favorite podsafe musician? (eg. Sean McGaughey).

    Depends.

    Favorite male artist: Matthew Ebel
    Favorite female artist: Natalie Gelman
    Favorite male-fronted group: Rayko KRB
    Favorite female-fronted group: Uncle Seth
    Favorite label: Binary Star Music

    9. Ginger or Maryanne?

    No idea. Who are they?

    10. Bob, Mark, or Tod?

    Yes.

    I tag anyone attending PAB who hasn’t already been tagged.

  • I'm going to PAB2007.

    Some extra time appeared in my schedule, so I’m driving up Friday night.

    PAB

    Anyone else from Boston driving? Want to carpool? I have a fuel-thrifty Prius. 🙂

  • Lessons in photography for realtors and people selling houses

    Lessons in photography for realtors and people selling houses. A few lessons from this weekend.

    1. Use a tripod, always.

    Using a tripod will guarantee blur-free photos. My photos are NOT blur-free because I did not use a tripod.

    2. Learn to use white balance, and turn OFF your flash.

    Here’s the thing about most realtor photos. Most photos are bad, and the number one thing about them is that the lighting is wrong, wrong, wrong. Compare these two photos of the kitchen:

    Why realtors need photographers

    This is with no white balance and a flash. See how dark the cabinets look?

    Why realtors need photographers

    This is with white balance and NO flash.

    White balance is easy – point the lens at a white object in the room (a wall) and use it to set the lighting levels.

    If you use a tripod, you can avoid using a flash, and that’s a HUGE benefit because it shows the rooms as they’re actually lit, if not a little brighter. Using a flash also tends to throw photos towards the blue end of the lighting spectrum, which feels cold. Most of the time, in most house photos, you want to go for warm, and that means tripod, no flash.

    3. Learn the rule of thirds.

    Why realtors need photographers

    Simply put, if you shoot a room square on, you end up with flat, dimensionless photos that don’t give a feel or sense of space.

    The rule of thirds is well explained in this wikipedia article.

    Why realtors need photographers

    4. Shoot from hip level or non-traditional angles.

    Why realtors need photographers

    Nothing will make a house feel smaller than shooting from eye level, or higher. Shoot from hip level, low level, or unusual angles to capture more of a sense of space in the house. Sure, you’ll have to adjust your tripod and bend over to take the shot, but the result is WORTH it.

    Bottom line: more and more people are browsing on the Internet. Those few digital snaps you take can either entice a prospective buyer, or turn them off entirely. How many sales are you losing with bad photos and you don’t even know about it?

  • Stop Same Sex Marriage

    Stop Same Sex Marriage

    … the term. By delineating it with its own term, you imply that it’s somehow different than “regular”, heterosexual marriage. The gay and bisexual couples I’ve met in my professional and personal life have had relationships just like I’ve had as a heterosexual male. Using the term same-sex marriage to me implies that it’s different, and should be treated differently in the eyes of the law, the same way that any hyphenated-American automatically separates that group of people from an unbranded American.

    Either you’re married or you’re not. Either you’re American or you’re not. Any additional qualifiers are just noise designed to distract and confuse.

    Should certain groups of people be prohibited from getting married? Swap out any term and see how well it flies.

    Should black people be prohibited from marrying? Same-race marriage.
    Should elderly people be prohibited from marrying? Same-age marriage.
    Should poor people be prohibited from marrying? Same-economic-status marriage.
    Should Catholic people be prohibited from marrying? Same-religion marriage.

    Want to start changing minds? Start by changing your own. Eliminate the confusion around marriage and the term same-sex marriage by not using that term any longer. Call it what it is.

    Bigotry.

  • Oddities in Sweden

    Oddities in Sweden:

    1. A lot of things are made of wood – like your hotel room key, coffee spoons, ice buckets for the room, clothes hangars, and more. It’s environmentally understandable – better to use wood than plastic, especially for anything disposable, but it’s still odd at times.

    2. Leather elevator. I kid you not, the walls of the elevator were paneled with leather.

    3. One night stands on the menu. I kid you not – we asked about this at the restaurant, what dubbelrum was, since it was 10 times the price of anything else on the menu. The waitress said, yes, that’s exactly what you think it is. It’s a hotel room upstairs if your date and dinner is going very well.

    One night stand

    4. Exceptionally clean. Chris Brogan joked that the city was so clean he could lay down and sleep in the gutters.

    5. Not an SUV in sight. Plenty of SMART cars, BMWs, Volvos, Mercedes sedans, a few Toyota Prius cards, but no SUVs at all.

    6. English transliteration cannot be phoenticized. For example, PodCamp Europe was held at a town called Alvsjo. It’s pronounced “Elve-koi-ya”.

    7. No chlorine in the warm water bathing pool. This was odd to me, but the water was sparkling and clean, not a bit of dirt or other pool critters in sight.

    Despite these little idiosyncrasies, Sweden is a beautiful country, and Stockholm seems like a wonderful city to visit and live in. Night life is lively, crime is low, and the city is waking up to new media.

  • Podcasting is missing half a million in Europe

    We as podcasters may be missing half a million or more audience members, and we don’t even know it.

    Here’s the thing I noticed all over Stockholm, and other European PodCampers confirmed in other countries – there were an awful lot of people listening. They had headphones jacked into devices all over the place.

    FEW of those devices were iPods. Of the ones that were MP3 players, the iRiver T series seemed to be the player of choice.

    For every MP3 player I saw, I saw 10 mobile phones being used as media devices. Mobile phones that were spinning up music, content, and everything primarily from telco carriers.

    I also learned that there are an awful lot of handsets equipped to be able to listen to podcasts – most of the Nokia N and E series phones supposedly can – and that the only thing missing is a way to get the listener to subscribe easily. Right now, asking the user to key in an RSS feed is far below optimal, but if we can figure out a way to get one click subscribe working on those handsets, then podcasts can join the music on headphones everywhere.

    If you had the opportunity to have your show – audio or video – on half a million more devices, to half a million more listeners, would you? And how much would that be worth to your show?

  • To the land of köttbullar!

    I’m off to Sweden today with PodCamp Co-Founder and partner, Chris Brogan. We’re headed, of course, to PodCamp Europe, a gathering of new media minds veteran and new, for two days of sharing, learning, and growing. It’s shaping up to be a great event, with lots of interest from mobile communications companies, students, journalists, and more – which reflects Scandinavia’s strong points, from what I’ve been reading.

    A quick shout out is earned by Andy Nyman and the Swecasters for being co-organizers, and of course to Jeff Pulver and VON, and Audana for sponsoring.

    Other random things… apparently, Swedish fish actually were Swedish at one point. The Swedish Chef from the Muppets was not Swedish, but may have been based on an actual Swedish chef. Swedish meatballs are called köttbullar and are served at IKEA. This I did not know.

    Rehearsal went well last night for the Podcast Marketing presentation. I’m much happier with the current version, which is a lot more coherent, as opposed to being just a bag of stuff.

    If you’re going to be in Stockholm, email me – FinancialAidPodcast at GMail dot com – and we can try to grab a cup of coffee and see the sights of Stockholm!

  • A Missed Opportunity for Podcasting?

    A Missed Opportunity for Podcasting?

    Just got off the phone with a company representative that wants to do a regional sponsorship for a few grand here in New England. My show was very much not the right fit, so I talked the rep through navigating MySpace and Google to locate other podcasters in the area, as well as pointing them at the New England Podcasting home page for other great shows in New England that might be a better fit.

    Here’s the zinger – the rep was on every major podcast network site out there, and couldn’t search by locale. This is a local sponsor, and there was no way for them to say, “Show me all the podcasts in Massachusetts” that they could find. MySpace is one of the few sites that publishes that info.

    And Todd Cochrane – I stand very much corrected in my initial statement about demographics in the last post. This advertiser wants a specific area because their ad spend would be wasted if the target audience isn’t within an easy drive of the locale, so demographics very much do matter here. Crow ain’t bad with dijon mustard. A little feathery.

    To everyone out there running their own podcast or podcast network – if you want to take advertising, make sure you have a media kit. Want to see an awesome media kit? Check out the Mommycast media kit. It’s a thing of beauty. If you run a podcast network, please help make it easy for people like this potential sponsor to figure out which shows would be a good fit for them, right on your site.

    Maybe I’ll add how to create a nice media kit to PodCamp Europe.

  • I don't care about podcast demographics and neither should you

    Okay, that’s not strictly true, but it is true that podcast demographics aren’t terribly important to me for the purposes of audience building. Why? Because this is new media, not broadcast media. What’s the difference?

    In broadcast media, you send out a message to your target audience and hope there’s enough relevant people in that database that some of them take action and buy your product or service. Broadcast marketers tend not to give a rat’s ass about feedback unless it involves a lawsuit; the only feedback they want to hear is the ringing of the cash register.

    In new media, you send out a message to people who want to hear from you. Not only do they want to hear from you, they want to talk to you and each other, and if you do your job well as a new media creator, they’ll want to talk to lots of other people about your media. Here’s the thing. Except for the highest profile people like the Scobles and Pirillos of the world, it’s very hard to quickly make a judgement call on who is an influencer and who is not. Thus, either you spend a crapload of time researching everyone carefully in your database, or you treat everyone like an influencer.

    That’s the secret that broadcast marketers are missing. For example, with my show, the Financial Aid Podcast, a broadcast marketer would say, okay, the audience is students, so specifically market and target 18 – 21 year old American students. If a listener who is a 33 year old parent of an 8 year old and a 5 year old, broadcast marketing tactics would say completely ignore that person, because they have no sales potential.

    However, that broadcast marketer is going to miss the fact that said parent has their own podcast with thousands of listeners, and a positive mention of your show could instantly add 10% more audience to your own show. New media marketers understand this one fundamental tenet (which is also a Buddhist one):

    Everyone is connected.

    In your marketing efforts, step back and think about your audience, whether you’re a broadcast marketer or a new media marketer. Are you excluding a group of people from your market segmentations – and if you are, who do they know that you’re no longer able to reach? If you have advertising on your podcast – do your advertisers understand that demographics are less important than word of mouth and influence?

    Edit: I’m clarifying this post to mean demographics shouldn’t matter as much for your audience building efforts as a podcaster. The subsequent post will explain why they’re still relevant to advertisers.

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