Creating Killer Podcasts for Innovative Company Branding
Posted on 30/09/06 15:15
This is the second session I am writing about at the Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California. The "Creating Killer Podcasts" panel discussion consisted of Bill Kirkos (Intel), John Furrier (CEO podtech), Robert Scoble (the notorious and well known A-list blogger), and Jeff Knowland (SAP).
There was a common theme that seemed to resonate with all of the speakers at this panel discussion: Blogging, Podcasting and Wikis. And these tools appear to be providing a more powerful means of informing, influencing and persuading customers/stakeholders than traditional marketing, advertising and corporate communications.
Microsoft’s Channel 9, for example, features interviews with Microsoft developers about their products, a forum to discuss the videos and a wiki. Robert Scoble said that he started working on the Channel 9 video project because “he was sick of being marketed to by committees producing ads that don’t tell you anything.” Why not sit down with an engineer and ask, “What does this thing do?” Spending 30 minutes doing this would answer far more questions compared to being subjected to some formalized, committee-based ad-agency-produced commercial.
Did it work? The channel 9 podcasts were being were getting 4.3 million visitors a month when Robert was still working there, and this traffic was all being generated by word of mouth referrals – linking via blogs, and the general internet buzz.
Scoble’s biggest surprise about the impact of this project were seen is surveys on College recruiting: Channel 9 videos we the number one most referred to item by college recruits as changing the way they thought about Microsoft. “That seems like a cool company to join and I thought it was an evil borg-like company, but now I can see they are a smart people there and I want to work with them…”
With RSS, a company has a direct connection to the people who want to read your stuff. John Furrier, CEO podtech, said that it’s not just the content, it’s the subscription capability to that content that makes RSS so powerful. There is a large audience of stakeholders that are interested in what you are doing and they want to be notified when you have something to tell them. RSS is a core enabler of this type of communication.
RSS seems underutilized – simply being used as a feed for your aggregator to harvest articles. Bill Kirkos of Intel spoke about expanding the uses of RSS to include things such as the distribution of discounts on a slow business day to drum up sales, or communicating children’s grades to their parents as they are entered by the teacher.
Kirkos said that the over-arching belief that Intel has is that RSS represents an inflection point – an inflection point being a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, wrote about his book entitled Only the Paranoid Survive:
"Strategic inflection points can be caused by technological change but they are more than technological change... They are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient. They build up force so insidiously that you may have a hard time even putting a finger on what has changed, yet you know that something has. Let's not mince words: A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to."
I have to agree that RSS and other tools such as blogging and podcasting appear to represent an inflection point that will change the market and the way that business will interact with its customers.
There was a common theme that seemed to resonate with all of the speakers at this panel discussion: Blogging, Podcasting and Wikis. And these tools appear to be providing a more powerful means of informing, influencing and persuading customers/stakeholders than traditional marketing, advertising and corporate communications.
Microsoft’s Channel 9, for example, features interviews with Microsoft developers about their products, a forum to discuss the videos and a wiki. Robert Scoble said that he started working on the Channel 9 video project because “he was sick of being marketed to by committees producing ads that don’t tell you anything.” Why not sit down with an engineer and ask, “What does this thing do?” Spending 30 minutes doing this would answer far more questions compared to being subjected to some formalized, committee-based ad-agency-produced commercial.
Did it work? The channel 9 podcasts were being were getting 4.3 million visitors a month when Robert was still working there, and this traffic was all being generated by word of mouth referrals – linking via blogs, and the general internet buzz.
Scoble’s biggest surprise about the impact of this project were seen is surveys on College recruiting: Channel 9 videos we the number one most referred to item by college recruits as changing the way they thought about Microsoft. “That seems like a cool company to join and I thought it was an evil borg-like company, but now I can see they are a smart people there and I want to work with them…”
With RSS, a company has a direct connection to the people who want to read your stuff. John Furrier, CEO podtech, said that it’s not just the content, it’s the subscription capability to that content that makes RSS so powerful. There is a large audience of stakeholders that are interested in what you are doing and they want to be notified when you have something to tell them. RSS is a core enabler of this type of communication.
RSS seems underutilized – simply being used as a feed for your aggregator to harvest articles. Bill Kirkos of Intel spoke about expanding the uses of RSS to include things such as the distribution of discounts on a slow business day to drum up sales, or communicating children’s grades to their parents as they are entered by the teacher.
Kirkos said that the over-arching belief that Intel has is that RSS represents an inflection point – an inflection point being a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, wrote about his book entitled Only the Paranoid Survive:
"Strategic inflection points can be caused by technological change but they are more than technological change... They are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, so that simply adopting new technology or fighting the competition as you used to may be insufficient. They build up force so insidiously that you may have a hard time even putting a finger on what has changed, yet you know that something has. Let's not mince words: A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to."
I have to agree that RSS and other tools such as blogging and podcasting appear to represent an inflection point that will change the market and the way that business will interact with its customers.
