Today we talk about: Suck Less, Gathering Demographics, Google Gears, Taking SaaS offline, Associations, Getting kicked out of trade shows, More data than ability, Podcamp Europe, Google Analytics
John is: Still gearing up for Orlando
Chris will be at Podcamp Europe
Our theme song is called Mellow G by Fonkmasters from the Podsafe Music Network
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Unknown Speaker 0:08
This is marketing over coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.
John Wall 0:19
Good morning, I’m John Wall. I’m Christopher Penn. And this is marketing over coffee. Yes, it is. And I know like I can’t I can’t not drink my coffee immediately as soon as I say that exactly. need my dosage. Alright, so we’re already talking without rolling podshow is the big star you kind of you we talked about sucking last last week. And over on your blog, you had a number of posts. And so what we kind of what’s been the what’s been the story with that? Well, actually, I only had two posts.
Christopher Penn 0:45
The first one was sort of like an organizational suggestions and things and the second was a very specific idea where Poggio could really turn up, turn the dial up to 11. They want to end and make a big Big difference. The first post there was a lot of different reactions very very diverse reactions. It was it I thought was interesting that I thought the post itself was relatively neutral, you know, from an organizational you know, management kind of position. And different people depending on their agendas, you know, saw the posts supporting their particular perspective. So it was a interesting little bit, I guess a Jedi Mind Control there. The second one I thought was more interesting, at least to me, even though it was more technical, was that I was looking at following the whole sound exchange are a thing where the saying webcasters you know, now you got to pay up the enormous amount of money and to play music, and the law behind that is compulsory licenses governed by the copyright recording board of the US with the way the license is written says use a statutory requirement, you must pay fees unless you have another license in place and negotiate with a sound recording copyright owner. Well, if you look at the podshow p PMN license podshow spearmen license specifically waives all royalties not only for podcasts and downloads, but also for streaming. So is as long as an internet radio station was a member of the PMM, they could play anything on the PMM. And not only, you know, promote independent music, but they wouldn’t owe a dime to soundexchange because the license would override the statutory requirements. So podshow is essentially sitting on a goldmine of you know, I think it’s like 2700 bands, and all their music on there. So that was the kind of the point of the second question and I hope that you’re the day or somebody else who uses the pm and takes takes them up on that those licensing terms because it could really change internet radio for the better,
John Wall 2:46
right? Sure. Yeah. No more bands, more music and licenses in place. Just a chance to push stuff out the door further,
Christopher Penn 2:52
and kick the RA and the
John Wall 2:55
right, exactly, give them the SmackDown that everybody just wants that to happen. What else? Did you get an email from? podshow. They had some kind of edge. Yeah.
Christopher Penn 3:05
The some saying that they were hacked and stuff. And then there was a post on Adam Curry’s blog about their mail server got compromised, but I don’t even know what mail server platform they’re using. But mail servers are notorious for being compromised on a routine basis. So I was kind of almost like I’m a non event. Yeah, I kind of kind of expect that from every company.
John Wall 3:29
Well, sure, especially social network. Yeah. I mean, that’s pretty much the the reason they existed. Now, if I had gotten my password emailed to me or something, yeah, that would have been something that would have been cool. I would have been excited about that. But getting a random email. In fact, in fact, I’ve been this week I get hammered more by eBay. Really? Yeah. There’s a new new spam phishing technique out there. on eBay. When you post an item for sale. There’s a button up there where people can ask questions and you’ll get emailed the question? Well for one item, I got At least six emails from people, like four or five of them from distributors in China saying, Hey, if you’re selling stuff, you know, come talk to us, we can get you stuff. A guy who said he was from Louisiana and been wiped out from Katrina and would like to swap anything for art, if I want to just give them my stuff. Maybe I’ll pass on that. So, you know, it would take nothing to throw a CAPTCHA on there and filter some of that stuff out. So I would hope that would happen because it was amazing. I’ve never had that much. You know, spam through eBay on one shot, maybe they can integrate stumble upon people network, you know, manually filter spam or something, I don’t know. Well, that or I mean, they’ve got they’ve actually upgraded their feedback data to that. So and this is a good marketing practice too, for anybody that you know, it used to be you just kind of said the transaction was good or bad. That was it. It was digital. And now they have like four levels of stuff like was the description good, did it ship quickly. You know, where the goods what you expect I forget exactly what they are. And they’re all five star ratings too. Okay, so you’ve got four title. And that’s it. You know, I’ve been doing a little bit more of this stuff to over it with some other projects were kind of every time you do a campaign, just throw, you know, if you’re, if there’s 20 data points you want to get on a customer, just every time you send an email, just do a little quiz or something thrown one question. So yeah, who does that?
Christopher Penn 5:22
When whenever you signed or they were doing it for a long time, whenever you signed in any service on Yahoo, they asked you one thing they would say, you know, What year were you born? Or what’s your zip code? Or what’s your favorite band or whatever? And thanks, man, it would put it all end up in your Yahoo profile. And if you just casually answered them, here and there. So you find out the complete profile yourself in about six weeks. Right, right. Next thing you know, you’re, you’re on Matilda’s getting a birthday card, you know, based on the data you gave them when you’ve gone over the edge. Let’s see.
John Wall 5:50
All right. So Google gears I want to ask you about that because I used to be kind of hooked on Firefox. I was reading only through Firefox, switched over to Google Reader. Two or three weeks ago, Ron at griddle cakes radio gave me a tip that I should be Stop wasting my time there and go over to that. And now Google gears is gives them the ability to take that stuff online. And I saw like almost two weeks ago, you downloaded it and you ran with it. So what’s what’s been up with that?
Christopher Penn 6:15
It’s an Firefox extension. What is it? It’s a state preservation database that it runs inside of Firefox. And all you do right now is in Google Reader, you can download up to 2000 blog posts. inside of this little mini database. I’m not even sure what it is like sequel lite or something like that, but it syncs up with Google Reader. So if you were writing on the plane or something like that, you want to have something go. Right now, it’s only available for Firefox as an extension, but you can download the development kit itself. And they open sourced it so you can use it for any any kind of web data. As long as you you make calls to Twitter using the API provided. So you could integrate anyone who’s got Google gears installed, do Integrate, you know, stateful stuff. So if you have a, say, a social network, you can have your mail delivered there. I think everyone is scrambling frenetically to be the first to have a Gmail extension for it so that you can take your Gmail on the road, which would be a huge, huge thing. I mean, that would basically be an outlook killer. A lot of people right, sure, sure. You could have Gmail to go.
Unknown Speaker 7:24
Yeah, cuz that’s
John Wall 7:26
POM has a device out that syncs with their phones. Now, this is the thing and a lot of people have been ragging. I’m actually I kind of dragged myself, because it has, it’s Linux based. And it’s instant on that, which is cool. You flip this thing over, you push the button and goes on. But as I’ve been thinking about now, it’s there’s so many decent web services as you hit around, and the first one to get offline Gmail and offline Google Docs. That’s pretty much it. You’ll have you could use Salesforce, you know, as a web based CRM, and you’ve got everything offline and web based now. There you go. All your apps there. No, you know, the fat client gets pushed to the side.
Christopher Penn 8:03
Yep. Google Mail and Google Calendar. Yeah, you’ve got an outlook killer.
John Wall 8:07
Yeah, that’s it. And that would be and it got talked about is departments across the world, you know, rejoicing. I mean to have these simple or devices that are web based.
Christopher Penn 8:17
Yeah. I don’t know if they were rejoice or Well, the IIT guys would rejoice. The corporate security guys would have a heart attack.
John Wall 8:23
Oh, yeah. No, no, that Yeah, there’s a whole nother range of issues. And then, you know, what does happen when one chokes even for a half hour? You know, of course, the thing with that is the risk is probably significantly less than, you know, the guy in your office running outlook, being out the day something goes wrong and being down for a full day.
Christopher Penn 8:41
Yeah. And hopefully, they would be smart about it, too. And not, for example, sync up the spam folder,
John Wall 8:46
right? Yeah, sure. Sure. try and do some some smarter manage the data. So
Christopher Penn 8:51
what’s on your plate this week? What
John Wall 8:53
is on my plate this week? You know, it’s funny, I was blocked a little bit and I was talking about associations. I’ve kind of had a rough I’m finally giving up, I think on the local associations we have. There’s a Boston chapter of the Business Marketing Association. And also in the past, I’ve been a member of the New England Direct Marketing Association NEMA. And, you know, I found that I just, I pay my dues. And then that’s it. I never do anything the rest of the year with these people. So I’m basically just writing them a check for the privilege of saying I’m a member. I mean, I don’t know, for some reason, it just seems like I can’t even get to the meetings. Yeah, you know, and then I look at, you know, some of the social network, the social network that has been kind of built like through LinkedIn, or through podcasting over the past two years. And, you know, I’m learning stuff every week from people that I talk to. And so it’s like, okay, so I can pay, you know, 275 a year for something that doesn’t get used at all or for free. As long as I contribute to this community. I’m getting all kinds of great feedback and education. Right. So yeah, I don’t know. I’ve just, you know, in fact, I’d be interested if anybody has any marketing associations that they think are great. are worth money. And then the other thing I was thinking is there probably is there’s just a whole nother crust a whole nother cast of markets here, you know that that’s working at a huge organizations that have enough budget to just join every Association there is and they don’t care whether they go these things or not, but they’re just joining all of them. So they can say that they’re, you know, members and they get the deals on the shows and things like that. But that and then, yeah, trade shows. I’ve got a trade show coming up next week. And we’ve had some interesting stuff. It seems my our Google videos have stirred up a little bit of trouble I’ve been told not to show them under any conditions on the show floor. So that’s a just means it’s your show. That’s a huge success or that or even the campaign just becomes these are the videos they won’t let you see. Yeah, you know that the video is too dangerous for the trade show floor.
Christopher Penn 10:51
I gotta wonder what’s in that video. You got it. You gotta tell us.
John Wall 10:54
It’s it’s actually a parody of the apple ads. Okay, where our product is one and the company competitions the other one. And but of course, See, the problem is that show is heavily affiliated with a competitor, right? So they’re able to kind of flex their muscles and say, Hey, you know, this doesn’t happen. And in their defense, it’s, you know, that’s understandable. I mean, we went in knowing the show is very clear. And most trade shows have these kinds of paragraphs in their agreements, saying, like, you know, basically, the show management has approval rights on everything, right, you know, if you’re going to do anything that’s against the spirit of the event, they can tell you to stop or they can kick you right off the floor to which you know that and we have no interest in getting kicked off the floor, because it’s all about, you know, doing the networking on the floor and getting to meet everybody there. So we will have to adjust our show as a recording. But that’s been exciting. And you know, in the sweet one I want to get your opinion, is more data than ability we’re talking about, you know, one end of the spectrum is appending data every time you touch somebody and really working your database, but at the other end of the spectrum are systems that go unused, you know, classic example. As you know, I just can’t stand this when you dial into some kind of service, right? And they have you type in your account
Christopher Penn 12:06
number and then a rep asks you for it as soon as you they get a human eye,
John Wall 12:09
right? It says, Oh, yeah, we’ll get a number. Yeah, not to point fingers, anything but yeah, card, you know, insurance industry and other classic, that kind of stuff. But so it’s just a, it’s a matter of, you know, can you take and get the most out of the systems you have. And the important thing is only buying to the extent of your ability to leverage it. If you’re talking about shelfware, you know, software that you get, and usually it comes to the case where you’re buying some huge enterprise system and you start getting stuff that you’d never get around to turning on or you don’t have the bandwidth to turn on. Yeah, and that’s,
Christopher Penn 12:44
it’s we have a telephone system. The office that has like I kid you not the manual is 1400 pages long. You know, on everything configured in call center features that you know, all these different types of things, integration API’s, and also a lot of it We’re not going to use I really the trickier part is is buying what you need. Right shows the sales guys gonna do everything again they sell you that the last little widget and stuff to capture that last bit of commission again because he knows what he’s done you’re never gonna buy from him again,
John Wall 13:16
right? Yeah once you’re in you’re in and the and that’s where the profit is to you know you buy that extra second little box that plugs into the system that’s where they get in here for the big bucks that and of course services to now the more crap you buy, you know you need to get somebody to help set it up for you to learn what it’s all about. So now you’re buying training, and everything else additional on that. So next week, you’ve got PodCamp your octave Europe is going to
Christopher Penn 13:40
be at Vaughn. It’s gonna be at the Vaughan venue itself in Stockholm, Sweden. So if you haven’t checked it out already PodCamp your org that’d be 111 people registered as of last night which is awesome. I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of the folks there’s so many I this is really interesting because we’ve got people from all over Europe coming and a lot of local folks to MTV Sweden, sending someone Loic Lumia from the web. The little web conference is going to be popping by. And there’s going to be the opportunity, you know, for Vaughn people to just stop it into, you know, the it’s gonna be concurrent with Vaughn. And so it literally two rooms inside of the Vaughn conference. So you know there Jeff Pulver is being very generous about donating the food and all that stuff. It’ll be really interesting to see how many folks from the I guess the the suit and tie crowd pop in and see what the new media folks are doing? Yeah, crossover. Sure. We’ve got a whole bunch of stuff we’re rolling out, I’m rolling out my new Facebook podcast player. They’re gonna be dumping a brand new version of the podcast marketing session that I’ve been doing the last few podcasts. I had a really good talk last night with MGB from love spirals, and about just podcast marketing in general, and it’s mostly on statistics and stuff. So I want to really kind of dig in with folks about What which numbers you should be looking at which numbers you should not be looking at, and how to interpret them and how to benchmark of success. A lot of folks are staring at the wrong numbers, they have to get a control panel. And, you know, we’re talking specifically ponchos pdn. But it applies to anybody who lives in TPN. Anybody who’s got a panel full of numbers, this, the looking at the daily numbers, is just a gigantic mistake, because the behavior of people who especially with iPods, is that they do not sync them every day necessarily, they may sync them a couple times a week, or sometimes some people only sync up on the weekends or only listen on the weekends. So with podcasting, especially, you need to look at like the seven and 30 day rolling averages, much, much more so than the daily numbers. If you look at the daily numbers kind of heart attack every other day, because it’ll be up, down, up, down, up down. Sure, sure. And the other thing that just blows my mind is that there aren’t more people using Google Analytics, and it’s urgent. It’s the urgent software package. It’s urgent six, which is urgent been a fantastic piece of analysts. software, it’s free, it is free. If you’ve got a blog, you’ve got, you know, anything, any place to let you put a JavaScript, you can use Google Analytics. I don’t know why more people aren’t using it,
John Wall 16:10
ya know and they’ve done a lot of upgrades in the past maybe six months I think there’s kind of been two major rounds the most recent ones amazing the stats and the graphs unbelievable yeah good stuff and and plenty to great way conversion analysis to commercial sales if your traffic sources good referrals. Yeah, yeah, good stuff there. And then we used to you Well, we still do use click tracks and it’s got the same kind of overlay function to you know, you actually see your your web page and it actually puts the stats right on the links themselves. You can see percentages of where
Unknown Speaker 16:45
the funnels and
John Wall 16:46
funnels are huge. Yeah, exactly. That’s the, you know, at the top, it’s here’s all the pages that referred to and then it funnels to the page you’re at, and then the funnel spins back out to you and says, Here’s where they’re going. Exactly.
Christopher Penn 16:56
If you have anything for sale on your website, and your You must be using the funnel feature.
John Wall 17:02
Yeah, there’s really no other way to kind of now that’s I mean, you could take you know, a 300 page site down to probably the 20 top performing pages she’s you know you’re doing because there’s a lot of money to and then the thing with that too is it just scales so wonderfully The bigger your site the bigger the financial impact us
Christopher Penn 17:18
Yeah, like that can be Yeah, but even if you’re like a small independent artists you need if you have a CD Baby page or whatever, you need to have your Analytics tracking on the thank you confirmation page that you run, and then
John Wall 17:28
I don’t know why you wouldn’t do that. Yeah, no, that’s Yeah, that’s it. That’s the finish line. It’s like the cash register rings every time that page gets hit. So
Christopher Penn 17:36
you got it. That’s exactly where you want to be. So yeah, they’ll all be coming up at PodCamp Europe’s gonna be a really good time. I hope anybody who can make it you know does and we’re gonna have I know we have a bunch of people recording sessions as Scott new video camera this past week, actually. Sanyo his little cd 65 it’s like the HD two but it’s not HD but it records in H 264, which is apples. Well, it’s not apples. It’s ABC. But the amazing I get about an hour and 15 minutes on a one gig SD card, and it looks good
John Wall 18:06
right now and then you can dump it straight into Australian format. That’s awesome. So, dude, very cool. Well, I’ll be in Orlando next week. So if there’s anybody in the wonderful world of the mouse and would like to chat marketing, I’m always up for swinging over to grab a drink someplace. And I think that will do it for this week. I’ll have to have some patients with us next week. We’re gonna have to figure out how to do transcontinental transatlantic casting. It will be transcontinental and transcontinental Yeah, and maybe maybe a day late to depending on what happens, but we’ll see what we can get together. But with that, sir, enjoy your coffee. Enjoy the coffee.
Unknown Speaker 18:42
You’ve been listening to marketing over coffee. You can hear Mr. Penn daily at the financial aid podcast and read more Christopher s pen.com. Mr. Wolf blogs daily at Ronan marketeer.com and podcast VM show every Monday.
John Wall 19:01
The marketing over coffee theme song is called mellow g by funk masters. And you can find it at the pod safe music network pod safe music network.com or follow the link in our show notes.