I’ll be at metacool today
Here’s the link: metacool.
“I just write this stuff down”
A new interview for you. One Degree – Five Questions For Seth Godin.
People like telling stories
Jake London points me to this new one from Chris… Link: The Long Tail: The dangers of "Headism".
All Marketers...
“One Lucky Store!”
What, do they think we’re idiots?
Oh, that’s right. We are.
From Convenience Store News, from Darren:
Same Store Sells Winning Lotto Ticket for Third Time
For the third time, the store at 8205 Gravois has sold a winning Lotto jackpot ticket, the Missouri Lottery said Monday. The most recent winning ticket sold for the April 9 Lotto drawing matched winning numbers 13, 14, 15, 17, 39 and 42, and is worth $1.3 million.
“This is one lucky location,” said Gary Gonder, spokesman for the Missouri Lottery.
Of course, in order to believe this lie, you’ve got to have a worldview that says that there’s some sort of skill or some sort of actual, real luck involved in winning the lottery. If you’ve got this worldview, then the story is perfect. Get in line, buddy.
Next thing you know, Gary Gonder will start telling us that people with certain Zodiac signs are likely to do better at video poker machines.
My Secret Project and the Bounty
I need your help.
I’m looking for three special people this summer to work on a secret project. No, I can’t tell you what it is. Yes, I can tell you about the internships: Seth’s Summer Intern Project.
Find me someone I successfully hire and you get $1,000 and the perverse satisfaction of knowing that you made a good match. Find me two and you get twice as much!
Blog it, post it, email it to the right people.
Thanks for your help!
This is real marketing
Curt Rosengren sent me a story about De Pree Jefferson. Link: Trevor’s Blog: De Pree.
De Pree works in a hospital. Doing little things, but things that matter.
Maybe hospitals should buy fewer billboards and hire more De Pree Jeffersons.
A blog I liked
Garrick Van Buren made me think. Link: The Work Better Weblog.
Speaking of podcasts
The All Marketers are Liars blog book tour continues today, but with a twist… a podcast! My one and only podcast, actually. Church of the Customer: Podcast: Are all marketers really liars? A chat with Seth Godin.
Two more thoughts about podcasting
that last post caused a minor firestorm, so I want to riff just a bit here.
1. I didn’t say I don’t like podcasts. In fact, I think they’re terrific. The user experience (take authentic, honest, informative audio with you when you do the rest of your life) is a great idea. It’s not going to go away.
2. I am fascinated by the math of the situation from the creator’s point of view.
What would have happened to radio if
a. it was really cheap to start a station
and
b. the dial could hold a million stations, not forty?
We certainly wouldn’t see the huge profits and high production values of radio today, would we? If there were thousands and thousands of stations to compete with, it would be an amateur medium, with nobody making enough to invest.
Podcasting feels a little like that. There will be millions of listeners… and there might be millions of podcasts.
But, then I think about A lists. Inevitably, a few podcasts will become like boingboing, the default channel for people getting started listening, or for people who want to listen to what everyone else listens to. (and of course there will be vertical A listers… like the Variety showbiz journal, but someone’s podcasted version)
Is it possible to build a podcast with a million subscribers? Why not? And if you did, would it be profitable enough to invest in and dedicate time to? No doubt.
So, I guess I see a much steeper pyramid for podcasts than I do for blogs. Not 10,000,000 podcasts at the bottom the way there is for blogs, but maybe 1% of that. And a few (a dozen, a hundred, a thousand?) at the top with big subscriber numbers and either subscriber revenue or ad revenue to make it worth the investment.
If your goal is to be an A list podcaster, today’s the day to start. And invest. And persist.
Thinking about podcasting
A few times a day, people ask when I’m going to have a podcast. My answer is probably not too soon.
The good news for podcasters is that users’ ability to hear podcasts is dramatically increasing. It’ll soon be built into itunes, and as awareness spreads, the number of listeners has to increase.
There’s a bunch of bad news, though.
First, you can’t browse a podcast. Which means that you won’t know what you like until you get it. That means subscribing in many cases. This is, of course, good news, cause subscribers are better than browsers. But it’s mostly bad news because it means that very few podcasts are going to be heard by large numbers of people.
Example: if there are 1,000 blogs and 1,000 readers, sooner or later every blog will get sampled by every reader.
BUT, if there are 1,000 podcasts and 1,000 people, it’s unlikely that you’ll be sampled by more than ten or twenty listeners. Why? Because the cost of sampling (in time) is too high. Once you’ve got your needs met, you’ll stop listening.
Problem two is that listening is a real time commitment. I can surf 300 blogs in the time I can listen to just one podcast. That doesn’t mean podcasts are bad… in fact, they’re far more powerful than blogs in selling emotion. It does mean that it’s going to be harder to get a big audience.
Which leads to the last bit of bad news: you can put up a blog post in two minutes, but it takes an hour to make a podcast. So, creators will want either big audiences or money if they’re going to really do it. And both are hard to see coming any time soon.
My two cents.