Thoughts in Time

Seems like just yesterday I started my own blog… now I’ve done my first podcast. Chris LaConte and I did a podcast with Dave Evans of Digital Voodoo and Hear This. This was exciting on many fronts. First, some of the other people that we are going to be featured alongside are luminaries like Jackie Huba and Ed Keller. Jackie wrote - Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force (you should buy her book). Ed is one of the authors of “The Influentials”.

Chris and I talked about a variety of topics. We talked about how we came to realize the importance of Word of Mouth (WOM) in the college market, what we’ve learned as we’ve developed our WOM marketing program (B-4), and added some other comments on why we think WOM is so important. When it is posted by Dave, I’ll definitely ad a post and a link.

The whole experience was great and really drove home the point to me that with the new communications technologies, anyone can create very high quality media. Dave arranged a conference call through one of those free conference call lines, and then started the recording. I’m assuming that later he receives a digital audio file which he can edit / cut together to make our comments flow smoothly, and to add his intro and closing. When I was young I remember my father (Dr. Peter Glass) constantly using a dictaphone. He was always dictating papers, letters, etc. Then he’d give the file to an assistant who would type them up. It enabled him to work on the go. Here of course comes a new idea… One could easily attach a nice mic to the ipod (such products already exist - or to a cell phone / PDA, record comments, have them sent wirelessly to a service and either have it broadcast (as a podcast) or transcribed or transferred (via speech to text) into a text format, and emailed to you. So you could record a letter on the go, and before you get back to the office it would be in your inbox in digital format. I’m sure someone somewhere is working on this, but if not - why not? DigitalAdmin…

Speaking about user generated / social media, I’m not going to write about it now, but I am pretty excited about the Squidoo - Seth Godin’s new company. It makes it easy to create what I would call a UGM nexus and gives people tools to monetize their work. Seth, as you probably know, founded Yoyodyne and is the author of many books including “Purple Cow” and “Permission Marketing”. Anyways, more on Squidoo in the future.

The podcast was fun and I look forward to doing more. Thanks to Michael Rubin and Andy Sernovitz along with Dave Evans for the opportunity! Anyone interested in word of mouth should definitely join WOMMA - or go to one of its conferences.