The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #129: April 17, 2006

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #129: April 17, 2006

Content summary: Gizmo today, not Skype; FIR listener survey update; blogger relations and how PR should pitch bloggers; blog commenting, engagement and Starwood Hotels new blog; Lee Hopkins reports; the .eu domain name controversy; Firefox Flicks grassroots marketing contest; listeners’ comments discussion (about ‘fractionalizing’ and community, RSS and email, wiki material on iPods); the music.

Show notes for April 17, 2006

download For Immediate Release podcast

Welcome to For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, a 79-minute podcast recorded live from Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Concord, California, USA.

Download the file here (MP3, 31.5MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as Juice, DopplerRadio, iTunes or Yahoo! Podcasts, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Listen to this podcast now:

In This Edition:

Intro:

News and Commentary:

  • 06:18 PR and blogger relations - some people think PR pitching is lame, but there is a best-practice way to go about it such as Shel’s project for ClickTV
  • 18:42 Using blogs to build engagement with customers - Starwood Hotels launches TheLobby.com and misses the mark with commenting (in particular); Anil Dash suggests a staged commenting structure; some commenting changes on the blog today but what else should they do?
  • 32:27 Andy Lark shouts out!
  • 32:42 From Our Correspondent Down Under: Lee Hopkins - BlogJet as an offline blog tool*; Pepper and Rubel: now that they are PepperRubel PR, should I pick a fight with someone to ‘spice things up a bit’?; why crisis comms folk need to know about web2.0, or know someone who does (*Neville suggests Lee should also take a look at the new ecto for Windows)
  • 44:18 Controversy surrounds the new .eu domain name registration system (and we’ve registered FIR)
  • 50:44 The Firefox Flicks grassroots marketing contest ended last week - over 250 video ads submitted in a good example of fans’ brand passion in action

Listeners’ Comments Discussion:

  • 54:10 Sallie Goetsch explains ‘fractionalizing’ and offers some views on community
  • 56:29 Clarence Jones also talks about community and participation; and has a suggestion for Tom Keefe: get a USB flash drive
  • 61:19 Michael Soulier says RSS won’t fix the email problem… yet
  • 67:31 Matt O’Neill tells us about Tiddlywiki and asks: does anyone have real-life examples of using wiki material on iPods to extend the value of podcasts?

Outro:

  • 70:48 Shel wraps the show; let us know your views about today’s discussions; how and where to send your comments; please take the FIR Listener Survey; where to find the show notes
  • 73:47 Outro podsafe music from the Podsafe Music Network - Easy Groove by The Blue Mile

FIR Show Notes links
Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the home page for info. If you have comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for our future shows, email us at fircomments@gmail.com, or call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

So, until Thursday, April 20…

Posted by neville on 04/17 at 09:31 AM

  1. It was very apparent that Neville wasn’t on Skype, as usually it sounds like you guys are in the same room, and there was a perceived ‘distance’ between you.

    I haven’t noticed the Skype gaps that you were speaking of in your show, I would be curious if anyone listening was complaining about them.

    Posted by Andrew  on  04/18  at  05:26 AM

  2. Hi, guys.

    Brace yourselves for a long comment—I was actually in a position to make notes today.

    Regarding Gizmo (which various people have recommended to me and I’ve installed but not tried), it seemed that while this show had fewer of those twangy Skype pauses, there was a lot more static, and still a couple of gaps. Time will tell whether it’s really an improvement.

    As for the death of the e-mail newsletter, I don’t think it will happen until all the e-mail newsletter readers are gone. I write a weekly e-zine which is reposted as a blog. One reader frequently sends comments back to me as e-mail messages. I suggested several times that he post these comments to the blog so that everyone could read them.

    After about the third time this happened, he admitted that he didn’t know how. Posting a comment is not rocket science, but it’s still an uncomfortably new technology for some people. Even though I’ve unsubscribed from a lot of e-zines because I can get them by RSS, it’s not going to be everyone’s preferred option.

    (Oh, and speaking of blogs, subscribing to Micropersuasion is like trying to drink out of a fire hose. Newsgator and Outlook were choking. I had to stop.)

    As for instant messaging/SMS replacing e-mail—I hope not! I’ve resisted IM since the 1990s for the plain and simple reason that I don’t want to be interrupted all the time. Teenagers may have nothing better to do; I can remember spending hours talking on the phone about nothing at that age.

    IM is a curse if you’re trying to work, possibly an even worse curse than telephones. I keep Skype set on “Do Not Disturb,” the same way I keep my cell phone turned off unless I’m planning to use it. (The purpose of cell phones is to make outgoing calls when you’re stuck in traffic and about to be late for a client meeting.)

    I’m not suggesting that IM and SMS should be kept out of the workplace entirely—they can be useful and sometimes, like phone calls, they can shorten the time it takes to get something done. But e-mail is something I can answer in my own time, like podcasts are something I can listen to in my own time.

    And speaking of podcasts—hyperlinking to a certain part of the recording would be an amazing tool for us commenters. Show hosts and listeners wouldn’t have to strain their memories to know what we were commenting about.

    That’s more than enough for one show, I think. I’m off to pick on some other poor podcaster.

    Posted by Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with "sketch")  on  04/18  at  09:23 AM

  3. I could still hear the ‘thuds’ that were there when you guys used Skype - though I am starting to think it might not be a comms issue and might just be Neville falling asleep and banging his forehead on the microphone.

    Being a recent convert, I am not sure whether you have done this before, but all the talk about Skype and whatnot has made me really interested in how you guys produce this podcast - it might make a useful tutorial for other would-be intercontinental podcasters. Stuff like what software you use to put together and edit all the different audio files, what hardware you use to record, where and how the podcast is hosted and distributed. That sort of thing. Think it would be very interesting.

    Re: podcast hyperlinks - isn’t there such a thing as an “enhanced” podcast or something, that includes bookmarks? I saw this once on the free podcast that the British comedian Rick Gervais did with The Guardian newspaper. If you clicked the white button in the centre of an Ipod’s clickwheel, it would pop up with that useful screen where you can fast forward and rewind using the click wheel rather than holding down left or right; only the time bar would have lines on it, which you could skip to and which displayed short descriptions of what was in that section.

    Cheers!

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Briggs  on  04/18  at  11:43 PM

  4. In rush, so short:
    Isn’t a blog more like the watercooler or cafeteria than the lobby? Odd analogy. Shel, good luck with the blogger relations effort. And it seems I haven’t been shouting my own blogging-relations efforts loud enough (though I even linked to you, Shel :-( ). Here is the link to my post with some links to results near the end http://critic.typepad.com/planetsab/2006/03/more_on_the_bel.html .
    No need to count the comments on the bellobene blog, though, Neville…

    Posted by Sebastian  on  04/20  at  02:29 AM

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