Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Interview: Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek - August 16, 2005

In this edition of For Immediate Release podcast interviews, Shel and Neville enjoyed a 36-minute conversation with Pete Blackshaw, Chief Marketing and Customer Satisfaction Officer of Intelliseek, Inc, the company behind Blogpulse and Brandpulse. Topics and themes discussed include: consumer motivation and word-of-mouth marketing; measurement metrics; comparing blog search tools and what may develop in a period of Furious Innovation; new dynamics to emerge; customer experiences.

About our conversation partner:

Pete Blackshaw is a recognized expert in interactive marketing, word-of-mouth behavior and consumer understanding. Throughout Pete’s varied experiences in marketing, government, consumer affairs and entrepreneurship runs a common theme – the power of the internet to give individuals a voice and change the way things are done.

At Intelliseek, Pete manages the overall marketing strategy for the company and oversees client engagements and consulting projects. He also leads the firm’s popular webinar series.

Pete is the 2004 co-founder of the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association, one of the fastest-growing industry organizations in the US in advertising and marketing circles, and he co-authors a bi-weekly column on digital marketing strategies for JupiterMedia’s ClickZ network.

Before receiving his master’s degree from Harvard Business School in 1995, Pete served as a press secretary and legislative consultant to then-Sen. Art Torres in the California legislature, where he guided several consumer-focused bills to passage and initiated the first “interactive” legislative hearing in the US. He has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Download MP3 podcast

Download the conversation here (MP3, 14MB), or sign up for the RSS feed to get it and our future shows automatically. (For automatic synchronization with your iPod or other digital player, you’ll also need a podcatcher such as the free iPodder, DopplerRadio or iTunes 4.9, or an RSS aggregator that supports podcasts such as FeedDemon).

Interview Segment Time Points:

  • 00:01 Shel introduces the interview
  • 00:39 Pete describes his background leading up to his job at Intelliseek
  • 04:05 Pete on consumer motivation to speak their opinions
  • 05:22 Pete explains the principles of word-of-mouth marketing
  • 19:57 Neville: marketing similarities with PR with the ‘audience in charge’ of the message
  • 11:08 Pete: lots you can measure in word-of-mouth communication with new metrics; how you can slice-and-dice those metrics
  • 14:50 Shel: much of this is reactive - who’s using it proactively?
  • 15:09 Pete on optimizing and making marketing strategies more efficient
  • 16:30 Pete: consumer-generated media (CGM) help brands measure up; word-of-mouth is a long-term strategy
  • 17:47 Neville comments on Mary Hodder’s analysis of blog search tools and asks Pete for his thoughts on that research and what should develop
  • 19:54 Pete: biased towards ease of use and consumer focus for search tools; filtering spam will be a big issue; search for material other than textual, eg, video, audio; the importance of profiling the influencers
  • 23:41 Shel: different techniques applied to search
  • 24:11 Pete: Blogpulse goes deep into its search
  • 24:20 Neville on the different methods search engine use, illustrated in Mary Hodder’s posts, doesn’t add to confidence in those tools
  • 25:34 Pete: we are all so early in the blog search space, things will begin to converge as consumers dictate their preferences
  • 26:57 Pete: bloggers held accountable for what they blog; the interesting dimension of strong opinions and observing
  • 27:54 Pete: we’re still in a period of Furious Innovation
  • 28:02 Shel: are you continuing to explore different approaches to measurement?
  • 28:11 Pete: building unique and proprietary ways of measurement including for video and audio
  • 29:25 Pete: the potential big impact of podcasting in word-of-mouth marketing
  • 30:09 Pete: all sorts of new dynamics will emerge and PR firms haven’t begun to think about this
  • 30:40 Pete: continuing to log thoughts on CGM; launching a new blog to do this
  • 31:15 Shel asks about CGM best practices
  • 31:36 Pete outlines some customer experiences with product launches and supporting activities
  • 34:04 Conversation wrap up
  • 34:35 About this podcast and where to find For Immediate Release.

Links for the individuals and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the conversation:

Pete Blackshaw, Intelliseek, Procter & Gamble, PlanetFeedback.com, WOMMA, Blogpulse, Brandpulse, Google, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, Mary Hodder, Bloglines, Corante, GM FastLane Blog, Advertising Research Foundation, ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com.

Posted by neville on 08/16 at 08:11 AM
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