Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Posted by on Feb 22, 2008 in Blogging | 0 comments

If you want your favorite blogs to be ultraportable, check out Feedjournal. It makes an old-school newspaper out of your RSS feeds.

Here’s today’s Christopher Penn morning paper. (PDF, 292 kb)

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What metrics matter to podcasters?

Posted by on Feb 21, 2008 in Marketing, Podcasting | 2 comments

A recent question sent into Marketing Over Coffee – what metrics matter for podcasters to measure their success, a la the ADM?

Ultimately, traffic metrics are only the top of the funnel – they’re the raw number of eyeballs in, and that in itself isn’t worth much except for general trends.

No matter what statistic you use – file downloads, Feedburner numbers, etc. the main value of basic traffic statistics is trend growth – does your show have more audience this month than last month? Does your show have more audience this year than last year, and what kind of growth are you looking at – 1%? 5%? 50%?

It’s more important to use a consistent growth metric than a standardized one – if you consistently measure on Feedburner numbers, then you have a baseline to measure growth. If you consistently use files downloaded with status code 200 from Apache, you can measure based on that.

Having two statistics – Feedburner + Apache – is good for ensuring that trends are consistent. If Apache completed downloads are radically different than Feedburner numbers, you need to investigate why. Is it a spambot scraping your content? Is it people listening straight off the web site without a download? If metrics matter, your chosen benchmarks should move in tandem – 10% growth in Apache is 10% growth in Feedburner.

I think it’s vitally important for podcasters to also chart out their funnels, even for shows with nothing to sell. For example, Marketing Over Coffee right now doesn’t have a revenue model per se, at least in the sense of a widget for sale. But we do have conversion metrics we want to examine – blog comments, subscribers to the feed, etc. and rolling forward, we’re almost certainly going to put out a newsletter. We may even be able to measure our success by speaking gigs, etc., but unless you’re living in a CPM advertising world, eyeballs and ears don’t count for much.

The Student Loan Network measures the Financial Aid Podcast by both growth of the house list and loan volume – two very clear, revenue-generating sales metrics. Those count for a lot more than eyeballs and ears.

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John Wall Nails Trade Shows

Posted by on Feb 21, 2008 in Conferences | 4 comments

Want some of the best advice about being a trade show exhibitor? The Ronin Marketeer, John Wall, has it all for you.

For more of John, check out Marketing Over Coffee, too.

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Quick look: the Nokia n810

Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 in Technology | 15 comments

I’d been hearing a lot of buzz about this little machine ever since Podshow’s sponsorship of it with a few prominent podcasters I listen to, like CC Chapman and Julien Smith. Yesterday I got to play with one of the boxes, courtesy of Peta Andersen, and I think one of these is in my future soon.

Why?

Take a look at this picture. What do you see?

Nokia n810 running terminal

That’s an n810, and it’s running terminal.

The n810 is a Linux box. Yes, it comes with all the shiny applets and stuff, but it also comes with a Linux distribution called Maemo. Maemo makes the n810 a big deal because it’s a variant of Debian Linux, and that means you get a command line.

Poking around a little more, that terminal is running bash, and apt-get is installed on there.

apt-get, if you’re unfamiliar with Debian Linux, is a package manager that lets you download and install packages from the command line. To install, say, wget, you’d type apt-get install wget when you’re online and the service would do the rest.

Why is this a big deal? Unlike my iPod Touch, which I still love, the n810 is a true portable computer. The existence of a bash shell and apt-get means that I can run most of my marketing software (a lot of the stuff I do is on the command line on my Mac, such as wget, perl, bash scripts, etc.) from a microcomputer in my pocket. That plus a large, tactile keyboard makes this little device a winner.

Now if only I could get a better price than $400…

If you’re a podcaster promoting your show’s coupon codes, you are welcome to post the codes in the comments.

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Sometimes, the responsible choice is walking away

Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 in Economy | 1 comment

I read with dismay this story on MSNBC about people breaking into their retirement funds to pay for housing and other debts they’ve accrued.

Now, understand that I work for a financial institution, a lending company. It is in my short term interest and financial welfare to recommend that people should always pay their debts, and for the most part, if you have the ability to repay, you should.

However, in cases like the story above, sometimes the responsible thing is to walk away.

Which is worse?

  • Declare bankruptcy, default on your loans, and take a 7 year hit in which you pretty much are cut out of the lending world?
  • Deplete your retirement, default on your loans anyway, and not only take a 7 year hit on credit, but also be wholly dependent on welfare and charity for the last 20 years of your life?

Which is worse?

The logical conclusion, the business conclusion, is to walk away from your debts. Don’t think that businesses don’t make that decision every day. Sallie Mae (ticker:SLM) lost a deal with JC Flowers – they walked away. There were consequences, but the consequences of walking away were weighed by JC Flowers and they decided that walking away made the most financial sense.

There’s a culture encouraged by financial institutions that there’s a moral penalty for walking away, and that moral pressure is one of the many forces used by companies to keep individuals in obligations, whether or not they have the ability to repay.

Here’s the problem with that. It’s short term thinking. For the citizens in the MSNBC story, it is in my long term interests as a taxpaying citizen of the United States for that borrower to walk away. Companies come and go, but that citizen, if he depletes his retirement, will be dependent on me and others for a subsistence lifestyle. Just as he’s trading his future for the present, so are financial institutions trading America’s future for the present if they continue to encourage debt holdings by consumers who simply cannot pay and will not be able to pay.

Conclusion: if you’re a financial institution with a consumer who cannot repay, that loan is going to decay sooner or later anyway. (unless it’s a student loan which can never be forgiven or written off by the consumer) Write it off now, preserve that citizen’s retirement and savings, and help them be able to buy your services later on down the road. Think long term, think big picture.