IMV29 : Web 2.0

The following is a transcript for IMV29 : Web 2.0. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo Episode 29. I’m your host Ted Murphy and with me today is Chris Brooks, CEO of Talkr. Welcome to the show today, Chris.

Chris:

Thanks very much, Ted.

Ted:

Chris, can you start off by telling our audience a little bit about Talkr and the services that you provide to bloggers and podcasters?

Chris:

Sure. Talkr’s a platform to automatically convert your blog into a podcast. Let’s say that you already write a blog on search engine optimization or Star Trek conventions. Choose your favorite blog topic. And you’re interested in podcasting but you don’t have the time, the money or the interest in actually recording podcasts. What you can do is you can come to Talkr’s site, that’s Talkr spelled with the lazy E. So it’s T A L K R dot com. And come to Talkr’s site and register your blog with us. And then we will go out every hour and check your RSS or Adam feed to see whether you’ve published any new articles.

If you’ve published new posts or a new article we’ll take those posts and we’ll do a bunch of processing on them to make them more attractive to the listener and then we’ll convert them from text to speech. And then we’ll return to you either an RSS feed that people can configure their podcast client to retrieve or we can also give you a link that you can add to your blog template so that every time you publish a new post there’s automatically a link included that points to the audio file of that post on your blog. So that’s the core service we offer.

The second piece to it Talkr’s beginning to do now is work with advertisers to put advertisements in those audio posts.

Ted:

So from a marketer’s standpoint, actually let me look at it from a brand standpoint. I’m a brand and I am currently producing a corporate blog that’s talking about my products or services. I could go through your service and now magically transform that into a podcast with little to no effort?

Chris:

Yes. Exactly. So the initial configuration takes five to ten minutes to configure and then from that point we take it from there. There’s currently no cost to work with Talkr. And if you decide you don’t want advertising in your podcast, for example if it’s a corporate podcast or corporate blog, you may opt out of advertising at any point.

Ted:

So if I’m including advertising in my – let’s say I’m taking it from a media publisher’s standpoint and I’m actually including advertisement in that podcast, do I get compensated for that?

Chris:

Yes. So I should make the caveat that we are not currently working with any advertisers, but we’re exploring a number of options with a number of different advertisers. At some point we’ll be a revenue share which we’ll currently set at a 50/50 revenue share between Talkr and the publisher, but my guess is that we’ll go something towards at 70/30 with the publisher receiving the bulk of that revenue. And so at that point it works just like any other advertising you might work with such as Google or Commission Junction or anyone that you might use where you get a monthly check. Probably based on CPM, how many downloads you’ve had.

Ted:

There’s been a lot of hype surrounding Web 2.0 lately and new smart web applications. Can you give us an overview of what you think Web 2.0 means and what the marketplace really stands for right now?

Chris:

Sure. I am perfectly happy to describe Talkr as Web 2.0 as long as it’s two people who are interested in Web 2.0. And I think that Web 2.0 can mean a lot of different things and I’m not new in saying that. So even if you look at Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly publisher and, you know Rich McManus from Read, Write Web and folks that are very actively working in the Web 2.0 space, it’s really an amalgam of many different ideas. But perhaps my favorite, a very brief definition of Web 2.0 is chmod 775. And if you’re a UNIX geek at all, chumad is the command you’d give at the UNIX command line to change the commissions on a file, 775 or 777 effects whether the world has the right to write, execute and read that particular file. So that’s a really geeky explanation.

Perhaps to sum it up better, I think what people that are pushing Web 2.0 are getting at is that there are a whole set of new infrastructures in place today that allow more people to contribute content to the Web rather than just reading content from the Web. One of the most interesting, to my way of thinking, contributions that Web 2.0 companies have made is to allow massive groups of people to develop intelligence together about a particular field. So people talk a lot about tagging and Web 2.0. Which is where individual users can come to a particular piece of content and say, “Ah, this piece of content relates to dogs. And this piece of content relates to houses. Or real estate.” And because there are so many people looking at it and then they all put their own terms on it it’s a way of having humans go out and parallelize the process of figuring out what a particular piece of content is about.

Wow. Sorry. I get a little excited about this and when I do I become completely inarticulate.

[Laughter]

Ted:

So let’s look at that concept then and what has happened with content on the Internet and how would you say that this shift from let’s say publishers creating the majority of that content to consumer generated media and the sharing of that information and morphing of that information over time, what do you think the biggest lessons are for companies and specifically to our listeners to marketers and advertisers that they should look at the Web 2.0 movement? And what are the things that they should really embrace?

Chris:

Hmm. That’s an interesting question. Which is just my way of stalling for time. Ok. Personally I think that when people first introduced Web 2.0 they talk about it as sort of, you know it’s a changing of the guard in the Web and it happened in 2004 to 2005 to 2006. And then they’ll start listing out which companies currently practice Web 2.0 and most of the successful ones are pretty old companies. So personally I think one of the most interesting examples of what people quote as Web 2.0 is Amazon and their efforts as user generated reviews. So UGC is an acronym a lot of Web 2.0 folks use for user generated content. And what Amazon’s done a wonderful job of convincing people to come to their site to review the books and CDs and all the products that they sell. And so I know that even if I don’t buy every product on Amazon any time I want to research a purchase I go to Amazon and I read what they have, what all Amazon’s users have to say about that product. That’s actually a very old strategy.

So certainly when I was working in the late 90s for web companies we were doing that same thing with web based reviews. But user generated content can be age old mine for companies that implement it well. So you can get very sticky content that’s created very cheap or even essentially free because all you’re paying for is the platform and the incremental cost to add a new piece of content to that platform is virtual nil. And users may drive their friends to it. So it’s viral as well. So my final thought on Web 2.0 is yeah people are talking about a lot of very old things when they talk about Web 2.0. And I think it’s a nice tag to describe about 500 to a thousand little companies out there today who are trying to do what companies did in the late 90s. But a lot of what’s old is new again.

However, having said that there are a few things I think publishers should be aware of. One is that Microsoft is working on Internet Explorer version 7. It’s supposed to come out within about the next year. And when it does they’re going to be integrated feeds much more tightly with the new version of Internet Explorer. So these are RSS or Adam feeds. And I know listeners of your show have already heard much about this. So I won’t go into detail on that. But I think it certainly makes sense for people that are currently content publishers to be thinking deeply about how they’re going to integrate RSS into their business strategies going forward.

RSS feeds are often a very effective way for publishers to get information in front of potential readers. But it also has the potential to dramatically affect the earnings they would normally get on that. Cause those earnings are no longer shown within their environment, with their advertising. So I think people should be experimenting today with RSS feeds and learning what’s involved so that once IE7 comes out they have their feet on the ground and they’re running either in front of or chasing after new wave of folks using feeds.

Ted:

So let’s jump back to podcasting a little bit and what you’re doing with Talkr. What you’re doing sounds phenomenal and I can’t see why any blogger wouldn’t want to change that blog into a blog and a podcast. So what do you think the implications are of the technology? Are we gonna see a huge explosion in podcasting and what is that experience like? The text to speech experience versus the conversation that we’re having right now and inflection and tone and excitement and everything else like that? You know what’s that experience like listening to that podcast?

Chris:

Sure. See I don’t want to be an unalloyed optimist about text to speech and podcasting. Because there are certainly some downsides to listening to computer generated speech. When you first say that it’s the last time you heard computer generated speech was 2001/2002 I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised with how it’s evolved over time.

On the flip side, however, it’s not the same as listening to two people talk. Now you don’t hear people get excited. You don’t hear people laughing. And there are all sorts of audio cues that people give when they talk that just don’t come across in a text to speech generated podcast. So my first thought is I believe that text to speech is going to be a very interesting and powerful platform for any sort of advertisement that’s currently delivered by radio or on the radio. And I think that text to speech and podcasting has some tremendous advantages.

The first being that you have the text so if you want to add contextual based advertising it’s much easier in text to speech than it would be in a traditional radio or audio format. The second advantage is just that if you had an advertiser that was looking for niche content or niche content there’s a tremendous amount of inventory available currently that can be converted into content on that niche. And generally speaking it’s a fairly easy sales job to go to bloggers and say, “Hey I have an advertiser. I’m working with advertisers in this particular niche. They’d be interested in advertising in a podcast for your blog. Would you be interested in publishing a podcast through Talkr?”

You know it’s an interesting tool and you get paid for it.

Ted:

Yep.

Chris:

I don’t want to overstate the case. I think today there’s really I believe a dramatic gap in the infrastructure for advertising on podcasts. And if you think about how people advertise on the Web, you know there’s CPM, cost per impression, cost per click and cost per action or acquisition, CPA. If you shift from surfing a text Web site on a web browser to listening to a podcast and an MP3 player the client on an MP3 player is much less functional than the client on a web browser. And I think there’s this dramatic gap where in cost per click advertising when someone clicks on an ad, what they’re really saying is, “Hey, you know I’m actually interested in potentially purchasing something in this field. Advertiser, sell me.” When you’re listening to a podcast outside of a web browser there’s really no mechanism for doing that.

Now perhaps an advertiser can include a phone number and the user can call the phone number and buy something. So there’s an analog to the cost per acquisition method of paying for advertising. And there’s certainly an ability to say, “Well, we’ll pay you $10.00 per thousand downloads.” So there’s an analog to the cost per impression. But there’s really no analog for cost per click. And so that’s why you see many of the big podcasting companies like, well big is in quotation marks there. Like Odeo or Pod Show are really trying to move their traffic online again. And they’re trying to make their Web sites places where people come and listen in browser. Because in browser you can have click metrics. So they’re able, you know most of the advertisers that I’ve talked to are very interested in integrated ad campaigns that not only will they place an advertisement in the audio but they’ll also have the ability to have a graphical ad in front of a user and the user can click on those ads. And so it’s very forward thinking of those advertisers to be willing to experiment with podcasting. But they’re strongly hedging their bets by putting, you know the cost per click base mechanisms in place as well.

Until someone develops that the analog, the cost per click, listening to a podcast offline, ok and some infrastructure whereby a user can indicate interest in a particular advertiser’s proposal without having to buy something. Until that infrastructure’s in place I don’t think podcasting has the same kind of legs that you see in text-based Web sites and in video, for example. In some ways I think video advertising has leapfrogged over podcasting. Even though video podcasting and submission of user generated video has at least to my way of thinking taken off, you know a year later than podcasting took off.

Ted:

So what would be your top three tips that you would give to an advertiser or marketer who was looking at either utilizing podcasting as marketing or utilizing other Web 2.0 concepts? What would be the advice that you would give to them?

Chris:

Well, my expectation is that most advertisers – and this is true in my Web .1 ventures, is that you have to have some of your budget set aside for experimentation. And I believe that’s where podcast advertising is today. It’s in that experimental phase. And so advertisers should be thinking about first of all, can I work with a Pheedo, can I work with a FeedBurner? And to start experimenting with advertisements in feeds themselves. So these are still text or graphical ads that are placed within RSS and Adam feeds. But because the user’s reading them on a web browser they have an analogy of cost per click and it’s called – wait for it – cost per click. Ok so the user can click on the ad right in their browser. So I think it makes a lot of sense for people to start experimenting with advertising and feeds in general.

I also think people should be advertising in podcasts but you certainly want to be looking for ways to generate standard advertising metrics. And you probably want to be experimenting with things beyond just cost per thousand downloads. So integrated campaigns where you have, you not only get advertising in the audio but you get an advertisement on the Web site as well. I think makes a tremendous amount of sense there.

I’m not sure that’s three tips but that’s what comes to mind at your question.

Ted:

Well it’s certainly been a wealth of information that you’ve shared with us today and I appreciate you coming on the show. If any of our listeners have any questions for us they can always call us toll free at 86662064461 and for more information on Talkr you can visit www.talkr.com. That’s TALKR.com. Chris thanks and have a great day.

Chris:

Thanks, Ted. It’s been a blast.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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