{"id":142,"date":"2006-05-23T16:06:49","date_gmt":"2006-05-23T23:06:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/wp\/?p=142"},"modified":"2006-05-23T16:06:49","modified_gmt":"2006-05-23T23:06:49","slug":"pitching-with-podcasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2006\/05\/23\/pitching-with-podcasts\/","title":{"rendered":"Pitching with Podcasts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In talking with one of my old friends who’s figuring out how to market his software<\/a>, I realized that I’ve come to rely on company produced MP3s as part of my means to learn about a company.<\/p>\n

Podcasts are great medium to get information and pitches to content hungry people like myself. The key in my mind is time-shifting: having a conversation in non-real-time. I see info workers and esp. influencers working more and more with time-shifted information and data.<\/p>\n

I realize that RedMonk<\/a> is somewhat of a freak in it’s work setup — I always jokingly call it The New World of Work — but information workers are increasingly distributed across many different geographies and time zones. The tools of the ‘net-life are all time-shifted: email, blogs, and even IM. IM may seem weird, but about half of the conversations I have in IM are delayed: someone IM’ed me an hour ago, and respond to them. Then they respond 10 minutes later, etc.<\/p>\n

Content for Research<\/h2>\n

For example, I’m not a long-time expert on Pervasive<\/a>, so when they asked me to be part of their ISV round-table earlier this week by going over trends in IT, I downloaded all of the MP3s they had available to listen while I cleaned the house, mowed the lawn, walked the dogs, and worked.<\/p>\n

I of course sucked in all the text, PDF, wikipedia, and conversations I could get my hands on as well. In the end, I was still not what you would call an “expert” on Pervasive, but RedMonk in no way professes to be vertical experts at everything (except those things we’re passionate about ;>). Instead, I’d achieved the RedMonk goal (at least my<\/i> RedMonk goal) of understanding Pervasive in context of the software industry, their users, their products, strategy, all with a handful of deep drill-downs, like Pervasive’s micro-kernal architecture.<\/p>\n

That is, I could have a conversation and give actionable advice about Pervasive as a member of the software ecosystem, and I’d know the questions to ask to get more detail as needed.<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, I come across a lot of company’s podcasts. What I’m looking for when I’m in research mode are very narrowly focused podcasts that are technical in nature. I don’t really want speculative podcasts that seem to show off how forward-thinking a company is. For example, IBM has a series called “The future off…”<\/a> where they talk about broad industry and cultural issues. That might be good for some folks, but there’s plenty of that sort of stuff out there already<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pervasive’s podcasts<\/a> (not technically podcasts as there’s no RSS feed) were exactly what I was looking for: info on PSQL v9<\/a>, their integration offerings<\/a>, and even some Btrieve info<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Each “episode” was short, to the point, and there were plenty of them on many of Pervasive’s products and thinking.<\/p>\n

The Series<\/h2>\n

On the other hand, my consumption of those podcasts is topic driven: I listen to them when I have a specific company, product, industry, etc. that I want to bone up on. I don’t subscribe to podcasts like those and listen to them regularly.<\/p>\n

For that, what I’m looking for is more of a “gang” format, where there’s the same core group of people with the occasional guest. Preferably, there’ll be people on the podcast from outside the company, and not just “high-level” folks who’ve gone through media training and can be “trusted” to talk to the public.<\/p>\n

Having the same people makes the podcast more episodic in the sense that I know more of less what topics, no matter how broad, to expect and<\/i> allows me to build up a relationship (though one-way) with the podcast. The Java Posse<\/a> is a good example of this sort of podcast (though it’s not run by Sun [why not sponsor them with hosting or something else?] it’s all Java all the time), and I have high hopes for the Sun IdM<\/a> podcast to be like this instead of the usual rotating VP’s with talking-points podcast.<\/p>\n

With these podcasts, length isn’t such a big deal. After getting the same “gang” of people each week, the primary things I look for are being as casual as possible and “real.” That seems to be quite a challenge for most companies, but it’s just a mind-set shift from being scared-poopless about talking in a human voice in public. I think there’s some book on the topic for those who need paper-tonics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Technorati Tags: community<\/a>, marketing<\/a>, podcasts<\/a>, research<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In talking with one of my old friends who’s figuring out how to market his software, I realized that I’ve come to rely on company produced MP3s as part of my means to learn about a company. Podcasts are great medium to get information and pitches to content hungry people like myself. The key in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podcasts","category-the-analyst-life"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}