I just finished a blogging and podcasting workshop with the Porter Novelli agency in Adelaide, Australia. I only wish I had been able to be there in person. This fine looking group did send me a picture from during the presentation. I had control of their computer with NetMeeting and we were on speakerphone.
Like many agencies I’ve had the honor to present to, they wanted to see some real world examples and talk about what I’ve learned from over a year in the new media world. I hope it was helpful. We looked at various blogs and podcasts that I’ve been involved in or know of and all with an ag focus.
If you’d like a workshop of your own please feel free to contact me.
I’m able to announce another upcoming event I’ll be blogging. This time it’s the Country Music Association Fan Fair in Nashville. I’ll be blogging it on AgWired for New Holland.
New Holland has an on-going promotional campaign that involves country music star, Michael Peterson who has a new album out that’s only been available at New Holland dealers. At the Fan Fair on June 11 he’ll be presiding over the first ever Michael Peterson/New Holland Celebrity Tractor Race. Additionally, all the pictures, interviews and video I shoot will be loaded onto a video iPod to be given away in a contest for people who enter at the venue. Very cool promotional idea if you ask me. Here’s some more details on the event from the CMA Fan Fair website:
Sunday, June 11, spotlights the Michael Peterson/New Holland Celebrity Tractor Race from 1:00–3:00 PM. Country Music artists and celebrities will race against the clock through an obstacle course on a New Holland compact tractor. A New Holland Boomer compact tractor will be signed by all participating celebrities and auctioned off at a later date on eBay, with proceeds to be divided between the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and to the winner’s charity of choice. Participants include Deborah Allen (Curb recording artist); Bering Strait (Universal South recording group); singer/songwriter Woody Bradshaw; singer/songwriter Bekka Bramlett (former member of both Fleetwood Mac and Bekka & Billy); The Honorable William J Chatfield (Director of Selective Service); actor Alan Dysert; actor Scott Getlin; Craig Hentrich (NFL punter with the Tennessee Titans); Janet Ivey (creator of “Janet’s Planets”); Robert K Oermann (noted Country Music historian and journalist, as well as former judge on the USA Network’s television series “Nashville Star”); singer/songwriter Bobby Pinson; singer/songwriter Colt Prather; and singer/songwriter Billy Yates.
I thought I’d provide you with an example of the way I like to conduct event coverage via blog. This week I’m attending the Indianapolis 500 and my primary coverage is on our Domestic Fuel website. The following is one of the posts from Thursday that shows you a good mix of media types that can be done. This was posted to the website before the afternoon was over. Think of how you can do this (or outsource to us) for your events. Let me know if you’d like more information. Here’s my post:
After the Ethanol Summit program was over, it was time for a ride around the track. USDA Under Secretary Tom Dorr is inside the truck you see here on his second lap.
I got to ride in the truck afterward. They allowed 3 of us to ride along with the driver. I interviewed them all as we were making our laps today in the Chevrolet Ethanol Pace Truck.
The guys in the truck with me were Dan Edwards, Indy Track Racking Operations Director (driver), National Corn Growers Association Chairman, Leon Corzine and Waitt Farm Network Director, Emery Kleven. Emery took the picture of me in the back seat with Leon. You can listen to the interview here: 
Indy Pace Truck Interview (3 min MP3)
Just to make it interesting I also shot video clips. The first one here is a Pace Truck drive-by with the USDA Sec. inside. The second one is my ride inside the truck while doing the interview you can hear above.
Pace Car Drive-By (1 min wmv)
Pace Car Laps (3 min wmv)
If you subscribe to our website you’ll get lots of information about new media, especially blogging and podcasting. To kind of put it all in perspective in one document, Eric Schwartzman, founder of iPressroom has just published a white paper titled, “New Media Marketing Communications.” You have to register to receive a copy but it’s free and easy.
There’s lots of good stuff in there. In the summary he says that “New media marketing communications programs represent the channels by which organizations may leverage the web to reach their marketing and PR objectives.” That’s exactly what they do. They work in unison with what I would call the traditional media marketing communications programs. Together you can have one extremely powerful marketing program.
If you’re serious about wanting a new way to communicate with your customers or members then podcasting will certainly provide you with a new avenue to do so. To learn more about it I recommend a conference like the Corporate Podcasting Summit. Of course you can call your friendly ZimmComm New Media rep (that would be me).
I like this line describing the event, “How to integrate the podcast into your full suite of marketing activity for profitable gain.”
Look here for the agenda and here for the blog about it.
Once you have a high traffic blog that’s been up a while with commenting allowed the spammers find you. It’s just like the spam you get in your inbox only it comes in to your blog. I would love to get my hands around the throat of one of these little $%*^&(’s. Can you say, “comment spam rage?”
Almost 4,000 spam comments in the last 3 days on ZimmComm blogs. Amazing! It’s one of the hazards of being so popular I guess. To combat it I just installed Akismet on the blogs. It’s a nice little WordPress plugin that’s simple to install. Since I’ve been marking the comment spam as “spam” and that was putting it into a folder, Akismet can look at that and learn from it. Now they’re all in the Akismet spam folder which it automatically deletes after 15 days unless I do so manually.
I am seriously hoping this helps.
Our local Jefferson City Chamber holds a periodic “Good Morning Jefferson City” breakfast and companies can have 30 seconds to tell everyone the “good news.” In our case we were just alerting them to our new media capabilities. We read a script and had the tagline play off my iPod on my travel speakers.
Good breakfast and a fun way to learn more about a variety of companies.
How’s this for a picture to get your attention? What a week it has been. Event blogging is really picking up. Check out my post this morning on our AgWired site about a 46 day event that’s being blogged as I write.
I started the week at the Clean Cities Congress where as of this point I’ve posted 64 articles, most with pictures and audio and even some video clips. You can’t believe the positive response the organization who held the event has received so far. I’ve got a feeling it won’t be the last event blogging for AFVI.
Then it was on to Indianapolis to blog the visit by U.S. Secretary of Energy, Samuel Bodman. It was his first visit and he even got to cruise the track in an Indy Car.
So, if you’d like to let your customers or members know what’s going on when you hold an event or conference remember the professional event bloggers at ZimmComm New Media.
If I approved every comment that’s submitted to this blog you’d be linked to all the drug information you could possibly want. And some other not so nice stuff. One of the things you have to prepare for in the blogging world is how you handle comments. I think they’re part of the reason a blog is a great communications tool. They’re also one of the features I find businesses the most fearful of. I’m going to write more about this soon.
In the meantime let me just make a comment on comment spam. Borrowing a good friend’s expression, if I could get my hands on a spammer I’d like to “pinch his little head off.” What kind of lowlife person is a spammer? I have no idea but they’re the reason you just have to moderate your comments today. That means that I have to approve comments before you can see them. It’s an unfortunate situation. But otherwise you’ll see lots of comments and want to see what people are saying only to find out that’s they just want you to go buy their drugs or other paraphenalia.
Just before I wrote this post I deleted 17 spam comments that came in today. Amazing. But I know I’m not alone. We all just deal with it.
I’ve been watching this for a while since we’re a PR Web contributor and subscriber. The idea of podcasting for news release clients is an interesting one. I still wonder who listens and how they find these podcasts. It’s PR Web Podcasts which is still in “beta.” Actually I think everything on the web is in constant beta.
I mean, we’re talking a lot of podcasts here. Just visit this site and have your iTunes ready. There’s pages of podcasts to subscribe to or download. I guess I’ll try a few myself to see what they’re like and then I’ll report back.
When I first heard about them doing this it seemed to make sense. But then I wondered about the whole idea of who will know they’re there. I hope to learn more.
There’s an interesting article on e-Marketer about radio. It pretty much confirms through some research what I’ve suspected. Basically, eventhough there are a lot of alternatives to tradional AM and FM radio people still listen and are loyal. Of course they are. Who has ever said that podcasting or satellite radio would be the end of local radio stations? What these new media options mean is that consumers have more choices than ever. They will and have cut into listening time to radio stations and tv too for that matter. Thanks to MediaBuyerPlanner for the link.
The report states about the internet’s impact on radio, “far from killing the older medium, by adding more listening options and giving listeners more control, the Internet may actually be reviving it.” Let’s assume more people are willing to tune in again. I hope they have something interesting to listen to!
The report says that the internet radio listening audience is at about 52 million people, up from 37 million last time studied. The numbers they quote come from a variety of sources which are identified in the story.
Some other interesting tidbits include that Sirius and XM satellite radio services had about 9.2 million subscribers at the end of 2005 and 18% of people who don’t subsribe are seriously considering doing so in the next 12 months. 11% (27 million) of Americans have listened to podcasts and they estimate that number to grow to 51 million by 2010. There’s lots more in this article. I think it helps put new media vs. “traditional” media in perspective.
New media compliments old media. And as the numbers suggest, new media already captures a significant audience with projections showing that it will continue to grow quickly. For this reason I think marketers should be investing in these new media technologies now as they’ll be necessary if you want to have that edge needed in a competitive media world.
Here’s a great example of how a blog can be used. Everyone seems to think that it’s only about having a company representative write about the company. Not so.
Newcastle Brown Ale is seeking someone to blog for them from specific events as part of a big promotion. Depending on who is picked and how they write this could provide them with a huge return. Hey, I’m tempted to enter.
Consider the events your company is involved in. What if you either hired someone to blog the event for you or conducted a contest to find a blogger and let them be creative? This could be applied to a local event just as easily as an international one.