FileSlinger™ Favorites

My client Blake Hendrix and my fellow BACN member John Todor have co-written an article containing one of my favorite pieces of business advice: Don’t Compete on Price:

Court the engaged buying personality and you will win over highly profitable customers who will want to be your customers for a long time. Let the Wal-Mart’s battle over market share. By winning mindshare you sell the experience; customers stick with you and become your best source of word-of-mouth marketing. You will not have a direct competitor. You have found your niche!

Download the complete article here.

Blake Hendrix draws upon 20 years experience facilitating small business. His practice stresses perspective and simplicity in defining and solving the issues that confront the small businessperson. His keynote is integrating Strategy, Logistics and Tactics to achieve the goals of the organization. His latest book, “Strategic Decisions for Small Business” was published in 2006. The second in the small business series is due for release in June 2007. Learn more at www.saltmineconsulting.com.
John I. Todor, Ph.D. is the Managing Partner of The Whetstone Edge, LLC, a customer experience consulting and training firm that applies scholarly research on human behavior to buyer-seller dynamics including customer loyalty, trust, retention, customer service, CEM—customer experience management, and marketing strategy. He speaks and consults worldwide on these topics. www.TheWhetstoneEdge.com

Yes, I’m back with more podcast recommendations. Since I seem to have evolved into the local podcasting expert (which I think is kind of funny since I’m not a podcaster myself, only an obsessive listener and serious researcher), people frequently ask me for recommendations, and one category I haven’t listed favorites in yet is podcasts produced by print media, radio, etc. So here they are.

Slate Magazine Podcasts
Witty, wacky, and provocative, with selections from Ad Report Card, The Human Guinea Pig, and others, as well as the weekly political gabfest.

NPR Business Story of the Day
The closest thing I do to keeping current. NPR has tons of other podcasts, for a variety of shows.

The Daily Telegraph Podcast
I wasn’t a Telegraph reader when I lived in Britain (I favored the Guardian and the Times), but the podcasts provide a non-American and more conservative perspective to balance that of the People’s Republic of Berkeley.

BusinessWeek
I get the Cover Story, Tech and You, and Cutting Edge (formerly “The Blog Elite”. I like them all, but have one complaint: there are no ID3 tags on the MP3 files, which means they all come up as “unknown” on my player.

Wired News
I just started listening to these. They’re short, opinionated pieces about new developments in technology, from games to cell phones and wilder things.

Quick trackback test for SND.

There was a record turnout at today’s Bay Area Consultants Network meeting this morning, where I was speaking on a panel about “Virtual Marketing Magnets.” For those who couldn’t make it, there’s a web version of my PowerPoint (complete with the text of what I said, or at least, the text of what I was planning to say) and a clickable imagemap of my handout. You need Internet Explorer to view the PowerPoint properly, I’m afraid.

I’ve become quite the podcast junkie, as those who see me with my earbuds running down into the beaded pouch I got at Target to hold my MP3 player can attest. In fact, thanks to my contributions about podcasting syndromes, I am now listed as co-founder of the Podcast Asylum.

As a professional writer, naturally I’m interested in podcasts on the subject of communications. Here are four business communications podcasts I listen to, comment on, and even get mentioned in (which of course biases me in their favor). They’re listed in alphabetical order, not necessarily order of preference.

• Across the Sound is a relatively new podcast produced by prolific bloggers Joseph Jaffe and Steve Rubel, with an emphasis on what is and isn’t working in marketing, PR, and new media. The “Sound” in question is Long Island Sound
• Better Communication Results: Australian Lee Hopkins provides brief, often humorous tips for improving your business communications.
• For Immediate Release: One of the longest-running podcasts, FIR is the brainchild of two members of IABC, Neville Hobson (in Amsterdam) and Shel Holtz (in California), who conduct their discussions via Skype. (Which is another of my favorite things, but that belongs in a different post.) Shows run up to 90 minutes in length and conclude with a different choice of music each week. Ordinarily I’m not too keen on music in spoken-word podcasts, but Shel and Neville have good taste.
• Trafcom News by Canadian Donna Papacosta is another recent offering, with short shows aimed at “people who care about communicating with employees, customers, prospects and the world.”

Note that all of these people listen to, comment on, and contribute to each other’s podcasts. Podcasting is a conversational medium, and listeners get to join in on the conversation—and perhaps become podcasters themselves if they stick around long enough.

Don’t expect to hear me podcasting myself any time soon, though. It took half an hour to record a two-minute audio comment to send to FIR. Writing is much faster and easier for me.

I’m not a web developer, but I’ve done my own web design and written my own HTML since 1995. (Well, in 1995, anyone who could create a basic static web page was a web developer.)

Web design has long since outstripped my capabilities (and the time I can devote to it). I don’t do Flash, Java, ASP, DHTML, server-side includes, or any of those advanced, programmer-like things. But I still do my own websites, and a few for other people.

Fortunately for people like me, there’s Sitepoint.com. The Australian company’s slogan is “Empowering web developers since 1997.” Sitepoint’s articles, books, blogs, and forums are a terrific place to learn how to improve your website, from CSS layouts to Search Engine Optimization to running a web design business. One of the best things about the site is the opportunity to download free sample chapters from books like Firefox Secrets and The CSS Anthology.

These books are so clear and comprehensible that even I can understand them, and they enabled me to customize the appearance of my blogs and to set up the new Author-izer website with CSS-based layout.

Sitepoint’s commitment to plain English instruction is a rare and welcome thing in the world of high tech.

Since all businesses are in the business of marketing, it’s a popular subject for podcasters. But anyone thinking of writing a book should also tune into Publishing Basics Radio for the down and dirty on self-publishing, print on demand, and vanity presses. WBJB host Ron Pramschufer (and I thought “Goetsch” was tough in the pronunciation department!) interviews his competition and anyone else he thinks will help listeners “navigate the self publishing minefield.”

The podcast is a production of SelfPublishing.com and Books Just Books (hence the un-radio station is called WBJB). In addition to MP3, audios are available for download as QuickTime, Windows Media, or RealMedia files. Point your podcatcher at http://wbjbradio.com/wbjbradio.xml to subscribe.

I only learned yesterday that Conversations with Experts, a weekly teleseminar series hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff, is available as a podcast. Several past ‘casts have been about blogging; the current theme is publishing, inspired by the Blog to Book course. Of course, once Denise realizes that the feed is still on and the audio files they’re selling on the website are still appearing for free in the podcatcher, she’ll probably turn it off. Catch it while you can at http://dlwakeman.audioblog.com/rss/experts.xml.

Podcasting (also known as audio blogging) is a fairly new but increasingly popular phenomenon. There are more podcasts out there than you can shake a stick at, and I’m still sampling them, but these three already stand out.

Diary of a Shamless Self-Promoter
Chicago-based tradeshow presenter Heidi Miller is a woman “who gets paid to talk.” You can tell, too: she speaks confidently, enthusiastically, and with good diction. Several podcasts I’ve listened to have a decent quality of information, but hesitant or lackluster presentation. Heidi’s style is as engaging as her “Zen marketing” substance. I’m not sure I like the new intro music, though, however slick the production.

The Marketing Minute
Not to be confused with Marcia Yudkin’s e-zine of the same name (and actually labeled “Marketing Edge” by my podcatcher, Albert Maruggi’s podcast appears several times a week. In addition to the one-minute clips, there are “Marketing Focus” interviews with marketers and technology experts. Maruggi has mastered the art of saying something useful in a short span of time.

The Marketer’s Podcast
Australian marketing experts Alan Stewart and Andrew Winter provide insights into the workings of the human brain and the different ways people make buying decisions, as well as suggestions on how to improve marketing. They’re entertaining, creative, and very responsive to feedback. (But guys, you really should put your names on your website! Leaving them off is a marketing no-no.)

Honorable mention goes to the Church of the Customer podcast, by customer evangelistas Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell. So far they only seem to be podcasting once a month.

Finally, a word on the subject of “podcatchers,” as podcast aggregators are called. You can always download individual podcasts manually from the website, but that gets time-consuming if you listen to more than a few shows. I’ve tried both iPodder and Odeo and prefer iPodder. Odeo has a nice web interface for managing subscriptions, but it stores all the MP3 files in one folder, and it gives them rather impenetrable URL-based names. Plus it gave me an error message every time I turned it off, and it needs to open iTunes to run. iPodder puts each podcast in its own folder and preserves the producer’s chosen file name. Both are free downloads; iPodder is open-source and Odeo is in beta.

Want to know whether your web page focuses on your customer? Visit Future Now’s “We We Calculator“, type in the URL, and find out. It tracks the number of words which refer to you and your company against the number of words which focus on the customer and gives you a score. Hours of entertainment (if you have a large website) and instant insight into which copy you need to polish.

Although far too obnoxious to put on a business or professional website, this is the funniest replacement I’ve ever seen for the standard Internet Explorer “Page not Found” error message. It comes from British online magazine “The Ripper” and I forget exactly how I came across it, but you can find it by doing a Google search on the phrase “The Page is Too Stupid”