planet sab

Brand is a promise, a promise of happiness

The above is a great quote from a conversation between Joseph Jaffe and John Gerzema of Young & Rubicam, author of The Brand Bubble. Listen to it on Jaffe Juice #115, I highly recommend it, I listened to it twice.
Join the Conversation

jaffejuice, johngerzema, youngrubicam, brandbubble

Interview with Steve Gillmor about his musical past

Steve Gillmor was kind enough to chat with me about music. You can find the podcast over at Channel 14/Kanal 14, enjoy.

gillmor, stevegillmor, music, podcast, kanal14

Follow-up on revver

The other day I wrote about my revver issues. Somebody was kind enough to respond, but after my follow-up comment all I am getting is silence. Instead something has happened on the technical side of the game. Feed-burner tells me I am still having over 7k downloads per day, however, stats for the latest episode on the revver site show merely 137 views.
And I checked, in the meantime there has been no message on either payment info or change of statistical analysis.
After reading Kent Nichols account of how the Ninja left revver (Thanks Tim), I am thinking (more like a communcations consultant) that one might just have to track not only clients and topics/companies related to them, but also services one likes to use. What do you think?

Vaynerchuk hits home run

You have to give the man credit for a great idea. As far as podcasts go, this might actually a better concept than winelibrary.tv.
Endless topics, cheap to produce, suspense, give-aways. Scalable to a network with all the sports out there. And lots of niches, too, I might just start a show on my Shanahan card and jersey collection.
I agree that the video space is wide open, dying for content to replace traditional tv programming.

Podcasting: the whole 9 yards is actually much longer

You can write and read as many "25 tips on improving your podcast"-guides as you want, even act upon the tips – the learning curve just never ends. This week alone, fueled by input from Gary Vaynerchuk, C.C. Chapman and the guys from Marketing over Coffee, I felt like a pre-schooler yet again. And believe me, looking at the numbers, the Speaking English Podcast is about to enter his Sophomore year in High-School pretty soon.
The lesson here though is, that the work is never done. There is always room to improve. Every day. Work on the info text of each show. Add a new distribution channel. Find new ways to measure. Connect more to your audience.
Every day.

Open letter to revver.com

Dear people at revver (yes, that includes "the guy who can't read a calender),

for more than two years I have given you my content from www.speakingenglishpodcast.com for free and used your player, promoting your brand. Even more so, I allowed you to monetize my content in your name.

In return I received some money, but let's be honest, almost 500k views this year alone did not even translate into a three-figure sum for me. It might have, but you are late with payments. Almost four months late. And the money you promised to send out on September 11th which would have been enough to buy my wife a decent dinner, did not reach me yet. And I just double-checked my PayPal account.
What the hell is going on?

I can tell you what the hell is going on. You are ruining the one USP you had. There are so many video platforms out there (which, btw, I am all feeding through Tubemogul.com), easy monetization was your one advantage. The only one.

Since that seems broken I see no reason why not to talk more with sandieman at viddler, I really like what he did with Gary Vaynerchuk. Ask a Ninja switched, the mentos guys put there latest video on vimeo, it seems as always I am the latest to realize the ship is doomed, but I will move on.

Just give me the money you owe me. Or I'll send the Ninja!

Podcasters: enhance your ID_3 tag for iPhone and iPod Touch users

I saw it first on Jaffe Juice, then on The Hollywood Podcast:



One touch on the podcast's cover and not only the time listened/remaining appeared, but also some text. I wondered how they had done that and tried it myself.



The trick is in the ID_3 tag in the lyrics section, a region I had previously thought was the most useless feature. Not so. From The Hollywood Podcast's example you can guess, that it is also scrollable, really cool. You can't click the links it seems, but apart from that a great way to enhance your podcast. You can put the entire show notes into the lyrics section and iPhone and iPod Touch users can follow them while listening.

Interview with Marc Canter on Kanal 14

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to Marc Canter, among other things about his Open Mesh project. Check it out at my Kanal 14 podcast site.

2 thoughts about Workfast.tv

I recently unsubscribed from Scobleizer TV because I realized I was only watching every 10th show. Only the ones that were kick-ass and which people had pointed me to. I am still watching Workfast.tv though, but it's not always easy. Two key-observations – and Robert, of course I still love what you are doing.

1. I understand that this is a Fast Company program, aimed at managers. However, it feels like you are straining to fit into the suit you are wearing. What made your Channel 9 shows special can't get through here, you don't seem to be as free a spirit as usual. Therefore, your questions are sometimes not as good as they used to be, it seems like you are not letting your mind wander enough.

2. Loren Feldman is right, Shel Israel, I am sorry, should not be on this show. (and I am not even sorry to take Loren's position on this)
Watch the show with Tim Ferris or better, with Michel Azar and Gary Koelling from Best Buy. Actually, better don't. How unprepared can you be? How uninspired and uninterested? In the latter show, Shel has to make a real effort to rememberread the guests names and in the Tim Ferris show it became obvious that he didn't remember much of what can't possible be more than a one-page abstract.

I am not sure that I remember correctly but the last three episodes without Shel would prove my recollection that Shel will no longer be on the show. I think this is a good move. And of course, I now have to go and watch Scobleizer TV about Evernote, which also works on my new iPhone...

Happy 2-year Anniversary Speaking English Podcast

Thank you everybody for watching the Speaking English Podcast for the past two years, yesterday was the day. I am very grateful for all the feedback, positive as well as critical.

What started out as a podcast playground turned into a quite a project, with quite some content delivered as far as Feedburner tells me:


Not to brag, but the actual views served is much higher, with content distributed on Revver, Sevenload, MySpace and several other platforms. Revver remains the service of choice at the moment, but it is hardly a money maker.

As a consequence (trying to find a different model), I am delivering episodes 85-89 ad-free and with a higher quality, hoping to attract more happy viewers and maybe finally a sponsor. As you can see on my revver-site, views over the last shows are up to 45k, feed subscribers around 2k. If I were a (reference) book publisher, soft drink producer, electronics vendor, hard drive manufacturer I'd take a real close look at the numbers ;-) Also in the works is a DVD (taking a page out of the Tim Ferris play-book).

Enough baiting. Thanks again for watching, I wish I had more time to do a live show or maybe some Seesmic-action at a scheduled hour once a week. Maybe in the future. And remember, you can always chat me up at sebastiankeil at gmail dot com.

Oh, Episode #86 has just been published.