Podcast

What is a Podcast?

The first time I heard it, the first thing that pops into my head was the iPod. Well, they both have the word “pod” that makes them sound alike.

Good thing, it’s one of the topics that we need to discuss in Emarke, Raf Ochoa was the assign reporter. In a way, he was able to shed some light on what Podcast is all about. Below is just a summary of his report. Guys, I hope that your able to pick up something.

A podcast is a media file that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds (RSS) for playback on mobile devices and personal computers. It is simply an internet radio show. It’s nothing more than an audio file (usually mp3) that is downloaded via the internet.

…why call it podcasting?

• The term "podcasting" was first mentioned by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian newspaper in a February 2004 article, along with other proposed names for the new medium.It is a portmanteau of the words "pod"—derived from iPod, a brand of portable media player produced by Apple Computer (now Apple)—and "broadcasting".

• It has never been necessary, despite the source of the name, to use an iPod or any other form of portable media player to use podcasts; the content can be accessed using any computer capable of playing media files.To avoid a term suggestive of "iPod", some use the term netcast instead of podcast. A backronym has been posited where podcast stands for "Personal On Demand broadcast

Understanding Syndication- RSS

Podcasting involves a set of rules known as RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS allows podcast content to be syndicated instantly on the Web. In 2004, the RSS format was combined with aggregator software to check RSS-enabled web pages for new audio content (Podcasts) and keep users up to date on content.

Users had the option to have that content delivered directly to their home computers, and ultimately, their digital media device or MP3 player.



How to get the Podcast?

Choosing an Aggregator

1st: An aggregator or feed reader is software that uses a web feed to retrieve syndicated web content such as weblogs, podcasts, vlogs, and mainstream mass media websites.

• iTunes

• Bloglines

• Google Reader

2nd: Subscribe to the RSS Feed of the Podcast using Aggregator

How to Subscribe

iTunes> Advance Menu> Subscribe to Podcast > then enter the url for the podcast directory you are subscribing to.



Benefits of Podcasting

• Reach a new audience

People like to consume media differently, so including another media option could help you reach new audience. Unlike video podcasts, audio podcasts allow a listener to multi-task, so they could end up listening to you on the way to work on while they browse the web.

• You can reach a niche audience.
  

Podcast aren’t limited by the market. A podcast on pet care with an audience of 500 would be cancelled instantly in a radio market, but as long as the podcaster is willing and eager to produce shows, this niche podcast will flourish all around the world.

• Highlight your authority

Giving away useful information can highlight your expertise in your field and might make people more likely to trust you in future. You could also record seminars and conferences so that people who couldn’t make the event can listen.

• Build a relationship with your listeners

Podcasts put a voice to your company/website and help you avoid being just another logo. Because podcasts are also opt-in, it means that only people who are interested in what you have to say will listen.

• Increase advertising potential

If your podcast becomes popular, you might even be able to start selling advertising slots.

• Respond to customer feedback.

You can use your podcast as a chance to address any customer concerns or feedback you’ve received.

Permission Marketing

The book “Permission Marketing” by Seth Godin which was release last May, 1999, was a sales and marketing book which I think as a purpose of letting the marketers know of other ways of encouraging sales and maintaining good relationship with its present and future clients.
Our teacher in Emarke, Sir Aran had prepared 5 questions for us to answer based on the book Permission Marketing.

1. With the entry of Seth Godin's permission marketing concept, how does it affect traditional marketing vis a vis internet marketing?

- The way I understand traditional marketing, it’s the usual marketing that we see and experience today, the advertisement in the radio and television, the billboards and any other marketing promotional activity which aims to inform the clients with the products and maintaining a good relationship with them. When internet technology comes in, more and more people are getting hook up with it. A lot are now spending much of their time in the world wide web. To a point that people are already started ordering and buying their needs and wants in the internet, because it’s very easy and convenient, everything had become just a click away. Because of the increase of popularity of the internet and the increase in numbers of people on purchasing on line, it become now clear to marketers that the next platform or venue for them to encourage sales is the internet. Since there is already the internet, traditional marketing will be lesser and the internet marketing will continue to increase. Consumers doesn’t want to be bombarded with a lot of information and products, they want that they are giving the options on what information they should get about anything and the internet is providing them that. Of course we will still see a lot of traditional marketing, but it will be less effective because of the entry of internet marketing.

2. Provide 5 examples or applications of seth godin's marketing concepts to any product/ brand or company. Elaborate.

• Mobile Marketing – being used by Globe telecom and Smart, where in they send text messages of different kinds of promotional activity and the user had an option if they still want to continue receiving those information or promotional text.

• Spam mails thru emails- every time you open your inbox, you always receive an email which you don’t know where it come from or you don’t know who the sender was, it’s a spam mail. Most companies used this kind of application to increase the number of their followers who will eventually be their client.

• Blogsites – companies use this also to encourage followers. When you become a follower, you will able to know all the marketing promos of that company, thus it will most likely end up being a client to them. Also, if you have your own blog and u had followers, you yourself become an advertisement without you knowing it.

• Social Networking – the most famous of them all is Facebook. A lot of companies are already using facebook in promoting their products just like what Uniliver did to Dove soap, Starbucks, Nike and even celebrities and politicians uses facebook to increase their popularity and value.

• Internet Advertisement – examples of these are Google Ads. Everything you open just about anything in the internet, you will see these ads. But if you observe carefully, the ads that you see depends on the website that you visit. For example, if you visit a realty website, most likely the ads that you will see are those related to real estate like interior design, landscaping, furniture etc.

3. What do you think are the reasons why small companies should adhere to permission marketing? why big companies should adhere to it as well?

I think both small and big companies should try permission marketing. A lot of people are getting hook up every day in the internet, and internet is one of those tool that they can use. People nowadays are always bombarded with a lot of information, you and I sometimes get tired of these marketing promotional activity. I my self don’t want to be bombarded with a lot of marketing information. In this case, this is where permission marketing comes in. Permission marketing is also a way of empowering your consumers. Using permission marketing will make them closer to their clients, thus digging deeper to their needs and wants. Permission marketing will help companies in developing closer and more intimate relationships with their clients. The use of permission marketing will help companies in maintaining relationships.

4. Discuss basic principles of permission marketing and explain.

The basic principle of permission marketing is that marketers obtain permission before proceeding to the next step in the purchasing process. This is mostly used by online marketers, notably email marketers and search marketers, as well as certain direct marketers who send a catalog in response to a request. These people will ask permission to send email newsletters to prospective customers. This kind of marketing requires that the prospective customer has either obtained explicit permission to send their promotional message (an email or catalog request) or implicit permission (querying a search engine). This can be either via an online email opt-in form or by using search engines, which implies a request for information which can include that of a commercial nature.

5. Are the concepts of Seth Godin conservative or radical? Explain.

I think it is both conservative and radical. Conservative because he still used the basic principles of marketing. Radical because he has a different approach to it and he uses the latest in technology which is the internet.

See Seth Godin himself explaining some of the topics found in the book.

E-Commerce

Last November 12, 2009, I was able to attend the Digital Filipino E-Commerce Summit held at the Hotel Intercontinental, Makati City. Invited speakers include Donald Patrick Lim, CEO of Yehey, Stephanie Caragos, President and CEO of Syntactics Inc., and of course, my cousin, Arnold A. Alvarez of BF Homes Properties to name a few. There is this one statement of Mr. Lim of Yehey that stuck in my mind, which is "robo" which means that the consumers "research online, buy offline". Those are actually true specially in our country. I think that we are still new with the concept of E-Commerce, and we are still in the infant stage in doing it. All the speakers agree that there is a great potential in making money thru E-Commerce.

What a coincidence that the E-commerce report was assigned to me in our Emarke class. The following is the summary of my report about E-Commerce.

E-Commerce

Our world as it is today could not survive without the internet. Almost every business or corporation uses the internet as a vital part of their business. As the use of the internet has become more and more prevalent in our daily lives, so have new internet terms and slang. New words and acronyms like blog, LOL, and Googling have been introduced into our daily vocabulary. Another common internet term is e-commerce.

E-Commerce, which stands for electronic commerce (also called electronic marketing) is a way of buying and selling goods using electronic systems such as the internet or other computer networks. Every year the amount of business transacted over the internet grows exponentially. This use has especially grown with inventions like electronic funds transfer, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange, etc.

Though some e-commerce involves the transaction of funds for virtual products, like premium content on a website, advertisements or characters and content for MMORPGs (Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games), most e-commerce involves the transportation of physical items. Most large retail stores have an online website for purchasing goods as well as a physical location. This type of e-commerce is called business to consumer. Business to consumer e-commerce is an enormous rapidly expanding market. A consumer can go online and purchase just about anything, from inexpensive items like books, movies, or groceries, to expensive investments like cars and real estate.

E-commerce is can be categorized into the following:

• Business -to -Business (B2B)

• Business- to- Customer (B2C)

• Consumer-to-Business (C2B )

• Consumer- to -consumer (C2C)

Business to business is one in which a company deals with another company for business and exchanging of goods, products, services. Some of the examples of b2b e-commerce sites are a company's official site, brokering sites etc.

Business to customer is one where the company sells its goods to the customer or trades with the customers. This is electronic retailing and called as e-tailing in common. One of the best examples is amazon.com.

Consumer to business is when a customer works for a certain company for business and the company buys it, here the consumer has to price the trade. Example for such a site is priceline.com

Consumer to consumer is more like auctioning, bartending, etc... where a consumer places bid and other buys it. Here the websites acts an intermediate for the business Example for such sites is eBay.

E-Commerce provides advantages to both the Business provider, consumers. For the business it is provides easier way to market a particular product at low cost and also the product easily reaches the global market. For the consumers they can buy products from home, so no tedious work in buying and they can trade any time. E-commerce thus is a greater benefit provided it has ultimate security.

Another aspect of e-commerce is online banking. With just a few clicks, a person can transfer funds from one account to the other, pay bills, buy stocks, or wire money overseas. All major banks and credit unions have the option of online banking.

Most likely majority of us has purchased something over the internet or used online banking. We are all part of the growing business of e-commerce.

Consumer and Trade Promotion

I just want to make a summary of this topic which unfortunately where not able to discuss due to lack of time.

Consumer promotions are promotions with the use of tools like samples, coupons, cash refunds, price packs, premiums, advertising specialties, patronage rewards, point-of-purchase displays and demonstrations, and contests, sweepstakes and games which are targeted towards end consumers or end users of the products. On the other hand, a trade promotion is directed towards the retailer and wholesaler. The point of a trade promotion is to persuade resellers to carry a brand, give it shelf space, promote and push it. The tools used for consumer promotions can also be used as trade promotions. In addition, manufacturers will do things like offering discounts off list price, advertising allowances and display allowances as trade promotion tools.

For sure, you guys are already familiar on how does the tools used in consumer promotions looks like.

Below is an example of a well made consumer and trade promotion in the internet. I found it in you tube. Enjoy!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A search engine is a software that searches, index and returns matches that are usually presented in a list called SERP or "Search Engine Result Page." There are hundreds of search engines but the most popular are: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing search engines.

Optimization is modifying a web page/website to achieve the highest possible ranking when searched on the targeted keyword/s of the web page or website.

SEO is the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines. Firms that practice SEO can vary; some have a highly specialized focus, while others take a more broad and general approach. Optimizing a web site for search engines can require looking at so many unique elements that many practitioners of SEO (SEOs) consider themselves to be in the broad field of website optimization.

The primary purpose of SEO is to get your website to rank high in search engines, it is critical to remember that the reason for doing this is that you are trying to attract more visitors to your website, therefore it must be appealing to human visitors and not just search engines. This means that design, layout and quality content are very important factors, so remember to always think about the user experience your website delivers.

SEO doesn't require a vast expertise in programming or high-end technical design, but knowing the basics of HTML will make a significant difference. Since the majority of techniques involved in top search engine optimization involve text, it can also be referred to as SEO copywriting. Overall, the entire process deals with the effort to optimize web pages, in order to improve their position in search engine ranking.

For example, if you were to type in the words, 'What is SEO?' into a search engine like Google, then you will see a list of pages upon pages of websites, articles, and so on that deal in some way with the words you've entered. The more relevant the web pages, or the better the SEO consulting, the higher they will rank. The ultimate goal is to attain a first-page ranking. After all, few people look beyond this first page for results. The words you entered, 'What is SEO?' are called keywords, a major component in professional Search Engine Optimization.

Keywords, or keyword phrases, are a critical component of search engine optimization services. Since search engines are generally concerned with ranking web pages by text, then knowing how to create the text on your site, or in your articles, can have a vast and vital impact on how high your page, or site, ranks. There are techniques that are employed in writing SEO text and keyword density, but before discussing that, it's important to understand how search engines operate.

Search engines are machines. They aren't a crowd of people huddled around a room somewhere sifting through website after website logging relevance, links, and other information and ranking them based on some algorithm. They are machines doing a similar process without the human element. These search engines don't care about the color or design or layout of a website. They can't measure aesthetic qualities. They care about content.

Search engines are not intelligent and therefore how they move through the Internet and web pages is a fixed manner. They crawl through the web searching through every single page that exists. Currently there are over twenty billion (yes, billion) web pages on the Internet. These machines, called crawlers or spiders or in Google's case, Googlebots, follow links from one page to the next indexing, processing, and calculating a complicated series of algorithms to decide where a particular page should rank based on any number of factors involving keywords.

Since these search engines are fixed entities that follow a particular pattern, understanding how to build content on a site to achieve the best results, or highest rank, is possible with the right knowledge.

Here are some basic but important pointers to remember in SEO:

1. Put your most relevant keywords and search terms in the title, description, and first few lines of your website text and content.

2. Make your website easy to navigate. Have a plan for your page hierarchy and make sure your links are clearly defined.

3. Create a site-map so to insure quick and accurate indexing of your websites pages.

4. Come up with essential and precise keywords. Use them as link anchor text. If you have a blog, use them as the "category" titles and in your individual post titles.

5. Make sure plain text image tags use your relevant keywords as well. Search engines only index plain text tags and not keywords or text embedded in image files.

6. Make sure you have no broken links.

7. Make sure your HTML tags are accurate.

8. The "robots.txt" file should be updated and accurate and not block any of the search engine crawlers like the Google Bot.

9. Last but not the least, build inbound links to your website by submitting to directories, submitting articles, posting at forums and promoting your website at social media sites.

Blue Ocean Strategy

When I took up Marstra (Marketing Strategy) 2 terms ago, my teacher was Sir Umali. Sir Umali was able to discuss it in our class. Based on what I’ve learned during the discussion, Blue Ocean Strategy is all about creating a new market instead of competing in an existing industry. The way I understand it, we have to find and create a new market and make it our own. We are creating a demand. Just like what C2 ice tea did. How do we create a new a market? Well, one way of doing it is by Gap analysis, ive learned it also from Sir Umali, where in we identify the gap of the existing product offered in the market. In doing so, we need to identify the needs and wants of the consumer. Combine the results and we are able to come up with a new product. In a way you are trying to fill in the existing gap against the need and wants of the consumers.

It is very important to be innovative, and this is where our subject Emarke comes in. Since the newest venue for marketers to promote their product, internet can also be a great tool to find and create new market. Internet can help us big time in creating a demand.

Internet Marketing

Internet is the newest venue for marketers as millions of millions of people are getting hook up every day. Internet is the newest stage. But what is internet marketing?

Internet Marketing is:

• The marketing of products and services using the Internet as its medium.

• Requires a comprehensive strategy that synergizes a given company's business model and sales goals with its website function and appearance, focusing on its target market through proper choice of advertising type, media, and design.

Internet Marketing and its Different Forms:

• Contextual advertising - entails the placement of ads on web pages, whose content match with the content displayed on the website.

• PPC [Pay-Per-Click] – the URL of the advertisers gets displayed on top, bottom, left of the search result.

• an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.

• Affiliate Marketing – the advertisers enlist their product to other website to market their product. 1) The affiliate search results are displayed on your website so that if your visitor doesn’t find anything interesting in their searches, they’re still on your site. Need to constantly update - What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

• Rich Media Advertising - use of streaming audio and video as well as applets for the promotion of the website. It tends to reach out visual clients.

• (RSS)Really Simple Syndication-a web feed format that enables one to keep a tab on updated content. Mostly located at the bottom or upper right of the site.

• Viral Marketing - It is a tell a friend marketing where in you seen a advertisement in the website, you tend to tell it to your friend and tell others.

• Search Engine Optimization- tweaking the site to enhance the rankings obtained by it on the search engines.

• The process of getting your website to the top of the search engines.

• Blogging - is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

• Auto responder marketing - delivering of goods or services automatically.

• Used as e-mail marketing tools, to immediately provide information to their prospective customers and then follow-up with them at preset time intervals.

• Email Marketing - is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience

• referrers to sending an e-mail to a large number of people at once using a mailing list.

Instruments of E-mail Marketing

• Individual replies to customer requests

• Newsletters (both with original content and supporting a Website)

• Personalized mailings

• Public mailing lists (for market research, support, etc.)

• Autoresponders

• Networking (participating in forums, discussion lists, fairs)

• Web site

Business Models

• e-commerce

• publishing

• lead-based websites

• affiliate marketing

“MUST” in Internet marketing

• Enriching One’s Website

• Internet Marketing Tools

• Keyword Suggestion Tools