Podcast Of The Month: January

Admittedly I didn’t listen to many podcasts in January, but I’m still going to do this for the month, and there are a few conditions:

• I must have listened to the podcast in January (regardless of when it was actually released)
• The selected podcast can be the most entertaining/informative/educational. Anything goes.

So the winner for last month goes to Jaffe Juice #101 for an excellent Winners and Losers segment covering the whole Scrabulous fiasco by Scrabble and Mattel, as well as Target’s blatant disrespect to the blogging community. On top of that, it was this episode that motivated me to take part in Joseph’s UNM2PNM (Use New Marketing To Prove New Marketing) initiative, where he sends me a copy of his latest book, Join The Conversation, and I provide him a review in return. Sounds fantastic? It is.

Other notable mentions this month:

• Six Pixels Of Separation #84-87
• Comic Pants Podcast #47-48 (for comic/graphic novel fans only!)

There’ll be much more nominees for February (I’ve already listened to about 10 podcasts so far), so keep reading for that, or if you’re feeling nice, why not subscribe to my RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss it?

If you agree or disagree with my choice, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, and alternatively, if you have a podcast you’d like to recommend me to listen to, leave me a comment as well.

Twitter 102, Fighting Procrastination With Productivity

As a follow up to my Twitter 101 post, I came upon 2 articles featuring Twitter this week:

• Marketing Pilgrim has a pretty interesting article about how Twitter is used in the classroom:

Twitter is a way to record thoughts and ideas that you search – it’s a history
Twitter connects you to a larger world outside of the classroom and even the country
Students can follow people who do what they want to do or who they admire and get a sense for their job and life
Twitter can improve writing and punctuation

• ReadWriteReb also has an article on Twitter as a platform for serious discourse, mainly in the context of news.

There’s some controversy about the classroom article because the students in question are 6th Graders, and I think that’s fine. Let them be exposed to Twitter at an early age and all that. But more importantly, who’s going to teach people like us? I think I have 2 friends (in the similar age group) on Twitter, and unless that number grows to reap substantial network externalities, it’s hard to see that catching on.

Similar sentiments regarding news. Running a Campus Radio station, sometimes it is hard to get the most updated news. Wouldn’t that all change with Twitter? However, again, it depends on whether sufficient people are using it to highlight news, for anything to be really gained out of it.

Next up, if you’re someone who is guilty of procrastination (as I am), here is a free ebook by Fruitful Time called Stop Procrastination Now and here’s a guide to Lazy Productivity. I found them both to be pretty helpful.

Finally, if you were too lazy to check out Jaffe Juice #102 for the Scrabulous jingle, Ariah was kind enough to provide the youtube link, so watch it right here. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

10 Relationships vs 5 Million Impressions? (And a Scrabulous Jingle)

Jaffe Juice #102 was released with perfect timing, on a day that I had lots of driving around to do. The beginning, a Scrabulous introduction is hilarious and well worth listening to, though of course, not the only thing you should listen to.

Early in the podcast, there’s a conversation about whether you would prefer 10 good relationships or 5 million impressions. Just one person in a room full of professionals voted for 10 good relationships. Perhaps some reason can be attributed to the fact that the numbers really are very far apart, and I suppose even for someone who wants to go down the relationship path, it might be hard explaining why you’d want to spend so much money on 10 relationships vs 5 million impressions, especially to a boss who’s well stuck in old marketing.

That said, I’m actually pretty curious about what number it would have to be before people start agreeing with 10 relationships. 3 million? 1 million? I was thinking to myself the other day that I wish I had done my Advertising module later, because I know so much more about new media and new marketing now than I did 4 months ago, and I have no doubt the new ways can be equally if not more effective. However, I’m reminded that unfortunately, the client and to some extent the professor, still graded very much on old marketing, which is sad.

What could be a worse situation than having the knowledge of how to make things better, but have people around you who don’t realise or recognise it?