Jenerous

(Side note: It was a beautiful summer in Seattle (and my consulting business has been exploding). That dual dynamic has meant that my interview rate has slowed a lot and not many of the interviews I actually did this summer have been put up here on the site. But the days are getting shorter, the rain has a hint of fall in it and it's time to get back on the horse.)

Occasionally I'm lucky enough to connect to someone who shares a lot of similar interests (marketing, podcasting, entrepreneurship) for one of my interviews. For this podcast, I found just such a kindred soul in Marcus Couch, the Director of Online Marketing for Entrepreneur Media, the publishing company behind Entrepreneur.com, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Entrepreneur Press.

One of the fascinating challenges of facing marketers today is how to use technology to enable true personalized/1to1 communications. But in order to reach that advertising nirvana marketers are going to need customers and prospects to give up a lot of information repeatedly with only a vague promise of a better experience. Not exactly a great sales pitch!

I love new technologies as much as the next geek marketer but only if they improve the customer experience.

Recently, I chatted with Scott Madlener of the Performance Communications Group about their new ISAT technology. (It stands for Internet Secured Application Technology).

ISAT seems to have innovated on basic website technology and improved the customer experience at the same time by using an integrated approach. Perhaps it's not applicable in every instance but still worth exploring.

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As the web becomes more and more important to business and marketing, understanding the ways that we measure it also rise on a marketer's list of priorities. For this podcast I connected with Aurélie Pols of OX2, a leading European web analytics firm to further my and hopefully your understanding.

As social media and word of mouth marketing slowly mature as disciplines, I'm glad that more and more people are writing books on the subject. Because as much as I love the stream of consciousness info flood that I get through my blog reader every morning, it's also nice to explore a subject in a more deliberate way.

John Cass of IMO Wireless, my 12th interview and one of the first people to believe in my 1,000 podcast project enough to spend some time with me, has recently written a great book (

Recently I've been spending a lot of time talking with local entrepreneurs in Seattle. One of the new friends I've made is Chris Airola, founder of Red Llama Inc., serial entrepreneur and a "multi-modal interactive artist" with Stronghold Productions.

It seems to me that the only thing better than being a toy maker might be being a toy marketer. For this podcast, I decided to test this theory by chatting with an expert in toy marketing, Ted Mininni, the President of Design Force Inc, a branding and design agency that specializes in the toy/entertainment industry.

Most blogs have a fairly small readership, usually a handful of friends, peers or family members. But there are the occasional standouts that achieve 1,000s of readers through some combination of hard work, luck and the right niche. TechCrunch's 300,000 plus is the common example. Recently, I was lucky enough to interview a sharp entrepreneur named Collis Ta'eed who took his new blog/community (FreelanceSwitch) from 0 to 4,000 RSS subscribers in under 30 days.