Entrepreneurship

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.

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.

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.

There is certainly no shortage of media in this world. From the "old school" media channels of magazines, newspapers, books, TV & radio to the "new school" world of blogs, podcasts, vlogs & social networks, we're all drowning in content. Today, I was lucky enough to chat with a man who is seeking to span those two worlds with a new publication - Larry Genkin of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine.

One of the interesting questions hanging around the social software/media world is when and how (even if) businesses (especially large ones) are going to embrace these new technologies. In the past, I've done research on business adoption of social media and discussed it among past podcasts (Ynema Mangum of BMC is a notable one) but my next interviewee provides a whole new level of insight.

Yes, I too did a double-take when I saw his name for the first time. But John Payne's company CircleUp had me at first glance. CircleUp makes a social messaging service that allows you to send an email or instant message to a "circle" of your contacts (from 2 to thousands) and get a single response back with everyone's answer. How cool is that?

For this podcast I was lucky enough to sneak into the packed schedule of Ted Rheingold, the founder of Dogster and Catster, two online communities built around people's passions for their pets. The networks have grown dramatically since they were founded in 2004 and now feature over 1.5 million pictures of 300,000 different pets.