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PAB2007 – Mitch Joel and Chris Penn

Marketing Toolkit presented at PAB2007 by Mitch Joel and Christopher Penn

Podcasting is about much more than getting your show listed on iTunes. Consumers have never been so powerful. Consumers have never been so connected. Mitch Joel unravels the fascinating world of new marketing, consumer generated content and social media. Learn the real-world marketing toolkit that won’t break the bank and will get your show noticed by creating conversations where the results work and listenership increases. Understand everything from search engines and link strategies to leveraging logs, online social networks and virtual worlds to build your community. If you’ve been unsure about the big wins in these online channels, the online Marketing Toolkit is the session for you.

Photo by Bob Goyetche.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW…

Bob Goyetche: I’m Bob Goyetche.

Mark Blevis: I’m Mark Blevis. This is special coverage of Podcasters Across Borders 2007 on the Canadian Podcast Buffet.

Bob Goyetche: This episode is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust. Stay tuned to the end of the show to find out how you can get a free iPod.

Mark Blevis: Do you know that Podcasters Across Borders 2008 is already in the planning mode?

Bob Goyetche: Really?

Mark Blevis: That’s right.

Bob Goyetche: You mean you’re not, you’re kidding.

Mark Blevis: I keep hearing it on the Canadian Podcast Buffet. It must be true.

Bob Goyetche: Well, well everything those guys say is true.

Mark Blevis: If you haven’t yet heard, and you haven’t yet marked it on your calendar, PAB 2008 is taking place in Kingston, Ontario, that’s Canada from June 20th to 22nd in 2008. Go figure. Stay tuned to the Canadian Podcast Buffet and keep watching www.podcastersacrossborders.com for details on speaking sessions, social activities, registration, hotel accommodations and all the good stuff that takes place at this big family gathering.

Bob Goyetche: But for now, let’s listen back to Podcasters Across Borders 2007. A very special session featuring Mitch Joel from Twist Image and Christopher Penn from Financial Aid Podcast in a tag team matchup about your Online Marketing Tool Kit.

Mitch Joel: So what I’m going to do is first, I’ll tell the story of how this happened because some people might be thinking that it was just supposed to be me speaking. And then I saw that, Christopher S. Penn over here was coming up as well. So I decided…we decided together rather to present this together…thanks for the feedback. And so quickly, these are the phone dial-in numbers for both of our podcasts. I’m going to introduce Chris. This is Christopher S. Penn, ladies and gentlemen, the one and only. I call him Ninja because he is the marketing Ninja; he is the producer and host of the Financial Aid Podcast. He’s also the guy quasi responsible for Bar Camp, Podcamp rather, Podcamp Austin and now all of Podcamp along with some other people. Responsible for Bum Rush The Charts, also one of the guys involved in that. And more recently, one of what I think is one of the best examples of online marketing I’ve ever seen, Virtual Hot Wings, which you should check out at www.virtualhotwings.com. So that’s Christopher.

Christopher Penn: And Mitch Joel is the President of Twist Image, a digital marketing firm in Montreal, beautiful Montreal. A highly sought after speaker, has shared the stage among others with Bill Clinton, Tony Robbins and will be at TED next year, yes?

Mitch Joel: Yes.

Christopher Penn: Alright, for sure, excellent.

Mitch Joel: Not speaking, just attending. Okay so what we decided is, for those of you may or may not know Chris is, there’s an evil side to both of us. And we decided that we might unleash a little bit of the evil in today’s presentation in terms of helping you have some of the tactics that may be are used for more nefarious reasons online. But you guys can use it for more loving and passionate ways of building communities. So you might see us do the pinkie move and the pinkie move would mean it might be a little evil.

Chris Penn: Looks better on Mitch than me.

Mitch Joel: That’s right. So I’m just wondering, it’s after lunch, a little tired. Quick question, what do you think is the percentage of YouTube’s growth in Canada from April, 2006 to April, 2007? Now here’s…before you jump ahead, don’t think like an internet freak. Think as if you’re a business person and I handed you a term sheet, seriously, that said I’m looking to acquire this company. What do you think percentage wise this company has grown in one year? Does someone want to throw out a number, percentage wise?…what?…20%…yeah…sorry?…22%?

Chris Penn: It’s not an auction.

Mitch Joel: 6000% okay…40%…okay…This is working out really well, I’m happy we did this… 1000%…20,000…okay. Anyone want to make a reasonable number or? Anyone…250%…okay…250%. How many people think it’s higher than 250%? Okay. How many people think its lower? Okay, the actual growth of it is 616% in Canada from April to April. That’s a big number, in case you were wondering. What I tell most people is if you took the “6” off of the end of that number and went to your boss, you should have two questions; one, how much of a raise am I getting? Two, when are you moving your s–t out of here so I can move into your office? Because even if you had 61% growth, it would be an insane number to have, so imagine that number.

Let’s do the same thing with Facebook…Canada, April to April. What do you think it might be…2000…a 1000…a 1,000,000…thanks, thanks for that logical answer, appreciate it. I love the fact that that’s the science person by the way. That’s part of that whole….okay, let’s go with a 1000. How many people think it’s higher than a 1000? Show of hands? How many people think its lower? What?…that’s not even half of it…how many people think it’s higher…what are you drunk? Lower…okay…better…it’s actually 2,424% growth. So why are we showing you these numbers? Two reasons; one is this isn’t an internet bubble anymore. See these numbers indicate that we have what’s called critical mass. We also know in Canada we have broadband penetration at its highest per capita in the world. In fact it’s close to 90% which really means that anybody who has it, or wants it, has it. It also means the only people who don’t have it are people who don’t have money, can’t afford it, or people who can’t read…no, percentage growth…audience, yeah…so audience growth was the question, yes. So…which is very telling because even people who can’t afford it, if you actually look at our society now, they can go to their church, or the YMCA, shelters even have internet access. So we’re actually hitting this interesting curve. So it’s interesting to look at this and say well, why is this? One of the big reasons is that social networks don’t care about technology. And that’s an important thing to understand as podcasters in this room. It has very little to do with the technology. It actually has to do with the simplicity of it. And the idea in how you connect to your consumers and crowd.

So here’s another cool stat that I want to throw out at you because it’s sort of really interesting in terms of looking at this. This was done a couple of months ago in terms of global online people. So this is what we’re seeing from people with broadband, 48% of their time, leisure time is spent online. So this is another sort of significant number to look at in terms of why it’s important to you as a podcaster. More and more people are using their leisure time online which is great because that means they have time to listen to or watch your podcast. Very, very powerful statement. So, before we get into the chunk of the stuff, I also wanted to look at online communities in RY because we get this question a lot in our day-to-day business. People say this is great, this podcasting stuff, this blogging stuff. Well what do we know about the RY? And the numbers are actually pretty telling. What we actually do know is that community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. We know that community users spend about 50% more than non-community users, all good numbers. We know that community users visit nine times more often than non-community users. And this is something that really sort of blew me away when I read this. 43% of internet users who are members of online communities say that they feel as strongly about their virtual community, as they do about their real world communities. They feel as strongly online as they do about their real world communities…sorry about the cut-offs, I don’t know why…

Mark Blevis: I’m not sure why it’s doing that either.

Mitch Joel: Alright, well whatever, it’s just words. So yeah…it always, see if they we’re running off the vio, no problems…I also wouldn’t need to plug it in…so, anyways it doesn’t matter…But you see this is an important slide. And this is something that Chris and I have been speaking about actually all week in preparation for this which is, you know, in our day-to-day jobs in terms of helping people with online marketing, building digital marketing strategies, I can tell you that any client I sit down with wishes that they could go back four or five years and really do their web presence the way they wanted to. Because right now, they all feel like they’re doing catch-up, right? Like don’t you think everybody at your corporation feel like you’re trying to catch-up to where the web has come? Do you feel that way? Yeah?

So this is the opportunity. The opportunity now is to understand that you start looking at community strategies now, it won’t be like that in four years. You’ll actually be in the inflow or ahead of the curve. And it’s an important thing for you to bring that back to whatever you’re doing personally. Or for your projects that you’re working on. You’ve got to start thinking now about how to build these online communities. So, I guess the big question is “why should you care?” And it’s really summed up greatly by Chris Anderson who you heard about earlier, who’s the author of “The Long Tail”. And he’s also the editor at “Wired Magazine”. And he said this quote. It’s something that I actually heard, and I copied down here. “Your brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what Google says it is” right? And that’s the reality of it. I know Julien…is Julien here? Julien is going to be talking a lot about this area. Julien has got my favourite quote of all time which is “Google really doesn’t care about your podcast”. I hope I didn’t steal the wind from your show Julien…no…okay…that, that was it…that was the whole thing, right? That’s all you had was that quote…good.

And the last sort of concept to sort of start embracing this whole thing before Chris and I really dive into some of the tactics and the ways in which we’re both thinking, is the theory of Digital Darwinism. And here’s the idea, is that if you’re podcast sucks, it will become extinct. Meaning you could be podcasting, but you don’t have any listeners, you don’t have an audio community, you don’t have people calling in, you don’t have people commenting on your blog. You know, there’s not much point in doing it unless it’s just fulfilling your own personal satisfaction, which is fine. But from a marketing perspective, what we’re trying to do is to get people to build their market shares, build their audience. So that’s one side of it. The other side of it is that if it’s really great, it will evolve, right? People will call in, they’ll change the show, they’ll change the nature of it. I look back a year and look at my show, listening to Chris’s show. It’s completely evolved. Because the community has accepted it and brought it in. So when you’re thinking about your strategies and tactics for building your audience and all these ideas we’re going to share with you, think about Digital Darwinism. Is this something that’s going to become extinct or is this something that’s going to help you evolve? My friend…

Chris Penn: Okay, so let’s get into some of the actual pieces and components of this. I divided up the tools in the tool kit that you’re going to be using into roughly about seven areas. The most important area, of course, is the one that is the database itself. Everything that you do needs to be tracked, needs to be accounted for in some way. You can use Excel, you can use My Sequel, doesn’t matter what you use. There’s an expression that Chris Brogan, who unfortunately could not be here says is “we live or die on our database”.

Mitch Joel: Is that me or is that you…

Chris Penn: I don’t know who that was. So let’s talk. Lead generation is where you get new listeners. These are sources from where listeners come from, there’s a number of them. My Space is a good one because there’s a lot of people there and particularly for audio podcasting…oh by the way, I’ve had seven cups of coffee today…I may talk a little fast…

Mitch Joel: Keep your hands and feet in the ride at all times.

Chris Penn: My Space is a place where people have a lot of accounts. 170 million accounts on there, probably about 100 million active users. If My Space were a country, it would be the sixth largest country on the planet. And the people who are on there, because they’re engaged looking for music and things are receptive to listening to things. Google, everyone knows what Google is, word-of-mouth is an outstanding choice for getting more people to your show if you leverage your community well. Traffic sources like StumbleUpon and Dig are always good for boosting your numbers, linked in and Google. If you have a show, this is an example we talked about at Podcamp Toronto. If you’re concerned about building audience, you may not need to have the biggest audience, you have to have the right audience. If you are a salesman of a Gulfstream airplane, you need to sell one every two years in order to really, really live well. If your podcast has an audience of three people and two of them buy airplanes, you’re done. You don’t need to recruit, you know, hundreds of thousands of people ‘cause that’s just going to waste your bandwidth. So use the tools to research.

Mitch Joel: One example of that actually is, I was given privy to this Microsoft Case Study that was run in Montreal…not in Montreal…in Canada and it was for a specific line of software. The software price point starts, just starts at $60,000. The podcast was listened to or downloaded over 18 thousand times and it was considered by the media a complete flop. And it’s interesting right? If they’d gotten four, five sales out of that, and we actually know that they got over twenty sales out of it; imagine what the revenue was for that one little program. So it’s important that you understand that as well. And probably into the idea of sliver casting and that whole notion very soon but.

Chris Penn: Absolutely. Can’t say this enough. If you’re content stinks, no amount of marketing you do is going to help you because you’ll lose listeners as fast as you get them if not faster. Activism or presence are kind of intertwined, so services like Facebook give you the opportunity to create a community online that you can leverage, you can talk to people and get feedback from them. Same with presence like AOL, instant messengers and twitters and stuff. It can be fun. You know, chat rooms like, you know, online chat rooms….

Chris Penn: No one’s on the chat room right now right?…on the count of three…no, I’m just kidding…

Mitch Joel: Thank you Chris. Presence and tools like that are good for instant feedback. If you have a blog that you need comments on. If you have a show that you need some comments on, these are great tools for getting it. Chris Furlow says that Twitter is his solution for that comments “0” on his blog. That’s all Twitter is for him and it works wonderfully.

Chris Penn: I’m just a little curious. Raise your hands. How many people here do have a database, in terms of like they know it, they explore it, they’re nurturing it? Hands up high, high. It’s important. Look around, look around when the hands are up.

Mitch Joel: Yeah, take a look.

Chris Penn: Because you have to be working on that right away, right? If you’re not building your audience, and tracking it, you’re actually not building your audience. Do you get that?

Mitch Joel: The question was when you’re talking about a database, are you talking about things like ______ and stuff? That’s reporting, the database is different. I’ll show you an example of one in just a bit. Do you have anything else in mind?

Chris Penn: I’ve got a lot, but keep going, we’ll come back to this.

Mitch Joel: Okay. Marketing and distribution are two sides of the same coin. Marketing is what you do to get people to your show. Inside this thing here is your database. So all the services that we have up there, Google, StumbleUpon, Dig, Facebook, LinkedIn, Word of Mouth. All of that are things you do to get people to your show. On the flipside, distribution, how you get people to listen to your stuff. The tools, once you know who they are, once the database tells you who they are, you can then go ahead and pick the right vehicle for getting your content to them.

Chris Penn: So that’s really similar to the model of push and pull. And so I’m seeing a lot of the eyes sort of like…what? What’s going on here? What this is, is really a quick sort of look at how the channels flow. And we’ll probably come back to that first slide and talk about how we use those channels individually and independently, to be more effective. And we’ll sort of see what people know about what, so.

Mitch Joel: And in fact, we’re going to do two examples here. This is a program called Facebook sync for the Macintosh. If you have friends on Facebook, this will sync up your address book with them. And in here, you will see your friends, you’ll see their pictures, you’ll see information you can get about them. In these records if the person has opted in and everyone has opted in by automatically when you sign up for it, you just don’t know it. Things like your e-mail address, your phone number, where you live; all incorporated in there is a marketer who can pull all this information down onto your computer.

A second example, this is a program called Spyder from MySpace, exclusively for MySpace. You take your MySpace profile, put it in here and then say, show me all my friends. And it will pull them in, download them in a nice format. What you can then look at is, well let’s look at your friends. Oh, here’s the information that they have provided to you as a marketer. This is Caroline, she’s 28, female, she is married, she’s a protestant, and she’s a financial aid advisor. That’s just the person I want to talk to for a financial aid show. And she’s also into Scrapbooking, Silence of the Lambs and Sex in City.

Chris Penn: Yeah, what’s really important about this is people are asking me a lot about advertising and social networking and how this whole thing works. And there’s three models that I’ll share with you; one is the ability, obviously, to advertise in a social network, which can be quite expensive. So one of the things we do know is if you advertise on the homepage of MySpace, I think it’s someone’s space, but www.myspace.com is about a $1,000,000 a day. That’s how much traffic it actually generates which is quite mind blowing. Number two would be to do something within the environment. So maybe creating a space in MySpace, which may or may not be a good idea, depending on what it is your schilling. You’ve got to sort of figure out, is this the right crowd for this type of content? So, as an example, Captain Morgan’s Rum, when the Captain was doing his own blog, not a great idea, not a great execution. A third idea is to understand social networks and do something unique for just the network in general. So that would be, for example, starting your own blog. That would be it.

So those three, those are the three opportunities you really have as a marketer. And when you look at this, what’s really interesting is even…have you guys all heard of Bebo? Bebo’s one of the largest online social networks, not specifically in North America. I would hear about it a lot more in Europe. In fact, I just read a stat that 98% of people in Ireland are on Bebo, which I thought was pretty insane. Under a certain age, I’m sure. Not people over 60 I would guess but. So the point is, is that people are saying well how are they advertising online? And they’re like, you know, the President of Bebo is actually saying, the CO is saying, you know, right now we’re seeing advertising. And we’re seeing things like experimenting in social networks. So they’ll do like events within the social networks. Like, come to this page and you can listen to some free downloads and stuff like that. And it’s been getting relative success but nothing major. And the message in his statement was actually we don’t have a freaking clue how we’re going to use this to really market. But what they did talk about which was really interesting is the idea of the momentum effect. Has anyone heard of this, the momentum effect?…no…it’s a really interesting thing. If you actually look at the profile, and you look here and see hostile, that’s the momentum effect. When a brand is mentioned in a profile, that’s a huge momentum effect. So if someone says I love Six Pixels of Separation, that’s the creation of the momentum effect. Oh, and you can actually do is track this. So I mean you can start off now and go into a place like MySpace and see how many people are talking about your podcast, track that number, start doing something, track that number again in a week. If their number is going up, you’ve created a momentum effect. If it hasn’t, you haven’t. That’s a really…it’s dynamic. As a marketer, I can tell you it’s fascinating to hear that this is how we’re tracking success in online social networks is by whether or not you’re being mentioned in the profile and whether or not people are picking up on that.

Chris Penn: To that, you can actually use…this…remember…at least from MySpace, this is all publicly available information on someone’s profile. So if you happen to be in say a Podsafe band, you can put the name of it in quotes in Google, and say show me everything on MySpace that mentions that. And you’ll get an accurate count of who is out there. And then in…

Mitch Joel: Does someone, does somebody have to be your friend for you to see that information?

Chris Penn: No.

Mitch Joel: So I want you to appreciate that statement there, ‘because that’s like a huge thing. MySpace has, in theory, become one of the best market research platforms you can imagine. It’s as big as the sixth largest country.

Chris Penn: Sixth largest country, just behind Brazil.

Mitch Joel: You can do a search on anything. So let’s say you are a band and you’re playing Kingston and your music is similar to The Rolling Stones and The Strokes. You can actually plug that in and find the exact people in that network who like that type of music. Imagine the power of that.

Chris Penn: You can also message them and communicate with them inside of the tools. If you say “I want to see everybody who mentions say Mathew Evil and their profile.” You can send them a message, the customer saying “hey I noticed you’re a Mathew Evil fan, you might want also like Jeff Smith”. You could say “I noticed that you listen to Six Pixels of Separation”, you might want to try Online Music Marketing. All the data’s out there, you just need the tools to do it. And you’re going to need different tools to do it as well because each platform has its own quirks. There’s no one master database except mentally in your head. So for MySpace, you’re going to use tools like Spyder. For tools like LinkedIn, you’re going to use a contact manager, Daylite, Outlook.

Mitch Joel: How people here have LinkedIn? So like everybody should be on LinkedIn and you should all be connecting to each other obviously when you leave. What would be another great one to connect on? Facebook?

Chris Penn: Facebook.

Mitch Joel: Facebook. So same thing. I mean, you can blow your network out. I don’t know if anyone has ever seen…I have a slide that shows my LinkedIn. And the reason I show it is to just show how quickly social networks scale. So if you know how LinkedIn works, you create your profile and you link into other people. So at my first level, I have about 600 contacts, second level is about 50,000 or 60,000 second degree. My third degree is 1.7 million people in my network. It’s scales really, really fast. You have access to amazing people.

One of the coolest stories is we were doing some work for AXE Deodorant and we wanted to do some stop action animation using some old school action figures. So we got in contact with Mattel and it was just like dead end, like calling zero and dialling who’s there in Legal. Like, we didn’t know anybody. One of my account directors comes over and says “have you tried LinkedIn?” and I was like, doh, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. Go into LinkedIn, two degrees away was the Director of Strategic Alliances and New Marketing Opportunities. So I have him write the e-mail. I forward it to you who I know, and then you forward it on to that person because it’s all permission driven. In twenty minutes, the person called me. By that afternoon, the deal was perfect, done, in the can, right person, right direction. So you can also use it to leverage your network to build your channels.

Chris Penn: Let me give you a starting point, we have just under 10 minutes. Let me give you a starting point because there is a lot of stuff on here. Facebook, for example, uses e-mail addresses as a primary key. LinkedIn does too. So does StumbleUpon in some cases. MySpace does not. So of those services, you want to start by getting an e-mail address, a functioning, working e-mail address for someone. You don’t need to spend a lot of money. You can sign up for, create a group on Google Groups. The goal is to ask people to sign up for your newsletter. Create a newsletter for your podcast as a way that you can get back in touch with people. Because when someone subscribes to an RSS feed, they can leave at anytime, which is good for the consumer, not so good for you if you’re trying to get people’s attention, to market to them. Get the e-mail address first. That is the first and probably the most important core component of your database that you’re going to build. You can keep it in a regular text file if you wanted to. Start there. Once you have the e-mail address, import it as a contact into LinkedIn. See what else you can know about them. Import them as contacts to a group that you create for your show on Facebook. See what kind of momentum you can create there. But you must start by getting the e-mail address. So I’m going to say that’s the first piece of the tool kit. Everything else comes out of that.

Mitch Joel: Yeah, I mean and from, in terms of my side of the tool kit beyond acquiring an e-mail address, one of the things I push really hard, I’m sure you’ll hear a lot more about it today, is the power of content. And what I mean by that is, we tend to write how we think. And what I’m going to urge everybody here to start thinking about is write not like a search engine but for a search engine. And it’s really important. And it’s really important on many levels. I spoke about a week ago, I think, at Search Engines Strategies in Toronto. And I had this whole thing on RSS and Podcasts, and that was my thing. And I got up there and I was like, you know what, I’m p—-d off and I’m just going to you all why. And I’ll tell you why too is people in search engine optimization, all they care about is getting their text to number 1 in Google. That’s all they care about. They sit in these rooms, in these bad hotels with bad food, just focusing on how can I get my site number one first page Google? And although that’s important, you need to start appreciating things that are happening in our world which is like Google Universal and audio and video and images and all this stuff. And no one is really looking at it. And that’s your huge opportunity right here. Your ability to tag things, your ability to create great show notes, your ability to transcribe your show, your ability to make sure that all this stuff that everyone didn’t have their eye on because they’re worried about reciprocated links and keyword stuffing, that’s one side.

The other side of it is when you’re doing your show notes, everything, you’ve got to remember your title. That’s your first…that’s like considered what’s called your H1. It’s like primary in search engine optimization. Be descriptive. Be very, very clear what it is. Don’t say to people I’m going to a conference this weekend. I’m going to Podcasters Across Borders, the only Canadian/US get together for podcasters and podcasting. I just got podcasting in there five times. So think like a search engine, just don’t write like one. That’s another huge component of it.

Chris Penn: And with that I think we’re…I think so…

Mitch Joel: Take on…

Chris Penn: I think so.

Mitch Joel: Well yeah, we’re done…okay…the other compon…well, let me just go back for one second, and then we’ll take questions. Yeah…so this is based off of your push and pull. Did everyone catch that part? You know those push marketing? TV ads. And then there’s pull, feeds, stuff like that. This whole Yin Yang idea revolves around the notion of participation also. So that’s the third “P” in marketing right now. And that’s what we are living in. We sort of do it all the time and we don’t realize it. But most marketers aren’t thinking like that. They’re thinking about how can I push a message to you, or how will you as a consumer pull the message out? Social media is based on the participation model. And it’s another huge component of it. So if you see things like LinkedIn, MySpace, none of them work, or Facebook, unless you join those communities and become a part of it. I mean, how many people here are in Second Life? Raise your hands? Okay. And I presume the rest of the people know what Second Life is, the online virtual world. You can’t just go in there and set up shop. I mean you can, but it would be a bad idea. You need community acceptance. That’s everything. Our community credit is the entire world. And it’s the same thing in podcasting right? You’ve got to build the cred’s. So even if you’re not thinking…even if you’re not podcasting yet or thinking about getting into podcasting, it’s a good time to start trying. Listening to a lot of them, audio comment on other peoples’ pod shows, pod shows? Podcasts.

Chris Penn: Podcasts.

Mitch Joel: I had an Adam Curry moment there…oh my god…it’s my first one, someone make note…But it’s really important because once you’re ready to launch your podcast, people listen. I’m going to point out and Jay did the same thing. When you did you’re online music marketing, people knew Jay in the community, through the band, through the fact he sent in audio comments and text comments. So when he launched his show, we all helped him. That’s called coopertition. Trust music guy owns a business, it doesn’t really exist in the business world. And that’s the opportunity in marketing, is took at the push and pull which is what all marketers are doing. And then leverage the participation model. People will be astounded by what happens when you give abundantly. It’s an amazing opportunity. So, what does that mean? Okay but you’re all raising different…sorry…Six Minutes of Separation, okay, good. It’s a good name for a show. Questions, Joe.

Joe Thornley: A disclaimer, I’m from the marketing world, Joe Thornley from Pro PR. You just gave that presentation. How do you think that the ordinary Facebook member, or MySpace member would feel if they saw a couple of marketing guys saying you can get all the data, you can put it into a database and our whole objective is to use that database for our purposes?

Chris Penn: Yeah, I should have done the pinkie Dr. Evil stuff in that moment, I think. I forgot to do it, we forgot. It’s a reality. I mean, you know, it stems back to the user who didn’t probably read the terms and conditions. But I mean it’s a reality of the business. Anyone can go in there and look and see and that’s what it’s for.

Mitch Joel: It is out there, and also it’s incumbent on you as a marketer to use it skilfully and not just, you know, put on a big message in a cannon, hit everybody and hope to god it sticks. It’s actually, look at the information there, get to almost know the person, at least from the information they’ve provided and establish a relationship with them from there.

Chris Penn: Let me just dovetail and then you can follow up. How many people know ForBiddeN on MySpace, Christine Dolce, she’s got…just you? I love you Julien. Christine’s got…I mean she looks like a porn star, but she’s not, she’s just a stripper…no I’m just kidding…She’s got like 1.3 million friends, okay. And this is the example that will speak to that. If she sent an e-mail saying hey everybody if you need your web page designed I think you should go to Twist Image, you would reject her, you would dump her as a friend, you would get rid of her. If she sent you an e-mail saying I just saw the movie “1408” spoke to the movie company, they’re willing to give away 5 passes in every city if you answer the skill-testing question. You, as being one of her friends, would go “yeah, I like that type of movie too” because that’s why I’m her friend. So just as much as people have friends in those environments, they can’t afford to lose friends either.

And it’s a very thin line of trust, and it’ll come up I’m sure in later presentations. “The Trust Economy” which is you can’t just spam people because then they’re just like “I don’t want to hear from that person again”.

I actually, I want to add to that too, ‘cause the company that I’m working for “5890” started a Facebook group for one of our clients which is Coors Light and it’s called “The Coors Brewing Company Group”. And 6,000 people joined it. They got to know that they’re going to be marketed to. So I mean, people are willing to, clearly willing to give up their data for that reason because they’ve signed up to a group that says Coors Light Brewing Company, you know. Enter our contest and buy our beer. So, you know, I think, I don’t think they’d be that offended.

Mitch Joel: On the other side of that is, you know, talking to David Jones from Inside PR, Terry Fallis is already here. You know, he does that…he always shows example, Facebook groups on Doritos, 358 groups on Doritos. And they haven’t started one. Why would they not want to engage that community? Oh there’s a group for Hot Chilli Doritos, send them a box, you know. Hey, we love this, keep it going. It’s just a great grounds that people are saying that’s the momentum effect; people are saying I’m mentioning your brand in my profile. Huge opportunities. So use it ethically, use it wise but people are going to, even if you don’t create it, people will do it for you if they love your brand and it’s the right environment for them. It’s not for everybody.

Arthur Masters: Hi my name is Arthur Masters, I spoke this morning. Just about whether or not people on Facebook or people who are members of communities want to be marketed to. It’s kind of yes and no. I kind of know what’s happening as a Facebook user. And I actually belong to a group that I think is “What You Need to Know About Big Brother on Facebook”.

Mitch Joel: Right.

Arthur Masters: And if you go to that group, it’s a discussion of how we’re all being like, you know, just trolled for data. And the other point I want to make is that there’s a little sandwich place in Ottawa called DiRienzo’s. Maybe you know it, just off Preston Street near the Prescott Hotel. And they make the best sandwiches ever in the universe, hands down, for the least money you’re ever going to pay for a sandwich. And someone started a Facebook page called “DiRienzo’s Equals Best Sandwiches Ever”. Within a week, there were 6,000 people. Within two weeks, it peaked out around 10,000. It’s a family-owned grocery store. And they do one thing – they make sandwiches really well. And I believe one of the daughters of the owners is now an administrator of that site. But I don’t know if she was to start with. And it was entirely grassroots. People loved the product. People will create their own online communities to support your product if your product is that good.

Chris Penn: And, it fits the channel of the community. And I love a good sandwich, by the way, I do.

Mitch Joel: And Mark is saying we are done. So thank you very much.

Chris Penn: Thank you.

Bob Goyetche: This episode of Canadian Podcast Buffet featuring Podcasters Across Borders audio is brought to you in part by TD Canada Trust. When you switch your main chequing account to TD by August 3rd, you will qualify for either a Free Shuffle, iPod Nano or a 30 gig iPod. Visit www.tdswitch.com/pab for details.

Mark Blevis: Thanks to all of the PAB2007 Sponsors: Rogic Podcast Conglomerate, Third Storey Productions, TD Canada Trust, Thornley Fallis, StartCooking.com, Marion McDonald, Don Edwards, Freddie Litwiniuk, Bill Deys and Christopher Penn.

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