In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Tony Mamone, the Founder & CEO of Zimbio, the interactive on-line magazine. Tony tells us how his magazine caters to four basic pop-culture categories of news; Style, Entertainment, Current Events, and Sports. Zimbio covers more than just stories, it highlights the people making the stories.In this 30 minute interview Tony shares his ideas about social media, user generated content, and on-line publishing. Tony explains how Zimbio is “self policed and added to” and about “the democratization of publishing”. Tony also tells us how his small 15 person company built Zimbio to more than 13 million readers every 30 days, with the help of 35,000 volunteer contributors, offering a combination of “citizen journalism & paid traditional media”. Zimbio publishes more than 10,000 articles and 5,000 photographs every day!
George Strompolos, Content Partnerships Manager for YouTube
George Strompolos, Content Partnerships Manager for YouTube
In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with George Strompolos, Content Partnerships Manager For Google’s YouTube about companies from around the world who are using YouTube to market their company’s products. George tells us that “YouTube isn’t just about teenagers watching videos of dogs on skateboards”. It’s about Fortune 500 marketing and companies like Blendtech and their “Will It Blend”, which caused a 300% increase in sales due to these YouTube videos.In this 25 minute interview George describes how YouTube’s members are uploading 13 hours of video per minute and more than 1 billion video downloads per day! George tells us that YouTube has the same number of users under 18 that they have over the age of 55. He also shares how some of their video content providers are actually making a living from their contextual advertising associated with their videos. One such rising star is “Fred”, a 15 year old pretending to be 6 with anger management issues. You just have to see Fred to believe Fred.
In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Stephanie Ichinose, Yelp’s Director of Communications about how Yelp helps! Stephanie explains how “Yelpers” are rating restaurants, auto mechanics, dentists or any company right in your home town.In this 34 minute interview Stephanie describes how Yelp has received more than 3.5 million reviews of services all over the United states, and how Yelp.com has more than 14 million unique visitors every 30 days. Stephanie further describes how the mobile phone has changed the way people access Yelp information. Imagine you’re out to dinner, wanting a good pasta restaurant; turn on your mobile phone, type in pasta, and Yelp returns all of the rated pasta restaurants that’s closest your GPS cell phone and shows their five star ratings!
In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Patrizio Spagnoletto, Senior Director of Marketing Yahoo! Search Marketing where he discusses how easy Yahoo! makes it to create multiple keyword advertising campaigns. He explains how they provide a step-by-step on-line process and even have customer support that will help you over the telephone. Patrizio explained how by choosing more specific two & three word keyword phrases that you can actually target a much more specific customer and at a lower cost.In this 17 minute interview Patrizio describes how many of their 100’s of thousands of customers such as Lending Tree & Amazon manage 100’s of keyword campaigns and how 20% of your keywords can generated 80% of your revenues.
David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Live Platform – Azure
David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Live Platform – Azure
In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with David Treadwell, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Live Platform. David discusses Microsoft is all about building connections with people, devices, and data, and how Live can help businesses and individuals “sync to the cloud” (you have to listen to hear what this means), get access to 5gb of on-line virtual storage, and 25gb of photo storage for free.In this 23 minute interview David explains how more than 460 million (nearly a half billion) are currently using Microsoft’s Live Platform and how Microsoft is strive for an open architecture to allow developers access to all of the Microsoft Live tools. David also speaks about the value of Microsoft’s new program called “BizSpark”!
In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Dharmesh Mehta about Windows Live Messenger. Dharmesh explains how Windows Live Messenger is designed for IM, Photo, and video sharing and you can go from your desktop to your laptop then your mobile phone all seamlessly.In this 23 minute interview Dharmesh shares his insights about why 325 million people are currently using WLM and how 85% of its users are outside of the United States using 55 languages. He further explains how WLM works on three levels, SMS, WAP, and Client Apps and offers features applicable to the entrepreneur and the Fortune 500 enterprise alike. Dharmesh discusses how all these service and 25 gigabytes of virtual hard drive space is yours free. He also speaks about the 10 billion messages sent each day using WLM and how more than 10 million messages were sent using WLM just in the time it took to do this interview.
In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Peter Booth Wiley, Chairman of The Board of John Wiley & Sons where Peter describes how Wiley, a 201-year old company, has been in the forefront the technological revolution in publishing. That’s right, John Wiley & Sons celebrated their 200th anniversary in 2007. John Wiley was publishing books when Thomas Jefferson was president. Peter explains how Wiley began experimenting with computers in the 1950s while thinking about how they would impact their authors, their customers and the way they published. He describes how Wiley took this experimentation to the next level in the 1980s with the creation of a sales training program on an interactive videodisk with assessment capabilities.In this 39 minute interview Peter explains how the secret to Wiley’s success is two fold; they create an internal culture that encourages creativity and they listen to their authors. (more…)
Listen to this podcast interview with Lon Safko and Stephanie Cottrell Bryant the author of “Videoblogging For Dummies,” published by John Wiley & Sons.Stephanie shares her insights into the world of videoblogging and her passion for getting it right in this 24 minute interview.
In this podcast, Lon Safko speaks with Francine Hardaway, Founder Of Stealthmode Partners, the Phoenix Social Media Club & The AZ Entrepreneurship Conferences discusses microblogging and its varied uses today. Francine shares her insights on how microblogging has developed and how Twitter’s 3,022,000 (today) users are taking advantage of nearly real time micro-community communication.In this 34 minute interview Francine describes how Twitter, Pownce, Plurk and Google’s Jaiku are being used by individual, groups, Fortune 500 companies, and even police departments for first-responders. She also shares how companies like Southwest Airlines and Dell Computer communicate with their customers on a regular basis using Twitter.
In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Scott Clough about on-line gaming and community building. Scott shares his insights about how on-line gaming or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) has grew from the simple board game to the P.C. to on-line with more than 10 million players in one game alone.In this 32 minute interview Scott explains how role play, collaboration, teamwork, strategy, and ultimate success of a quest can be exciting and habit forming. Scott explains “cheats”, “hacks”, exploits” “griefers” and how they affect the game and the community. Scott further tell us about “farming” or “harvesting” gold and swords, the “casual” versus the “hard-core” player, why on-line gaming builds such a huge faithful following of gamer community and why businesses should watch the $1 billion+ multi-million player industry.
