Creative Commons puts a great new spin on the traditional All Rights Reserved Copyright - Use of Some Rights Reserved Copyright. What does this mean? Traditionally if you wanted to use a piece of music for your podcast you’d have to pay for a royalty-free library or negotiate with the copyright holder for a the use of their work.

With Creative Commons, usually you can use the work with an attribution to the owner. There are variations on the SRR copyright, like attributed, non-commericial only. Here’s a list of the types.

To browse the library of music, go here.

Jonathan

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Podcasting is becoming more and more mainstream every day, and for good reason as marketers find it an effective and efficient marketing tool. Here are some of the reasons why you may want to consider Podcasting in your marketing strategy:

Power of the voice: One thing that sets podcasts apart from the written word is the production factors and emotions that can be present in the audio. This makes the intensity and degree of communication much more pronounced than simply reading text from a brochure or webpage. Consumers can listen to a podcast at any time, and often intergrate the audio into their daily activities, of walking, gardening, or commuting.

Market for podcasts: The market for podcast consumption is growing rapidly. The listener market is currently estimated at over 6 million. The podcast listener base in the US is forecast to grow to close to 60 million by 2010.

Podcast advertising: Advertising in podcasts or production of podcasting content is being utilized by savvy marketers. Podcasting advertising will witness a compound annual growth rate of 154% from 2006 to 2010 compared to $3.1 million revenue in 2005 according to a recent report by the Economic Times.

The future: Many experts report that podcasts represent the next evolution in the new digital media domain. According to a Forrester research report by 2010, 12 million people will be listening to podcasts as a part of their media diet. This figure was announced even before iTunes popularised podcasts.

Taking this all into account, podcasts provide a great opportunity to market your product or service to unique niche audiences. At InvisibleIdea we help you create distribution of your content by creating your own distribution channels.

Matthew

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A great way to deliver your podcast is through a pre-loaded, custom-branded iPod or MP3 device. Ipods are great because of their high perceived value, their ability to carry a great marketing message, and its use for the customer beyond.

Your logo can be imprinted on the iPod carefully loaded with a:
1. “best-of” edit sold as a premium product.
2. a “season 1″ edit. This would be a great giveaway - incentivizing your audience to fill out your ratings and reviews, or fill out your demographic surveys.

If you included a small audio edit educating them about how to subscribe to and download future podcasts, you’ve got a subscriber who will tell all their friends and family about you.

Jonathan

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Dan Mason, president and CEO of CBS Radio, and his crew rolled into San Francisco this week to talk about radio in the digital age. Mason told the crowd of mainly media buyers, radio personalities and sales executives that radio is still very much relevant in this new digital age. Mason also pointed out that the prediction of the demise of radio has a long history dating pack to the advent of the launch of TV. More recent forecasters have continued on with this theme, saying that 8-track tapes, cassettes, CD’s, satellite radio and iPod’s would kill radio. However, in this round of innovation, it seems that CBS plans on embracing the change as demonstrated in its launch of the new play.it media player. The objective seems to be to target the 9-5 at work listening audience, who may not be able to receive a radio signal or bring a radio into their work space.

The player which will be marketed jointly with AOL seems to be ahead of the pack in web based media players. Now listeners will be able to listen to radio stations from around the country from a single radio station’s website. So if you are a music fan and you enjoy listening to Alice Radio in San Francisco, and you hear news of Elliott Sptizer, you can click over to CBS’s NYC news station, WCBS to get the low down.

But this is only one interesting feature of the player, which soon will have a Pandora-like feel to it. Listeners will be able to create their own radio station by typing in an artist and getting suggestions of other similar artists. The listener will then be able to easily rank the artists by dragging them closer to the start of the play list. If for instance, you are a big Springsteen fan, but hate the Eagles — you can ban the Eagles from ever playing on your station.

There are multiple benefits to advertisers with this new platform, as banner ads can now be contextually placed in the media player and synced with the content of the audio feed. For instance, if a music station is promoting a concert, a graphic could appear on the player during the ad or even when the talent talks about the concert.

I asked Mason about allowing advertiser generated content to be integrated in the player, and he said it’s open for discussion. I wondered if I could place some of the financial programs that I syndicate into the player, so a listener could create their own business talk radio station. All I can report right now is, stay tuned…

Matthew

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Don’t be afraid to ask your listeners to fill out a survey, whether it pertains to your website, blog or podcast. As noted earlier there are a number of great different tools to ask your audience about their experience with your product. We use a great tool put out by Podtrac, which offers a free web-based survey that allows you to track and analyze responses specific to your podcast. This can be incredibly useful information as it allows you to identify areas to help you improve the topics that you cover in your program, as well as providing valuable qualitative information that advertisers crave.

The survey is fairly comprehensive, we added it the webpage for one client and in a very short time got almost 200 respondents. From this we learned that we had, as expected, a very richly qualified demographic of upper-income male listeners. It also demonstrated that people really enjoyed the program, and try not to ever miss an episode. Several audience members also asked that the audio quality of the show be enhanced, in exchange for a slightly slower download.

Our team has been able to take this demographic information and share it with potential advertisers. So far, two new clients have signed annual agreements based on this demographic information. The survey is a win for everybody, the listeners, the producers and now the sponsors.

Matthew

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Nobody explains it better than a Ninja.

Matthew

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Word of mouth is the most powerful and sought after type of marketing. If your people are referring you to to their friends and family, who in turn refer to their friends and family, your likely-hood of closing is much, much higher - and its free!

There have been numerous studies done that found other customer’s testimonials are much more believable than shout advertising. WOM is so powerful there is even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) that meets every year.

Why is it so powerful? Its trusted, its self-reinforcing (here it from many personal sources and its got to be true), and its self-perpetuating (the viral effect of others spreading it).

What are some technologies that employ WOM?
Community forums and ratings & reviews. Forums allow the product enthusiasts to discuss with each other your product. Check to see if a forum about your product or service already exists. If not, you can easily start one and kick off the forum which relevant questions. Let your lead customers drive WOM inside the forum to other spectators.

Ratings and reviews are huge. If you saw 30 Five-star ratings for a podcast with 30 positive reviews in iTunes on a topic you’re considering learning about (i.e. the stock market, real estate) and the other podcast had little or no activity, which you would consider downloading and listening to? iTunes’ ratings and review section is a huge initiator of downloads and subscriptions. Utilizing these features can add big-time listenership to your podcast.

Jonathan

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