Internet Marketing Blog

Technology Use & Media Consumption Presentation

I've been doing a lot of presentations lately; here's the most recent. I believe that in order to most efficiently and effectively communicate online, we need to first understand the context within which we are trying to communicate. The success of communicating online depends in a large degree to the extent to which we understand the technology and devices people use to consume media, be it a newspaper or a phone or an Xbox 360 console or an iPod, and how people use those technologies.

Another important aspect to online communication is trying to anticipate trends in order to get ahead of innovation, which can profoundly change the online environment practically overnight.  Our ability to anticipate such changes depends to a large degree on our understanding of history and historical forces. Thus, my presentation begins with an overview of the history of communication:

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Social Networking Statistics

Morgan Stanley's March Internet trends report shows that social networking sites are quickly becoming major hubs of online activity: Six of the top ten Web sites are social.

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Medicate Me!

Jon Gordon interviewed psychiatrist Jerald Block on his Future Tense program this morning. Block wants to define compulsive computer use as a mental disorder. Some of the symptoms he cites are:

• Seeking psychiatric help
• Excessive - 25-30 a week for entertainment purposes
• Mood symptoms when not able to access computer
• Needing more expensive equipment and/or software on a frequent basis

Three out of four makes me a likely candidate for diagnoses. Though I haven't sought psychiatric help for my computer use, I do spend at least 30 hours a week using my computer.  Granted, most of my computer use is for work, not strictly entertainment, as Block qualified, but my work is extremely entertaining to me, so....? I do get cranky when I don't have access. Check. And I do love new technology and want better better better better. Check.

Still. A mental disorder? C'mon.

Don't get me wrong, mental illnesses are real and real serious but this just sounds like a way for one guy to make a career for himself. It's a sexy, media-friendly topic for which, I'm sure, a large percentage of the public qualifies.

Though I'm extremely skeptical of Block's idea, I have no doubt that extended computer use changes how your brain works. It's pretty well established that the brain can rewire itself, as it were, in response to some obstacle.

So why wouldn't the brain change the way it works based on how it is used?

In high school I was into music big time, played in bands, and was always writing lyrics and thinking about music. I could rhyme on a dime; much like the free-form hip-hop artists do today. My brain thought in rhymes.

Since I began working almost exclusively online, I swear my ability to recall facts and statistics has been shattered. I am so very bad at retaining that type of knowledge because I can always look it up online if I need it. My brain doesn't need to store those things anymore.

But when I was a kid, I had a near photographic memory because I could recite statistics and facts from the back of the baseball cards I collected. I spent a lot of time reading and looking at them.

But mental illness?

Conversational Marketing Presentation

For The Minnesota Council Of Nonprofits Technology Conference - 3/27/08

This is the presentation my Tunheim Partners colleague Pat Lilja and I gave to the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits annual technology conference this year:

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Google For Windows Mobile

Google released today a search application for Windows Mobile devices that puts the Google search box on the first screen, eliminating the need to fire up a browser and hunt for your bookmarks or type www.google.com into the address bar.

Google, of course, touts this as a major time saver, and it is. Google observes a 20% increase in the number of searches performed after people have installed their mobile device. But it also conveniently grabs some of the most important mobile device screen real estate to keep the search company front and center for the coming mobile revolution.

I just installed the app on my T-Mobile MDA and I gotta say, I like it a lot. I already search a lot on my phone but I'm sure I'll be Googling much more now that two steps have been eliminated.

I've been saying for some time that people can demand content on their own terms and while that mostly means time-shifting content, it will increasingly also mean place-shifting content as wireless broadband becomes ubiquitous.

With all the trends pointing to a mobile future, it's time to start seriously thinking about ensuring that your content is mobile-friendly.

Marketing To Millennials Presentation

This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.

Super Bowl Search Activity

I turn again to our faithful friend Google Trends to take a look at the search engine queries people perform surrounding the single most popular annual event on the planet, the Super Bowl.

The Day Before The Super Bowl

On Saturday, February 2, the day before Super Bowl XLII, people are more interested in the weather than the game. And I don't mean the weather at the game; they are interested in a certain groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil. Four of the top 10 searches on that day are devoted to the rodent.

You have to scroll down to the 14th most popular search phrase before you find one related to football. Searches for Art Monk reveal an interest in the Washington Redskins wide receiver who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame that day. Only 13 of the 100 most popular searches that day had to do with football, and of those 13 only 5 are related to the big game (superbowl time, super bowl time, superbowl schedule, superbowl kickoff, and what time does the superbowl start).

All the other football searches had to do with the Hall of Fame or this year's inductees:

• art monk
• nfl hall of fame
• andre tippett
• darrell green
• keith curtis
• pro football hall of fame
• emmitt thomas
• fred dean
• gary zimmerman

The day before the Super Bowl, then, people are researching the Hall of Fame inductees and preparing for Super Bowl Sunday.

Super Bowl Sunday Searches

By contrast, on February 3, Super Bowl Sunday, the top 100 searches are nearly all related to the game; there were either football related searches or searches for personalities, ads, or events having to do with the Super Bowl.

I laughed out loud when I saw the most popular search (how old is tom petty) because that was the first thing that popped into my head when he took the stage for the halftime show.

Of the top 100, only four searches were not related to the game:

• mira sorvino - who was to appear in the episode of House that followed the game,
• nick cokas - some guy who married an American Idol contestant
• ernie pyle - the famed WWII correspondent whose death photos had recently been published
• maria shriver - the Kennedy family figure who recently endorsed Barack Obama

Demonstrating just how much of a cultural event the Super Bowl has become, none of the top 10 searches are related to the actual game. Very few of the top 100 queries, in fact, are about the game itself.

Most of the queries are for personalities appearing at the event (tom petty & jordan sparks) or for Super Bowl ads.

Super Bowl Monday Searches

The day after the Super Bowl, people turn their attention elsewhere. As of 10:30 p.m. CST Monday, February 4, there are only eight Super Bowl related queries in the top 100. A Super Bowl related search does not occur until number 20, with giants parade. The rest were:

• super bowl commercials
• ticker tape parade
• new york giants parade
• superbowl commercials 08
• superbowl ads
• will ferrell superbowl commercial
• david tyree

Search Behavior During Breaking News - Benazir Bhutto Assassination

  Benazir Bhutto 
  Originally uploaded by catman_1966

It will come as no surprise that people turn to search engines to find information about breaking news events. But thanks to Google Hot Trends, which highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity, we can see just how they search for such information.

The assassination of former Pakistani president prime minister Benazir Bhutto on December 27 provides some insight into search behavior during such a crisis. News of the assassination broke around 4 a.m. PST and people immediately turned to the search engines for more news.

Among the top 100 most popular daily search terms that Goolge Trends tracks, 14 of them were related to the assassination. In the list below, the number preceding the search phrase denotes where the phrase ranked within the 100 most popular; the time following the search phrase indicates when that search phrase peaked in activity.

1 -      benazir bhutto - 6 a.m.
6 -      bhutto assassination video - 8 a.m.
7 -      bhutto assassination - 7 a.m.
22 -    pakistan news - 6 a.m.
25 -    martyred - 7 a.m.
39 -    zulfikar ali bhutto - 6 a.m.
53 -    pakistan assassination - 7 a.m.
56 -    benazir bhutto assassination video - 7 a.m.
66 -    asif ali zardari - 10 a.m.
70 -    butto - 6 a.m.
71 -    map of pakistan - 8 a.m.
77 -   musharraf - 7 a.m.
84 -    pakistan map - 9 a.m.
100 - bhutto pakistan - 5 a.m.

Based on volume, most people searched for information about the specific event in general, so we see a lot of searches that include the main subject's name: Benazir Bhutto. There was also a high interest in video of the assassination, which would indicate either morbid curiosity or simply the fact that the initial media coverage of the story lacked video. Finally, we see searches that indicate an effort to flesh out the story, illustrated by queries like "martyred," searches for information about Bhutto's father "zulfikar ali bhutto," husband "asif ali zardari," searches for Pakistan's current leader "musharraf," and for maps of Pakistan.

The following is the same list of search queries sorted sequentially by the time of day during which the query had its peak volume:

bhutto pakistan - 5 a.m.
benazir bhutto - 6 a.m.
pakistan news - 6 a.m.
zulfikar ali bhutto - 6 a.m.
butto - 6 a.m.
bhutto assassination - 7 a.m.
martyred - 7 a.m.
pakistan assassination - 7 a.m.
benazir bhutto assassination video - 7 a.m.
musharraf - 7 a.m.
bhutto assassination video - 8 a.m.
map of pakistan - 8 a.m.
pakistan map - 9 a.m.
asif ali zardari - 10 a.m.

Consider that, in the US anyway, weekday mornings for most people begin with a quick breakfast (with, perhaps, a morning television news show on) and a drive to work (probably while listening to the radio). With news of the assassination breaking at about 4 a.m. PST, most Americans heard of the news the first thing in the morning, thus you see a surge of general search queries from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m., the general time most people get up in the morning.

The one query that stands out among the 5 to 6 a.m. time frame is for Bhutto's father, which would probably indicate that most of the reporting on the story mentioned that Benazir Bhutto was the daughter of former Pakistani president and prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

From 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., people begin searching for information to flesh out the story, including searching for video, for information about Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, and for maps of Pakistan.

The only query in the 10 a.m. hour is for Benazir Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari. This is likely a result of the news media's continuing coverage with stories about Asif Ali Zardari's arrest on charges of blackmail in 1990 and his subsequent imprisonment.

Curiously, no related queries appear within Google Hot Trends after 10 a.m. I don't know why this is. Maybe people had simply informed themselves to the point that, absent any new news after they returned from work, they simply didn't feel the need to know more.

The following is a screen shot of Google Hot Trends sometime in the morning of 12/27/07 (click the graphic for the full sized version):

Christmas Season Search Engine Use

I did a bit of keyword research on Christmas-related searches just to see if I could glean any particular trends for these types of searches.

Christmas Eve Search Behavior

On Christmas Eve, the top Christmas searches were for the Norad Santa Tracker tool to track Santa's progress on Christmas Eve. These searches imply family search activity as kids and their parents follow Kris Kringle's gift deposits.

Additional family activity type searches include queries for Christmas carol lyrics and popular holiday entertainment such as "It's A Wonderful Life," and searches for Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart.

Cooking-related searches are also very popular, so grocery stores and other recipe providers would do well to optimize their sites for these queries.

Other types of searches include queries for store hours for those last-second shoppers--demonstrating the importance of including your store hours on your web site and within your local online listings.

Christmas Day Search Behavior

Christmas Day searches, not surprisingly, are heavily populated with post-Christmas sale-related searches as well as store-, and especially restaurant-hours searches.

Cooking-related searches are also popular.

Christmas Day searches also give an early glimpse into the gifts that were popular. This year Zune and iTunes searches were popular, as were Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band searches.

Christmas Searches Start Early, Real Early

When looking a historical search trends for Christmas-related queries, the one thing that stands out is that people appear to start thinking about and, presumably, then, researching Christmas gifts as early as August. That's when Christmas-related searches begin to spike upward.

This behavior is quite consistent from year to year, as this Google Trends chart of Christmas-related searches from 2004 to 2007 demonstrates:

This can be seen most clearly looking at at single year, as the following Google Trends charts shows:

And as the following Christmas searches chart from KeywordDiscovery.com confirms:

There is an obvious opportunity for online retailers in particular to engage customers long before the Christmas season even begins by examining and optimizing search campaigns targeted at these summer searches.

New Word Of Mouth Networks - Teens Talk Online

I haven't fully digested the new Pew Internet & American Life Teens & Social Media report, but the summary makes clear that teens' online behavior is creating new networks that will require online word of mouth marketing to be an increasingly crucial tactic within overall Internet marketing strategies.

The Pew study shows that they are prolific online content creators:

• Of the 93% that are online, 64% of them have created content online.
• 39% of online teens share their creations online.
• 33% create or work on others' blogs or web sites, be it for friends, groups they belong to, or classroom assignments.
• 28% have created their own blog.
• 27% have a personal web site.
• 26% create mashups.
• 55% have created a social networking profile at sites like Facebook and MySpace.
• 47% have uploaded photos.
• 14% have posted video online.

Teens share their online content and that sharing builds the foundation of their word of mouth networks because that content is a virtual conversation starter. The Pew study found:

• 89% of teens who upload photos say that people post comments about those photos at least sometimes.
• 72% of video posters say those videos elicit comments at least sometimes.
• 76% of teens who use social networks say they leave comments on other people's blog posts.

It seems clear that teen marketing for the short term, and, as these kids grow up, overall Internet marketing for the long term, will depend upon tapping into these online word of mouth networks.

Is Search Engine Advertising Trustworthy?

Eye-tracking heat maps of search results pages generally reveal that most searchers' focus is on the top, left hand third of the natural search result links rather than on the spaces devoted to search engine advertising.

It begs the question of whether search engine advertising, as opposed to natural search engine marketing, is effective at all.

A 2007 Nielsen study (via Micropersuasion) offers some data that would seem to support that assertion.  The study found that the most trusted forms of advertising are:

1. Recommendations from consumers - 78%
2. Newspapers - 63%
3. Consumer opinions posted online - 61%
4. Brand websites - 60%
5. Television - 56%

Conversely, the least trusted forms of advertising are:

1. Email I signed up for - 49%
2. Ads before movies - 38%
3. Search engine ads - 34%
4. Online banner ads - 26%
5. Text ads on mobile phones - 18%

I have always emphasized natural search engine marketing over search engine advertising for the very reason that people consider the links in the natural search results to be more credible and therefore more trustworthy and as a result they will be more likely to click on those links.

The fact that few people consider search engine advertising trustworthy while many people trust brand websites is a compelling argument for emphasizing natural search engine marketing over paid search advertising.

That does not mean that I think search engine advertising doesn't work, though. Clearly, Google would not be thriving due to its search engine ad revenue if the service didn't produce results.

While people do trust natural search results more, the same dynamic is probably at work as it is with traditional advertising.

People do not tend to pay attention to advertising until it's relevant to them; that is, until they are in the market for what is being advertising. I'd love to see a study on it, but I'd be willing to bet that as people move closer to a purchase decision, the search engine ads would increasingly be perceived as more and more trustworthy.

Crowdsourcing Disease Symptoms

I heard a fascinating piece on MPR this morning about a woman who noticed that whenever her severely autistic child had a high fever, the symptoms of his autism fell away to the point where he could communicate with them normally.

When the fever fell, his severe autism returned.

The phenomenon is called the "fever effect" and researchers have apparently known about it for years.

The report got me to thinking that such phenomenon might be more quickly unearthed and, as a result, the aspects of diseases might be better and more fully understood, productive avenues of research might be more quickly and efficiently identified, and medical science for specific diseases might be more quickly and completely advanced if there were a way to crowdsource disease symptoms.

I don't know if anyone's thought of it, but wouldn't it be enormously beneficial if there were some central location where anyone could contribute in a qualitative and quantitative manner their own anecdotal evidence of disease symptoms and phenomena like the "fever effect"?

I could see parents, family members, loved ones, disease sufferers and physicians all contributing to and researchers consulting with such a resource.

I haven't really thought about what the technology for such a system might look like but I imagine that it could be some type of modified wiki format that would allow for open ended comment but would also be able to quantify the number of people who had observed a specific symptom, for example.

Give me a comment below if you know of anyone who might be doing something like this or have any ideas about the topic, what such a system might look like and work, etc.

Black Friday Search Queries

I posted a piece yesterday examining people's Thanksgiving-related search behavior so I figure today is an appropriate time to examine people's Black Friday search behavior.

As you can see from the Google Trends chart below, a day after the 100 most popular searches are dominated by Thanksgiving-related queries, Black Friday is all about shopping; and about shopping for specific products in particular. Six of the top ten search queries are for specific products. Two of the top ten searches are for sales or coupons and only two queries are unrelated to shopping:

The obvious search engine marketing conclusion here, is that online store owners should do their keyword research and ensure that their individual product pages are search optimized and traditional retailers should ensure their sites are optimized for such words as "deals," "coupons," "sales," "shipping," "directions," etc.

Thanksgiving Day Searches

People perform Thanksgiving-related searches near that holiday, so we see predictable spikes in query volume for such searches.

Thanks to the magic of Google Trends, this is the search volume for the top Thanksgiving-related searches since 2004 (click on the graphic to get a larger size):

This is how the search volume grew for those same search terms within the past 30 days:

And this screenshot shows the 100 most popular search terms today:

All Roads Lead To Rome...Online

Colosseo
Originally uploaded by sebatl

Just as all roads led to Rome during the Roman Empire, all online roads must lead back to your client and their message, if you are to have a successful comprehensive Internet marketing strategy.

Think of your client, your product, or whatever it is you are marketing as the city of Rome. You must make it as easy as possible for people to find you and travel to your city. The map must be clear and the roads easy to travel.

One of the primary reasons for the construction of Roman roads was to move the empire's armies quickly for their many military campaigns. Likewise, you too must build your online roads for your Internet marketing campaigns.

Multi Channel Marketing

The use of the word "channel" in the subheadline is deliberate, evoking, as it does a television metaphor and its content channels. Especially cable channels with their narrowly focused content; ESPN for sports, Comedy Central, the History Channel, and so on.

Internet channels define content as well: The Daily Kos for left-wing politics, ProFootballTalk.com for NFL football gossip, and engadget for consumer technology news. But Internet channels also define types of content: Technorati has blog posts; YouTube has videos; Flickr has photos, and Twitter has text messages.

Internet audiences are fragmenting because of hugely popular, deeply engaging sites like MySpace and YouTube. People are no longer spending a majority of their time at search engines, using them as portal to their final destinations. Now many people are going directly to their favorite online communities and spending a lot of time there. The word "community" is the operative word here because the most important thing most of these sites have in common are some sort of social networking feature.

All of these channels boast large, self-defined audiences: sports or history lovers; online video or photo enthusiasts. They give us the ability to reach the people who are most likely to want what we've got.

We know a lot about the audience already by the mere fact of them being there. MySpace users probably want to hook up with one another for whatever reason and because of the large presence of musicians and bands there, MySpace users are more likely than not music fans. YouTube users want to watch video; Flickr users want to share and look at photos; Technorati users want to read blog posts.

If you want to reach your audience online most efficiently, it is essential that you establish a presence at the online channels where your target audiences hang.

When In Rome

But, because of the social networking/media aspects of these channels, merely establishing a presence at these channels is likely not enough.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

The lingua franca of YouTube is video; for Flickr it is photos; for MySpace it is "friending" and comments. Take a look at what content you own and/or produce and match it to the medium. If you produce audio, upload it to Odeo. If you blog, make sure you feed your posts to Technorati. If you establish a YouTube account but don't upload and share your video, what's the point?

It is not just content type but also the tone of your content that matters.

Formal, Corpspeak on MySpace pages and comments just sounds weird. It's not in tune with the MySpace culture. Your blog posts that proclaim rather than discuss, announce rather than engage will fail; it's just not how the blogosphere works.

The Search Engine Glue - It's All In The Metadata

While, as I said above, people are spending more time at centers of online gravity, search remains a central function that serves as the glue that holds your comprehensive Internet marketing strategy together.

People don't abandon searching once they leave their favorite search engine; more often than not, they continue searching at the destination site. Search is, in fact, the primary and most efficient way of finding content at YouTube and Flickr and Technorati.

In order to reach the self-selected audience that search provides, you shouldn't forget to search optimize the content you provide these centers of gravity sites.

Finally, as I discussed in a previous post about blended search results, the content from the YouTubes and Flickrs and MySpaces of the world often rank well in Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.

If you're skilled and a bit lucky, many of the links will lead to Rome.

Meta Me: My Lifestream Through Google Analytics

Now that Google is increasingly owning everything online, they ought to start thinking about integrating their Google Analytics service into everything else they own not called AdWords.

In addition to analytics, the Google accounts and services I use include Webmaster Tools, Local Business Center, iGoogle, Alerts, Gmail, Talk, Docs, Notebook, Calendar, Maps, Maps for Mobile, Earth, Picasa, Groups, Page Creator, Reader, Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Blogger, FeedBurner, AdWords, AdSense, Checkout, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Video, YouTube, Desktop, Mobile Search, GOOG-411, Google SMS, Web History, Trends, Suggest, Sets, and Toolbar.

I'd like to get statistics for all of these products and services to analyze how and how often I use them. I admit, it would be a huge step for a lot of people to surrender and personally identify all that data about themselves and entrust it to a megacorporation.

Services such as Tumblr and the most recent Google acquisition, Jaiku, allow account holders to plug in the RSS feeds from all of their various online accounts, from your blog to YouTube to digg to Flickr and Twitter and display the content you create in one "lifestream" to which friends (or strangers) can subscribe. The emergence of the notion of, and services catering to, lifestreaming suggest that the idea of sharing your entire electronic life is gaining a foothold in the popular consciousness.

Certainly, user statistics for all these services are being collected by the service itself, though that data is not necessarily personally identifiable. Why not allow people or organizations access to their own data?

The payoff could be huge for both the user and the organization. Say Google runs with my request and integrates Analytics into all of their products and opens up the user data to their users. The analytics of how you behave online could prove invaluable to those users in terms of finding ways to use their time or services more efficiently or in hundreds of other ways we have yet to fathom.

The payoff for Google is massive and obvious in that they would accrue a gold mine of user behavior data, the knowledge from which they could then apply to their existing and future products.

Further, with Google's foray into the productivity software business, the resultant integrated system could form the foundation for a largely automated time recording system to calculate time sheets in the background, saving businesses a lot of lost time and productivity.

And that could the mother of all cash cows.

What It's Like To Give A Radio Interview

Perhaps it's serendipity but it's funny how things work.

On August 1st, the 35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, for the next few days I watched and subsequently wrote about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and citizen journalism.

As a result of that post, I was interviewed by Joseph Jaffee for his Across The Sound new marketing podcast, during which I brought up the issue of reputation management during such crises.

That interview got me thinking about reputation management in general and that I hadn't really wrote about the issue here, which resulted in a new blog category for the topic and few new posts on the subject:

• Preemptive Marketing
• Persona Marketing - Marketing Characters Online
• Consolidating Online Identities

All of the above has presumably led a Minnesota Public Radio reporter to find and interview me about managing your reputation online.

We had two fairly in-depth telephone conversations where I discussed some of the technical aspects of how search engines work and why some web pages get ranked higher than others, as well as some practical tips for managing your reputation online.

She followed that up with a request to tape an interview with me, which she did at my office.

She gave me two examples of people who had encountered negative information about themselves onlilne. A few days later I got a call back from here asking to re-interview me because her editor suggested she make the story about herself rather than the two examples she asked me about.

Considering the topic, I did some online research about her and learned a great deal about the reporter. I discovered plenty of news stories she'd produced, so I got a feel for what she was interested in professionally. I learned where she had gone to college, some of her attitudes about college, that she is very smart because she'd been awarded some fellowships to work abroad, so I also knew where she had traveled. I found a full color photograph of her.

Further, from the information I found, I could also deduce her age and her income. I had essentially built a fairly comprehensive demographic and psychographic profile of this reporter.

I found nothing damaging about her except a few things she may consider slightly embarrassing.

I gotta say, she really took one for the team by making the story about what information there was about her online.

The interview was a little weird because it was my first experience doing a radio interview that wasn't over the phone. She arrived with a little black brick that was her digital recorder and attached a set of black headphones to it and a big black microphone to it as well. It was all very sleek, black, electronic goodness. I totally want one.

Anyway, while she was interviewing me, she would direct the microphone at my keyboard whenever I went to use my computer. The only problem is that my notebook has a very quiet keyboard! At the end of the interview, she recorded about 30 seconds of room noise which is used to fade from one segment into my interview so it doesn't sound like an abrupt transition.

At one point I said something quoteworthy but the tape wasn't running, so she asked me to say it again and I think I pulled it off, but I think it sounded better the first time.

The interview was for a relatively new show called In The Loop that  incorporates live audience participation. The live show for which I was interviewed will be held on October 11, at MPR's UBS Forum at their Saint Paul studios (register for tickets here).

I'll let you know when the show goes online.

On The Record...Online - PR Podcast

Eric Schwartzman
Originally uploaded by
edelman_talkshop

I have been a big fan of Eric Schwartzman's On The Record...Online podcast since I discovered it a couple of years ago.

Eric Schwartzman is the president and founder of iPressroom and the managing director of Schwartzman & Associates.

On The Record...Online is a public relations podcast with a unique, fascinating, and educational focus: Every month Schwartzman interviews a journalist or someone in the PR or news media business primarily about how they use the Internet for their jobs.

For someone like me who is fascinated with, and needs to know about how people behave online, I find the podcast extremely valuable in helping me understand how best to approach online PR.

For public relations professionals in general, Schwartzman's monthly podcast should be a must-listen for the insight not just into how journalists use the Net, but also for their views of the media industry and how that landscape is changing due to the Web.

A minor complaint: The first five minutes of the On The Record...Online podcast is devoted to housekeeping items and self-promotion.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against self-promotion; it is a primary reason to do a podcast, or, in my case, a blog. Publishing a podcast or blog is a wonderful way to market yourself by demonstrating your expertise. In Schwartzman's case, I think the podcast itself accomplishes that by the quality of the content and high-profile people he interviews.

I can tell from his interview questions and the people he gets as guests that he's well-connected and understands PR and, especially, online PR. It seems to me, then, that he could leave the  overt self-promotion for the end of the podcast because his interviews themselves are self-promotion.

Despite that quibble, I am a big fan of the podcast.

Listen to the most recent On The Record...Online with BusinessWeek's chief of correspondents, Joseph Weber.

See also:

• (Not So) Daily SearchCast - Search Engine Marketing Podcast
• Across The Sound - New marketing podcast

I Want A Healthy Serving Of Statistics With My Social Networks

I live and die by statistics.

I use Google Analytics and Webmaster, Statcounter, Performancing Metrics, MyBlogLog, Feedburner, AddThis, ClickTracks and other for that very reason.

I've got great statistics for my web sites, blogs, and RSS feeds; so why can't I have them for my social networking and media sites?

The video sharing sites like Google Video and YouTube and Metacafe