Podonomics

Chris Benoit is dead. One of the biggest names in entertainment wrestling was found dead along with his wife and son in their home of an apparent double murder suicide.

Pretty glum stuff, huh?

For a good majority of you, you probably have no clue who Chris Benoit is. Well, I do. Not because he’s a Canadian, but because I’ve watched World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) since I was a little girl.

My dad used to watch WWE religiously every week. Names like Hulk Hogan, Randy “Macho Man” Savage, the Hillbillies, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, Jack “The Snake” Roberts and The British Bulldogs were the huge names in wrestling at the time (I did this all without having to Google the names). Because there was only 1 TV set in the house at the time, there was nothing to do but watch grown men jump around in tights.

(more…)

I went on an AirCanada adventure on Friday. I climbed on a plane at 8am EST on June 22nd in Toronto, landed in Edmonton 4-hours later, waited 2-hours, then climbed on a connecting flight to Fort McMurray at 12pm MST.

I landed in Fort McMurray at 1:45pm MST which gave me 45-minutes to get to the company where I was going to present on podcasting. I did a 2-hour presentation, had dinner with the attendees, sampled Albertan steak (yummy), then returned to the Fort McMurray airport to catch an 8pm MST flight to Calgary. I arrived in Calgary at 9:10pm MST, then waited 3-1/2 hours for the connecting flight to Toronto. Four hours later, I landed in Toronto at 6:05am EST. Spent my entire Saturday sleeping.

Which brings me to my gripe about air carriers in Canada. There is only 1 direct flight from Toronto to Fort McMurray and it’s on AirCanada. It leaves Toronto at 10am EST daily and arrives in Fort McMurray at 12pm MST. The return flight to Toronto leaves 50-minutes after it lands in Fort McMurray. In essence, the same plane that flew there is the same plane that returns to Toronto minutes later. If you want to fly to Toronto from Fort McMurray anytime after that 1 direct flight leaves, you have to take a connecting flight via Edmonton or Calgary.

This has to do with podcasting, I promise. Read on.

(more…)

Jim Balsillie (seen right), co-CEO of Research In Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, wants to buy the Nashville Predators, a National Hockey League (NHL) team.

Most media outlets are reporting that the Nashville Predators have already been sold, however, I heard on the radio this morning that the deal is awaiting approval from the NHL Board of Directors.

Guess what? A meeting set for next week Tuesday has been cancelled by the Board citing that they need at least 10-days notice to vote on such an important decision.

Why the hold up? You can blame Balsillie.

(more…)

According to Dictionary.com, the word chameleon means:

a changeable, fickle, or inconstant person

Now, some are saying that podcasting is dead because one company called Podzinger recently changed its name to Everyzinger. Others, such as my friend Scott Bourne, says that podcasting is just a small sliver in the new media pie, so hence we should focus on finding a new name that encompasses all audio and video online, including YouTube, etc.

(more…)

Just to let you know, I‘m not the only one talking about all this digital noise in social media. I found some interesting posts from people who are also trying to put themselves on a social media diet.

• Chris Brogan talks about The Importance of Saying No.
• By way of Scoble’s blog in his post entitled Is Social Media Making Us Ill, Stowe Boyd has an awesome PDF of a presentation called Flow: A New Consciousness For a Web of Traffic looking at how social media affects our attention spans.
• By way of Michael Geoghegan’s Information Overload post, Brian Oberkirch lists about a dozen or so things he’s doing to curb the email overload in his post called Trimming the attention sails (Brian was also influenced by Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week book).

I’d love to add some more posts from you that describe what you’re doing to trim the digital fat. Please add your comments.

Last week, I complained about all this digital noise. I belong and use so many online social media tools that it started to affect my productivity. I was also getting very overwhelmed and burnt out by the constant need to always be “on” everytime I entered cyberspace.

At the insistence of my good friend, Jan Janzen, I listened to a recording of Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week. He was being interviewed by Yanik Silver.

It was probably one of the most profound recordings I’ve heard in ages. I immediately applied something he talked about to my own business with profound effects. I put an autoresponder on my email that now alerts people that I only check emails twice a day. I encourage people to call my toll-free number if they want to get in touch with me or just wait until I check into my email.

(more…)

I recently did an interview with Tim Blangger, a columnist with mcall.com. He asked me about what’s new in podcasting. My responses to his questions now appear in his June 8th column.

One thing - I responded to one of his questions about iTunes. I said that “it is great.” I don’t recall saying that, however, maybe I did because I was giddy or something.

On the one hand, yes, iTunes is great because it has done alot to help podcasting. Its podcast directory helps people find podcasts. The iPod enables people to download fresh content and spice up their stale jukeboxes.

However, is iTunes really that great?

“Um, just drop it in the mailbox, dude.”

No word of a lie, but I just got off the phone with someone who wanted to know how to mail a letter to Canada. He was calling from New York and apparently, he got something in the mail from a company that shares the same postal code as mine does. He plugged in the postal code into a browser, saw my number, then called.

I thought it was a joke. Maybe a New York based radio station running a segment trying to confuse Canadians or something. But when the guy asked why the zip code had letters in it, I knew that the call wasn’t a joke. He then admitted that this was his first time sending a piece of mail outside his own city, so I think that explains it.

Sadly, there are many people in this world who have never travelled outside their own city blocks.

My posts have been few and far between over the past couple of months. Yeah, I know. The reason:

• My book - It’s taking everything out of me. I write so often that I have little writing left over for anything else. And yes, the project still goes. I have to hammer out 50 more pages by next Friday.
• My success club - I’m working with a small group of highly motivated business owners who want to use podcasting in their business. The coaching, the networking and the chance for me to not hold back on any of my strategies has been extremely freeing and rewarding.
• My exhausion with the digital noise - Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, Second Life, the constant barrage of requests to do this and join that. I’ve had to put my status on invisible on just about every IM I’m on just so I can enjoy some silence. I just find all these social networking tools very…what’s the word…intrusive. Why can’t I be online and not have to connect with anybody? Why is it that everytime I turn on my computer, I have to be engaged in “the conversation”? And why when I choose not to connect with anybody for a hours, even days, I’m labelled as a snob? I just don’t get it. It’s incredibly overwhelming at times.

So there you have it. I need a vacation.

I was adding some content to my book in a section about branding your podcast. While doing some research online, I came across the following term:

• Brand equity - The value built up in a brand. It is measured based on how much a customer is aware of the brand.

Interesting. If value can be associated with how aware customers are of a brand - meaning the logo, slogan, colours, company name - then can the same be said of podcasting? Of course and I’d replace brand with podcast and call this podcast equity. If we piggy-back off the definition above:

(more…)