PodCamp Philly: What AWeber Learned and Shared

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Marc Kline

PodCamp Philly Logo This past weekend, a few of us from AWeber spent the weekend in our City of Brotherly Love for the second annual PodCamp Philly “unconference”.

If you’re familiar with us, you probably know that we don’t offer a podcast. And of course, our service focuses on email marketing. So why would we spend our weekend at a conference on apples when our business is oranges?

Two Different Tools With Similar Goals

Podcasting, like email marketing, is simply a device to communicate with an audience. The method may be different, but both provide mediums to deliver value to a targeted group of people.

Our focus is on email marketing because it is such a crucial tool in the arsenal of the modern business.

But the benefits of multichannel marketing are hard to understate, and with new technologies and new combinations of existing tools surfacing faster than most can keep up with, it’s important to sift through what’s useful and what isn’t.

And so here’s what we learned this weekend at this free conference:

There’s a great buzz about podcasting, and a community of people very passionate about sharing their expertise in producing an effective show.
At any given point, a podcast can appear on the producer’s website, an web archive/directory, iTunes, and thousands of people’s pockets (on their portable media players) all at once.
An effective podcast and email share the same #1 most important trait — value must be provided to the viewer.
Podcasters often rely on RSS to syndicate content to viewers.

It’s this last point that made for a few useful discussions with other participants. Our RSS to email feature came up quite a few times as our contribution to the furtherance of the podcasting community.

AWeber’s Take on RSS

If our common goal is to communicate effectively with our audience, we need to make sure we’re speaking to them in a way they understand, and quite possibly, RSS doesn’t mean anything to your mom, to your brother, and to a lot of your friends while email does.

That is what separates tools that are truly optimal and effective from what’s neat and useful only for people who are more technically adept. Podcasting and email have proven their staying power, while RSS hasn’t quite caught on yet for the common person.

So, we shared our experience working with customers on marketing their blogs and how podcasters could benefit from using the same type of tools.

A Big Thanks For a Great Weekend

We want to thank the organizers who clearly put a lot of work into the event, as well as all of the presenters and other people who shared their experiences and personalities with us to make it so educational … and.. well.. fun.

If you have any interest in starting a podcast for your business, check out the schedule of upcoming PodCamps. One may be coming to your town soon!

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3 Responses

whitney
September 14th, 2007 at 5:40 am

As lead organizer for Podcamp Philly, I want to thank AWeber for its generous sponsorship. They really helped make it happen for us.
We’re so happy that you learned a lot at Podcamp. At my first Podcamp, I found a group of ultra-passionate people that seemd to take my breath away with their dedication and enthusiasm. I am proud to call many of them close friends now. I’m glad you had the same first experience!

Thanks again so much for your participation- it meant the world to us.

Whitney Hoffman
Lead Organizer
Podcamp Philly
Rob Wendes
September 18th, 2007 at 5:48 am

Thanks Marc, for an interesting article on Podcasting.

The thing is that there is just the risk here that the terminology might become a little confusing. As far as I can see RSS is a transport medium, which describes how to find some information. The information might be a Blog, an article or an audio file. So I guess from my viewpoint, I see RSS as a distribution medium, since RSS syndicates are either fed with, or periodically look for media from authors.

Isn’t the Podcast the media being broadcast, and RSS a tool for delivering it?
Marc Kline
September 18th, 2007 at 8:14 am

Rob,

It is true that RSS is a transport medium, much like email is. It is a technical tool to deliver information. The problem is that it doesn’t yet (nor does it appear to soon) have the online saturation/common use to make it available to the everyday online user.

Yet, often times we see RSS being used *in place of* email as a delivery tool for media, whether it is to deliver a podcast, blog articles, and so on. Our recommendation is to provide *both* RSS and email as a medium for delivery, in order broadcast the media to the widest audience.