by Lee Gibbons CEO

I was pleased to see that Rob Walch of podCast411 felt it important to correct his blog post and change it to reflect much more accurately where Podango stands on hijacking feeds. He first titled the post “Podango Hijacks Feeds.” Then, upon learning that what he was seeing as clear evidence of same was really a bug, he downgraded his rhetoric to “Podango’s Bad UI Hijacks Feeds.” Now, I see that the title of the post is “Podango’s Bad choices caused lots of pain to user.” I think this is a much more accurate reflection of what is so.

Upon making this change, Rob has also issued this update at the beginning of the post:

Update #2: I have crossed out references to Evil and Malicous as it does look to be an issue of “Don’t blame on Malice what can easily be explained by ….�

Let me complete the quote for Rob, who is basically calling us either incompetent or stupid, depending upon which version of the saying he is quoting.

We are neither. We have responded remarkably well and on the high road to his original admittedly mistaken and unfounded attack on our integrity and now on our competence.
It is just too bad. I have lost some respect for Rob through this situation.

For Ginger Campbell, on the other hand, I have gained greater respect. She has admitted her error and allowed us to say that we were a part of it. She helped me understand that the error I am referring to here actually was NOT part of the reason Rob asserted that we are evil. It was as she suggests, a very separate situation. Due to timing, it did turn out to have a compounding effect of masking our understanding and not reacting as quickly to the actual issue of one of our engineers leaving a temporary redirect tag in our RSS code.

She sent a very kind, supportive email message to Shalon Ironroad acknowledging that Shalon had done everything she could throughout the resolution of these issues. She also had a very open and frank conversation with Dout Smith (Podango President and Co-founder) to resolve the issue and come to a common understanding of resolution steps. She was as gracious as one could expect her to be.

So, onward and upward. I expect this to be the last anyone should need to say about a situation. My take-away from it all is that it might have been handled much more gracefully, and professionally all the way around: Quicker, more precise response on our part. Less rash, more balanced, responses on Rob’s part. As for Ginger, unfortunately caught in the middle, to you again we express our sincere regrets and also our thanks for making us better at what we do.

by Lee Gibbons, Podango CEOÂ

Continuing our quest to blog about all ten of the rules that govern Podango’s culture, this post is about Rule #6: “Get Listeners!”

We have talked to dozens of podcasters about what we might offer to be of greatest benefit to them, and with rare exception, the thing they would value most from Podango is getting more listeners. It comes well ahead of monetizing their podcasting efforts, podcasting tools, or our nifty go!Station infrastructure.

Podango has found that the best ways to get more listeners all have one thing in common: making it easy to find the podcast. We have also found that the growth of Podango go!Stations mostly comes from people who first simply wish to find out more about a given topic. They Google it, they ask their friends, and they listen to key influencers within their fields of endeavor and communities of interest. In other words, they are looking for you already. Or, at least, they are looking for what you know that can help them.

Another way to look at it is, “Getting listeners” is really a misnomer. It is 180 degrees out of phase of your real goal. Your real goal is to give to listeners. The more abundantly you achieve this goal, the more quickly your listenership will grow. Here are six steps that will lead to increasing your listening audience.

Step One: “Don’t just do something, stand there!” In other words, before jumping in and randomly praddling on about your own musings on the universe and its contents, put some thought into your podcast and figure out what you have to talk about that is sustainable, interesting, and worth invesing a consistent effort to produce. In their book Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, Rob Walch (PodCast411) and Mur Lafferty (www.geekfuactiongrip.com) suggest that you first “make sure you create a show that you would want to listen to.” Tim and Emile Borquin (The Podcast Brothers Podcast) suggest that in their podcast they simply, “Have something to say, or don’t say anything.”

Step Two: Truly connect with your audience. Again, quoting Rob and Mur, “A key reason we have heard from listeners about why they enjoy podcasting so much is the interactive nature of podcasting, Many podcasters go out of their way to communicate with their listeners, to include listeners in the show and to build a community around their show.” (Tricks of the Podcasting Masters, Chapter 12, page 199)

Step Three: Serve a Community. The reality is that a community already exists that your podcast serves. If that seems a strange notion, you might want to consider another theme for your podcast. Our most successful station owners (Station Directors) are those who come to us with very ready answers about the community they serve. Often, they have already been integral parts of their communities of interest and have simply elected to grab a Podango go!Station as a better means of serving their community of interest. So, your job is to really to tap into your community and serve them with the information you provide. Are you a fanatic pet owner? How do you normally connect with the other pet owners out there? How do you find more information about your particular breed? Who are the experts, service providers, and vendors who participate in the value network already? How are they reaching you? The same methods may be available to you. Along with that, these people and organizations make great advocates. Enlist them as sponsors, partners, and interviewees. You may be able to help them produce their own podcast, and they may have wide coat-tales you can ride on as you help them meet their unique–and probably compatible–objectives in serving your community.

Step Four: Serve the Underserved. As you think about the content for your podcast, consider the relative importance of your podcast to those whom you aim to serve. Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger created MommyCast out of their awareness that moms are an underserved market as regards their ability to communicate with other moms in a massive conversation about all things of concern and interest to moms. They recognized that moms are often on the go, with their eyes and hands busy, or waiting, perhaps for a child to finish a ballet class, and that a podcast to fulfill their need was a perfect fit for their lifestyles. Similary, Tim Borquin of Endurance Planet and TNC New Media produce programming for endurance atheletes, having recognized that these folks have a pattern of being out, running and training and are hungry for more information about increasing their performance and endurance. They have created a variety of podcasts as extensions of that need that are delivered every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Step Five: Be Easy to Find. Registering on the major podcasting directories is an obvious first step. Tools like PodSubmitter.com allow you to submit your podcast to 55 podcast directories from a single form. Additionally, providing detailed show notes and even transcriptions will drive up your natural search engine trafic. Podango employs every method we know to promote the actual content of the podcast, as well as providing blogging, forums, wikis, etc. All of these information sources are designed to get more natural search trafic to the content provided in podcasts. And while these methods are automated and convenient within the Podango infrastructure, they are by no means exclusive to Podango and can be employed by nearly anyone.

Step Six: Particpate in the conversation, wherever it is taking place. Woody Allen once said “Ninety percent of success is showing up.â€� On its face that sounds simple, but to really show up within your community of interest, you have to “Care, Be There, Be Aware, and Share!” meaning you have to be where the community is. Are they having weekly meetings? Do they have a common website in which they have a community forum such as the kind you can form at Yahoo Groups, or something dedicated to a particular niche such as Deviant Art? Are there leading blogs with open commenting where great information is exchanged? Your presence in these venues will lend credibility to your offering both because you will be known by key players in your community of interest and because you will have access to key information and a working knowledge of the art or science that will help you better serve the community at large.

This is not an exhaustive list of all you can do, but these are key elements of growing your listener base. What else have you found useful or helpful? Leave your comments!

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By Lee Gibbons, Podango CEO

In life there are defining moments when one flashes upon a concept that shapes them fundamentally. These moments of epiphany do not come randomly, although they seem to have their own timing. They do not merely appear out of nothing, and yet they are usually unanticipated. They rarely come all at once with full clarity of meaning or alignment with our experience, and yet they ride into our conscience with sufficient resonance that we experience an alignment between them and our prior framework of understanding such that we embrace them. They feel at once as familiar as a old, best friend, and yet as exciting as a newly found love, motivating us to change and reach to embrace them while we also feeling to push them away out of a sense that with them we are irreversibly changed and accountable to their power within us.

Now what does all that have to do with the Podango Rule #2, “Don’t be evil?â€� Well, one such moment of clarity came at the end of a college course required for my advertising communications major, “Persuasion 295.”

Throughout the semester, the professor (Douglass Gibb) began the semester by making it very clear that in this class he would grade much differently than we had experienced in other classes, even the ones we might have taken from him. He told us that we were to pick a partner in the class and that we would work with them closely throughout the semester. I chose a friend I had known for years throughout high school. Carrie Bestor and I had been in musicals and performing groups together throughout our high school years. Our senior year, I was Captain Von Trapp and she played Maria in the Sound of Music. She was bright, talented, and like me, recently married. I felt safe.

Then, Professor Gibb told us that we were to compete with that person for our grade. He gave us an assignment to pick a couple of competing categories of products and pitch them to local high school classes. I remember choosing Aqua-Fresh toothpaste while Carrie was stuck with some new twist on Crest. I was stuck with Burger King while Carrie got to pitch Wendy’s which had just opened franchisees in the area with their improved speed and new, juicy square patties. The results came out split!

We were also given an assignment to cooperate and present the winning products to our classmates, and we were to give each other a grade on that project. This, knowing that we were competing with each other for the top grade, brought me feelings of real angst about what to give Carrie. She had pulled her weight and been great to work with, just as I knew she would. Yet I also knew that I really needed an A from the course. I also knew that we were neck and neck in terms of the split result that the competitive products had yielded.

At the end of the semester, Professor Gibb gave a final lecture wherein he reminded us where we had been: First, we were in competition with one another. Then, we cooperated. He had the class us compare and contrast those experiences. We roundly agreed that cooperation was the higher law–the way to live! We concluded that working in a manner that generated a balanced resulting consequence for both parties was far superior both in terms of the reduction in effort as well as the improvement of the end result.

He then told us that there was a higher law; that of contribution, wherein one gives freely, without expectation of balanced reward. He may not have used these words, but he taught us that contribution requires that we have an abundance mentality and give freely, believing that if we help others advance their cause, we would have greater good returned to us.

It felt right, and felt possible, but seemed unpredictable, as some people might take advantage of such selfless giving. Still it rang true. I had experienced my greatest joy as a human when I had given pure service to others in need.

The semester ended and we received our grades. To our utter delight, Doug Gibb had gone against the college’s grading policy of grading classes on a curve and had given every member of the class an A. He explained that it was his contribution to our success. My GPA benefited just as I needed it to, but more importantly, I had one of those key learning moments.

Now, some 20 plus years later, having practiced “The Contribution Principleâ€� again and again and never yet having had it fail me, I am building a new company. Podango, like every other company, has to make money for its investors and stakeholders. However, the power of the new web—called by some the live web, Web 2.0, or the open web–is created by the same abundance mentality and openness taught by Doug Gibb in Persuasion 295. It is structured around win-win relationships and is creating mammoth opportunities for contribution and fantastic benefits to the communities served by those contributive efforts.

I love Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, TechCrunch, NewsGator Online, PodZinger, Evoca, Flickr, Findory, Wikipedia, BlogLines, MySpace, WordPress etc. (I could go on and on…) They provide us with unprecedented opportunities to contribute to others’ successes. And, true to “The Contribution Principle,� they invariably return to greatly benefit she who contributes through them.

In the post that becoming known as “The Podango Rules Post,� I wrote:�Rule #2: Don’t Be Evil! Podango provides world class podcasting infrastructure and ad connections and Podcasters keep their RSS feeds!�

This rule reflects my desire to contribute to the success of our Station Directors, Podcasters and the Communities they serve. I truly desire that our Station Directors have the tools to become the greatest contributors within community their station serves. I want podcasters affiliated with Podango to profit and benefit from superior infrastructure and more plentiful ad revenues than they can make elsewhere, while enabling important conversations between them and their listeners. Finally, I desire that listeners will be served by amazing community interaction that enables them to contribute openly to the benefit of the communities of interest in which they live and play.

Podango gives away to Station Directors, for free, the right and ability to begin a Podango station so that there are no barriers as they begin to serve their communities. We have built in transcriptions and linking technologies to generate better search engine rankings so that people looking for information can find Podango Stations more easily and then become served by their Podango Communities, led by our Station Directors, and find boat loads of great information within each Podango station. We provide top notch community services to allow the richest possible online conversations to take place between community members.

All this is starting very small, with us contributing what we can with what we have, but I firmly believe that abundance mentality attracts abundance. I believe that allowing podcasters to retain rights to, and control over their RSS feeds will lead to improved podcasts and greater loyalty. I believe that allowing Station Directors to own, grow, profit from, and someday sell their stations will facilitate greater passion and superior quality in stations delivering greater benefits and making greater contributions to the communities they enable and serve.

That is what I meant by “Don’t be evil.�

Some have thought the “Don’t be evil� was pointed at one particular company or another. The truth is, it came out of a conversation we had with Rob Walch of the podCast411 podcast wherein he encouraged us to let podcasters keep control of their feeds. The practice of not doing so seemed to me to be small thinking… not born in an abundance mentality.

Finally, To compete may be viewed as a necessity in a free market society. However, cooperation between ‘competing’ companies has been shown to generate greater opportunity through mutually growing markets and industries. But, as illustrated by open source successes, nothing is as powerful as contribution.

I sincerely invite any who have a relationship with Podango to shout us down if ever we appear to behave in a small or “evil� manner and to help us understand what we can do to truly contribute to your efforts to give to your communities of interest.

Tell us! What do you need in order to succeed?