Every conversation I’ve had with professional firms this last year turns to the issue of lead generation at some point. So it was with some interest that I turned to this podcast from Paul Dunay’s site. While it doesn’t exactly blow up the notion of referral, something that Rick Telberg is utterly convinced the research confirms, it alludes to how community can help underpin sales techniques you’ve probably not thought about too much. See if you can spot how that might happen.
More important, the podcast has been tagged for different topic areas using Veotag. This is a brilliantly simple idea that dispenses with the need to make separate show notes for rich media. It allows the listener to jump straight to the point in the program that’s most relevant to them. And it works.
I’ve no idea if it could work on an iPod. But for the person who is accessing a podcast, vidcast or rich media training sessions via your website, this is the way to go. Providing your listeners with pointers rather than forcing them to do stop-start fast forward is a perfect way of providing the viewer/listener with intelligent signposts and access to the rich media/podcasting experience.
Here’s one scenario. You’re making a bunch of training videos for your Sage clients because Sage Line 50 training doesn’t do it for you. You have those catalogued. But…because they cover single topics in depth, they need indexing. Veotag could be a useful way to index by tagging. Now you not only have a resource people can learn from, you also have a resource into which people can dip to fill knowledge gaps. How good is that?
The only real gotcha is that when using the free version, embedding existing code for showing Veotagged media that already exists on a website is a bit tricky. You have to cut and paste from the web page source of the page on which it sits. Alternatively, Veotag gives you a link to the hosted media but that’s not quite good enough for me.
There are a few tweaks I’d like to add to the service: e.g. I’d like additional tags for helping me discover Veotagged content that falls into certain categories.
The provider has a comprehensive set of priced offerings for business users starting at an incredibly reasonable $495 (£260/€387) pa which includes 1,200 minutes of streamed content each month with no apparent storage limits. For additional (unspecified) fees, you could completely outsource the tagging process, adding in accompanying slideshows and fully customizing the player as it might appear on your site. That is what I call a comprehensive web 2.0 service.
The only question is whether Veotag offers enough to qualify as a service or a sophisticated set of features. I think it’s almost enough to be a full blown service but it has got competition from established players who do the basics well enough to attract a significant audience.
Last week I pinged Robert Scoble about providing transcription services on PodTech. If I could slice out Veotgagged segments then I’ve really got something useful that goes one better than transcription. IMO.
As an aside, the reason I stumbled across Paul’s site is because a community with which I am engaged pointed to a post by Ross Mayfield which uses the Veotag service. I have Ross in my RSS reader but I don’t always visit his feed. I didn’t have to because Zoli Erdos started a discussion about the lack of usability with podcasts but used Ross’s example of a way he might be persuaded. In turn, David Tebbutt started messing around with Veotag and talked about how it could also be used with Camtasia style media. (Emily/Bob and a few others I can think of – are you listening to this?) That’s the point at which I found Paul Dunay’s site. It’s a great example of how community works.
Technorati Tags: podcasting_accountants, PodTech, RSS, Sage Line 50, Scoble, veotag
