Podcasts are one of my favourite ways to keep track of everything that happens in the industry. The debates and contrasting points of view that often ensue help me learn and understand topics in more depth than simply reading an industry rag such as Mashable.

So without further adieu, here are my pick of podcasts you should be listening to if you’re serious about making smarter marketing decisions this year:

1. The Beancast
   Hosted by the golden voiced Bob Knorpp, The Beancast is a weekly roundtable with some of the brightest marketing minds in North America discussing the latest trends and issues affecting marketers today. Every episode is around an hour long but the debate and discussion is worth it.
   
2. Six Pixels of Separation
   Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of Mitch Joel and his blog Six Pixels of Separation, and his podcast of the same name is no exception. Geared toward senior marketers and executives, each week he interviews business and creative thought leaders such as Avinash Kaushik and Jonathan Salem Baskin giving unparalleled insight into a diverse range of topics.
   If you do subscribe, keep your ears out for the occasional Media Hacks episode with regular hackers Mitch, Chris Brogan, Julien Smith, Christopher S. Penn, C.C. Chapman and Hugh Mcguire.
   
3. Marketing Over Coffee
   Hosted by John Wall and Christopher S. Penn this incredibly popular podcast is essential listening for anyone looking for actionable marketing advice. I’m yet to listen to an episode that hasn’t given me something useful to make me better at my job.
4. Across the Sound
   I’m totally cheating here, but this deserves it’s own entry. Another SPOS spin-off in a “two for the price of one” kinda way, this is a monthly discussion/debate between Mitch Joel and Joseph Jaffe – two of the industry’s heaviest hitters – riffing on the business, cultural and social impact of digital and social media.
5. Communication Junction
   ***Shameless plug alert***
   Now coming into our second year, this regular discussion between Sarah Thomas, Jason Neave and myself covers digital marketing, PR and social media in Australia and is the only Adelaide marketing podcast we know of.

So there you have it, head on over to iTunes or use your favourite podcast client and start upping your marketing IQ.

We’re more connected now

The hype on launch was deafening. If you worked and lived in social media, everyone was talking about it particularly when heavy hitters like Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble jumped on and declared it the way forward. The figure often used here is the length of time it took Facebook (3 years) and Twitter (30 months) to reach 25 million users but what most forget in that comparison is that the acceleration in growth correlates with an increase in connectedness.

It can’t be understated how important this was in driving such rapid growth, the fact that we are more connected than ever before means that it is easier than ever to seed an idea provided it is compelling enough to your audience. In the case of Google+, the number of people actively playing in, not just on, social media for work and play gave it a ready made audience.

Adoption is getting faster

The diffusion of innovation has now changed. Instead of a normal distribution, the front of the curve where the innovators and early adopters live is getting squished as we adopt innovation faster than ever before. Before Google+, it was the iPad that smashed all records for consumer electronics adoption in a market that previously didn’t exist.

Social media is driving this by empowering consumers and changing their behaviour to become active participants in media and technology. Every blog, tweet, check-in and status update can cause innovation to be diffused not only faster, but to the right people who can amplify and seed it further.

A 'Normal' Technology Adoption Lifecycle

Hat-tip Martin Read for the inspiration for this post from his tweet several months ago (alas, I couldn’t find the link).

Bold, maybe. Stupid, heck yeah! Here’s why:

While this cynical attempt to get viewers to sample the new show could be considered a short-term success attracting 1.25 million viewers,  it certainly hasn’t translated into much else while potentially also dealing damage to the Masterchef brand and Ten’s already flagging reputation.

The role of programming whether it’s on television or radio is still very much about funneling viewers from one day part to the next, but what Ten’s and other programming departments haven’t quite grasped is that the audience is not as captive as they once were. Not only are viewers now spoilt for choice with the rise of award-winning niche content on specialist networks (think Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad) but the proliferation of PVRs, smartphones, tablets and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet not to mention the grand daddy of them all – the remote control – means that viewers have the freedom to consume media when and where they want. The idea that you would force your content upon them precisely when all they want is to find out who won is ludicrous!

Despite what some so-called experts say, the television audience isn’t shrinking in favour of other technologies – it’s actually growing. We are consuming more television content than ever before, except we are doing so across multiple media channels and augmenting the experience with social media.

The disrespect shown by Ten towards the Masterchef audience resulted in a huge social media backlash that spilled over into the mainstream arguably causing even more harm to The Renovators who’s ratings only continued plummet in the wake of the debacle. If Ten is serious about rebuilding their share of audience and advertising, they should focus less on using tactics designed to artificially get people to watch their programs and start respecting them and focus on creating genuinely compelling content.

If you thought the Northern Lights during the Adelaide Festival of Arts were cool, wait till you get a load of this!

It all began in 1990 at the age of 10 when I first discovered AC/DC while watching music videos on a Saturday morning. The video was ‘Thunderstruck‘ and that was exactly the effect their music had on me. AC/DC’s raw energy and straight-up rock’n'roll sound was unlike anything I’d heard before. From that point on, I was hooked.

The only problem was that there was a clear stigma attached to their music where anyone who listened to it was instantly branded a bogan or similar. Particularly in the schoolyard where Nirvana and Pearl Jam (for example) were considered cool, AC/DC was most definitely not.

This extended to mainstream media, where despite achieving more international success than any other Australian entertainer, the local press routinely ignored them with music critics dismissive of each new album.

In the past 2 years, however, there has been a real shift in how AC/DC are perceived. Especially in the last few weeks with the band on the Australian leg of the Black Ice Tour, it seems fans are coming out of the woodwork and every major media outlet can’t get enough of them.

What you see is what you get

It is almost a reaction to the collapse of the world economy and the excessive consumerism of the early 2000′s that consumers now are looking for authenticity and a sense of ‘realness’. In this regard, there is no better example (in musical terms) than AC/DC.

For 37 years they have recorded and performed different variations of the same few songs. But the fact that they come exactly as advertised and without pretense means that for their fans, they are a constant in otherwise turbulent times as we seek to inject our lives with something more meaningful than today’s homogenised, mass produced, faceless ‘music’ that is more style than substance.

Unlike other similarly massive bands who are constantly reinventing themselves and striving to remain relevant by preaching one cause after another (I’m looking at you, U2), AC/DC have never wavered from what they do best: playing blistering, wildly entertaining hard rock.

(Read what Brian Johnson has to say about Bono and Bob Geldof)

They have built a level of trust with their fans that few other bands have done and are now more successful than ever before. All by focusing on the things they do well and getting rid of the rest.

So next time, before start thinking about changing your logo/website/etc. ask yourself (a) why you’re really doing it, and (b) if your customers will even notice or care.

I finally got to see AC/DC live for the first time at Adelaide Oval on March 2nd. For a bunch of guys my dads age, they put on a hell of a performance that more than lived up to my expectations. Unlike some bands who I’ve seen live who could be sleepwalking through their set, you just know that these guys care about giving their fans a show and are leaving nothing on the table!

“All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”
- Sun Tzu

The Chinese military general and author of The Art of War, Sun Tzu, says that in battle, there are only two forces at play – direct and indirect.

Direct forces, he says, are how most battles are conducted, by matching the enemy head on and slugging it out till the death.

Indirect forces, however, are about outmaneuvering the enemy and winning by targeting their weakness and turning elements such as terrain and cover to your advantage.

While it is important to use the right combination of direct and indirect forces in your strategy, it is always the indirect that wins the war.

Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat

Marketing is also made up of direct and indirect forces.

Most marketing tends to be focused on direct forces. It becomes a case of churning out one tactic after another in an effort to match your competitors. Your biggest rival starts a Facebook page, so you start one too. They drop their prices, you follow suit. They launch a new TV campaign, yours is on the air within weeks. Direct methods can be easily imitated and unless what you’re doing really strikes a chord with your audience, it will rarely lead to any real long term gain especially when you consider that once the campaign is done and dusted and the budget is blown for the year, consumers will have moved on to something else. Even product innovation is only a short term advantage unless you have the resources to keep staying one step ahead.

Strategising might be slow, but it works

In order to succeed, you must be relevant and engaging, and the only way to do this is by taking into consideration the indirect forces at play. What gives a brand a sustainable competitive advantage is the how they leverage the indirect forces in the marketing. Take Apple for example. The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player or even the most innovative, but it is the one that went on to dominate the market. The reason was partly because of Apple’s innovative design but mostly because of how the Apple brand is positioned and the in-built cool imbued in all its products.

From a marketing perspective, indirect forces are the intangible elements that can’t be easily copied by your competitors. Fundamental to achieving this is a superior understanding of your customers and competitors so that you can identify where the gaps and opportunities are in the market and positioning yourself to claim this space. At the risk of oversimplifying, it is then a matter of leveraging these insights and developing an appropriate strategy to inform your tactics.

Ultimately, what this means is that if you want to succeed you need to get your brand right and not get obsessed with the tactics. While direct forces are essential to keep you in the game, it is the indirect that will win it for you.

In the words of the late Theodore Levitt, “determine a mass market, identify a small niche within that market and do it better and differently than anyone else.”

(Anyone else think the title of this post sounds like an awesome B-grade HK kung fu flick?)

As a kid who grew up immersed in comic book mythology, the arrival of Heroes was like a wet dream. Although by no means perfect, season one was an adrenaline rush that gave viewers a huge pay off with every episode and won the show a fiercely devoted fan base. Everyone I knew either loved it or knew someone who did and were itching to watch it for themselves – it had that sort of buzz.

Then it all started to go wrong.

The last two seasons has seen the show fall apart spectacularly as it made ill-fated attempts to reinvent what was an already winning formula by introducing poorly developed characters and arcs, ill-advised love stories and nonsensical  twists. Even when they realised their mistake, every effort to revive the flagging interest of hardcore supporters only served to disillusion them further.

In contrast, other shows I am devoted to (such as Supernatural, Dexter, Battlestar Galactica and Entourage) have only got better and better partly because they have always remained true to the spirit of the show (or at least done a swift about face when they’ve got it wrong). Rather than get caught up trying to appease their critics, they have focused on engaging and inspiring their true fans. With each passing episode, their number of fans continues to grow as existing ones recruit more and more to the cause.

(On the flipside, former Heroes fanatics, me included, are probably more likely to discourage people from watching any episode from season two or three)

While this strategy has not necessarily translated to massive weekly audiences, what it has led to is a passionately engaged following that enthusiastically laps up each episode and any associated content.

Only listening to your critics and trying to please them does not necessarily mean that they will come around and love you. Even worse, you might end up losing those who do.

Instead, listen to your biggest fans. Understand why it is they love you and make sure you keep getting that right.