Richard Edelman is championing the need for PR agencies to completely change the way they work and has some sharp words for corporate marketers, most of whom are still focused on controlling the message. “You cannot control the message. You have to accept that fact.” He cites the GM chevyapprentice.com campaign as an example of how a company took a chance, got some flack, admitted there were some negative results and moved on.

He says corporations that don’t accept the need for a conversation-based approach to the business are burying their heads on the sand. “Only 30 of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging. That’s pathetic.”

“You cannot just have a top-down conversation where you buy a certian number of impressions,” he said of conventional marketing wisdom. “It’s a horizontal conversation. It’s top down, peer-to-peer and an open discussion.”

Conversation-based marketing is scaring advertisers “The ad guys are terrified. This is ruining their revenue model.” He’s clearly positioning PR agencies as being competitive with advertising agencies in social media and having a chance of stealing away some ad business.

There’s a lot of discussion at Syndicate about tagging, with the first session with Jeff Jarvis evolving into an extended debate over Technorati’s tag-reading algorithms. Technorati’s David Sifry was in the room to defend his company but people were using the wireless network to point out Technorati’s inadequacies in real time. It was lively but a little out of hand.

There were some interesting points on the lack of tagging standards or metadata for blogs. One is that there are too many standards, some open, some proprietary. Standards are needed. Second problem is that too few bloggers even use tags because they don’t understand them or don’t see value in them. One audience member put it well: “It’s like a giant Tower of Babel populated by mutes. We’ve got multiple languages but nobody’s using them. “

I’ll be blogging from the Syndicate conference in NYC for the next two days. Lots of great speakers: Jeff Jarvis, Richard Edelman, Scott Sigler, Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls and on and on. Should be fun. Will try to post photos!

Rightlook Radio is an example of a small business that’s using podcasting to grow its profile and establish leadership in its field. The San Diego-based company provides education, training and materials to support people in the auto reconditioning business. It has 20 employees and has been growing between 30% and 50% each year since its founding in 1998.

Stephen Powers is the founder and president. He has been reconditioning cars since he was 17. Powers is savvy about technology and he’s a born marketer. Rightlook’s slick website is a cut above anything else in his business.

When Powers was introduced to podcasting last year, he immediately saw its potential for his business. He spoke to some experts in this field and then invested about $5,000 in good quality equipment. This is important because podcast quality is a differentiator. Rightlook had some experience in multimedia, since it already produced videos for its own training programs.

Rightlook Radio launched early this year. The format is talk show style, with extensive first party interviews with customers. Its purpose is to demonstrate the potential of auto reconditioning as a career and convince people that Rightlook services can help them grow their business.

Format decisions are important. Rightlook could have gone with more of an instructional approach but chose to highlight the founder’s personality and customer successes. This works for Rightlook because Powers has an engaging, friendly style and he’s a natural for radio. Interviews with customers help reinforce the message that auto reconditioning is a great way to make a living. The interviewer is a female employee, which is a good choice because it infers that this is a good business for women, too. In fact, one of the shows spotlighted a reconditioning business run by women.

Powers is clearly a born marketer. Rightlook has promoted the podcast in full page ads in a Professional Car Washing & Detailing magazine (yes, there really is one!) as well as including it in other advertising, both print and online. The company published press releases and made t-shirts. When clients come to visit, they get a tour of the professional-looking studio. Rightlook looks hip and in step with technology.

Powers doesn’t have any hard statistics on the podcast’s success, but says downloads have been in the thousands. It doesn’t really matter. The whole program paid for itself after one customer signed a $24,000 deal after following a salesman’s recommendation that he listened to the podcast. Another show about ozone machines resulted in the sale of several machines in the days after the podcast launched.

Continuing the series is a no-brainer. Operational costs are next to nothing, and the buzz and visibility that the program generates in its industry is well worth the effort, Powers says. “Without question, we’re going to continue to do this for a long time,” he says. Podcast are also an interesting potential channel for delivery of training and marketing materials.

Thanks for Michael Geoghegan for the referral to Rightlook.

Did you catch the quote from Howard Stern that the Associated Press reported this week? It was in response to reports that terrestrial radio networks were trying to get Stern to ditch the satellite show and come back to poppa.

“‘I’m very flattered terrestrial radio can’t let go of me,’ Stern said Wednesday on his morning radio show. ‘But I would throw up if I had to go back. I’m never going back.'”

The quote sounded so familiar to me, so I went back to the notes from my January interview with Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ who’s one of the pioneers of podcasting. Here’s what he said:

“When you’re in a “professional” broadcast environment you’re always thinking about rules you have to adhere to, such as language, corporate rules. With podcasts, your filters are all self-imposed….This is why I’m doing this stuff. I’ve always had the man above me telling me what I can and can’t say…Listeners get tuned in and they love [podcasts]. They’re walking away from radio and turning to podcasts because radio has been relegated by marketing and packaging into something that’s very tightly formatted. It’s so homogenized that people just said ‘screw it.'”

So here you’ve got two notable, successful, in-demand broadcast personalities who are saying no to big bucks and big audiences because they don’t want to deal with the hassles of sponsor pressure, corporate suits and the FCC. If you were a mainstream media executive, do you think this would make you just a tiny bit nervous?

I’m not a zealot about social media and I don’t believe mainstream broadcasting is going away, not now and not ever. But it is going to have to change if it’s going to continue to attract the kind of talent that will keep it innovative and in-touch with its audience. A lot of that talent is bleeding away to alternative outlets.

Just as a kicker, last week I spoke to Paige Heninger and Gretchen Vogelzang, hosts of the phenomenally successful Mommycast podcast program. They have also been approached by commercial radio about taking their program to the airwaves and they are resisting. The reason? They don’t want to lose control.

Lots of people are trying to figure out how to make money with podcasting, a medium that has some structural barriers to audience tracking. Media Post’s excellent OMMA Magazine notes a couple of interesting efforts in the latest issue.

Kiptronic has a service that connects podcasters with advertisers interested in reaching their audience. The service inserts a short ad at the beginning and/or end of a podcast at download time. The podcaster doesn’t have to do anything and the actual podcast file isn’t altered. The service is only four months old, so the company isn’t referencing customers yet, but it’s an interesting approach to making audio advertising as Adsense-like as possible.

Perhaps an even more intriguing idea comes from Podbridge, which claims to have technology that can tell who has actually listened to a podcast, not just who has downloaded it. Users provide demographic information (anonymously) when they first sign up for the service and then the Podbridge software tracks which podcasts they listen to and shoots that information back to the advertisers.

If Podbridge has really solved the problem of monitoring which podcasts get heard, then it has achieved a major breakthrough. However, the site has no detail that I could find on how this game-changing technology works. Not to mention why users would choose to sign up for a service, the main purpose of which is to devliver ads to them. The company is brand new, so it’ll be a while before we know whether its delivery matches up to its promises.

I’m writing a book about social media to be published by Quill Driver Books in early 2007. The working title is The New Influencers and it’s a book for marketers about how bloggers and podcasters are influencing markets and what makes them tick. It’s a book about humans, not technology.

I’m looking for people who are willing to share stories. In particular, I’m interested in stories about people have used personal publishing to make a difference in a market they really care about. The change doesn’t have to be seismic and you don’t even have to be the one doing publishing. Maybe you work in a marketing department that had to react to a blog swarm or used a viral marketing campaign to great success. Or maybe you were just a bystander watching an conversation play out in the blogosphere that advanced the cause of a company or its customers. The Dell Hells of the world have been well documented. I’m looking for some of the thousands of other ongoing stories of how people are making a difference in markets by expressing their opinions.

If you have a story to tell, please post a summary here and include your contact information. Or e-mail me a quick description. I’ll be in active research mode for next couple of months, so any good ideas are welcome. Thank you!

If you, like me, tend to put your faith in technology a wee bit too much, this article on RFID hacking from Wired will freak you out just a bit.

MobilBLU (now there’s a terrible company name for you!) says its new $130 MP3 player gets 150 hours of battery life and is preconfigured to download podcasts with one click, according to this story in InformationWeek. This the first device I’m aware of that was designed specifically for podcasts and I’m sure we’ll see more innovation in this area.

BTW, the story quotes In-Stat research forecasting that digital audio player sales will reach 286 million units in 2010. If you do the math, that figures out to about one unit per U.S. resident. Hmmm. I dunno about that. Unless they’re giving away MP3 players in cereal boxes by then. But not everyone likes cereal…

Congratulations to Doug Kaye and friends for Podcast Academy, a touring roadshow that offers two days of nuts-and-bold advice about podcasting. At $275, it’s a great deal (one of the nice things about social media is that so few people are making money at it that the conferences are still cheap!). You can listen to the proceedings at the link above.

A few broad observations:

This is a “just do it” phenomenon. You don’t have to invest thousands in recording equipment and you don’t have to be all that polished. Just get out there and start podcasting. You’ll get better as you go along. And everyone’s still making this up. One of the best sight gags came from Michael Geoghegan, who showed a screen shot of the ID3 file accompanying the first podcast produced by General Motors on its FastLane podcasts. The file was empty except for a single cryptic file name, somdthing like Lutz1. The slide got a hoot from the audience and it made a point: even the biggest, most resourced companies are feeling their way along in this new media.

Words and audio need to be tightly connected. You need to fill out your ID3 tags and publish shownotes to accompany the podcast. This is crucial to getting indexed by search engines and found on iTunes.

There’s no good ROI model. A couple of speakers took stabs at this topic but I didn’t hear anything really useful. Even the most successful podcasters aren’t quitting their day jobs. Podcasting should be part of your PR campaign and it burnishes your image in ways that are hard to measure. Geoghegan used the example of Rightlook Radio, a Los Angeles-based mobile car wash company that’s using podcasting to educate small business people about franchising. There’s no hard return to measure but this company is engaging with customers on a whole different level than its competitors.

People use podcasts differently than the use radio. For example, Dan Bricklin pointed out that podcast listeners always start at the beginning, which means that you don’t need to constantly remind people of what your program is about. Doug Kaye noted that a lot of people listen to podcasts while exercising, which means they give you more time to stretch out and explore a topic. The differences aren’t immediately obvious but they’re pretty significant when you think of them.

Quality counts. There was a lot of talk about equipment and technique. Doug Kaye gave a great talk on the physics of sound and Paul Figgiani had a comprehensive examination of equipment options. It’s clear that while the entry cost of podcasting is low, the cost to do it well is not. Expect the bar to move higher as successful podcasters gain traction and buy better equipment.

If you’re serious about podcasting, the Podcast Academy is worthwhile investment.