- Solidified a deal with a new Blogging PR firm
- Got our third episodes for Podded Meat shot
- Got our second episodes for Podded Meat edited
- Began talks three different ad agencies with focused directly on Vodcast advertising.
- Currently spending a wonderful weekend with my girlfriend (I love her - I know it's not work related, but damn it's been a great weekend!).
Oblong Box Stuff
First of all, the blogging thing is going along well, although much short of original projections. The entry level blogging PR company isn't sending nearly the volume of work they originally promised, nor the volume of work they seemed to have in the past. They overshot in their recruitment of bloggers and have more writers than they have work for. As a result, I have consistent amounts of work coming in, but it's not enough to spread around to the growing number of bloggers.
The upside is that the work does seem to be on a slight increase, so this should remedy itself.
The second PR firm I've solidified for the Oblong Box network has a much larger volume of work available for my writers, but they have a stringent recruitment policy. This is both good and bad. The most difficult rule to get around is that the bloggers that perform the placements for this company must have been in existence for at least three months, which currently excludes the bulk of the Oblong Box network (the first tier of writers, i.e. the early adopters, will qualify in about fifteen days).
The upside of this rule is that we're probably not going to run into the problem of having too little work, since their screening process is so stringent.
As I have mentioned before, the payout rates from this group are in most cases 100% more than the current PR company we have, and in some cases, dramatically more (I have seen a couple placements go for $35 a pop, vs the $2 a pop we currently have). This can obviously add up quite quickly.
Podded Meat Thoughts
This week was a technical difficulties filled week. We're still getting our production legs, and technical difficulties greatly increased the production time on our work this week. A critical cable went out on the sound board this weekend, and we had to record to tape instead of recording to hard drive. This really isn't an issue, since the tapes are DV, and maintain the digital format, but we weren't able to monitor sounds. Thank goodness the audio recording system has quadruple redundancy in that format, because two microphones did not record anything at all this weekend.
Additionally, hard drive requirements for other production work in the studio this week made things very difficult to work with. The editing box has a five disk ultra-scsi 3 raid array, and the whole sucker is full up to about 500 meg left (each drive is I think 36 Gig or something). If anyone has a lead on cheap Ultra SCSI3 drives, let me know. We need to upgrade.
We're currently building a new editing box with better drive capacity, but in the meantime, we may need a better harddrive setup to hold us over. There's about enough room on the drive for about four commercial jobs and one week's worth of episodes before the whole machine starts dragging horribly. If we had more shows in the pipe than we currently do, we'd likely be in a bit of trouble.
Incidentally, I'm also scouting out good show ideas. I'm interested in taking a tight knit community site out on the net, and developing a show around the socially driven content that is created there on a regular basis. We were in talks with such a group last week, but they decided to go with a more traditional media outlet instead of us to produce their show. Short-sighted in my opinion, but ultimately their choice.
If you have any ideas in that vein, let me know.
The upside to all this is that we had over 1000 show views between both of our first episodes with almost nil promotion. This project is going to be wildly popular and successful. It's just a matter of nailing down the monetezation. The adfirms I talked to sounded promising, but light background checks with their current vodcast partners proved un-impressive, so I'm still seeking national ad firms willing to expirement in New Media.
Other News
I went to pick up my perscription for my Advair today, and noticed that a lot of the doctors and nurses were useing the same website for all the information they needed about the medications they were handing out. I stoped on of the nurses to ask her more about this site. She said that it was a good and easy way too look up over 3,000 different types of medications, and it told you about the dosage and whatever interactions it might have with other medications taken. It sounds wonderful if you ask me.
Conclusion
Between all these things, and iRP and the campaign junk I'm still trying to keep together, I'm unbelievably busy. I like life this way, but again, as many of you know, things fall through the cracks. I expect a couple more weeks of this before things start to settle down for me. We're trying to decide on whether we're going to do a 10-week season or a 23-week season. I'm leaning towards 10, so we can introduce new shows in about seven weeks or so. It all depends on how quickly things take off.
Check out PoddedMeat on Monday - new eps coming out then!
/rizzn
