I read a lot of books in preparation for my DishyMix show each week. I’ve amassed a whopper stack and I would like to send DishyMix listeners a copy of any book you want.

Just post your desire on the DishyMix Fan Page and make sure to email me your physical address.

I’ll mail it out to you.

The Age of Engage    Denise Shiffman
Boom    Mary Brown & Carol Osborn, Ph.D.
Click    Bill Tancer
Connection Generation    Iggy Pintado
Digital Outlook Report    Razorfish
The Dip    Seth Godin
The Element    Ken Robinson, Ph.D.
The Frugal Millionaires    Jeff Lehman
The Gort Cloud    Richard Seireeni
Groundswell    Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Here Comes Everybody    Clay Shirky
Honest Seduction    Scott Brinker, Anna Talerico & Justin Talerico
Ignited    Vince Thompson
The Leap    Bob Schmetterer
Open Brand    Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, Ph.D.
Peak    Chip Conley
The Perfection of Marketing    James Connor
Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends    Pete Blackshaw
Search Engine Optimization    Rebecca Lieb
Stopping Identity Theft    Scott Mitic
Trust Agents    Chris Brogan
Who’s Got Your Back    Keith Ferrazzi
Word of Mouth Marketing    Andy Sernovitz

Thanks for listening to the show!

Simon Van Wyk: Host of Hothouse Interactive Podcasts carried these books back to Sydney during his recent trip to SF.

Simon Van Wyk

Brand Digital Allen P. Adamson
Branding Only Works on Cattle Jonathan Salem Baskin
Click Bill Tancer
Revolutionary Wealth Alvin & Heidi Toffler
Rubies in the Orchard Lynda Resnick
Saddle Up Your Own White Horse Saundra Pelletier

DishyMix episode 72: Simon Van Wyk, Australian Media Expert on “Lessons Learned” from DishyMix Guests: Blogs, Search, Social Media, ROI and Marketing as Conversation

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I just had the most amazing photos taken by Lesley Bohm, LA celebrity photographer. I’m working on some new information products to follow Talk Show Tips and wanted to update my “look” to my current styles.

I met Lesley at a Mastermind event and we hit it off. Once I saw her work, I realized I couldn’t live with anything less. Lesley is a celebrity portrait photographer. She LOVES to connect with people and make them look beautiful.

Lesley and Susan

Since so much of our contact is made online now, it’s more important than ever to have images that reflect who you are and bring out the best in you.

Here are some images from my shoot and photos of Lesley’s studio and of her working with another client.

One Taste

What a disappointing piece of sensational journalism. An amazing group of teachers from OneTaste SF/NY were recently interviewed for Nightline, including Nicole Daedone, the founder. I have been waiting eagerly for the show to air because what they teach is “Orgasmic Meditation.” OMing is a practice that helps women feel more sensation through a stroking technique that OneTaste teaches.

Instead of accurately covering the value of this “massage” practice, ABC lumped OneTaste in with porn movies and eroticism. They completely missed the point of the practice and reverted to crappy, sensational journalism to drive traffic to this web page.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Story?id=8311520&page=1 (no link love from me, ABC)

See how ABC has optimized this page for the keywords “Porn” and “Erotic Film?” Desperate for traffic, ABC? How insulting. You entirely missed the point of OneTaste’s OMing practice. It’s a way that a woman can become in touch with her orgasmic potential and a way to feel a level of sensation that frankly, few partners can provide in the typical sexual context.

My husband and I were trained 4 years ago at OneTaste SF and it completely changed our relationship for the better. I’ve come into myself more as a woman and as a human being through this teaching. I have experienced a level of sensual sensation I cannot believe is possible and it continues to expand. My intimate connection with my husband is deep, comforting and hot. Every woman deserves to experience OMing.

I’m so passionate about it that I tell people about OMing all the time, produce podcasts with OneTaste and have recently co-created a “workshop in a box” with Dr. Patti Taylor for people who want to self-learn rather than going to a workshop with others. http://ExpandHerOrgasmTonight.com

Expand Her Orgasm Tonight: 21 Day Program for Partners

OneTaste’s teaching is important.

To liken it to porn is a slap in the face and an indication that Nightline’s reporters (and ABC’s webmaster/SEO people) completely missed the point. I am saddened by this terrible piece of reporting.

If you are intrigued by the possibility of exploring and growing your orgasmic potential, spend some time on the OneTaste website, go to one of their classes and/or listen to the podcasts we produce with them.

http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/215-taste-of-sex-reality-audio

http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/223-taste-of-sex-erotic-poetry

http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/213-taste-of-sex-guest-speaker

Kyra Reed, co-founder of social media agency in LA called Markyr, stopped in to the DishyMix studio while she was in town for the WITI conference. This is a sizzling, fun interview with a hands-on social media and community expert.

Kyra Reed, Markyr

Conversation ranges from Bing to GoogleWave to Hashtags to TweetCrawls. Then we get into social influence marketing strategy and creating a solid, active community site.

Then things get dishy as Suz and Kyra talk about men with presence and why that’s the sexiest attribute a man can have. Don’t you love how the show combines humanity and marketing business advice all in a 30 minute treat?

Kyra Reed, Markyr on Community Development, Integrated Microcosms, Tweet Reach

I’ve been working with John Cecil of Innovate Media on a series of Video Spokespersons for the landing pages of our new information products. Personal Life Media has launched a publishing division where we are selling downloadable content direct to consumers. These virtual products are created by experts whom we’re highlighting with video spokesperson technology from iAds on the sales pages.

Video Banner from Innovate Media for Talk Show Tips on DishyMix Blog

Here are three examples of video spokespersons, the third being “not suitable for work*” so please beware that it’s an adult-education, sensuality product for couples.

Talk Show Tips http://talkshowtips.com

Speak Up with Power and Influence http://speakupwithpower.com

Expand Her Org*sm Tonight http://expandherorg*smtonight.com

In addition to shooting the video spokespersons in their green screen studios in Orange County, they shoot clips usable for video banners, skyscrapers and medium rectangles. We put these in our affiliate marketing service, RevShareNow, for our partners to use to drive sales.

These are the three formats iAds created for Talk Show Tips, my elearning system for show hosts. You can see the skyscraper live on my blog too.

CLICK HERE to see the video skyscraper live!

Here are samples of my ads:

1.  Skyscraper – http://bit.ly/5IY7k - runs in a standard IAB ad unit
2.  Lower third – http://bit.ly/2Uqkk - overlay
3.  Box – http://bit.ly/3DJuH - runs in a standard IAB ad unit

I like how the Box ad looks like I’m kind of flirting with you. blink blink

John Cecil, Innovate Media and Susan Bratton, Talk Show Tips

John Cecil says the click through he’s getting when the video ad matches the video spokesperson is fantastic. I also notice I’m getting really high click through rates on my animated .gif banners running alongside the video banners. It’s increasing the overall click through and conversion rate having the video banners on the site.

These video ads and spokespersons work particularly well in our situation – where we’re selling the expert’s products. I think this would be great for other people who are brands, like Jack Canfield for example. John says even if he uses actors/actresses for brands that don’t have a single person associated with them, that they click through and conversions are significantly higher.

Innovate Media Video Shoot

Here is my interview with John on DishyMix where he talks about testing various models as spokesperons against a brand’s market segments. Very interesting show. Enjoy!

Episode 91: John Cecil on Video Spokespersons, Pickle Fights and Surfing in OC

*NSFW but definitely suitable for your personal life. Amazing work by Dr. Patti Taylor.

“Behind the Rebranding Campaign of Wal-Mart’s Scarlet Woman” – Julie Roehm

This Fast Company article about Julie Roehm is a rehash of her career and subsequent personal issues but it completely misses the opportunity to showcase what Julie does best – which is blend marketing analytics with bold brand messaging.

For some fresh perspective on Julie’s ideas, try DishyMix.

Julie Roehm on DishyMix

Here’s my DishyMix interview with Julie where you can get a good sense of her creativity and ideas about the future of digital marketing.

Julie Roehm:Firebrand, Press Icon, F500 Marketer and Change Agent on the Importance of Culture

Earlier this week the Traveling Geeks had an amazing Speed Dating event with Seedcamp and NESTA. Seedcamp is an early stage fund that combines their investing with entrepreneurial and business model training. The quality of the entrepreneurs and their business concepts were impressive, polished and beautifully articulated. Seedcamp grooms entrepreneurs to a level I’ve not previously experienced. And I highly encourage women to apply for their next Seedcamp program as most are still men.

“The 20 teams do compete for seed funding, but most importantly, garner world-class connections in the European entrepreneurial ecosystem. At the end of the week Seedcamp will invest up to €50K each in 5 teams for a small equity stake (5%-10%).”

Applications are now open for the next Seedcamp Week 2009 program happening this September.
SeedCamp’s Blog post with more details is here.  http://blog.seedcamp.com/

Contact:

Stephanie Zari
+44 (0)7920 062621
zari at seedcamp.com
www.seedcamp.com

We started off the day today with a fun event created by Reshma Sohoni and Alasdair Ball of SeedCamp.  SeedCamp is an early stage fund that also provides exacting business support and grooming for UK and European start ups who are socially-oriented. Typical investments are up to 50 thousand Euros for about 10% of the business.

By the caliber of the entrepreneurs and the quality of the business ideas I witnessed today, Reshma and her team are making smart investments and providing wise and plished council for the entrepreneurs they back.

Every single one of the thirteen companies was, in my estimation, a great idea combined with a terrific leader or team. The most successful to date include Spotify, the European version of Rhapsody’s “all-you-can-eat for one monthly fee” celestial jukebox; Huddle, which bills itself as the collaboration tool for the MySpace generation (I will do a separate post on Huddle for you as I know you will want to try it) and Moo.com, the on-demand printing company with a smart solution for mass-customized printed products like business cards, stickers and “moo cards” which are their own smaller, clever creation that’s become a standard with the social set.

Other companies that stood out for me were SkimLinks not only because Alicia Navarro was the only female CEO, but also because she’s in a very hot category – website monetization infrastructure. More on SkimLinks arresting start up story and how it works in a very smart way in another post.

The one person with whom I didn’t get to meet but still was very impressed with their initial presentation was Stupeflix. Perhaps the name doesn’t translate well in the US – why would someone want to start the beginning of their company name with a word that sounds like stupid? Nonetheless, this is beyond a cute video creation tool like Animoto, Stupeflix allows you to use XML to slightly change the assets within any video to create multiple unique versions of a video. Best explained by example, they showed a weather video where the location and temperature were automatically changed for various locations on the fly. You could master one video and then have unlimited versions automatically customized by city.

Andraz Tori of Zemanta gave me a quick and helpful demo of his blog writing suggestion tool. This authoring suggestion tool provides related links, images, related stories and more which make every blog post have more robust content and links. I’ve been using it so far this week and can tell you I would not give this tool up now that I’ve used it.

Another tool I have not yet tried but know will be addictive is UberVu. This is one of a new breed of social meta tools, like MobyPicture (recent post about MobyPicture) that aggregates comments from across one’s social sites into a single interface where you can see comments from your followers to your posts, all threaded together in a single application. You can reply to those threads within UberVu and it will place your replies back out in context without requiring you to do so much webpage traveling.  UberVu’s idea of providing reporting for rollup data will significantly help the social media managers and social listening companies keep track of all their conversations in a single UI. There’s a business model in this one, though it may take a few attempts to right-size the offering and prices.

I have to run off to The Guardian – we’re doing a podcast round table there. It’s pouring rain like hell and I wish I could just keep telling you about the companies we met today. I promise to write more to you about some of the individual companies, many of whom are in early or private beta.

I’ll be in London/Cambridge as a “Traveling Geek” and we’re having a TweetUp, sponsored by The Conversation Group and NESTA.org, to which I’d like to invite you.
Here is the invitation:http://www.eventbrite.com/event/366118069

The half price “friend of geek” (that would be me) discount is good until the 26th June.

More here about the Traveling Geeks.
http://travelinggeeks.com

Please let me know if you are coming. I’d love to see you there!

Twitter bird photo credit- Creative Commons MatteoPenzo.

Bernie interviewed me today for his terrific show, Find & Convert.

Bernie’s Show       Bernie’s Blog        Find and Convert in iTunes

He asked me a number of questions in advance of the interview and I thought I’d blog the answers here.

Who is Susan Bratton and what does she have her hands in now?

I’m a CEO, Publisher, Blogger, Podcaster, Speaker and Author.

DishyMix is my weekly podcast and companion blog. My coverages ranges from brain science to new gadgets to landing page conversion to the future of the social graph.

I’m the CEO and co-founder of Personal Life Media, an aspirational company and next-generation publisher focused on providing virtual, fully downloadable content experiences.

Our mantra is “frank talk and deep discussion for your personal life.”

We publish 40 podcasts, companion blogs and are launching 15 new information products I call “ebooks with benefits.”

Our first info products to market are, Talk Show Tips, Speak Up with Power and Influence, Masterful Techniques to Overcome Anxiety and Fear, Naturally Slender Quickstart and a 21 Day Lovemaking Program for Couples. We have another 10+ info products in production.

Top shows on Personal Life Media include:
DishyMix, Inside Out Weight Loss, Expanded Lovemaking, Buddhist Geeks, Living Dialogues, 3 Digital Photography Shows, The Diva Cast, The New Man, Just for Women, Philosopher’s Notes, Tantra & Kama Sutra and Sex, Love & Intimacy.

What is my high level view of social media marketing?

I view social media as being in three categories, Listening, Appvertising and Participation. Shiv Singh of Razorfish really helped me gel my concept of these buckets and his DishyMix interview is coming in June.

Listening is getting the most traction with Participation second and Appvertising third.

Listening: New companies like Unbound Technologies, a next generation Neilsen Buzz Metrics, is focused on opportunities around the social graph and social influence marketing. They create a list of the most influential individuals for any given brand and then provide an “affinity map” of the other most-influential people and brands related to that single, key influencer. This is fantastic for outreach, prioritization of influencers and joint promotions to important clustered audiences.

Taking behaviorial targeting to a new high with the inclusion of social graphing is Media6Degrees. They offer ad targeted based on social graphing. I also need an update on Lookery who is aggregating social media data across social networks to use for ad targeting. My interview with Scott Rafer of Lookery is here.

Appvertising is being well handled by ClearSpring, Gigya and RockYou! as well as SocialMedia.com and ContextOptional. Brands who create useful aps or sponsor useful aps for their target consumers are brilliant players at a high-level of sophistication in the social influence marketing sphere.

Participation is certainly evident in Facebook Pages. Here’s my DishyMix Fan Club where I give away all kinds of goodies to my listeners.  Also popular and smart are consumer generated content experiences like HP on YouTube described here in my interview with Daina Middleton and the darling of the moment, corporate Twitter accounts like this one.
What is the biggest difficulty in Social Media Marketing?

I believe in larger organizations, it is around internal ownership. Should social marketing be part of marketing, corp comm, where? In smaller organizations, I see the problem being one of overwhelming choice. Where do I start as a small business with limited resources?

Also, tracking and ROI still being figured out. Here is a great presentation on social media ROI.
http://www.slideshare.net/yongfook/social-media-roi

Lee Odden (the wonderful soul who connected Bernie and I in the first place through his superlative Top Rank Online Marketing Blog  and I talk about integration of web analytics and social media analytics in this interview I did with Lee at SXSW for the #Community Powered project. Emphasis on real time data. The data that you can collect through something like a social media monitoring tool, like Buzz Logic, Collective Intellect, Radian6, married with web analytics, like Google Analytics, Omniture, Web Trends.

Lee Odden and Susan Bratton on Web and Social Media Analytics

Podcasting? How did you get into it? What is the current state of podcasting and consulting your crystal ball on podcasting’s future.

Podcasting is still a nascent market.

The beauty of it is that anyone can create an audience of raving fans. (and in my ebook with benefits, called Talk Show Tips, I teach you how to empower your raving fans with the tools they need to help you grow your audience.)

If you are articulate and like to talk more than you like to write, audio may be better for you than blogging. And with transcripts, you can have the best of both worlds.

For video, the bar is very high on production quality. Make sure you are adequately resourced before pursuing.

Commercial podcasting is a very smart solution for brands who have deep knowledge to share with their customers and prospects.

The ADM (Association for Downloadable Media) is working on ad models, audience measurement and consumer attitudes toward sponsorships of podcasts.

It’s a greenfield opportunity for sponsors. Integrated social media programs are key. You must leverage the hosts’ social media influence.

There are two excellent video clips on Volomedia’s blog about Podcasting Metrics and Podcast Advertising and Sponsorship that Jeff Karnes and I just presented at the eMetrics Summit.

My presentation is at Slideshare.com about some of my best programs from TrustedID, Holosync’s MeditateFree.com, Better Sex Institute, Lensbaby, Accuquote and Audible.

http://www.volomedia.com/blog/2009/05/shows-on-the-go-with-jeff-karn.php

http://www.slideshare.net/SusanBratton/podcasting-metrics-and-sponsorship-ideas

Finally, Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret ‘Master Host’ Techniques will teach anyone how to land big name guests, prepare for their show, ask killer questions with my easy question-generator mini-course, create and manage a facile show flow, conduct professional in-interview techniques and learn a dozen ideas for using social media to radiate your show and help your fans promote your show for you.

What is your DishyMix podcast and blog business model?

I’m very fortunate to have sponsors who underwrite my show to reach my valuable, sophisticated audience of marketers, agency pros and digital media mavens. DishyMix is sponsored by Isobar US Carat, the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summits, adtech conferences, Trusted ID, Upstream Habitat and Audible.

Who are some of the most memorable guests on DishyMix?

I’ve created a blog post to wrap up my Top 10 Favorite DishyMix Guests.

DishyMix: Success Secrets from Famous Media and Internet Business Executives

And Coming Soon! Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock on his newest tome, Revolutionary Wealth and Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone on his newest angle, Who’s Got Your Back?