Hill+Knowlton Strategies

Today saw the release of the final episode of Ricky Gervais’ all-conquering series of 12 Podcasts.

As Ricky Gervais will tell you (and often, if you’ll let him), he is a comedy phenomenon with record sales of his DVDs, live gigs and books. It was inevitable that he would prove the tipping point for Podcasting when it was announced that the Guardian would be hosting it, stacking up a world record 3 million and counting downloads along the way.

While I have experimented with various forms of Podcasting, from the Telegraph’s daily Podcast, to various BBC programmes, to the weird and wonderful world of amateur Podcasting, it has been more in a professional capacity to learn about the medium than as a staple of my media consumption. The Gervais Podcast, however, has become the essential accessory to my Monday evening commute and his informal chat is ideally suited to the MP3 player.

The strange sight of a commuter chuckling away to himself still provokes looks of bemusement from commuters clearly upset that someone is enjoying the daily scramble to make it home, in the same way that we still haven’t quite got used to those people with hands-free mobiles talking into space. It certainly helps to keep the seat next to me free.

Gervais’ ‘charity’ in providing free Podcasts, or ‘putting something back’ as he calls it, is also at a temporary end in another significant move for the medium. Gervais said in receiving his Guinness record: “Steve and Karl wanted to charge for the podcast. Just a pound they said. I said no. We’ve had nearly 3 million downloads so far. It’s difficult doing a show with two people who won’t talk to me now”.

Steve and Karl look to have got their way as both a new set of episodes and the full archive will be available for paid download shortly on Audible.com and iTunes Music Store and a currently advertised price of $6.95 or £3.75 for ‘at least’ 4 more episodes.

The real test will be whether people are willing to pay for the content. The Podcasts already attract advertising from the likes of Channel 4 and this form of informal chat is more commonly found on commercial radio, funded by advertising. As a representative of their target audience, I have to say I’m tempted to subscribe, although am reluctant to as the success of the series so far should be able to attract sufficient advertisers to keep it free and subscriber numbers ever higher.

The success of the Podcasts really do show once again that while innovation will always attract the curious, content is king in any medium.

The issue of blogger allegiances is still very much a live one, as Spanish start-up FON has discovered. Does stating that you’re an advisory board member amount to a full disclosure of interest? The tech sector feeds a (once again) growing number of entrepreneur-commentators whose networks of relationships (rewarded and un-rewarded) are often less transparent than those of MSM journalists. As the WSJ notes, “the possible conflicts associated with bloggers may be more nuanced than outright pay-for-commentary scandals.”

An apparently simple idea, and as Steve Rubel said at the time, an interesting one.

Lending sample products to talkative gadget enthusiasts that regularly review new models in their blogs was nothing new. The key innovation was giving them a blogging space packed with member-only resources which would help to amplify the reach of their blogs and facilitate the development of comment and citation networks both between them and with the wider blogging community. As well as getting access to new gear, the bloggers are clearly benefitting from the information and interaction fostered by the blogger relations blog. (Not to mention the increased traffic.)

However, Oliver Starr makes the point that all would-be copycats should note: “When sending something like these phones to hard core geeks, you’d better be awfully confident that your product is exceptional.” Nokia certainly appear to have been very open, making no restrictions on the blogger reviews that have arisen from this initiative. They also made sure that the campaign has been managed by a communications consultant with a technology background and his own blog – and with the time and enthusiasm to comment on each review generated by the 50 or so bloggers originally recruited to the scheme.

Gadgets like camera phones (whose output is itself media) lend themselves especially well to well-considered promotion through the blogosphere and other social media. And it’s clear from reading the blogger reviews that they are able to give the kind of hands-on perspective of how the devices fit within personal lifestyles that most mainstream journalists wouldn’t trouble themselves to reproduce:

“I took a 344MB AVI file of Pirates of the Caribbean and the PC Suite software churned out an 81MB .3gp file that plays like a champ on the Nokia N90. While viewing isn’t as great as it is on my PSP, it is nice to know I can do this on the device and save having to take multiple devices on trips.”

Still, there have to be one or two less transparent aspects to this campaign. How, for example, has Nokia managed to keep the flow of reviews so steady over the past three months? And in my review of all the posts I’m sure I spotted at least one blogger who had posted multiple reviews without making the sequence of posts entirely clear.