Targeting SloanTV - Who is our audience?

SloanTV is having some identity issues right now.  If we don't count Miro's wife Elizabeth, our first legitimate viewer, Adam Blake, asked for more Sloan-related content.  Miro and I are hesitant to make a show that targets just Sloan, but we also don't need to be a worse version of the Daily Show.  So what should we do?

We need to talk about targeting.  A tried and true marketing mainstay of good business.  In short the question targeting forces us to ask is: who are we making the show for?  Once we have that question answered, we can start to drive our content decisions for our target audience.

My current thinking on this is the following.  What if we target Boston-area business people:

1. MBA's
2. hopeful MBA's
3. Boston entrepreneurs.

I can already hear my marketing professor cringing that my targeting isn't tight enough.  Okay, so let's exclude hopeful MBA's.  They're don't want a show made for them, they want to watch what real business people are watching, so let's assume that we'll get some of them with plain old spill-over.  That takes the list down to:

1. Boston entrepreneurs.
2. MBA's

Well, we have to make the cut between one of these two groups.  I'm leaning towards cutting the MBA's.  Again, we'll get some of them with spill-over.  MBA's are also HIGHLY UNINTERESTING to the rest of the outside world.  So building a show for them will exclude basically everyone else.  So, here's what's left:

1. Boston entrepreneurs.

I like it already :)

Photography by partymonstrrrr

How to pick a topic for your Online TV Show | What should Sloan TV Be When it Grows Up?

We've been trying to find our way to a clear focus for the show. Here's a recent Facebook exchange I had with a friend:

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  Adam Blake Show 0 sucked - nothing was there!!!! Show -1 was interesting - love the concept. But, seemed slightly similar in setup and content to HubSpot TV...
  

  14 hours ago ·  · 
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  Miro Kazakoff Yeah, we are still working on Posting Show 0. And, you won't catch up denying that we ripped it off from Hubspot TV. What should we be doing to make it different? And how could I have gotten you to post this on the blog?
  

  13 hours ago ·  · 
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  Adam Blake The stuff you guys talked about didn't really seem heavily related to Sloan. What would be interesting to me would be the inside scoop of what is happening at Sloan right now. Speakers, events, etc.
  

  13 hours ago ·  · 

Adam brings up an interesting point. Here's how I see the trade-off

On one hand, we could focus really tightly on the Sloan community. This would generate content that would be a high interest to a very small number of people (those at Sloan)

On the other hand, we could go really broad; talk about general business news. This would generate content that was a little bit interesting to a large number of people.

Generally, it's better to start with a small market where you can really effectively address their needs. But with broadcasting, the goal is audience and impact. I think we can serve a pretty tight need that is still bigger than just students at Sloan.

My suggestion: news and events that would be interesting to people in business school, people considering going to business school and people who follow business school.

Some examples of topics:

• How does b-school recruiting work?
• What do economic trends mean for business students?
• How does b-school education tie into the banking crisis?
• What's the right kind of education for our future leaders?

Adam, Tom, Nation, thoughts?

SloanTV | Episode 0 | Of Apps and Avarice

The Technical Parameters of SloanTV Video Recordings

I was finally able to figure out the formatting of the recorded videos produced by Livestream.  Here is a screen shot of the settings:

Marketing Plan for Launch Show 1

Tom, please claim you activities for Show 1 and add

• Bring beer - Tom
• Print show notes - Miro
• Bring equipment - Tom
• Tweet one week before & Monday & Tuesday and 3 times on Wednesday - Miro & Tom
• Send email to friends on Tuesday Evening - Miro & Tom
• Post to Google Groups Monday and Wednesday
• Chalk board on Wednesday in classrooms
• Facebook event/invite
• 
  

Ideas and Script for Show 1

1. Introduction
2. Call to action
3. Headline
1. ???
4. What I learned on my summer vacation
1. Sales is like sports. It requires discipline and athleticism
5. ???
6. Jargon
7. Business Tip of the Week
8. What's on your Radar

Notes/Feedback on Show 0

Tom's Feedback

• Let's try to record it at the time
• Much higher energy, take it up a notch
• Next week re-read the feedback notes
• Move faster through the content
• Anything we want to get on the the show; needs to be on the show notes
• Props help transitions
• SHow -1 got boring at 1min 30sec; Show 0 at 4min 30sec
• One Segment per paper (no more 2 headlines)

Miro's feedback

• Much higher energy
• Liked the content, generating content before hand is better
• Right amount of content
• Worried we dragged; 
• Next time leave space and write in
• Back and forth on the show notes worked well
• Put prompting questions on our show notes (e.g. "Why should we care about law school")

Notes while watching:

• Don't slap the table
• Loved the web is dead bit
• Miro should use hands more
• Show drags at the Law school: write the prompt
• Miro is too stiff. Let the rapport come through
• Volume still feels weak
• Tom's move along question works
• Good closer:
• I'm MiroKaz. I'm TheRealTomTose, and this is SloanTV

• checklist for next time
• Miro brings the show notes
• Tom brings the studio
• Miro Posts show after
• Tom bring beer 2 weeks

Marketing for episode 0

We talked about soft launching our show. As we approach episode 0 and our launch with episode 1, we need to get a marketing plan together. Here's my suggestions:

1. We send out a Tweet right before the show telling people to tune in (my twitter is linked to Facebook too)
• Twuffer.com is a service I really like for scheduling Tweets easily
2. After the show we send an email to our friends telling them about the show and inviting them to watch the posted video

In Preparation for Show 1, here are some important channels:

-Google Groups

-Twitter

-Email

-Signage on campus

-Chalk writing on the blackboards

Tom, can you think of anything else? I can imagine two types of approaches. One is the straightforward one where we post info about the show. The other is more time consuming one where we try to build momentum by posting different cryptic messages everyday leading up to the launch to try and get some buzz.

Thoughts? I think the latter approach would be more fun. For show zero, if you think those are the right things, let me know and I'll draft something.

Blog changes: Logo added, colors changed to match MIT

I did some blog look-and-feel stuff today.  Three little things make a huge difference in the look and feel of the blog.  I changed the background color, the text color, and the main logo.  All was very easy to do:

Background color:
In blogger, do this: Click Design -> Click Edit HTML -> Edit this tag: 

Text color:
In blogger, do this: Click Design -> Click Edit HTML -> Edit this tag: 

Main Logo:
In blogger, do this: Click Design -> Click Page Elements -> Choose Edit in the 'Blog (Header)' box.  You'll be walked through the rest of the options.

I'm trying really hard not to buy this microphone.

We'll have our first rocket-ship on SloanTV!

Last week on the show, you might have noticed that the audio was good-not-great. We purchased a couple of microphones, but were unable to get any of them working on my MacBookPro using the line-in, so we ended up using the built in mic.  We were blown away with the performance, but it's still just not the same as a great mic.

One obvious solution? Use a USB mic! It's plug and play, and basically guaranteed to work. Plust the thing just looks really cool.  The one shown here is called The Yeti.  With a name like that, it HAS to be awesome.

Google Analytics added to SloanTV.com and blog.SloanTV.com

I just finished installing Analytics on www.SloanTV.com and blog.SloanTV.com

Google analytics ia a powerful tracking platform for website data. You can use it free at http://analytics.google.com

New things that I discovered:
(1) Analytics now has an asynchronous tracking code, which as far as I can tell just degrades the performance of tracking at the benefit of the power needed to track.
(2) Analytics will now aggregate data for different sub-domains. I.e. I can see different usage on blog.SloanTV.com and SloanTV.com
(3) When you install Analytics, it takes a while to recognize your code. Don't worry, if you copied and pasted correctly, it will start to work eventually.

Ideas (And eventually script) for Show 0

So one of our big findings on show -1 was that we need to keep the show really tight. In part this means more time developing the content.

Tom, here's something of potential interest for Headlines:
http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/spec-entrepreneur?goback=.gde_95004_member_27462594

Thus Far the Show looks like this:

1. Introduction & Call to Action
2. Headlines
3. ???
4. Business Tip of the Week
5. What's on Your Radar?

Show -1 Commentary

Learnings

• IT takes a while for livestream to process the recording for download

Miro's Initial thoughts before we watch the video-

-Great start
-Liked about it

• conversational
• Tom managed the crowd well to cheer for us
• Moved fast
• Liked pacing

Things for next time to work on

• Tighter, tighter, tighter
• Hard transitions between the segment
• We need the Papers to match our show note

Tom's Initial Thoughts Before we watch the video

Liked

• I liked that the people in the audience would rebel. They supported us and cheered
• Awesome

To work on

• Think we need to move faster
• If we want to get info across, we need to have it detailed out beforehand
• Try to have moments of clear structure with more free flowing in between
• Did not have backup for the hardware

Watching the Show

• I need to keep my hands off the desk
• We bounce forward when we talk
• I move my head too much
• Sound is okay. I wonder if it will still work when the room is full of people
• I need to look at Tom more
• What's on your radar should be very short and punchy

Tom

• Quality of the video is mediocre
• We need to pick up the pace by knowing our content tighter
• At about 1:30 min in everyone tuned out.

What did you think?

SloanTV Episode -1 | In the beginning...

Blogging Basics | How to change the picture next to the name of my blog

This giant 'B' is my first sign that I'm not dealing with a pro when I look at a blog. We use blogger and it suits our needs almost completely (there are some major SEO with it), but I can't stand that B. Fortunately it's easy to get rid of:

How to change the Icon on your Blog

Blogging Basics | How to remove that bar at the top of my Blog

One of the frustrations of using free software for most everything is that the tools deliberately make it difficult to remove their brands from them. One of the benefit of using modern webtools is that they tend to be pretty easily hackable. For the popular tools there are tons of people online who can walk you through how to do those hacks.

Today I quickly found this resource on How to remove the nav bar in blogger

Now we look all spiffy and professional.

How to keep your RSS Feed when you change hosting services

I just switched our RSS feed to Feedburner.

Feedburner is one of those great little services that addressed a pressing web need, built a company quickly with good talent and got aquired.

They are also the subject of a case we read in 15.371 (Founding Dilemmas in Entrepreneurship) at MIT Sloan. They have the interesting distinction of being built by a serial founding team that had worked on several other ventures together. Frankly, for me it would be a team of a well running team that got to tackle different problems time after time.

All you need to do is enter your RSS feed in at feedburner.google.com.

Feedburner will generate an RSS feed address for you that you can enter into your Content Management System. In our case, for Blogger, its under Settings -> Site Feeds.

Now if we shift our blog to a different services all our users RSS feed stay the same. A nifty little feature.

Jargon | SloanTV Segment

"Jargon" is an idea for a recurring SloanTV segment. The idea is that Miro and I (TRTR) discuss one piece of must know business jargon and explain what it means each week.

For example:

Pivot

-verb

1. A change in business plan for a startup company.

2. What you do when you need to change your business plan, but you already have VC funding under one plan and you don't want to sound like you're making a huge change, but at the same time you need to make a huge change.

Howard Says | SloanTV Segment

"Howard Says" is an idea for a regularly occurring SloanTV segment where Miro and I (TRTR) discuss our favorite Howard Anderson quote of the week. We came up with this idea because it felt like every time we had an entrepreneurship related conversation a Howard Anderson quote came along with it. Plus, I think we both imagine Howard Anderson as a prototypical old-school entrepreneur.

"If you don't come in on Saturday, then don't bother coming in on Sunday" - Howard Anderson

Set Design

Current set plan:

Sit at one of the public, round tables in e-51 lobby on MIT Sloan's main campus. Shoot from there every week.

Advantages:

• Easy Setup
• With-the-people feel

Disadvantages:

• No psychological leverage
• Hard to see by large audience.

P.s. I tried to get the old HubSpot TV table, but it had already been discarded. It's so hard to imagine the table discarded when we need a table so badly. What a shame. What a shame. Lesson learned ... move faster on good ideas. Don't wait around for a 'good' opportunity to strike.

How to Generate Tons of Content for your Blog - In 3 Easy Steps

1. The secret to generating tons and tons of content for your blog is easy. Start a blog with one other person, then start a passive-aggressive content generation arms race. You'll have tons and tons of content in no time.

2. I forgot the other two steps...

3.

How to post video online

So I'm looking for ways to post our video online.

Here are some useful resources:

... or maybe not

Searching for "post video online" is yielding a bunch of links from 2005, many of which are pay sites with outdated or bad info. ... Sigh

Okay, i"m having a bit more luck with online video sharing free

I've pulled together a few contenders:
http://photobucket.com/
http://www.veoh.com/
http://www.brightcove.com/
http://www.ooyala.com/
http://vimeo.com/
http://revver.com/
http://www.episodic.com/
http://www.dropshots.com/

And yes, I do know how to create a proper link, but I'm lazy. I'll look at these sites in more detail and hopefully have something to share reasonably soon.

Outline for a Video Podcast | Episode -1 Script Outline

Here's my initial proposed outline. Make sure to scroll through the comments to see where we ended up.

1. Introduce ourselves and the show
2. Interview each other about personal goals
3. History of how this came about
4. -- Streaking --
5. Tech talk on how we are making this work
1. Camera and equipment to record it
2. How we are getting it on the interwebs
6. B-school tip of the week
7. One thing you learned this week

Tom, I'm eager to get your thoughts.

The Basics of putting a video Podcast together | Notes from our First meeting

Our first meeting mostly consisted of figuring out what we could put off until later.

Our goal was to commit ourselves to broadcasting something and figuring it out as we went along.

We agreed the first show would be show number negative one (-1). We would do a 2nd show number zero. We'll soft launch both of these shows; taping them and posting them but only telling a few people. And then we will do our big launch around show one.

What we agreed about show -1

• We'll shoot in E51-Lobby
• We'll do this one on tape and then work up to live
• The topic of the show will mostly be how we put the show together
• The show will be on August 18th at 4:30

We agreed on a few principles:

• We want to do the show in an area where people will see it. The goal eventually is to have people come hang out and watch the taping
• We want to do it live, because otherwise we'll try to edit it and then it will become a bigger time suck than we have space for in our lives
• We are pretty much transparently ripping off HubspotTV

Other things to do in prep for show -1

• Figure out the equipment situation including a camera, mic and a tripod -- Tom
• Figure out how to get the show posted to the Internet -- Miro
• Write blog posts on our goals, meeting notes from our first meeting and a proposed outline of show -1 -- Miro

Things to figure out later

• A facebook fan page
• launch marketing

Tom, anything I missed?

Welcome to Sloan TV | Goals for doing your own video Podcast

Yesterday, Tom and I had the first live meeting of Sloan TV.

We agreed on a couple of personal goals for the project:

• Increase our personal brand
• Have fun
• Entertain people
• Get rich, laid and famous (path to this is unclear, except the middle part, for that our wives are involved)
• Keep it Lightweight

We also agree to try and expose as much of our thought process as possible to readers and viewers. We're going to try to use the Blog in lieu of email and essentially post all our conversations in the form of blogs and comments.

We hope you'll join the discussion.