At the intersection of Search and Podcasting I came across a site worth looking at. Landed.FM is a Internet radio site with a podcast site feature. But what’s really novel is how it supports the real company behind it, WorkZoo.com, a job board  and search engine.

On first blush, WorkZoo looks a very bare bones site. (Don’t be fooled by the noticably weak branding and typography.) It’s amazing feature is the way it displays a map of the concentration of jobs in the arre you are searching! Technically called the GIS (for geographic information systems) this works off a sophisticated algorithm that allows the searcher to get more than just results or hits from a search engine.

You can move the cross-hairs of your target area on the map by moving the cursor (Say from Arizona to Colorado) and the results change. All this happens very, very fast.

The jobs are displayed graphically as color-coded dots. At the top of the page, you can then tweak the search fields to display results (a) by distance from the zip code you input, (b) by state, and (c) by how recently the jobs were posted. An advanced search is also possible but this lacks the ability to search in multiple zip codes of states, for instance. I would like to be able to use multiple key words, or sort by years of experience, salary etc.

Like Blinkx desktop search utility I discovered yesterday, WorkZoo saves time by simplifying the search process. By some coincidence, WorkZoo and Blinkx originated in the U.K. but are now competing on this side of the pond.

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Apart from writing on branding (nothing more than attempting to preach what I practice!) I get a kick from evangelizing the ‘branding from within’ idea. Though it seems easy in retrospect, branding can be painstaking work.  The realities of a branding project go beyond the pretty logo and cool web site, a lovely tag line, and some drop-dead ads. As a Marcom person I do all of the above, but that still isn’t even scratching the surface of what the branding game is all about. No one likes to hear that research has to precede a lot of the action. Customer demographics are changing rapidly as do their media habits and, consequently, their attention span. Branding in a fragmented, mobile world is not the same as it was even 5 years ago.

It’s easy to point out to Zippo , Bajaj, O2, or Nokia as examples of good branding across the globe. It’s different when one has to start from scratch, or –worse– reposition/redesign a week, poorly defined brand.

Truth be told, branding was the art / science of the mass-production / mass media / mass consumption age. In this everything-is-customized age the concept of ‘mass’ is obsolete.  (If you missed Businessweek’s "Vanishing mass market" story, stop, and read that first!) Branding is not the one-sight, one-sound, one-sell straightjacket. Just ask McDonald’s, that is connecting with its customers by taking branding into areas outside of the restaurant experience. Branding isn’t simply about placing your logo in the most unthinkable places. It is about being relevant to the audience you are attempting to reach.

Harley Davidson famously stated that "we’re competing against conservatories and swimming pools, not other bikes." Meaning a Harley’s brand  value is in ‘recreation’ not transportation. Which brings me to my famous queston:

"What business are you reallly in?"  Seems like a dumb question on the face of it, when someone introduces you to his/her facility, where it is pretty obvious what they ‘do’ there. I visit Einstein’s Bagels with my 3-year old daughter on Sunday mornings, not for the bagels so much as the coffee. She enjoys a cinnamon twist, personally brought to her by the manager who just loves kids. What biz are they in? Is Amazon in the book business? I don’t think so! They seem to be in the online catalog & mall business. (see a previous comment). Is a bank in the ‘money’ business? Is the Fedex (actually Fedex-Kinkos) in the package delivery business? or is that the print business? They also offer teleconferencing! They have been busy rebranding, as you can see here.

There is a good case study of Pitney Bowes, a company that needed desperately to lose it’s ‘postage meter’ brand image, and communicate its real business –as a solutions provider in the document management business. PB’s rebranding campaign worked only after they got their employees to play a part in it.

Most brand experts focus on the external branding, spending very little time on setting the brand on fire from within.   

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‘The revolution will not be televised.’ is the title of the book by Joe Trippi, the man who gave Howard Dean the reputation of the first politiian to tap into grass-root networking, a.k.a. blogs.

Let’s temporarily assume that television is passe (not entirely true, loking at what’s going on in China, or with digital TV in Europe, etc). How much further could the communications revolution go once it has been open-sourced, blogged, webcast, and podcast? Or to put it another way, what else is there on the horizon? 

When Web 2.0 meets enterprise IT,  open sourc-ism will takes off says says Kim Polese (This and more at IT Conversations, which, not by accident is a free podcast.) It means the top-down models have to run for the exits as the bottom-up ones come into being. Polese calls it the ousting of the ‘Industrial ego system’ by the new eco system. Ego Vs Eco! So unlike a techy to phrase it that way!

It’s all about interoperatibility –that awful 18-letter word that describes how the new economy works. I was asked yesterday how podcasting will change communications when phones blend with ‘pods’ or MP3 players. Imagine what would happen if your MP3 player could send a message to mine. Or you could stream your content to a few folks in a room at a seminar. Would anyone care about your PowerPoint presentation at the far end of a room, when you could podcast it directly to a personal device that attendees can save –or even respond to at question time?

Broadband is making a lot of these things possible (Ever tried Skype?) as the pipes –or more accurately the wireless signals– that move data, text, audio & video transfer larger files at faster speeds.  WiMax is going to be the new standard for wi-fi, and should be here in laptops and pda’s by next year.  The revolution in content distribution and access, means that content will be shared on large scales, enterprise-wide. Check this out: MSNBC handled over 100,000 simultaneous ‘streams’ in May, when people logged on to watch the new Pope being elected in Rome. This was just on the web. The content delivery was handled by Limelight Networks. By the next Olympics in 2008, we will probably be watching (and sharing video) on wireless devices. Three years from now, marketing will be in a different league as our phones and ‘pods’ morph into 2-way, multi-media communication devices. Strong content and on-demand (permission) marketing will then play a big part in this new eco system.

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