I’ve been following The Marketing Technology Blog by Douglas Karr, and I’m in awe of him and his natural blogging ability. He blogs on his topic daily, sometimes more, and produces really well thought out posts. As a result, he has built a strong following on his blog that is rivaled by very few. And he’s done it in record time!

I decided to reach out to Douglas Karr and interview him on a podcast to bring you some key learnings on how to build the audience for your blog. Enjoy …

How to Build a Successful Blog Quickly, a Podcast with Douglas Karr

About Doug

Doug is currently a product manager for a major permission-based email service provider – named one of the fastest growing private companies by Inc. magazine. Doug is also a proud member of the Indianapolis Colts Marketing Advisory Board, led by Pat Coyle, the Colts’ database marketing director. Pat and Doug also launched the Indianapolis Book Mashup – a book club to discuss the latest business, marketing and technology publications.

Go to Portland, Oregon, and you’ll find everyone there talking about Voodoo Doughnut. They talk about the caffeinated doughnut. The chocolate-glazed chocolate doughnut rolled in Cocoa Puffs cereal. Or the voodoo-doll-shaped doughnut that bleeds raspberry filling when impaled with a pretzel pin.

Then there’s Innocent. The UK company launched a campaign called “Supergran,” in which English grannies knit little woolly hats for its seasonal winter smoothies (so the bottles don’t catch a cold).

I’m not talking a couple of grannies, either. Because of the demand for the hats (and the smoothies), Innocent lined up enough grannies to knit 230,000 of them in 2006. Even better, it donated a portion of sales revenues, 50 pence per hat-wearing smoothie, £115,000 ($225,000) total, to Age Concern, a charity dedicated to keeping older people warm in the winter.

And you never thought a bottle of juice could be a conversation piece.

The point is that people talk about the exceptions or the unexpected. In B2B technology, either services or products, it’s a little hard to wrap your technologists in woolly hats or roll them in Cocoa Puffs. So we asked the expert, Lois Kelly, for her opinion on how to give your sales team more tools to create conversations. So for some tips, check out our podcast …

Want more sales? Give sales something to talk about. A podcast with Lois Kelly of Foghound

About Lois

Lois Kelly is the founder of Foghound, a communications consulting firm that helps companies more easily talk about their business or products in interesting ways. Clients have included Sun Microsystems, FedEx, and others. Previously, Lois was senior vice president of The Weber Group, one of the largest PR firms in the world. Her articles have appeared in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Brand Week, Advertising Age and other publications. Don’t miss Lois’s new book: Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word of Mouth Marketing

You asked for it, so you got it. The number one most popular podcast in my series of podcasts has been “How to Start a B2B Community” with Mukund Mohan, CEO of Canvas Group. So I shared this information with Mukund and asked who I should interview next. He pointed me to Sean O’Driscoll at Microsoft.

Naturally, I’ve been reading all I can about social media and communities. But honestly, I heard more new ideas from Sean than in all of the articles and blogs I’ve come across on the topic.

I conducted an interview with Sean O’ Driscoll to learn what it is like to have thousands of communities to listen to and manage. And I wanted to learn how you harness these communities for product launches as part of an integrated marketing campaign. Enjoy …

Communities at Microsoft, a podcast with Sean O’Driscoll

About Sean

Sean O’Driscoll is general manager of the Customer Service and Support Community and the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program at Microsoft Corp. He is responsible for developing community-based support models and leading the worldwide MVP Program. The MVP Program is designed to honor and recognize amazing individuals in technical communities around the globe who share a passion for technology and the spirit of community.

For more information on Sean please visit his blog or view some of his posts we discuss on the podcast:

Post with the 5 methods for convincing the unconverted on communities

Post on HD DVD

Post on JetBlue/Turner Apology

Can you name the most popular blogging tool? Do you know what’s best for RSS? How about podcasting tools?

Well, I wondered, too. So I’ve teamed up with Robert Lesser, President of Direct Impact Marketing, to find some answers. We’ve produced a survey of Web 2.0 tools that is going to help tons of marketers get their Web 2.0 efforts under way. If you have an opinion or some experience with Web 2.0, this is your chance to share! Please listen to this podcast, join the conversation and take our Web 2.0 tools survey

Getting the Scoop on Top Web 2.0 Tools

About Robert Lesser

Before launching Direct Impact Marketing in 1998, Robert spent nearly a decade in marketing in the technology, packaged goods and retail sectors. He holds an MBA from the Schulich School of Business and an Honours Bachelor of Commerce from the DeGroote School of Business.

If you love Web 2.0 tools the way I do, you probably came to the quick realization that they’re powerful tools for creating a community

But added together they don’t equal a community. You can launch all the Web 2.0 tools you can think of and still not have a community. So the question quickly becomes: How do you create a community, especially in B2B? It’s easy to see opportunities in B2C around, say, yacht racing, NASCAR and even beer drinking (yes, Budweiser just launched bud.tv).

But what does it take to get a B2B community under way?

To answer this question, I enlisted the help of expert community builder Mukund Mohan. He’s the CEO of Canvas Group and a fellow blogger who publishes BestEngagingCommunities. He will take us through the 3 reasons to start a B2B community, provide 3 examples of existing B2B communities, and dig into the what, when and how of community building. I hope you enjoy hearing this one as much as I enjoyed producing it!

How to Start a B2B Community a podcast with Mukund Mohan

About Mukund

Mukund Mohan is CEO of Canvas Group. Before Canvas Group, he founded and sold 2 successful startups. Prior to that, he was head of product marketing for Mercury Interactive with responsibility for the direction and customer success of the company’s application management solutions. Mukund also was Vice President of Operations at Consilient, a software company focused on process automation. In that role, he managed a team of sales and services personnel and was responsible for customer success. In addition, he has held product and management positions at Ariba and Asera. He began his career at Cisco Systems.