Tom Raftery's Musings

I did an interview with Steve Rubel yesterday (Saturday) – Steve was great – he was full of interesting insights, enthusiasm, and good humour. I can see now why he has become such a successful blogger.

The interview was recorded from a Skype call so the audio quality is waaaay better than the previous interviews which were done recording landline to landline! I would have done Skype calls sooner, had I known (and saved myself a bundle in transatlantic call charges too!).

Thanks to Alan O’Rourke of Spoiltchild Design for coming up with the funky signature tune for the podcast.

Here are a list of the questions I put to Steve and the times in the podcast that I asked them:

Who is Steve Rubel? – 0:33
Why use social software in traditional PR campaigns? – 1:07
How do you qualify which companies should blog and which shouldn’t? – 4:42
What size organisation is Cooper katz? – 5:23
How does that compare to the rest of the PR industry? – 5:35
Are more and more PR firms following your lead into blogging? – 6:16
Do you know how many subscribers and unique visitors you have per day? – 9:19
Why should businesses in Ireland blog? – 11:42
If a company is thinking about starting a blog, how should they start out? – 14:38
How do you see RSS changing the face of business in the coming years? – 18:39
How many feeds are you subscribed to? – 21:59
Why did you decide to branch into podcasting? – 25:18
Podcasting and blogging are very different media – do you need to take a different approach to their creation? – 26:32
What podcasts do you listen to? – 29:11
Do you unplug from technology at all, do you have any non-tech hobbies? – 30:30
Do you not think that blogs are just a tool in a PR practitioner’s arsenal rather than a replacement for people given that some people will just use the Internet for email and not for joining in on the online conversation? – 34:51
What are your predicitons for the PR industry, traditional media and social media for 2006? – 36:31
Do you think that vlogging (or what ever video blogging will be known as) will be the next big thing next year? – 42:13
Are you going to the Les Blogs 2.0 conference in Paris – 48:50
What do you see coming down the line as the next big thing? – 49:32
Mac or PC? – 47:37
Why the Mac? – 48:48
What is your favourite gadget? – 50:54

You can listen to the interview podcast here (12.1mb mp3).