So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
airs every Thursday at 1 pm EST.
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on Amazon AMP. We walk through what it is and how does it work as a social platform and how it’s different from other Audio Platforms like Clubhouse. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- What is Amazon AMP and how does it work as a social platform
- How it’s different from other Audio Platforms like Clubhouse
- Is it ready for Prime Time as a platform for you to create content on?
Upcoming Episodes:
- TBD
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:39
Well, hey there happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show. It is just myself and John today who actually got the side, right. Right. Chris is traveling the world. He’s speaking, he’s doing a keynote at the SPARC MAE conference in Montenegro this weekend. So he is not joining us. So John and I are taking the reins today. And we will be talking about Amazon. And so we will be doing a platform review today. So what is it? How it’s different from audio platforms like clubhouse? And is it ready for prime time for you to create content on? So John, I have, as you can imagine, I have a lot of questions. First and foremost, is it my understanding that Amazon app is only available on iOS at this time?
John Wall 1:29
Yes, that’s corrected, they did the same thing clubhouse did where they put it out on iOS. And, you know, I can understand from a development side, because it’s just it’s so much easier. You know, you’ve got Apple’s hardware is, you know, to their specs, and you don’t have to deal with just Android, which could be anything. So. But yeah, from a marketing point of view, I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of people say that that was clubhouses biggest mistake that, you know, by the time it finally came around for Android, people were just like, Yeah, whatever, we don’t care.
Katie Robbert 1:56
Well, as an Android user, I never got access to clubhouse, so I can’t really comment on it. Other than, you know, I was never given access. And so I’m sort of at the same point with Amazon amp right now. So for those of us, myself included, who don’t know, what the heck is Amazon amp?
John Wall 2:14
Yeah, let’s hear it. Let’s go. Fire up. This is it. We’re rolling with all these different formats. John and I are just hitting button there. We got her both back. And we got this slide. Okay, so yeah, to backup Amazon. Yep. What is this thing and so we mentioned clubhouse. The idea with clubhouse was it was an app that people could talk and present. It’s basically a conferencing app. That was the whole idea with that. And, you know, there’s some interesting stuff up there, there’s a lot of spammy stuff up there. But it’s just another place to kind of get in with your community. And we tested it took it for a couple runs. And the thing that we always came back to is like, well, this is no different than a Zoom meeting without the video, you know, I mean, you could do the same thing, say, hey, let’s meet up on Zoom. And with all these platforms, though, there’s the hope that they reach that critical mass, where there’s so many people that you have to go there because you can get an audience that you don’t have. Whereas if you already have your audiences, it’s a hard case to, to jump in on this. So you know, clubhouse comes in Amazon app is the next stage of this. And the interesting thing with amp, which is what we can play around with a bit is that you have Amazon’s music library is attached to this. So you have the ability to it’s kind of a Be your own DJ service, you can go in there, and you can stack up songs you want to play. And so now you can talk and engage your community. But you have a way to play music. And you know, for the entire history of podcasting, this has been a gap in that, you know, getting the rights to play music. And in fact, that’s part of our, our classic, live without a net here today. Oh, man, the slides are blown by me already. Here’s the first many failures we’re gonna have.
Katie Robbert 3:54
Well, I mean, so as you’re pulling that back up, so it sounds like it’s another version of conferencing. But this time with music included, and so it’s so like I said, I was never given access to clubhouse, but clubhouse to me as an outsider. sounded like it was sort of, like, everybody just kind of talking. So almost like one of those like party lines, where anybody can jump in. And there’s no real conversation, like you could set up chat rooms or whatever they were called. But it sounds like like, there was no structure, there was no exclusivity, there was no planning, it’s like people could just jump into it. Is that true of this service as well?
John Wall 4:41
Yeah, can be used the same way. But that, you know, I mean, that is another one of the, you know, the amateur hour things that people complained about with clubhouse. I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way. You could say, hey, you know, we’re gonna let him these four speakers here. They’re, they’re going to be the ones that talk. And we’re going to have, you know, program and show notes and we’re going to figure out what We’re gonna do, but yeah, a lot of times, it’s just kind of like the, hey, everybody shows up. And let’s just put the first eight or 10 people on stage and see what happens. And, yeah, free for all. I don’t know, I could get on the soapbox about this and talk for an hour complaining and ranting, but like, that’s the biggest mistake with a lot of audio is that people just think that, you know, because it’s an interview, this is the first time that you’re going to the topics and you just kind of sit and talk and hope that something good happens. But the reality is, you know, all the best stuff is scripted, right? People have already vetted the topics, they have a rough idea, at least a rough idea, if not a fully fleshed out idea of where they’re going to go and what they’re going to talk about and what they’re going to do.
Katie Robbert 5:40
Well, I know having worked with you for a while I know how much, you know, time and effort and planning goes into a single marketing over coffee episode, it’s definitely you know, you and Chris are not winging it, you have your punch list of things that you want to cover. So it’s not just hey, let’s just get together and talk about what’s going on marketing, the amount of planning that actually goes into it is fairly extensive. You know, and so it’s just, it’s not just Okay, let’s just show up and hoping for the best. But yet, your podcast is still has stood the test of time.
John Wall 6:14
Yeah, so I’ve just thrown up here on the screen. This is the QR code to get the Amazon amp app from the App Store. So if you’re on iOS, you can just pull out your phone and grab this. And you can jump over there and install if you want to join along and see what’s going on. But yeah, to get back to what you’re just saying, Yeah, that’s the eye opening thing for me. And that was when I found out how National Public Radio This American Life, how they work when they create their episodes, because I’ve always said that, you know, our competition is not other marketing podcasts, we compete against National Public Radio and all the other things out there that people can listen to. And one day listening to Ira Glass, talking about the fact that well, they have a team and they pick 12 stories, and they go out and they work those 12 stories, and they bring them all back in, they have some rough stuff that they grind through. And ultimately, maybe three of those actually get on air. You know, two thirds of the stuff that they chase or write about doesn’t even make it to the public see yours, you know, it gets dumped or, you know, thrown in a bin to be returned to later on months later. And yeah, and so many podcasts are just like, Okay, we’re gonna record this week, and whatever comes out, that’s what’s gonna go out. You that’s fine. If it works for you. Yeah. And if you know if people are looking for freeform comedy, or you do improv or whatever, like, that’s fine. But yeah, you know, the problem is if you know if you can tell some weeks, you’re faking it, it’s not going right. Like that’s going to be in the long run that’s going to bite people or just, you know, eventually going to start listening to other stuff where they don’t have to roll the dice where they can, you know, interesting stuff.
Katie Robbert 7:47
Well, and so, you know, before we get into the demo, I feel like so, clubhouse seemed pretty unstructured. And now there’s Twitter has their own sort of version of you know, what clubhouse was? I can’t remember the name of it. It’s, I guess, communities? Or what is there’s something in Twitter now that you can sort of start up a, you know, audio listening piece to
John Wall 8:13
Yeah, feed, you know, and to be honest, like, I haven’t even seen anything on that. I haven’t played with that. Because it’s, I’ve yet to hear anybody say like, Hey, I’m doing the thing on Twitter this week. So yeah, no, I because I mean, it doesn’t show up in their main interface. So you have to go dig to find out, you know, whatever the heck it is. So yeah, I got nothing like that. To be honest,
Katie Robbert 8:35
but I guess I guess the point is, it’s yet another unstructured. I mean, you can make a zoom call structure, you can have an agenda, you can make a stream yard, you know, live stream structured, you can have an agenda, I think the risk is it opens up all of this unstructured conversation, which can be beneficial, but probably 99% of it is just noise and junk.
John Wall 9:00
Yeah, and that’s, you know, it is kind of interesting, because you see this with YouTube, where, you know, it’s just thrown out to the world and then the world kind of determines what gets the plays in views, you know, that like, there’s so much crazy content on YouTube that you know, if you told somebody you know, 12 years ago that there would be a channel where people are making millions of dollars of people, you know, throwing rolls of toilet paper and you know, doing it 10,000 times and saving the one where it actually lands on the thing you know, like the Dude Perfect thing that does survive and make it so yeah, that’s kind of opening up to the world and seeing what sticks. You know, if it survives, it’s great. You get some amazing stuff but Yeah, you totally nailed it that the reality is, you know, 99.9% of it is garbage that’s just horrible. And you know, you’re gonna have to deal with it. So your Twitter spaces I had to look it up because basis Thank you dig it up. And so yeah, the idea is like when you go into a tweet, you can name Your space and start doing your space. But yeah, are you you know, throw us a comment or tweet to me at John Jay wall if you’re using spaces or I’ve seen anything cool with that, because we’d love to hear if you’ve got anything that’s working
Katie Robbert 10:11
well, in the, you know, the the casual like I did this in one take Tiktok videos or Instagram reels are whatever they are. What you don’t see is how many takes it actually, is to get the thing that looks super nonchalant and casual. And so to your point where we started as the best content is really structured and planned out. So what’s in the box, John, what do we got? What do we have to work with?
John Wall 10:39
All right, yeah, let’s let’s enough, yeah, can let’s get to the action here. If we can not break, this is going to be the big thing. Alright, so here we go. This is the moment of truth, we’re gonna fire this thing up.
Katie Robbert 10:52
Well, you know, if it does break, I think that that’s all because part of the challenge with these new software packages, these new platforms is the ease of use the usability, the ability for, you know, users to just pick it up and start using it, like, what’s the learning curve. And so if it’s, you know, constantly breaking, you know, that’s not great. And I love your backyard. Adorable.
John Wall 11:20
This is my child from like, seven years ago, this, you know, this was what happens as a parent you like put it up and you never change it. So the top left here, we got the amp app, we can go ahead and fire this up and get right in here. So you can see what this thing looks like. So this is, you know, this is the login screen. This is what happens when you get in there. And the idea with this is it’s you know, you do the swipe, you know, you just keep swiping, here’s all the shows that are actually running today. And you’ve got on the top left there, that red on air icon, showing you who’s actually in there. And you know, and you do, even though this has this music functionality, we’ve got talking baseball here. Music from Mexico, there was another there’s another sports one that was actually up on here.
Katie Robbert 12:02
So it actually seems a lot like Twitter spaces and like clubhouse in that it’s sort of this, you know, people are putting together topics, conversations, like specific it’s a podcast, basically.
John Wall 12:16
Yeah, absolutely. And it will go through when you create the show, you can actually choose the topics that you want to put up on there. You can see on the top left there six people actually in the session four had delivered likes. And yeah, 90 has to arts music. And now this is in beta, there’s not a ton of users most of the time will go through. I don’t know. Yeah. Okay. So here we go. Oh, and this is interesting. Here’s a tip to you. This is on Thursdays, they have support crew does their own show. So if you’re using it, you have problems. Thursdays at two is the time where you can go on and talk to people actually work on the app and find out what’s going on.
Katie Robbert 12:50
That’s actually that’s super helpful. That’s a newer thing that, you know, I don’t see a lot of other software platforms doing.
John Wall 12:56
Yeah, I think this is, you know, it’s definitely a beta thing. But yeah, this is huge. The fact that there’s a bunch of humans that you could actually get to know and talk to something you’d never see, you know, Facebook or the Google platform, which does keep things interesting.
Katie Robbert 13:11
So are these Did you set up some, like when you first log into the software to the app? Like, are you given a choice as to like, what are you interested in? What are the things that you want to hear about? Or is this just like, here’s what’s available? Good luck.
John Wall 13:26
Yeah, you know, right now it’s it’s thin enough that it’s just here’s what’s going on? This guy Christian had to I have to give him a shout out. He’s a West Coast, radio, DJ and personality. This guy knows more about music than nearly anybody I know. And he does a lot of song exploder type things where, you know, he goes in and digs into music and tells you what’s the influences for stuff and where things have come from? Yeah, I’m trying to see if there’s anything else, you know, here’s my profile, everybody gets their own profile. And this is another thing now. So I have as my link, I have my Twitter profile. Because as of right now, there’s no chat function in this, you know, when you’re inside, and you’ve got a show running, other people can talk, but there’s no back channel for it. And so that’s one thing as we roll, I always say, you know, if you want to talk back channel, my Twitter handles John J. Wall, come talk to me over there, we can get in and, and, you know, at least have some kind of back channel. And the thing is, you’re completely unaware as far as what’s going on. You’ve got followers, people can follow you, and you can follow others. And so yeah, this is interesting. I actually have a bunch of people have started to follow me that I don’t know, you know, this is the classic early social media thing of just going and follow everybody and have them follow you back and try and get some critical mass. And my family hates me for this now because my Apple Watch goes off all the time. Anytime any one of these people start to show I actually get paid, which is ridiculous because I you know, listen to them about once or twice a week. And then they do have this is a feature they just added up the top right this arrow you can actually copy your profile link. So At least you have a way now to share your profile on other channels. And so yeah, so part of us worrying about getting kicked off today to this is one thing is, you know any of this music when we actually play and you jump in, if this gets caught in our YouTube feed, it’s gonna get we would get bounced. So you actually don’t get to check this out. But yeah, hey, Mr. DJ, this is classic 90s Get your smoothie jam on here?
Katie Robbert 15:24
That’s right, you play that song all night? Yeah, I know that one. We’ve got
John Wall 15:29
no you can see there’s two other people in the stream, we can like it. This clap function is new. This was like the, you know, on Instagram feeds there, you’ve got kind of the applause or hearts or whatever, you can throw a clap up there, we can throw our clap, she doesn’t need to know that we don’t actually hear her. And, and we can stop this thing. If you want to now you have the ability to stop the feed or restart it. And even if we go back out to the listings, the show will continue playing until we stop it or we select another show or event.
Katie Robbert 15:57
So can you go back into that show? Because I have a couple of questions for you. Yeah. So in the top left, next to the On Air, when you click the that little arrow down, what does it
John Wall 16:08
Yeah, that jumps back to the previous interface. Back to the selection.
Katie Robbert 16:13
See, I looked at that as a user and I assumed like some sort of a menu was gonna,
John Wall 16:18
yeah, that you’d get a bump, you do have the stacked dots over here they give you basically, you know, report the sharp guidelines. Yeah, really nothing to it. And now, and we can show this when we cross over to the other side. But Amber’s here can actually let people join her call, she can open it up for calls and then people can request to talk. In fact, we will show that let’s just, yeah, we’ve done enough with play. Let’s go ahead and act like we’re DJ now here. So we’re going to create a new show. This, of course, kicks you out of what you ever you’re into. And I have my mug up on there because I don’t have a better graphic to use.
Katie Robbert 16:58
I was like, Oh, they give you those little like prompts of like, show title, make it something catchy?
John Wall 17:02
I know, because I would prefer not catchy testing. We’ll call it probably crash and burn.
On that joy dollar sign. There we go. Alright, testing question. Okay. And then you have to select your topics. This is where you, you know, as far as I know, you can’t drive to these topics, but they’re still doing this categorizing right now. Okay, so we can know that life and culture, entertainment, the businesses and here we go business and career. So we’ll do that. Chris tech, and fighting sports. Are we Yeah, I
Katie Robbert 17:47
think that that’s appropriate. That’s
John Wall 17:49
totally who we are. Show Details.
Katie, in the morning, zoo here,
Katie Robbert 18:01
that’s true. That’s pretty much my life every day
John Wall 18:05
old school DJ style. Make, oh, look at that. So that’s interesting. Now we can go work safe, or we might as well leave the explicit tags on so we can do whatever we want
Katie Robbert 18:15
to swear every once in a while. So it makes sense
John Wall 18:18
occasionally, and now you can schedule for later that’s, you know, the better prepared content people are going to do the classic appointment media of, you know, it’s the five o’clock Friday drivetime show, or the ATM morning thing or you know, whatever your your gig is, but we’ll just go right to the setup
Katie Robbert 18:35
here. We’re gonna go well, no, but I would imagine that the that the disadvantage of scheduling for later is that you can’t then have the live people bring people into the call right?
John Wall 18:46
Now you can it’s it but it’s just you know, you’re saying that okay, this is going to start on Tuesday at five
Katie Robbert 18:50
Oh, I see sort of like scheduling some of these things in stream yard like so I set up the link to the to the live stream earlier this morning. So it was all set. I see.
John Wall 19:01
Yeah, exactly. You got it scheduled. And then yeah, in theory. I mean, we don’t know how this was gonna play Excuse me, but if it’s like old school DJ stuff, people just get used to hearing you add Sundays at noon you know, that’s tasty. caisson was always there on the weekend afternoons to Milan kind of thing but who knows if that’s the way the thing is actually going to work. So we have a button to go live, we can you can go back and change the, you know, the descriptions and everything you want. But the big thing is the bottom right here the playlist. Okay, so we can go in and this is where you actually add music from their music library. And so what we can do is go to add songs, and this is where you’re playing Russian roulette. And you really want to do this ahead of time because you have no idea what’s actually going to be there. Right when you start searching you know, certain bands don’t have don’t have sharing rights for whatever reason. And today, the prince of state is releasing the Purple Rain concert in Syracuse. So Gotta throw a little prints on our list.
Katie Robbert 20:01
I mean, I think every day is a good day for prints. This is
John Wall 20:05
true, you can never have too much prints. But now and as SEM rockin by midnight city shirt here, in spirit of old school, hair, metal and kita, as we were talking about,
Katie Robbert 20:16
yes, the pre show show we were talking about.
John Wall 20:20
And yeah, they don’t have not this midnight city, this is a different midnight city. So you know, this is one of those ones where you’re out of luck, you’re just not going to be able to play what they want to play.
Katie Robbert 20:30
But I think that, you know, you’re definitely giving the nod to why you want to, you don’t just want to wing it. And I think that sort of as we’re getting to sort of like the so what of why we’re doing this product review is, a lot of people in our space, do create, you know, audio, video, other kinds of content. And the amount of preparation that goes into creating that content to make it look effortless, is, you know, quite extensive. And so as you’re pulling up the songs, you know, it definitely just sort of reinforces the, you really need to be planning ahead, if you are a content creator, who’s just going to wing it, to create a podcast are a show on a platform like this, the chances of your the quality of your content being really good starts to drop, because there are so many things that can go wrong.
John Wall 21:25
Yeah, and this has to it’s been funny, there’s a lot of people that kind of talk about the old school radio DJ thing of, you know, if you’re gonna do an hour show, can you do it so that you’ve got the mix so that it ends right at the post that you know, it’s 60 minutes to the dime, the last song finishes and you sign off? I mean, you don’t have to do that. Obviously, with this, it’s just open ended, you can go as long as you want. But yeah, there’s a lot of that’s kind of the old school DJ artistry of like making sure you’ve got you know, enough songs at the right rate, you know, in the breaks are there streaming together, you’ve got all that, that you can go. So we’ve got a playlist here we go back to the show manager. And now this is interesting. Now, last time I had fired this up. I was not able to go live without a listener. Let’s see if that’s changed. Okay, we’re so ready to go live. We got a five second countdown. We’re gonna reject hate and do all the other things that we’re supposed to do. And oh, here we go. We got my countdown. Yes. Oh, two, one and live in five. Here we go. All right. So this is running now. And actually, let me say this, this is another thing to do that I’ve done. Now you can go live without any listeners, which was different before to get the beta, they had it set up that you would have to have one listener on to be able to go live. And so the trick with that is I had a second iPhone. And we’ve got, I actually just set up my wife with an account. And so she can go in there. And now we’ll see this is, again, this is where we’re starting to get really wonky. So we
Katie Robbert 22:57
fired like, John, I don’t want to have to listen to your show again.
John Wall 23:01
She’s like, No, we don’t want more. Here we are. Okay, there’s Hey, y’all. And now let’s see if we’ve actually made the
Katie Robbert 23:08
Oh, so I can see it just bumped up to one listener.
John Wall 23:12
Did it really okay, and that’s not us. So some poor soul is stopped listening
Katie Robbert 23:15
to us, we’ll test out this as we do. This is very meta. You have one iPhone as the listener to the show that you are broadcasting on the live stream, where we’re also broadcasting so it’s, it’s Oh, and someone just clapped.
John Wall 23:33
Someone clapped. How about that? I don’t know if they can. So what we’re gonna do, we’ll do them a favor, and we’re gonna fire up some music. You
Katie Robbert 23:38
have three listeners now. I think this is
John Wall 23:42
this is one of those things where like, if I tell people not to listen, everybody’s gonna come listen.
Katie Robbert 23:47
Well, because they, but I mean, this is really interesting. And so, you know, it definitely opens up a different kind of pod podcast opportunity. Specifically, if we think about, you know, our space, which is primarily B2B marketing in general marketing, digital marketing, there’s not a lot of opportunity to incorporate music into it. And so by being able to incorporate music into it, it may be more compelling, you know, content. Let’s see.
John Wall 24:17
Yeah, we gotta come with a tie. Just Android. Yes. Sorry. Apologize for that and just can’t help you as of right now. But yeah, you nailed that. The The big thing with this is this music library if you you know, we kind of joke about these platforms as being zoom without video. But the reality is, if you do anything involved with music, if music is central to what you’re doing, this could be really cool. You know, I could see sure microphones coming on and hey, here’s you know, 10 songs by famous artists that use our gear and you know, things like that. Or if you’re promoting new artists and you want to do hey, here’s the new you know, electronica hour or whatever, like this could be a really interesting way to get in and, and do some different kinds of things. So There’s a lot that you could jump on there.
Katie Robbert 25:02
Or if you’re a podcast, like marketing over coffee, and you tend to have tech sponsors that are around, you know, mixing boards and headphones, aside from just you and Chris talking and using this equipment, it’s a really good opportunity to demonstrate, you know, to users like, and this is what music sounds like, because music is always going to sound different than, you know, just you and Chris talking. And so it’s a really great opportunity to really demonstrate you’re not only using the equipment, but here’s what if you as the end user buys, the thing that we’re promoting, this is what you also get.
John Wall 25:36
Yeah, and that brings up another point to look at an insider thing that I learned playing around with a sins through some experimentation, you know, by default, now the iPhone doesn’t have a headphone jack. So most people would be listening via Bluetooth. And I found actually, the audio quality is way better, you just get get the apple dongle so that you can go to a real set of headphones. And the sound quality is phenomenally better on wired headphones than it is on Bluetooth. And so I don’t know, there’s a lot of protocols with that where they might be, you know, there’s different levels of Bluetooth connections. And I think because this is a kind of a fully functional app, they may be handcuffed as far as not being able to send the highest quality audio down to the stream. So yeah, if you do if you’re a listener, definitely get your dongle and some wired headphones, because that makes a huge difference as far as what you’re doing. And let’s see, this is like classical radio DJ were like scrambling because the next song is queuing up, and we were like in the middle of our burrito or whatever.
Katie Robbert 26:34
Well now, so as the host of the show, again, because it’s through your phone, I would imagine that you would want to have some sort of a good microphone and headset connected to the phone somehow. And so if it iPhone using a dongle into, you know, some kind of a system. So, you know, one of the advantages we have doing this live stream is that we’re doing it through our laptops, and so we can have better equipment, get up better microphones better headphones, you know, it sounds like you’re a little bit limited. If you’re doing it through your phone, like what would you recommend there?
John Wall 27:12
Yeah, so that’s where, you know, I really started to kind of audio geek out and we start getting into crazy hardware questions, because so basically, you have all you’ve got is either Bluetooth, or the lightning port out. And so the what’s worked best that I’ve been playing with is actually this rig here, this is a standard three pole, microphone, three and a half millimeter jack. So the idea is it’s a headset, and a microphone on one single plug, which most you know jabra headsets or any kind of quality zoom microphones that have the normal headphone jack. That’s kind of the best way to go in because you’ll be able to hear yourself well and you’re you’ve got a decent quality microphone I have been playing around and messing around with rode actually makes a dongle where you connect via the lightning cable. And then you’ve got two microphones in and a headphone out. So I have been had some success with the idea would be to have my normal headset and one of the microphones and then have the soundboard of my computer running into that second microphone. So now I could queue up other audio clips, and I’m sure they don’t want to hear this. But you could even cook you up other music, you know, and it would be coming through your mic instead of through their playing. So you’d be skipping their stats and probably violating a bunch of license stuff. But you could play a song that you otherwise can’t get on there. So I haven’t played around with that to get myself kicked off with yet. Because I haven’t found a really good reason to do that. But and this adapter, this is like 90 bucks this thing from Rode, but it is top quality. And then the side benefit of that is if you do any podcasting, you can use this thing to get two mics into your phone and use your iPhone as your mobile field recorder instead of having to carry around another box. So that’s at least something that you can use and take with. Alright, well we’ve got Tina said we’ve still got a minute 50 on Tina so she can can continue to do her thing. But we can go back when you go over to the Show screen here. This is where we can actually enable call in. And so this gives you like the last warning, okay, but you’re going to open this up to the world. And now it says we don’t have any callers back. So let’s jump back to the simplest thing.
Katie Robbert 29:26
At the bottom. It says grow your audience encourage more listeners to call in by right. Oh, I see. So when I read that first I thought it was sort of that chat feature of like, hey, at John Jay wall, you know. But it sounds like you as the host DJ would be saying, hey, looks like John Jay was listening, you know, thanks for coming up or thanks for you know, showing up to our show today. Just like as we’re doing this live stream. Hey, Ty. Thanks for watching our show today and asking you about Android.
John Wall 29:59
Yeah, This is the Yeah, it’s just the kind of the classic, repeat your branding every second or third song, you know, try and get people on board and the big one that as you know, go ahead and follow me, you know, so you can get them on the platform. And so then they will be getting notifications next time you go live. Got it?
Katie Robbert 30:16
I guess I guess the big question, you know, for you, John, as the person on our team who is really the podcasting expert, that sounds like, this is yet another platform to be doing podcast, is this a platform that, you know, is good enough for people to start a podcast on? Or do you think that it still needs more time?
John Wall 30:39
You know, it does need some work. But again, because it comes back to the music thing, like if you were just doing a talking head podcast, like no, I wouldn’t bother with this at all. Because the big thing is you own nothing here, right? You just have your user account and your followers, it’s like Twitter, or Facebook, you have no control over anything. But yeah, I know, for a long time, there’s people that would have wanted to do a podcast where they’re spinning music, you know, Tom Webster did a show just kind of proof of concept. Talking about in Los Angeles, there’s the, for the love me, I can’t remember, there’s a valley over there where, you know, during the 70s, like, all the major artists were there. And he was able to go on and tell the story of what’s going on in this part of the city where it was like, you know, Van Halen live there and Fleetwood Mac, and, you know, everybody would just come over and other people’s houses and, and so you could spin an hour’s worth of music of like, here’s the stuff that came out of this thing. And to do that kind of storytelling backed up with music. And because the big thing is, so many people have missed out on this music exploration. You know, it used to be everybody listened to the radio, we all heard the same songs, we all bought the same songs. And the internet blew that to pieces, you know, now it’s, I mean, if you have a kid or an older person, and you go look at their playlists, like 90% of the music, you probably don’t know who they are, where they come from. And so this is, you know, hoping to solve an exploration problem really?
Katie Robbert 31:58
Interesting. Interesting. I like that. All right, well, so John, as we start to wrap up, you know, so what we’ve been able to see is that at least going through the navigation starting to show, doing the basics, that user experience is fairly straightforward. You know, what other things would you recommend? Like? What kind of features do you wish this platform had for you to become more of a power user? Like, what would make you you know, put marketing over coffee? On this platform? I’m guessing one of the things would be the ability to download the show afterwards, or get some sort of metrics?
John Wall 32:40
Yeah, you know, downloading FM, Chris, that, you know, hits all kinds of music, right. So there’s questions with that. for content creators, it’s always more access to the audience, you know, if there’s other ways where you can get more people on or in, you know, easy sharing would be something, I mean, streaming, I’d kind of solve some of this problem. And that, you know, we have it running on LinkedIn, and YouTube and Twitter, you know, it’s streaming on a bunch of different platforms where this is single platform. But then the other thing, too, is, I don’t know, they’ve been doing a lot of work with Guy Roz, if you’re familiar with him, he’s famous for a number of radio shows and different audio programs. And he has a huge audience, you know, millions of people, and to be to have kind of a curated platform of like, okay, here’s some big names. And if you like this, you’re gonna like that. It could be access to more people. And then yeah, there kind of needs to be a little bit more. So we’ve got the new caller thing here, I can actually, we can just run through this, I can submit myself as a caller. So you can see how this thing works. If we request a call from over here. Okay, so now we show two new callers on this screen. And shout out to Mike Maloney, if you can hear us out there, my buddy from Chicago, but we will invite Corinne. And so she’s now there. And yeah, basically, she’s given the option to turn her mic on and just start talking. And so, yeah,
Katie Robbert 34:01
which is a little dangerous, depending well, not in the fact that it was Korean, but in the fact that, you know, if you don’t know, the audience members, you don’t know what they’re going to say. And so, you know, I think you and I both have had experience in, you know, more traditional radio, there’s a there’s a delay screener callers are screened, you know, you don’t even get to talk to the radio show first, like so I used to work over near AHF the studio in Boston, so Boston based and where I work, the hosts of the show would actually come in frequently. So I would get to know them a little bit, you know, talk to Hillman and you know, lb and stuff like that, and I got to learn a lot about how real radio actually operates. And there’s a big process that you go through before you the caller gets to be Put on air and then even then you’re not put on live, there’s a delay between whatever it is you’re saying on air to when it actually goes on air. So if they have to drop it or, you know, it’s called, like the dump button, if they have to dump the call, they can do that before it even becomes, you know, before the audience even becomes aware that that was a thing. This to me, for Amazon amp sounds like a little bit of a risk, big risk, because there is no delay. And you don’t know, you don’t necessarily know who the callers are, you don’t know what they’re gonna say.
John Wall 35:35
Yeah, absolutely. They’re, you know, there tends to be at least a two to five second delay most of the time, which is a little wonky, and can be a little weird. And yeah, but on the other, you know, another way to look at is this is kind of the golden age of social media for this thing, like everybody that gets on channels early knows that kind of like for the first two years, it’s only the cool kids that want to have fun and are willing to get through the beta. And so it’s not like you know, five years from now where it’s going to be a lot of haters and weirdos and angry people. So you can meet you know, interesting cool people but yeah, it’s absolutely that of, you know, you’re gonna click the button and you’re gonna pray that they’re not you know, just gonna start spewing something ridiculous or being a jerk or whatever I mean, you can you do have the dump so you can dump them but yeah, it’s you’re you’re definitely trading it being a scripted show to like, Okay, who knows what the hell’s gonna happen here we go. Oh, all right, we got another any last track. We want to request here. We’ll add one more to the file.
Katie Robbert 36:33
I’m here on this. Yeah, you know, and that’s it. And so but this is a great example of why doing this live is not, you know, a great, I mean, we’re doing this live to demonstrate the capabilities but like, in general, like, if you asked me like, what’s on your plate right now, I would stutter and be like, I don’t know, it’s a great question because then like your mind starts spinning, but having it at least having like a list written down of songs that you want to play, it’s probably not a bad idea but to try to do it like on the fly does not make for good audio does not make for good content. Because that’s really quite honestly what we’re talking about is just another way to create content and you know, that’s a lot of what marketers are asked to do is content creation, and this is just yet another vehicle for that
John Wall 37:26
cool art document. Let’s see if you can stop the oh you don’t want to stop it. Think of somebody you think is pretty big but may or may not be in here.
Katie Robbert 37:33
Oh, goodness. Let’s go Elton John.
John Wall 37:39
Oh, Elton John. I’m sure there’ll be a ton I’m sure there’s in there.
Katie Robbert 37:41
Yeah, that was great. I mean, you gotta go Tiny Dancer.
John Wall 37:46
I didn’t know he did a song with Dua Lipa. Alright, well, I had Tiny Dancer to the mix.
Katie Robbert 37:51
Let’s Yeah, we could we could, you know, totally riff on the whole, you know, newer collaborations thing. I’m not a fan of that particular version. But that’s me personally, that’s not representative of the majority of people who really enjoy that song. Alright, so John, as we’re starting to wrap up the live stream, any last thoughts on these newer content creation platforms like amp? Obviously clubhouse didn’t get didn’t stand the test of time, we have Twitter spaces, like, what are the big takeaways for marketers who are looking for new ways to create content?
John Wall 38:26
Yeah, again, you know, with this when it comes down to the music, if that fits into your strategy, jump all over it. Otherwise, you know, yeah, the kind of wait and see thing might be worth doing. You want jump in, try it out once locked down your brand names, you know, so you have an account with your name and whatever you want to do. And have fun with it. But yeah, otherwise, I think this is one where, if you’ve got a strong blog and a strong YouTube strategy, I would spend your time over there before you start messing around over here. All right, I
Katie Robbert 38:54
think that’s solid well, that. I mean, unless there’s anything else unless anyone has any other questions. That kind of wraps it up for this week. So we just did a review of Amazon amp. If you are still listening to John’s test show you are currently listening to the Dropkick Murphys, which are near and dear to my Boston heart. original lineup was, you know, probably better, but we don’t have to get into that. You know, so until next week, John, any final thoughts?
John Wall 39:24
No, that sounds good. If you love any music stuff, go ahead and ping us. We’re always up for talking about this and producing audio.
Katie Robbert 39:29
Alright, until next time.
Christopher Penn 39:34
Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast, and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics per market urs See you next time.
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