Charlene Li is an Analyst at Forrester Research and co-author of the new book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, which she wrote with Josh Bernoff. Charlene is one of the leading voices in the area of Social Computing and Web 2.0.

I briefly caught up with Charlene Li after hearing her speak at Forrester Research’s Marketing Forum 2008 in Los Angeles.

In this podcast, Charlene talks about getting the book written, and her and Josh’s goals of helping marketers understand the wild world of social media and engage with consumers in the groundswell.

Charlene also describes how marketing is evolving from highly controlled one-way messaging to a much less controlled process of creating relationships with consumers. In particular, she outlines how one of the best-known and most successful consumer tech brands, Apple, breaks the rules for engaging the groundswell, and the risks that other brands face if they follow Apple’s lead.

 

 Digital Podcast 48 [7:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (876)

Technorati Tags: Forrester 2008 Marketing Forum, Forrester Research, Charlene Li, Groundswell, Apple

In what must have been some marvelous licensing legal wizardry, The Financial Times is reporting that Apple has signed a deal with News Corp’s 20th Century Fox studio to provide an online video-on-demand service. The service will allow consumers to rent the latest Fox DVD releases by downloading a digital copy from Apple’s iTunes platform for a limited time.

Both Apple and Fox are officially quiet about the deal and the Financial Times says that it is likely the deal will be announced at Macworld on January 14th.

The deal goes beyond movie rentals in that Apple will also for the first time extend its FairPlay digital rights management system beyond its own products.

A digital file protected by FairPlay will be included in new Fox DVD releases, enabling film content to be transferred or “ripped” from the disc to a computer and video iPod. DVD content can already be moved to an iPod but this requires special software and is considered piracy by some studios.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Fox, video, iTunes, Fairplay, DRM, online video rental

I just checked Google analytics for the daily stats at Digital Podcast and I saw the biggest one time increase in daily visitors and page views. Digital Podcast’s traffic jumped up by 80% on Christmas day. I looked at the distribution of search terms for some anomaly, but it wasn’t there. Search terms remained consistent in their distribution.

I think that people got lots of iPods, Zunes and the like for Christmas and went looking for content.

I also think that Christmas day has probably become the biggest day ever for the music industry thanks to iTunes cards. I know for sure that’s the case in my home as my daughter spent her $30 iTunes gift cards before noon and my son spent his by 4pm. That’s the first time either of them has bought music online and it didn’t take long.

No wonder Apple’s stock almost hit $200 per share.

Technorati Tags: ipod, Apple, iTunes, Zune, Microsoft