Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Pete Cashmore, live from Scotland about Mashable. Pete tells up how he has built this social media news site from himself to ten writers with more nearly 20,000 articles on every subject within social media in under 36 months.  Pete discusses how Mashable covers everything from news, to jobs, to events, to Beta Invite-To-Sites, to to even Mashable’s own social networking site; MyMashable with more than 250,000 members.In this 16 minute interview Pete shares his insights on social media, their business model, their extraordinary content, and explains why 2.5 million unique visitors come to the Mashable web site, which include developers, executives, investors, employers, bloggers,...

Kakul Srivastava, General Manager of Yahoo!’s Flickr Kakul Srivastava, General Manager of Yahoo!’s Flickr In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Kakul Srivastava, General Manager of Yahoo!’s Flickr.  Kakul shares her excitement for the 30 million Flickr users sharing their live’s most precious moments with friends, family, coworkers, and community.In this 22 minute interview Kakul describes how 3 million photographs are uploaded to Flickr every day and are shared through more than 3 billion page views per month.  Among the many insights that Kakul shared in this interview, we talked about Building Community such as “Squared Circle”, and Getty Images Licensing Project, which is a collection of Flickr photos that will launch on gettyimages.com...

Alan Levy, CEO of Blog TalkRadio In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Alan Levy, founder and CEO of BlogTalkRadio.  Alan discusses how he saw a need for web based radio and how he created BlogTalkRadio.This is a 14 minute interview where Alan discusses many of his insights about creating your own radio show and how large corporations and even the Pentagon is using BlogTalkRadio as a communication tool for their customers, employees, and in the case of the Pentagon, our troops. (more…)

Gary Thuerk, Farther of Email Marketing In this interview I speak with Gary Thuerk.  Don’t know who Gary is?  He’s he guy that send the very first “Spam” email message.  An “unsolicited Commercial Email Message”, back in 1978!  Gary while working with DEC Computer sent the very first Spam to 400 of the government contractors then associated with APRANet, the very beginning of the Internet and eMail.  Listen to Gary talk about how the Cold War drove the Internet,  how sending out his one email shut down the servers at the University of Utah, and how to this day, Gary gets “hate mail” for creating Spam. (more…)

Neil Creighton, CEO of RatePoint In this podcast Lon speaks with Neil Creighton, the CEO of RatePoint email marketing, how he founded GeoTrust which was later acquired by VeriSign.  Neal talks about how he combined e-mail marketing with a complete review survey platform so businesses can get reviews from their customers and republish those out in different places, and a lot of that is social.  Neal tells us that e-mail marketing is the base part of their service and a lot of businesses use email marketing.  He says the ROI on it is very, very high and that for every dollar you spend you get $43 back.  Email Marketing is a very effective way to reach your customers.Neal says “A lot of it has to do with social media but the number-one thing people...

Matt Mullenweg, Co-Founder of WordPress In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Matt Mullenweg, Co-Founder  of WordPress and president of Automatic.  Matt discusses how and why he created WordPress just to fulfill a need for an easy to use blogging platform and how he had no idea how popular WordPress would become.In this 23 minute interview Matt shares his ideas about how social media and blogs are being used and about his hope this “open source” software platform is improved and maintained.  Matt discusses how people are using WordPress within the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and Ford Motor Company. (more…)

Gary Vaynerchuk, Host & Founder of Wine Library TV In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Gary Vaynerchuk about his success with building community and Wine Library.  Gary tells us how he built his brick and mortar liquor business to more than $50m by building his on-line community.In this 23 minute interview Gary talks about how he built his following using video to more than 80,000 video views everyday of his now 600 videos.  We also discuss his “How Do You Monetize A Blog” video, book & TV offers, how to “Network Virtually”, Word Of Mouth On Steroids, and his simple formula to success; PHCC, Patience, Hustle, Content, and Community. (more…)

Vint Cerf , “Father Of The Internet” & Futurist In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with “The Father Of The Internet” or as Vint corrected me, one of many developers who created the Internet.  In this podcast Vint discusses many of his insights on how the internet was created, his views on the affect of social media on the Internet, and where he thinks the Internet will be in the future.In this 29 minute interview Vint shares his enthusiasm for how far the Internet has come from their original governmental project, his support of “standardization”,  and he cautions us about Internet misuses. (more…)

Biz Stone, Co-founder of Twitter In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Biz Stone the Cofounder of Twitter where Biz describes Twitter as more than just a microblogging tool, but as a general communication utility.  Biz tells us how people are using Twitter for everything from “What are you doing?” to immediate disaster reports, from “Where is there gas in Atlanta” to a TV producer’s immediate feedback on a new television pilot.In this 31 minute interview Biz describes how Dell has made $500,000 using Twitter last year and how other companies such as Comcast, Whole Foods, and even NASA is using Twitter to make science more accessible. (more…)

Robert Scoble, Famous Blogger, Scobleizer, & Author – Fast Company, Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers In this podcast Lon Safko speaks with Robert Scoble the Famous Microsoft Blogger, The Scobleizer, and the author of “Naked Conversations” published by John Wiley & Sons in the airport on his way to Berlin, Germany.  Robert discusses the importance of “content”, sincerity, and the different ways to communicate with your target audience.In this 16 minute interview Robert emphasizes the importance of “listening” to your customers, prospects, and other potential readers of your blog, audio podcast, and video blogs. (more…)