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 At the Thursday
Berkman Meeting last week, along with the usual virtual
surprises and
fascinating opportunities to waste time and commune with weird,
smart people, we had the opportunity to meet Greg Narain, the
human embodiment of the principle of pure promotion in the Internet age.
Although our opinion admittedly comes from a small sample, Greg, who is responsible
for SocialTwister.com and is
making a significant splash with Beercasting.com,
seems to come from a marketing background and gives the impression that
every breath he takes and word he speaks are part of some vast lifelong
marketing plan. We got the impression that were it possible he would
have each article of clothing he donned in the morning and each and every
sentence that emerged from his mouth during the day pre-vetted by focus
groups for maximum effectiveness and support for the coordinated complex
of marketing initiatives which compose the life of Greg Narain.
At any rate, we ended up at the Cambridge Common, a college-type Pub
a few blocks from the faux-Victorian house which houses the Berkman Center,
as we often do. The rather simple but apparently popular essence of
a Beercast is the recording of
Bar Conversations and their posting on the Net, categorized by date,
topic and table. According to Greg
this model is so devastatingly effective that he is currently the subject
of a bidding war between the world’s major breweries for excusive sponsorships
of the budding beercasting network. Claiming to have created the first
viable revenue model of the podcasting movement, he comes across as the
Poster Boy for Crass Commercialism and Flash Marketing. He seems doomed
to wealth and dueling revenue streams.
Greg sells sponsorships to beer companies which provide the beer, of
course, and promotional costs. He sells commercials on his various web
sites and in the beercasts, at the beginning of each snippet. For
a price he will artfully drop advertisers names
and products into the actual conversations. He will also actually
sell the topics, letting sponsors decide what each table will talk about.
You may be able to catch the current
beercasting tour at a bar near you,
or get it to COME to a bar near you, for a still-small fee. Call
now. We get the impression Greg would beercast a Bar Mitzvah if the price
was
right and he could get the Rabbi’s permission.
He has also obtained the rights to Winecasting.com and Coffeecasting.com.
We hope some angler has already gotten hold of Flycasting.com, because
this guy wants it all.
Anyway, if any of you are curious of what a Beercast sounds like, or
what the Dowbrigade sounds like, this
link will get you to a twenty-minute
spiel by a quartet including the brainy and beautiful Lisa
Williams,
our Video-blogging hero Steve Garfield,
blogging enabler Shimon
Rura
(Father of Frassle) and yours
truly revealing personal secrets and embarrassing themselves while under
the
influence. For our part, the Dowbrigade
recounts a certain episode on the Colombian-Ecuadorian border for which
the statute of limitations has fortunately long since expired.
Personally, we think this whole Beercasting thing, and quite honestly
the majority of the Anykindofcasting we have listened to, is a waste
of time. We spent ten years listening to conversations in bars, and can’t
remember a single one or anything that we learned in the process, other
than to stay out of bars because after two beers our brain turns to oatmeal.But
judge for yourself.
Cambridge Common Beercast, table #2, topic #38
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