Using the Official Isagenix Podcasts

Trainer: Sr. Manager of Web Services Kevin Gawthrope

Now you can listen to all of our incredible conference calls with your iPod! We recently launched our Official Isagenix Podcasts on IsagenixPodcast.com and you won’t believe how easy it is to boost your knowledge and get all of your business-building tips in one convenient place. Listen in as Isagenix Sr. Manager of Web Services Kevin Gawthrope explains how you can best utilize the podcasts to build your business.

>>Kjersti: Alright well good morning everyone and welcome to our Saturday morning business training with Isagenix. My name is Kjersti Coté  your host and this morning’s call is all about the Isagenix, official Isagenix podcast. How exciting is this? I know there are some of you on the line that are already taking advantage of the podcasting and what it is and all of that. Well I have to tell you we have Kevin Gawthrope is with us this morning out of marketing and he is a member of our marketing team who had a lot to do with getting the podcast site and the availability of podcasting up and running with Isagenix. This morning’s call is going to be fairly short. We’re going to stick to the basics this morning and I will actually, if anybody on the line, if you have access to your computer I would actually you know get online right now and we’ll tell you exactly where to go in just a few minutes. But first I’d like to introduce Kevin to everybody.

First of all, he’s been with Isagenix for 2 years and I told him this morning, I said goodness it seems like you’ve been with our company for a longer period of time. And he said, I know I get that a lot. And to me that must mean that you’ve done a lot, Kevin. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of advancements since you’ve come in to Isagenix, technological advances which is very, very exciting. But Kevin brings to the plate over 15 years of online and marketing experience to any design challenge that he might face and he is very, very creative and he can do whatever it takes no matter what the medium he finds himself in. And just a little bit about his background, he has worked for interactive industry leading agencies such as Digitus and Cramer-Krassalt, I would assume that’s how you pronounce that. He also led the interactive web departments and in house marketing teams for companies such as Staples and US Airways.

He is working with, obviously with our Isagenix marketing team, our web strategy, which includes opening up the website to our associates, with our associates marketing efforts, blog, social media and including this new twitter and facebook that’s going on, I mean this is amazing and I know that this is something that’s most recent with the blogs and social media that the networking such as you know using twitter or Facebook or search marketing as well and I believe this is something that was launched or changed I would say just a couple of months ago and announced, which is very, very exciting. So maybe Kevin you can share a little bit about that as well. So he’s very passionate about you know building his own capabilities while at the same time partnering with his clients. He enjoys focusing on mutual goals of the project while delivering the best creative solutions that he can in a timely manner so his time is very valuable. We’re grateful for you to be with us this morning, Kevin. So good morning and welcome to the call.

>>Kevin: Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be part of the call and to be talking about the podcast and thank you so much for that great introduction, Kjersti. I really appreciate it. And you know this has been an exciting time over the past few months and for the few years I’ve been there we’ve done a lot to overhaul the website and the presentation layer of the associate back office as well as enhancing a lot of our calls such as using a podcast and being able to have a lot more rich media and multimedia across our site so it’s been an exciting ride and we’re just getting started.

>>Kjersti: I know, we’re just getting started, isn’t it amazing? I think about when Isagenix first began. I’m trying to think back when our website, our associate website was up and running for the very first time, back 7 years ago and the accessibility that we had and of course the advancements just visually and of course technologically from what we have today. And from what I understand our Isagenix replicated website, Kevin, is about an 18 million dollar web replicated site that people are taking advantage of every day. That’s pretty powerful.

>>Kevin: Yeah absolutely, when you have software as robust as ours and be able to create a simple user interface to you know keep the shopping and the information process simple, we want to make sure that we’re taking care of that and when you have investments such as that it’s important to make sure that you’re looking at everything from a usability standpoint as much as a branding standpoint.

>>Kjersti: Right, absolutely and well let’s get into the podcast. This is really cool and there might be people on the line listening that have no idea what a podcast is so you know give us the definition of a podcast.

>>Kevin: Sure, no problem, I’d be happy to. A podcast is basically a combination of a few technologies that have come about within the last, I would say 5 years and you know with the advent of the iPod, you know, about 5 or 6 years ago, it’s sort of worked itself into the vernacular of technology where there are different pods or podcast or that type of thing or iPod’s and when you have another technology such as what’s called RSS or really simple syndication, the simple definition of that is when you have basically a newsfeed coming off a website that’s sort of just the text that’s being taken from the page without too many images and that’s basically tied to an RSS feed.

It’s a simple tag and what that does is allows you to subscribe to just the stories through another piece of software like you would an email program or a separate program. And what they’ve done over time is that they’ve learned that you can send other things down the RSS pipe, so to speak, than just text and you can also include audio and video.

So when they started sending audio down the RSS feed, that sort of became the [inaudible] of a podcast sort of like a broadcast that you can sync with your iPod through iTunes or any other device. So basically it’s a way to broadcast an audio program through a subscribable feed and that’s basically where the advent of podcast came from. It’s something where if you have an application you can sync that up with your mobile device, in most cases an iPod which has a 75% market share. That’s sort of where the pod part of it came on so that’s sort of a loose definition of a podcast.

>>Kjersti: That’s very cool and so now obviously the podcast website is, isagenixpodcast.com so if you have your computer in front of you and you’re online go to Isagenixpodcast.com and this website is gorgeous. I mean it’s a beautiful website. You guys did a beautiful job and obviously you know what I’d like to do now is to kind of talk about the features of this website and of course subscribing to the Isagenix podcast and you know how people would do that. And I know that people can do it from the website. I know they can do it through their iTunes library as well but let’s get started on some of the cool features of this.

>>Kevin: Absolutely, what’s great about having the Isagenixpodcast.com space and also in case you happen to type in an extra s, if you were to go to isagenixpodcasts, plural .com, that site also works as well, it goes to the same page. So we just wanted to make sure that we’re clear that sometimes we add an S, sometimes we drop an S. If we do either, we’re covered there. This is sort of what separates us a little from other podcasts. You know the theme of a podcast, going back to the previous question, you know it’s sort of like a distributed radio show. A lot of podcasts are produced that way to kind of have a feeling of it’s a radio type of medium.

We took it a step further with the website because we want to make it accessible to as many users as possible and we know that we have you know internet users on our team, you know we’re a very digital driven company. But we also know that we have an audience out there that is all different ranks and as far as experience with the web and online and we want to make it just as acceptable and easy as possible. So having the website gives us a couple of options and the first one it does is it allows you to play the audio right on the page. If you look under the left hand side of the column here you’ll see all the latest podcasts and they’re all in chronological order and one of the nice things right there is you can hit play right from each and every entry and it opens up a slide bar and it starts playing right away. That’s something where you don’t need an iPod, you don’t need iTunes, you don’t need any technology.

Basically you just need a web browser that’s been released probably in the past 2 to 3 years and you can play right from the page and that’s something that we never wanted to take away because that’s one of the benefits of having just a downloadable MP3 but at the same time we allow you to have direct accessibility right on the page. So that’s probably the first feature that allows us to have a page like this and gives this page purpose.

The second part is having in sort of a blog type of way and this is — and to be quite open with you this page is essentially a blog that has a bunch of audio feeds on it and so we just happen to be sort of our landing page for podcasts. This allows you to do a couple of things as well. It allows us to update our content in a very timely manner. We don’t have a large path to production to get this content out to everyone. This gives us a little bit of a window and some ease of use to maintain and also produce the content in a fashion and turn it around. You know we try to turn things around within 24 to 48 hours from the call itself. Fair to say that the call we’re having right now we usually get up on Monday so look for that and look for this and we will be able to support that in a very timely manner because of the way we’ve architected the page. The nice part of that is we can get copy up there really fast and we can also start working on the transcripts for the calls which is probably the next feature that’s worth talking about.

If you go behind any of these little excerpts on the home page and you click through to what’s called the permalink page or the full page of the podcast, you get the full description, you get the imagery, you get the, of course it’s the same accessibility to play right on the page but you also get, and this is something that comes in maybe a week or two after the call because our turnaround time with our transcript vender, is you get a full transcript of the call. So every word, every question, answer, those type of things that are part of the edited podcast, is transcribed and we do that for a couple of reasons. The first thing that we do that for is for natural search optimization and what that is is that anytime we have, you know, key words or we have different phrases or different types of elements from the call that are unique to Isagenix or tied to Isagenix we want to make sure that that content is coming up on search engine.

So as we have more links and more people linking to this page from other sites, which is perfectly fine to do because this is all complying content, is that we have, we grow the spiders out there and the search engine algorithms to start looking at this page. And that’s a huge benefit for us. We have all those wonderful, great content that we put out there and want to make sure that people are seeing it. And so to help with that we provide all those content to increase the search ranking. The second part is and some of you may have heard about this over time but for the last 10 years the government is really involved with making websites more accessible and the web is billions and billions of pages. And something that, as big as this and a company as big as ours, we have to take responsibility for adhering to accessibility and what I mean by that is this is a small government section called section 508 and basically that says that websites have to be accessible to the hearing impaired, the visually impaired and what this allows us to do and yes, even though this is an audio podcast and anyone whose sort of visually impaired can still listen to it, this transcription allows us to have the screen readers, cause we build this site to be compliant, screen readers or any other computer assistant programs that allow you to, you know, read with the copy on the screen. Maybe you can’t listen to the podcast and you need to be able to see the text is bigger on the screen, this allows you to do all of that. And so having all the text from the audio call itself and providing that for the hearing or visually impaired is something that is important to us and it also solves that potential issue for us as well.

>>Kjersti: I love that. I had no idea about the mandating and I think that having the transcripts available, I mean this has never been available at Isagenix until now with the podcasting and I think that that is the coolest thing because while you can go back and listen to it, to be able to you know view that transcript and save it you know for quotes or whatever, just for training just to be able to read. Some people love to read better than they do you know to hear or have to read rather than listen. So I think that’s a really cool feature. Now let’s talk about subscribing because obviously there’s different ways to subscribe and why you know is it the same subscribing from the Isagenix podcast site as well as it is from the iTunes library or excuse me from the iTunes store I guess when you access your site you can do that. But — and also too, why would someone want to subscribe? Let’s talk about that first. If they do subscribe what’s the actual activities that take place after that?

>>Kevin: Sure, no, happy to describe that, you know of course with the market penetration that we have with the Apple iPod and iTunes music store we want to make sure we’re where everybody is going and we’re sort of where the conversation is taking place and where people are already you know subscribing to other podcasts. So iTunes was a mandatory requirement for us and we wanted to be there. So we have a couple of ways to subscribe. There are still some people out there who may not have an iPod or have another device and also use a different software to subscribe to either podcast or like I mentioned before, RSS feeds. And that’s where the links on the right hand side come in where we have just a straight RSS feed that can be directly tied to a software program on your computer, Mac or PC, and it knows well enough that you use this other program for your feed and this is where it’s going to point to and you’re subscribing.

And at the same time you know hopefully that will let you play podcasts as well. But for those that don’t this is where iTunes comes in. Google has it’s own RSS feed as well, which is why we put that on the page but the most important one is really iTunes because it has the most audience right now. And what that does if you click from the page and you want to subscribe to iTunes, we give you a really easy way, sort of a shortcut. You click on that link and it brings you directly in, it launches your iTunes. It brings you directly into the iTunes store, right to our page for that range of podcasts and you get you know all the different, the 5 different ones that we do now, for you to choose from. So let’s just talk a little bit about when you’re in iTunes. So once you’re in iTunes and again whether you’ve licked on this link or you’ve gone to iTunes music store yourself and you’ve just done a search, a simple search in the top right hand corner, make sure that you have the store selected because otherwise you’re searching your library of content.

You want to make sure you’re in the store first on the left hand side and then go ahead and do a search on Isagenix. What you’ll see happen in the results page is you’ll see a range of all different Isagenix podcasts, including our five official podcasts. And they’re really easy to denote because they have very clear album art and different colors and also says the official Isagenix podcast. We have five, we have the corporate update call, we have the product training call, we have the business training call and we also have real people, real results. And those are our four most popular calls. We have some others as well that we may be able to produce as a podcast down the road. And we also have the new one which is the A and Z which is Australian/New Zealand team have their leadership call updates and that’s something they’ve been asking for for a while so we’ve started producing those as well.

So really trying to get our international mark out there. Of course this content is available for everyone in all countries and we’re working with the iTunes store right now to make sure that these are available in the different country versions of the iTunes store, cause they do provide different content for different countries. So the second part of the question about why somebody would want to subscribe and this is something I can definitely relate to because you know working with the company for a couple of years and knowing that we produce all the calls in the back office as downloadable MP3’s, there is still about three or four manual steps that I have to do to basically copy the call down and put it to my hard drive, then drive that back over into iTunes and make sure that’s in the right folder so then when I plug my iPod or my iPhone in that it can actually copy everything over to that device. With this, I love the, you hear it on the infomercials a lot, this is a set it and forget it type of application where once you subscribe and that’s the best part, every single time you open your iTunes and every single time you sync your device, whether it be an iPod or iPhone or iPod touch, it will actually automatically download the latest and greatest podcast and in this case our calls, directly to your device.

And if you’ve missed it for a couple of weeks it will download the latest two or whatever settings that you have in your iTunes. And I think that’s the best part because it’s sort of a nice surprise when I’m driving my commute or if you’re driving around to your different meetings or events, that you have these with you at all times. And even if you need it for an event you can fire one up right then and there and have one play or to pull out a specific quote or something that you need and I like it that I can actually catch up on my corporate update calls that I may have missed Tuesday night, a couple of days later, from the car on the way into work. And that’s the best part because it’s already there waiting for me as opposed to having to remember to take all those manual steps.

>>Kjersti: I love that. It’s instantaneous satisfaction. [laughter] It’s already been taken care of for you and you get to you know go to it when you’re ready to listen to it. I love that. And you know I have to really compliment you guys on the huge visual aspect of this because I’m sitting here looking at the business training, the product training, you know the real people real result, the colors that you chose, it’s just visually appealing. Now as far as — we’ve talked about transcripts, we’ve talked about subscribing and of course subscribing from the Isagenix podcast, now let’s say that someone was in their iTunes library, they can subscribe to it that way as well, correct?

>>Kevin: Right and that’s what we were saying before, if you’re already in iTunes itself and you click on that left hand side of your iTunes application, you’ll see a little shopping bag that says iTunes store. You just want to make sure you’re there first and you’ll get their home page on the right hand side of all the content and that’s where you want to do a search. And that’s the easiest way to get there is just do a search on that top right hand corner for Isagenix and then the results screen that shows up will give you the library of all of them for you to subscribe individually. Once you get in there and you click on each one, it will just have a very simple button that says subscribe. They’ll be some reviews, they’ll be some, you know a list of all the previous ones to date and then just one simple button to subscribe and then it carries everything over. It will copy the most recent one and then you can also backfill by getting the rest. There’s a little button that says get to all the previous ones as well.

>>Kjersti: Right, ok so now there’s also a search area that you can actually do a search to find your call so obviously, tell us about that. If you’re looking for a call that Dr. Becky Natrajan did, would you just type in her name?

>>Kevin: Yes, absolutely, that’s the best thing. And going back, this is back on the isagenixpodcast.com page. You can — well actually I should address that a couple of ways. There is a search box on our actual website on isagenixpodcast.com that will basically spider not only the content of the little scriptions that we have but again this is where the transcriptions come in again. It will also spider all of that content so that if her name is mentioned anywhere during the call it will pop up, or Kathy or whomever. And that way you can identify which call you would want to listen to or subscribe to. And what the best part about that is that it will give you the name of the call. And then if you wanted to make sure that you’re sort of catching that on iTunes what you’d probably do is jump over to iTunes and find that same call and subscribe to that feed and then get that call. If you actually do a search on Dr. Becky or anyone else as far as who might be on the call, for different guests, in iTunes it may or may not come up in iTunes because they’re not benefitting from the transcript that we have on our site.

>>Kjersti: Right, right, absolutely, so if you’re going to do a search to find a specific person then definitely go to the Isagenixpodcast.com website to do that, to make sure that you’re going to get what you want, right? And then I know that you guys have a couple of different categories below which is kind of fun, you know the popular posts, you know the things that are getting hit a lot as well as different categories and archives. And I see we go back to March 2009, this is great.

>>Kevin: Yes we try to get a full year. What we’re trying to do and this is a good time to bring this up, we are, as we’re trying to provide as many of the calls as we can in the back office, we want this to sort of be the vehicle for our calls going forward and yeah we’ve been doing that for four months. It’s amazing how long it’s been already and we are trying to get a full year inside of the podcast of course. Once that happens we’ll probably move to sort of a yearly archive and then you’ll see a monthly breakdown for the year that you’re in. As we start producing the content in this fashion you know cause it’s been reviewed, it’s been edited appropriately, it has the disclaimer at the end, it’s 100% compliant content, we will start actually removing some of the regular MP3’s out of the back office and for right now we’re looking at any calls that are falling in 2006 or 2007 right now and we might start basically removing those out of there to get people to come here.

So over a year or two you’ll see basically a scrub take place and we’ll be directing people to this site because again it allows you to do all three things. It allows you to play it right on the page, it allows you to download the MP3 to your hard drive to do with what you wish and it also allows you to subscribe and allows you to copy it to your device. So because we’re providing all of that functionality here, over time the need to have it in the back office it will just be more of a direct link. This site will be there and you’ll be able to access it right from there and it will be just a very simple cut over to this area because this is a better delivery mechanism for all of those pieces.

>>Kjersti: Yeah, that’s exciting, very, very cool and of course I do know that you can click on take a video tour of the podcast site just so, obviously a little tutorial going on there, that’s great.

>>Kevin: We want to make it real easy for everyone so we did that.

>>Kjersti: Sure, yeah, yeah, absolutely and well this has been great. It’s been totally informative. I think that we’ve covered all bases. Is there anything else that you can think of before we close out this morning?

>>Kevin: I think obviously is just to basically to definitely drive, have the isagenixpodcast.com be your central repository but if you are, you know, in passing and sharing this with folks you know don’t be afraid to send them over to iTunes because it’s part of the vernacular.

iTunes has just become you know the number one music store in the country, even surpassing Target and Wal-Mart so you know the eyeballs are there, the people are there, it’s where people are shopping now so it’s not foreign to most people. Most people have an iPod or a multimedia device or a mobile device that will accept MP3’s or a podcast and so it’s really about just providing the easiest way to get the information that they need. And at the same time, you know, we wanted to make sure that we had a compliant content out there and that’s why we’ve chosen to go down this road because before we were only able to provide the MP3’s to associates through the back office. This actually puts us out there a lot further and we’re now publicly facing, when it comes to this content and we’re proud about that and that’s something that we want to scream from the roots up and having delivery mechanisms like this or having podcasts really separates, I think, separates us from the companies that are either afraid to do it or don’t have the ability or basically the concept to support it and that’s why these are so important. These are five weekly touch points on so much information and we’re just constantly looking to provide the tools to our associates that allow them to grow their business or to grow their coaching for the products or both and that’s why we love doing what we do because we want to make — you know if I was out there in the field you know I want the tools to make my life easier. I’m a very online focused person. We’re a very digital driven company and this is just sort of another chapter in that book that we’re writing right now and we’re real excited about it.

>>Kjersti: I know, well yippy Skippy. Thank you so much, Kevin, for your dedication and what you’ve been able to help get accomplished within Isagenix and all of your expertise because it’s true, I mean I am so pleased to see where we’re going digitally you know with our company and you’re right, I mean what we have here with Isagenix is quite unique. I don’t think I’ve seen too many companies out there, especially within our industry, that have the high tech, high touch capabilities that our website and all the tools that we use have as we do. So it’s very, very exciting and thank you for all your hard work and effort and thank you for being on with us this morning. It’s been a pleasure.

>>Kevin: Well thank you for having me. It’s been a blast and everyone, we’re just getting started so enjoy.

>>Kjersti: Alright, woo, we’re just getting started. Alright well thanks everybody for being with us this morning. It’s always a pleasure having you on and we do, we love and respect your time. I want everybody to go out and have an amazing rest of the weekend and we’ll meet everyone back here Tuesday. Actually I do want to give you a heads up, there’s Isagenix call on Monday at, I believe it’s 7:00 Pacific time so you can take advantage of that. Same number, same pen and then of course on Tuesday night at 6:30 Pacific we’ll have our real people, real results call, following that our corporate update call. Alright thanks again everybody for being with us. Bye bye.

Notice:

This program is for educational purposes only. The opinions expressed by the participants are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Isagenix International. These statements have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration. Isagenix products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Weight loss results may vary. Always consult your physician or healthcare professional before starting this or any other wellness or fitness program. Income examples reflect the results achieved by Isagenix associates across a wide spectrum. These are examples and not necessarily typical or average nor do they represent a guarantee of your personal results. As with any business opportunity, success depends largely on the individual associate’s skills, motivation and effort. For average financial performance data, see the independent associate earnings statement at Isagenixearnings.com.

 

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