Podonomics

Jason Van Orden provides an excellent summary of the benefits and drawbacks of corporate podcasting based on what he saw and heard at the Corporate Podcasting Summit.

One thing he didn’t mention - Most of the case studies presented at the Summit reported their success as if it were an accident or a freak of nature. I wasn’t happy with that. It bugged me to hear people say:

“Wow, and that was totally unexpected.”

I interviewed the manager of the Butterball Turkey Talk account as to why Butterball chose to publish only 6 episodes. When I asked her what were the results, she gave me concrete numbers. She said they were expecting 5000 downloads and got just under 10,000. There was no apologetic tone in her voice, no hint of surprise. Butterball put together some numbers and evaluated the outcome based on their initial projections.

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Never conduct an interview on a cell phone. Reasons?

• Makes post-production a pain in the butt. The person on the cell phone will sound 10,000 db softer than the person who used a land line. The poor sap who has to level the sounds will have bleeding eardrums by the end. And if it were recorded in mono (a single track) increase editing time by 300 hours.
• The call drops. For no and many reason. Lost signal, poor reception, Cylon attacks in the 5th dimension. And it’s such a pain to try and pick up where you left off.
• It’s difficult to hear your guest. I had a few interviews where the person was on their cellie and I had a devil of a time understanding what was said. I turned up the volume on my phone to no avail. It’s hard to conduct an interview, yet interrupt it every few minutes to ask the person to speak louder.
• Encourages poor telephone etiquette. Such as:
  • “Speak up.”
  • “Huh?”
  • “What was that again?”
  • “Repeat that.”
  • “I’m sorry, you chipped out there. Can you say that last bit again?”
  • (If you’re Canadian, add please to the end of each sentence)

My advice? Ask the person if you can them back on their landline. If the answer is no, reschedule the interview for a time when they will be close to a landline.

Remember, your goal is to make your guest look good. If you sound like a million bucks, but your guest sounds like crap, you’ll both have egg on your face. Plus, your production skills will be called into question. So, altogether now - NO CELLIES!

Tags: podcasting, podcasting tips, interviews, phone interviews

Tim Bourquin, producer of one of the most important conferences in podcasting called the Podcast & New Media Expo (PME), wrote a lengthy post on his blog surmising that the unconferences, in particular Podcamp NY, is operating under the guise of a conference.

In particular, Bourquin says that:

“Podcamp NYC has 38 sponsors, a website that sure looks a heckuvalot like a regular conference website (sponsors, agendas, schedules, press/media pages, registration, etc.), speakers who are from vendors & sponsors, and even conference tracks. Hardly what Dave Winer describes as an unconference and 180 degrees from the first unconference I had heard ever heard of - Bloggercon (although I am sure there were variations of the idea before that).”

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As a person who uses social media to increase awareness of my brand, I find the actions that have been taken against one female blogger to be truly disturbing.

On my blog, I don’t expect everyone to agree with my views and opinions and that’s the price I pay for being visible. However, disagreements become disgusting when it involves death and rape threats and pictures that are meant to demean, silence and put fear in someone’s mind.

This has happened to a blogger by the name of Kathy Sierra who blogs over at Creating Passionate Users. Four weeks ago, she started getting death threats in her inbox. While scary, she didn’t think anything of it until someone started posting pictures of her with a noose around her neck and being muzzled with a thong.

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I really, really like the way this article explained what a podcast is. Very well done. It’s an article devoid of any geek speak and just explains what podcasting is using language people understand.

In particular, I really like this paragraph:

Podcasts are like any radio show you might listen to in your car on the way to work. The only difference is the choice of when to listen belongs to you, not station programmers.

Simply beautiful. I also like this paragraph:

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If you’re a podcaster, you’ve probably been in a situation where the person you scheduled to do an interview with doesn’t show up. This happened to Tom Raftery (who has the most lovely Irish accent), host of an audio podcast called PodLeaders.

Typically, if your guest is a no-show, you just contact them and try to reschedule. If you were relying on that interview for your very next episode, you will have to post an apology on your blog saying that there’s no episode that week. What a faux pas!

Well, Tom didn’t do that. As he sat on the conference bridge line and listened to the on-hold music, it took about 17-minutes for him to realize that his guest wasn’t coming. So, instead of missing an episode, he went ahead and asked his questions without the guest present.

How did it all turn out? You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out. Click here to listen to his episode.

Tags: podleaders, tom raftery, podcasting, interview tips

There’s a chapter in my book called Launch Your Podcast where I talk about how to choose between a hosted and independent solution to publish your podcast.

A hosted solution is similiar to what Libsyn or Podomatic offers - a place you can get your RSS feed, podpage and hosting all wrapped into one.

An independent solution is where you can choose where to host your podcasts, what blog platform to use for your podpage and that you can customize the look and feel of your podpage to mirror your brand.

I know, I know, it’s not as cut and dry. I know that some hosted services do allow you to modify their template and that if you only want to use them to store your podcasts, that’s fine too.

That’s not the point of this post.

As I’m typing up the benefits of using an independent solution, one that I can think of is that you can write your own RSS feed, use the one that came with the blog, or use Feedburner. As I look at my statement, I’m now wondering what is the benefit of writing your own RSS feed.

Anyone care to weigh in?

I’ll be honest. I used to be pretrified going to conferences. You never know anyone and for those who do know each other, they form their little cliques and keep outsiders out. I would escape the lonliness by looking “busy” on my laptop or blathering in the hallways on my cellphone. All so I could look like I was connected to something, someone.

However, over the past 12-months, I can now go to conferences and know I’ll never be alone. All I need to do is see the list of registrants and I know someone will meet me at the airport or meet me in the lobby of the hotel or meet me for dinner.

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If you love podcasting and new media, you need to be a part of this movement. An independent band is releasing a song called Mine Again today and wants you to spend just 99-cents and 2-minutes of your time to head over to iTunes to buy it. The goal is to demonstrate the power of social media to help this song debut at #1 in iTunes.

Now, if you’re thinking these chaps are going to get rich off of this thing, think again. Half of the proceeds they receive will be donated to a college scholarship. We give to them, they give to a deserving student.

Go here for more details. Then, Bum Rush the Charts (click on the big blue button at the top that says Buy Mine Again).

Update: Looks like there’s a flame out happening on Digg. Not everyone is down with this, although the Washington Post did a story.

I got in around 12:09pm Toronto time. I didn’t know what time it was until I got to the baggage claim area (why don’t airports have big neon clocks all over the place). The flight was uneventful, however, it was a smaller plane so the seats were a bit more cramped.

I typically blog about the sessions when I attend conferences, but decided that offering my thoughts on London culture would prove to be more interesting. Plus, Jason, Paul, Karin and the team at Podcasting News are doing some awesome summaries, so you can just visit their blogs.

Which brings me to my laundry list of the things I liked and didn’t like about London. It’s quite long as I had time on the 8-hour flight to scratch together 4 pages of notes, so skim through now, digest later.

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