I was reminded of this crucial distinction when I perused the results of RAJAR’s latest MIDAS research. RAJAR, the UK’s radio measurement entity, publishes a semiannual look at British consumption of Internet-delivered audio that examines trends in digital radio, streaming and podcasting akin to our own Internet and Multimedia Research Series here in the States, and I am always interested to see how the behavior of UK digital consumers agrees and differs from our own here in the US.

I’ll have more to say about the podcasting statistics in a later post (they show continued growth in uptake, from 7.2 million podcast consumers in October 2008 to 7.8 million today,) but for now I wanted to focus on this telling statistic: while 4.2 million say they listen to podcasts at least once a week, only 28% find time to listen to all the podcasts they download (the typical user reported subscribing to 5.2 podcasts per week.)

I freely admit that I rarely listen to everything in my queue, and often weeks will go by before I will listen to an episode. Some subscriptions I have never caught up with, and others remain weekly staples. The vast stew of unlistened-to podcast episodes in my iTunes folder is very reminiscent of my TiVo “Now Playing” page, which also contains dozens of shows (and one entire series) that I’ve never watched. I suspect, if you own a DVR, that you have had a similar experience.

It’s easy to subscribe to episodic content–less so to find time to fit it all in. If you are a podcaster with a program centered on information or news content in a given niche, you know that listeners have multiple ways to get the content you offer (after all, you also got it somewhere.) What keeps listeners coming back, week after week, is you–character development, roles, trust, and your story. Even the most compelling podcasts, however, can pile up in someone’s feed reader amidst the plethora of audio and video available on the Internet.

That’s where scarcity can be your friend. If you are a terrestrial broadcaster thinking about podcasting your morning show, think hard about how often you want to seed content to your feed–sure, a quick, daily 2-minute joke or benchmark is an easy thing to snack on, but think long and hard before you attempt something long-form on a daily basis. More frequent podcasts may work if you are Dawn and Drew, because they aren’t repurposing broadcast content. But the more unlistened-to or unwatched shows I have piled up for a given program, the more daunting it is to tackle them–and the more likely I am to just choose a nuclear option.

All of which brings me to online video maven Tim Street, and how he handles the production of his wildly popular French Maid TV series. Tim’s very clever idea was to film a “how-to” series for men, with the subject of each video demonstrated by women dressed as French Maids. Some of the topics he has covered include how to change your oil, how to register a domain and (of course!) how to podcast. What makes Tim a very smart guy is that these topics are ripe for sponsorship–and he doesn’t shoot an episode until a sponsor pays for it. This means that he is able to monetize his show–and design it around a sponsor–from day one, and it also has the beneficial side effect of making new episodes scarce–i.e., valuable. Viewers know that a new French Maid TV episode is an event, so they make the time to watch it. Sponsors know this as well, which means that they have a little control over when the campaign is viewed (I’ve discussed podcasting’s problem with variable campaign length and asynchronous consumption before) and they also know that because Tim isn’t littering YouTube with hundreds of French Maid TV episodes a year, that they are sponsoring an actual, special event.

Now, this isn’t the prescription for everyone. But it may be that the best thing you could do with your podcast content is to make less of it, not more.

(Reposted from The Infinite Dial)

I helped ADM standardize the measurement specs around downloads, and the process was contentious around the metrics question, “download requests” or “completed downloads”?  The most final of all metrics , “plays”, was not considered because it simply was not feasible. During the current economic downturn, the need for the best metrics has become even more important for publishers and advertisers.

Over a year ago our engineers decided to resolve this issue in the most practical way we could – connecting iTunes to Google Analytics. We are announcing this product today. Before I go into the specifics, I would like to emphasize one important point – this free service does not require any relationship, contractual or otherwise, with VoloMedia.

VoloMedia’s Bridge-to-Google Analytics is a plug-in to the iTunes Media player, now installed with over 100 thousand iTunes consumers in the US – precisely 94,296 iTunes plug-ins were active over the last 5 days. Publishers are free to use this free service if it meets their needs, i.e. collect annonymous usage statistics regarding usage of their content on iTunes and to analyze them using Google Analyics: a free and robust industry-standard platform. If you have ever used Google Analytics, then you are familiar with “GA_ID – Google Analytics ID”. With a simple modification of the RSS feed to incorporate the GA-ID the publisher can start flowing aggregated play and download data to their Google Analytics account.  More information is on our website: http://www.volomedia.com

I hope this initiative is seen as one that is beneficial to the entire podcasting community, one more step forward to making podcasting a dynamic and vibrant medium for consumers, publishers and advertisers.

In addition to his thoughts below, I would advocate online or podcast only content made available by radio stations. Whether it be the long unedited version of an on-air interview, the 4th hour of a 3 hour morning show, episodes featuring character’s from the station,  or anything else you can imagine.

Mark also references the measurement of podcast plays and downloads that warrants some discussion, especially as it pertains to iTunes, but that’s for another time. Here’s Mark…

When it comes to radio station podcasts, we’re generally talking about two flavors:

One is the Public Radio kind, usually weekly shows with beginnings, middles, and ends or clips of information updates or highlights.

The other is the commercial radio podcast – often three hours of this or four hours of that.

The myth of podcasting is that this long-form way is the way listeners want to consume our content simply because it’s the way they consume our content over the air – a context in which they have no choice in the matter, by the way.

Actually, they do have a choice – it’s to tune in and out, ever-hopeful for a “hit” or “highlight.”  And tune in and out is exactly what they do.

But wait, doesn’t an on-demand environment give us the ideal opportunity to showcase the “hits” or “highlights” that our active listeners demand?

Let me ask this another way:  What’s likely to be more popular, the brief clip of the 47-year-old woman startling the judges with her vocal talents on Britain’s Got Talent – or the entire episode of Britain’s Got Talent?

Public Radio shows are generally like episodes in a series (for longer form stuff) or immediate and disposable, but useful in the moment (for shorter form stuff).  Or – in rare cases – the entertainment value of the whole (i.e., Car Talk) can’t easily be atomized into its parts.

Commercial radio shows, by contrast, almost uniformly lack beginnings, middles, or ends.  Arguably, the first hour of your morning show is not much different from the last.  And – by design – you do not usually need to hear the first hour to appreciate the ones which follow.  Nor, I would argue, do you need to hear today’s show if you miss it.  Indeed, today’s show is relatively similar to tomorrow’s show and yesterday’s show.  Wait a few hours, and like the movie Groundhog Day it will all come back again.

If I miss Hannity today, no sweat.  I’ll just catch him tomorrow.  One listener call on Dr. Laura can be substituted for any other listener call.  Thus the very consistency of the show reduces its value in an active on-demand environment.  When something is the same all the time, it’s never special – or at least any one show in its entirety is never essential.

Further, even though you can count your podcast downloads you generally can’t count the degree to which a listener is hearing the whole podcast – or any of it, for that matter.  My iPod doesn’t care whether or not I hear what is on it – it dutifully downloads podcast updates regardless.  No wonder most podcasts are heard online – not on portable devices.  At least a few minutes of them, anyways.

What this all suggests – at least in part – is that when we transform the radio show to the podcast we are thinking about the medium all wrong.  In an on-demand world for much of commercial radio, the unit of currency is not the “show,” it’s the “hit,” the “highlight.”

Sure folks will still listen to the long-form audio, but what many of them would prefer is that we carve out the “hits” – those special moments worth actively seeking out and hearing.  The “water cooler” gems.  Not the mundane same-old same-old that characterizes much of what lay between the “hits”

Listen, more folks will read your email if there’s only one short message in it.  And more folks will click your audio if it contains just the “hit” they’re looking for – and only the hit.

This, after all, is why people buy songs instead of albums.

Listening to radio over the air is as different from listening on-demand as an album is different from a song.

Share your content accordingly.

Reach Mark through his company and website Mark Ramsey Media

You would be surprised at the looks that come over their faces as if I had just asked them to show me their underwear or something. It amazes me that people don’t know how much money they want. Why would you make something that you want to sell and not know how much you want to charge for it? Would a farmer grow fruits and vegetables and not know how much they are going to sell them for? I don’t think so.

So why do people stumble on what they are going to charge to advertise or sponsor their video or audio podcast? There are several reasons.

Reasons People Don’t Know How Much Money They Want for Their Content

1. Most independent producers are not sales people.

If you want to sell advertising or sponsorships on your downloadable media you need to have a “Come to Jesus” talk with yourself about the word “Sales.” For some reason we creative types hate the word, “sales.” We are scared of the word, “sales.” To creative people, the dirtiest word in the English language is, “sales.” In working with several of my clients I’ve found they warm up to the word, “pitch.” If fact many of them love the word, “pitch.” Come on, You know you want to, “pitch” your show, so replace the word, “sales” with the word, “pitch” and get on with pitching your show and your show’s inventory to potential advertisers and sponsors.

2. Indie producers don’t have a handle on their inventory.

Producers know how to produce. No one ever told them what inventory was. Inventory is the available spaces (or “avails”) you have for someone else to advertise or sponsor. Watch other people’s shows, see where the ads are, see if you have similar places to advertise on your

show and then ask yourself how you are going to deliver ads in those places. Are you going to have to edit in ads each time you sell them (not recommended) or are you going to be able to dynamically deliver ads in and around your content? Next make a list of all your avails, and when they are available, and a deadline for the sponsor to get you materials.
3. There is no public marketplace set up where content producers can see what other producers are charging.
Who knows if and when we will see a solution to this problem. One work around could be doing your own research and finding out how much it will cost to advertise your show on someone else’s show. This will give you idea of what to charge. The ADM is working on some tools to help advertisers and sponsors reach ADM members but we are a few months away from launching those tools.

This is not rocket science. You know how long it takes you to produce your show, you know how much it costs you to produce your show and you know how much you would like to make for your time. If you aren’t able to get an advertiser or sponsor to at least cover those costs you should think twice about what you really want.
I’m happy to answers questions. Please feel free to contact me at 1timstreet at gmail dot com or visit my blog http://1timstreet.com

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Altimeter Group’s founder Charlene Li, and Peter Kim, an enterprise social-technology researcher are all over the social media trends. This post on their talk yesterday at Web 2.0 Expo is right on the money. Ironically, I was giving a talk to top brands in LA that morning and many of my core points are echoed in the post by Lauren McKay that talks about the failures of social media that we can learn from.

Here are the top points on the barriers that are preventing corporate success of Social Media. Jeremiah, Charlene, and Peter (everyone should be following their blog and here if you want to keep up to date on the trends in social media) points are worth repeating:

1. Social media doesn’t match up with our corporate culture.
2. My social media marketing campaigns aren’t working
3. I don’t know how to measure this stuff.
4. I’m not sure social media matters, anyway.

In fact, Owyang pointed out Dell’s tremendous success now in social media, which essentially sprouted from many failed attempts. It’s been a similar strategy for mega-brand Wal-Mart, as well, Li added. Wal-Mart, she said, has kept at it for years, picking itself up after failures and coming ahead stronger with its buyer blogs and mom communities. Kim summed it up by saying that social media might not have the implications on a brand that one would expect — but it will — and soon.

Within the conversation of social media fails, Owyang revealed what he sees to be as three main ways organizations interact with social media:

1. The “tire”: Social media comes from the edges of the company and is authentic because there are key stakeholders who are interested and invested in furthering social media efforts. However, Owyang said, one side of the tire has no idea what the other side of the tire is thinking or doing — and that can be a problem.

2. The “tower”: This approach occurs when management wants to centralize social media. On the upside, this means that employees will have common strategies and resources. However, it “tends to look like rehashed press releases,” Owyang said. It’s not authentic and customers can tell.

3. The “hub-and-spoke” model: This is when people from different parts of the organization come together under a centralized goal, but they all link out to different business groups. It’s cross-functional, yet not exactly centralized.

I have just compiled my 4 years of social media research, and I am now doing private briefing with brands and marketers to share with them my results and my vision for the future. Social media marketing is real and the current problems and failures are actually opportunities. If you’re interested email me at johnfurrier at gmail dot com.

I recently outlined the Four (4) stages of social media. It is my opinion and my angle that we will stay a few more years in the practitioner stage so that methodology and implementation standards emerge.

{Formally the founder and CEO of PodTech Networsk, John Furrier is currently operating a social media blog called SiliconAngle.com and a applied research social media lab called SiliconAngle Labs. SiliconAngle Labs engages with the worlds top consumer and technolgy brands to understand and deploy social media within their organization}

To the extent that you are the topic of your marketing strategy, (explaining what you do, establishing your credentials, describing your products, distinguishing yourself from the competition etc.) your articulate words are falling on deaf ears. One of the hard lessons of marketing and content creation is that your potential audience/clients want to see themselves in your words, not you.

Do you know what my needs are? Do you understand the issues I’m facing in my field? Can you articulate in one or two sentences what outcomes I am trying to achieve?

Can you put yourself in my shoes and describe the world through my eyes?

Regarding my own web presence, I can tell you that I don’t care one iota about the details of search engine optimization, the nuances distinguishing various social networking strategies, or how many megabytes of free space you’re offering me on your servers. From my perspective, all I want is to build a huge community who in short order become paying and loyal customers for my coaching and consulting services. I want conversation that translates into business, and I want it sooner rather than later.

While I understand that reaching my goal involves technical issues of search engines, social networks and adequate storage, instructing me in their importance simply isn’t going to endear me to you. While I believe that experience, expertise and credibility are important characteristics of any vendor I choose, talking up your credentials isn’t going to impress me.

I simply don’t care about you. It’s not personal. It’s perspective.

As the hungry service providers who wants others’ business, the burden of effective communication is on us. Right or wrong, fair or not, if someone else does a better job of describing how I can translate my content into audience and that audience into paying customers (the world through my eyes) then they will probably get the job even if you are more qualified.

Whether you are a service provider within the “New Media” industry (as in this example) or a content creator in an unrelated field for whom new media is a significant place of community building, information sharing and/or direct marketing, your audience will be able to “see” you to the degree that you communicate that you “see” them.

The sooner all of us who are service providers come to terms with whose perspective matters most, the sooner we’ll be on our way to making the sort of connections that turn into business. Now that’s good news!

Karl Edwards helps leaders play at the top of their professional game through personal coaching and organizational consulting. He has been helping teams design workplace cultures that empower, engage and get results for over 20 years. Join him and his partner, Claudia Rempel, for their weekly audio podcast “Working Matters” where they discuss practical strategies for handling your workplace challenges.

These numbers are extremely close to the Edison numbers on podcasting and certainly validate that study’s conclusion that podcast consumption continues to grow. This is a good study, and a worthy addition to the growing body of credible research out there on the consumption of downloadable media.

The Pew report does draw one conclusion that is likely to draw comments from a number of podcasters, if not outright controversy. With 3% of Americans indicating that they download podcasts “on a typical day” (and 17% of actual podcast consumers claiming the same), the data suggests, as Mary Madden indicates, that “podcasting has yet to become a fixture in the everyday lives of internet users.” One could point to the “300% increase in the daily podcast audience” here, as the headline reads in today’s Podcasting News, and see the glass half full, or one could focus on the number “3″ and be fairly dismissive of podcasting.

The truth, as it generally is, lies in between, and is best summarized just exactly as Madden has written–podcasting has proliferated, but has yet to become a fixture in daily life. The overall consumption numbers from both the Pew and Edison studies (one in five Americans) show that podcasting is becoming important on a national scale–but it isn’t yet a “daily habit.” I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that podcasters don’t really “ask for the order,” a phenomenon I wrote about at length on this very site in an article entitled “Podcasting: The Curse of Convenience.” Because you can listen to a podcast any old time, there is not necessarily a daily urgency to do so. There aren’t many daily shows, for one thing–and I often wait until the end of the week to even sync my portable MP3 player. “Daily” may not even be a reasonable standard–radio is measured on weekly reach (Edison’s data puts podcasting’s weekly reach between 8 and 9 percent) and television is measured on the “show,” both of which are more reasonable standards for podcasting.

Still, the essential conclusion here is correct–podcasting continues to proliferate, but is not yet a daily habit, even for most podcast consumers. The key to reinforcing daily podcast consumption is to reinforce its relevance to the lifestyle and context of the listener–keep teaching your listeners how, when and where to listen to or watch your content.

Just as I pointed out in January, the sound of what is being sent into the cloud needs to improve, if for no other reason than to avoid trying to figure out how to cram a “record” into your iPod. Seriously, for those that are my age, it’s unfair for us let those brought up on listening to audio in the mp3 format think that’s the best music can sound. For those that have never heard the sound of a vinyl LP you owe it to yourself to hear all of what the artist labored to put into the music, especially the parts the mp3 format has had to discard.

I know, I know, you’re going to say that the human ear can’t detect the difference between a vinyl album, a CD, MP3, WAV, etc. I’m sorry, I disagree. I hear a difference. And it’s especially noticeable in the MP3 format, the most popular format for portable devices and online streaming. The reason it is the most popular, if you didn’t already know, is that it is the smallest file size. An MP3 file is a fraction of the size of, say, a WAV file. File size is directly related to download time.

So what do we do about better sound quality on “the net?” First, don’t settle. If you can find a way to make that audio sound better then do it. Start with a Variable Bit Rate setting if you can. VBR allows the music to be compressed in places where the full audio spectrum will most likely not be missed, a fade in or out for example. Another option would be, with such advances in bandwidth and more and more access to higher speed connectivity, offer your audio in the WAV format. I’ll take a WAV over MP3 any day.

Whatever the case, I refuse to settle for what we now accept for high-quality audio. I don’t believe going back to vinyl is the answer. Memories of the cracks and pops of an over-played album and the need for the pennies on a tone-arm are enough to keep me away from climbing on that bandwagon.

If, as Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired commented, vinyl is the nail in the CD’s coffin in his article back in December, and is the best we can do then I would have to be very disappointed in technology. And, to date, I’m not.

Look I have great memories of opening that new album (I still distinctly remember taking the shrink wrap off that debut Boston album…sigh.), but beyond the romance of it all, I don’t want to go back. Hey, I liked the show Happy Days…it doesn’t mean I wanted to slick my hair back and do the stroll. Let’s move forward.

Have you got some tips for improved audio? Let’s have em.

These are tall words.  You’ve probably heard this story before (the Roomba will revolutionize home cleaning? Pet owners might disagree);  but let me explain the two reasons why:

1. Watching and listening to podcasts is straightforward and simple.   Quick navigation leads to consumption without the prior subscription hassles.  Devices need not sync.  Desktop media management disappears, just sit back, and watch or listen.  The navigation of popular and featured content is a snap.  When (if?) Apple comes out with a qwerty entry device instead of the painful text entry process via the super-simple remote, we might soon easily explore the over 125,000 available subscription points within the podcast directory.

2. A download (finally!!) is a watch.  The untethered nature of prior RSS media consumption has many great benefits, but it also stymies attempts to answer the question:  how can you prove that a download is an actual watch/listen.  In a sense, Apple TV re-tethers RSS.  Developers will investigate whether Apple TV watches are distinguishable in server log so as to aggregate usage in a way that is meaningful to publishers, advertisers and other interested parties.

Is this a fraction of the pie of all RSS media usage?  Today it is a very very small sliver, and likely to grow, but unlikely to amount to the biggest portion of the pie any time soon;  the larger slices will comprise desktop and portable media usage for the foreseeable future.  But the usage data will open up a new revolutionary window into how many people are starting to watch and listen to downloadable media, on the couch.

Chris MacDonald

A listener wrote me recently with a potential solution: ask your audience to evangelize your show. It’s so simple, really, and I’m surprised more of us aren’t already doing it. We all know that we are creating content in perhaps the most engaging media type ever, and while we’re all busy here trying to figure out how to (properly) use that engagement for advertising dollars, etc., we can also use it to further our reach. If we simply ask our audiences to tell their friends about our shows, even going so far as to explain that you don’t *need* an iPod to view/listen, it could really help. If only 10% of the audience does it, and they each tell two people, and only half of all the people told stick around, that’s a 10% increase in listener/viewership. That’s huge!

Let’s not forget that our audiences are our biggest asset. Be sure to protect them dearly, and they will likely do just about anything to help you.