Podcasting: The Curse of Convenience

I recently gave a talk at the New Media Expo on the efficacy of podcast advertising and some additional data on the makeup of the audience for downloadable media. I concluded that talk with three points for my audience to ponder (and if you were there on that Friday afternoon, I’m honored and grateful you came.) The last point generated more talkabout than the first two, so I thought I would expand a bit here on what I meant by the curse of convenience:

Lots of folks came up to me afterwards to chat about this one! Here was my point: Downloadable media represents a solution for consumers who want to control their media and be the programmers of their own personal media experience. It’s one of the reasons I am so bullish on the space: regardless of the penetration and uptake of the word “podcasting” (which we currently have at 37%), the desire to listen to what you want, when you want and on whatever device you want will soon be ubiquitous. The “convenience” of podcasts is clearly a big selling point–why be tethered to a television set or a radio at a specific time and place when I can take content with me and consume it when I want? Kind of a no-brainer.

So, yes, the “convenience” of your podcast is a feature–even a benefit–but my point here is that it isn’t the feature you should lead with. What you should lead with is how incredible your content is, and why, even though it is available to be listened to at anytime, it should be listened to now, or at least on the day it is released. There are two very compelling reasons why:

1. If your content can be consumed any old time, then it is easy to put off until later–or never. In other words, given a choice between something that is time-sensitive or has some kind of urgency attached to it, and something that doesn’t, the squeaky wheel gets the grease every time. I find that there are a lot of podcasts in my iTunes repository that simply go unlistened to or unwatched because they get bumped to the back of the line behind more topical content. If there is no need to listen to a given podcast now, then it can often fall victim to the urgent.
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Audience Evangelists

Last month I had the pleasure of participating in the Mac Podcaster Meet-up at Macworld Expo. We had a great discussion (as Matt was so kind to mention), and one of the points we touched upon was that many of us “long-time” podcasters haven’t seen much subscriber growth in the last 12 to 18 months. We developed our audiences early, and subscriber numbers have basically stayed the same. This means our attrition matches growth almost exactly, and nearly all of us on the panel were seeing it.

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!

Radio Academy Podcast: Future of Radio

On 15th January in London, UK, Radio Academy Director Trevor Dann hosted a seminal event about podcasting.

The panel included Nathalie Schwarz from Channel 4, Matt Wells, Head of Audio from Guardian Unlimited, Sarah Prag from the BBC, and noted independent radio / podcast producers Hermeet Chadha and Karen Pearson. The session covered many issues around podcasting, including definition, production values, regulation, culture, expectations of both listeners and viewers, metrics, and the commercial realities of making podcasting pay.

ADM member Dean Whitbread from Talking Voices and the UK Podcasters Association takes part in the question and answer session in part two, talking about video and the Association for Downloadable Media initiative.

This is a two part podcast of the event.

Part One
Part Two

I’m a New Media Producer not a Podcaster!

I recently attended the “Podcast and New Media Expo” in California and the issue of using the name “Podcasting” was up for discussion again, however, this year some speakers went to the length of declaring “Podcasting is Dead”. Perhaps supported by the fact that for next years Expo, the term “Podcast” has been dropped from the show title – it’s just the “New Media Expo”.

Now this is nothing new as the topic of “Podcasting” terminology was actually brought up in Leo Laporte’s keynote from last year, when he suggested that the name “Podcasting” was bad for the industry.

Since then, negative connotations with “user generated content”, the detrimental effect of not having Microsoft fully supporting podcasts (although this seems now to be resolved at least for the Zune 2) and the general misunderstanding that podcasting was only available on iPods, all seem to have validated Leos suggestion on calling for a terminology change.

However, last year his voice was a solitary one and despite him re-branding his shows “NetCasts”, the rest of us were happy to soldier on under the banner of podcasting.

With this years Expo however, the tide seems to be turning.

How to Search Engine Optimize Your Podcast

Building a loyal audience is the goal of any online media creator. To do this requires a steady stream of new listeners to your content. Search engine traffic is powerful since the visitors are targeted and you incur no cost to bring each one to your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of practices for raising the rank of your site and web pages in the search engines for relevant keywords.

Podcasting requires some specific “best practices” to increase the search exposure of your audio, video and RSS content. Here are five tips that are sure to increase your traffic.

1. Accompany Audio and Video Content with Text

Search engines look at the content of your site to decide which keywords are relevant to your content and which phrases you will be listed for. Currently, search engines such as Google don’t index audio. That means they have no idea what is said in the audio or video files it find on your sit. For this reason it’s extremely important to include text content that can be indexed and listed in search results.

Including “show notes” is one obvious way you can do this. Each episode should have its own post on the blog with a description of the content that includes relevant search keywords. An easy way to get the entire content of each episode indexed is to post a transcript to your site as well. You can find a transcriptionist on Elance or you can also give CastingWords a try.