Simon van Wyk recently chatted with podcasting queen Susan Bratton who’s the co-founder and CEO of the highly successful Personal Life Media, Inc. a podcast publishing company producing 15 weekly audio shows and companion blogs on personal growth, relationships, longevity and spirituality for people on the leading edge of culture. Their discussion covers social media and using podcasts in marketing.
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Have you got something to say to your customers? Simon van Wyk writes about podcasting.
One of the most attractive things about online marketing is that, although you can spend a fortune on your online activities, you can also achieve a lot by spending very little.
Podcasting is a great example of this. A podcast is essentially a radio show that can be downloaded onto a customer’s computer or MP3 device so that they can listen to it at their leisure. It’s that simple. You can buy the necessary equipment for less than $200, download free software and do it yourself (though many companies hire a studio to get perfect sound levels).
You don’t hear a lot about podcasting because it’s not as sexy as TV advertising, but it is turning out to be the quiet achiever of Internet marketing.
The Pew Internet Project reports that more than 12% of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, nearly double the figure from a year earlier. Radio measurement firm Bridge Ratings reports that more than 10 million people in the US are listening to podcasts, a number predicts will climb to more than 60 million by 2010.
The iTunes Podcast Directory has been growing nearly as fast as its music collection and now has more than 20,000 podcasts listed, while another podcast directory, Podcast Alley, lists more than 1 million episodes, up from less than 1,000 in 2004.
Online media distribution network Feedburner has more than 150,000 podcast and video feeds listed on its site and tracks more than 1.6 million podcast subscribers, a figure that has doubled in six months.
Great for small business
Podcasting offers all the benefits of radio broadcasting, with a host of added features. Unlike broadcast radio, you can choose what you want to listen to, when you want to listen to it, and in the format you want.
People will listen to a show that they have a definite interest in even if it takes 30 minutes or an hour. This means companies can reach a worldwide audience that has a narrow focus of interest in their topic.
Podcasting is being used to convey the latest updates about products and services, and to explore business trends in an industry.
Some podcasters are interviewing clients and leaders in their niche area about a specific subject that is of interest, which creates credibility and awareness.
Podcasting has a lot of traction with small business. The top podcast directories list more than 700 podcasts whose focus is small business, including content from such mainstream media companies as The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Time.
The vast majority of the podcasts available are provided by small businesses themselves  authors, consultants, technology companies and others who all want to serve the small business audience. Tools and production values (good sound quality, prepared hosts, entertaining format) is improving all the time.
As well, larger businesses such as IBM, Disney and many others are using podcasts as a marketing tool to reach a larger number of audiences that are not defined by geographical boundaries.
Does podcasting work?
It’s hard to measure the direct impact of podcasting on company revenues, but the growth in podcast advertising is a good benchmark. Research firm eMarketer reports that companies spent $80 million on podcast advertising in 2006, and it predicts this to grow to $400 million a year by 2011.
Another figure to keep in mind is the growth in distribution of devices that can be used to listen to podcasts. Leaving PCs and laptops aside, it is estimated that there are more than 100 million iPods in circulation, and more than 300 million copies of iTunes have been downloaded. More than 120 million MP3 players and 300 million MP3-enabled phones will be sold this year - and not everyone wants to listen only to music on their MP3 player, phone or iPod.
That’s not to say that if you simply build a podcast that they will come. Technology writer Charles Rubin says, “Don’t just take what you’re doing offline and move it online in the hope that being there will somehow make people stand up and cheer.” This applies to podcasting, as well – people will only respond to a podcast if it is entertaining and relevant.
John Havens recently published a guide to podcasting on About.com, where he writes that clever podcasting is all about building trust. “A business has to communicate trust or it will lose relevance to customers,” he writes. A podcast says to customers, “I’ve created material I thought would be valuable to you and am delivering it via a medium that allows you to check it out when it’s most convenient for you.”
Havens writes that “you’ve got to share that message in an entertaining fashion to distinguish yourself from competitors and prove to your audience that you care enough about them to help them maximise their precious time. So now you’ve also got to back up your message with actions that ring true for your audience.”
Will it sell?
As is the case with viral marketing, a quirky podcasting idea, well-executed, can have a huge impact for a small investment.
One of my favourites has been the efforts of Blendtec, which has created a series of video podcasts that have proved to be an enduring hit on YouTube.
Blendtec decided to market its industrial-strength blender to the high-end consumer market. Marketing director George Wright visited the company development lab for inspiration and when he arrived there was sawdust all over the floor. When he was told that came from churning up blocks of wood in the blender to test the Blendtec’s pulverising power, the light bulb went off.
He produced an in-house video showing the device blending a can of Coke (including the can) and a chicken, and put it up on YouTube. The response was overwhelming, and the video was soon followed by ones showing the Blendtec turning marbles, golf clubs, cubic zirconia and tiki torches into mush. The most popular video has been one of the Blendtec turning an iPhone into carbon dust, which has had nearly four million views.
Sales of the US$400 blender have increased five-fold since the videos first appeared on YouTube. Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research writes in his Groundswell blog that the Blendtec strategy works because it’s funny, visually arresting, short and authentic (the videos’ host, in goggles and white coat, is really a Blendtec engineer).
He advises other companies to “figure out what your unique value is, film it and put it up there. Find something that connects to the value of your product. You see these videos and you can’t help saying ‘Can that blender really do that? Maybe I should get one.’”
Well-targeted podcasts can create new and loyal customers who form beliefs about your brand’s ability to fulfil their expectations. They can prove to be timeless ambassadors for your business.
Simon van Wyk is founder of HotHouse Interactive.
One of the joys of the iPod revolution is that an amazingly high number of people now sit quietly on public transport, with white earplugs jammed into their ears.
A couple of years ago they had a phone stuck to the side of their head while everyone around them could hear half of a private conversation. They’ve still got their mobiles, but now they hold them in front of them while they text, their heads slowly bopping to the music.
Their information-gathering is personal my music, my conversations with my network. A few years ago (before mobile phones), most people on public transport would read a newspaper. Today, newspapers are something read by (shudder) old people.
On those odd occasions when I take public transport, it seems to be a quieter experience these days. One of the joys of the iPod revolution is that an amazingly high number of people now sit quietly on public transport, with white earplugs jammed into their ears.
A couple of years ago they had a phone stuck to the side of their head while everyone around them could hear half of a private conversation. They’ve still got their mobiles, but now they hold them in front of them while they text, their heads slowly bopping to the music.
Their information-gathering is personal my music, my conversations with my network. A few years ago (before mobile phones), most people on public transport would read a newspaper. Today, newspapers are something read by (shudder) old people.
There has been a seismic generational shift in the way people gather information about the world. A recent survey by the Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics & Public Policy asked Generation Y people under about their relationship with the news, and concluded that they don’t have one. They don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch TV news or listen to news radio, and they’re not even reading much news online.
Academic David Mindich writes that a survey conducted back in 2003 found that even back then the median viewer age of CNN and network TV news had risen to about 60 years, while only 11% of listed news as a major reason for going online.
Falling through the news
As a result, it is no surprise that pundits such as Veronis Suhler Stevenson predict that the Internet will surpass newspapers as the biggest advertising medium by 2011.
So where is generation Y getting its news and information? They’re not browsing for it anymore, via traditional newspapers and TV news broadcasts. They’re searching for it, looking it up on Google.
Patrick Spain, CEO of Highbeam Research, was quoted recently in Vanity Fair as saying that the rise of the Internet has altered the basic news metaphor.
That metaphor used ever since newspapers rose to prominence during the Industrial Revolution, continuing from print to radio to network television to cable television has been the concept of the inverted pyramid, or the front page: give people the important info first.
Now, Spain says, the metaphor “should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests.”
That same article quotes wiki software maker Joe Kraus, who says, “The old media model was: there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out.”
In the words of David Sifry, founder of blog search engine Technorati, one-to-many “lectures” (i.e., from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into “conversations” among “the people formerly known as the audience”. This former audience has changed from being consumers to ‘prosumers’, a term coined by futurist Alvin Toffler back in 1980.
Matthew Allen from Curtin University, who is currently president of the international Association of Internet Researchers, says that the biggest impact of the Internet has been to create a new media audience, with three key characteristics:
Interaction is the new content: as opposed to the previously dominant processes of creation, distribution, reception or discussion of content
Distracted and fascinated: the rise of user or audience behaviours that embody much greater levels of engagement with media, while at the same time reflecting an attitude in which users are easily distracted
You can get it for free: media consumers understand that while some media and some information must be, should be and often is paid for, that equivalent, similar or better media and information products can be obtained at no apparent or extra cost
Getting with the program
Unfortunately, news organisations are struggling with these changes, and many are responding by circling the wagons and trying desperately to defend their turf.
Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank, wrote an article recently where he called on journalists to stop reading their own newspapers online and start buying more subscriptions to the paper version in order to save their profession.
Ironically, he published his article on the Poynter Online website, not in print, and in true new media fashion he was roundly criticised by professional colleagues who posted hundreds of comments on his piece. As one of them pointed out, his call to action was like Kodak begging its employees to buy more film-based cameras to fight off the threat of digital imaging that didn’t work, either.
The other response of traditional news organisations to the Internet has been to, as Michael Wolff writes in Vanity Fair, “shovel their paper or broadcast content online, which is something like filming live theatre and calling it a movie.”
However, examples are emerging of media organisations taking up the challenge of the Internet and adapting their thinking to fit the emerging new model.
A key part of making the transition from traditional news to new media thinking is to understand the Internet “not as a publishing phenomenon but a social phenomenon,” according to David Weinberger, Harvard lecturer and blogger.
The rise of ‘citizen journalism’ is an example of this. Many media outlets, from community newspapers to national networks, are encouraging readers to submit stories, photos and video which are published under their brand. It’s highly interactive and flexible (we won’t talk about how much money they save on trained journalists).
The addition of journalists’ blogs and entertainment and food review lists to news sites is an obvious way of encouraging interaction. But the really interesting work is happening with people prepared to think outside of the box.
For example, US writer and educator Kim Pearson is working with a computer scientist to create a Web-based content management system with a back-end interface that allows storytellers to populate a database with clusters of content, along with a script that organises the content elements into multiple story lines.
Pearson says that this will “allow journalists to create immersive, multi-threaded non-fiction narratives. Readers could “wend their own ways through the stories of the protagonists of a complex tale such as Hiroshima amid a dynamic tableau of sites, sounds and contextual data about the city and the atomic bomb that felled it. I’m not talking about clicking through a Web site – I’m talking about fully realised stories, with character development and a clear, evocative narrative.”
In a less earnest vein, a concrete example of interactive story-telling is The Great Turtle Race. Set up by a group of scientists and writers, it followed the trek of 11 leatherback turtles from their home in Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands, a pilgrimage they make each April.
Sporting animated maps with up-to-the-minute updates provided by satellite tags on the turtles, the team set up a series of blogs, MySpace pages for the turtles (one turtle gathered 232 friends), video and charts, etc. It even had a business model: companies including a Chinese tyre manufacturer paid $25,000 each to sponsor a turtle. The money paid for the satellite tags and went into a fund to buy parts of the turtles’ nesting beach.
As site editor Jane Stevens said, “Fifteen years ago, if I had done a story about the plight of the gigantic, ancient Pacific leatherback turtles, 90 percent of whose numbers have disappeared over the last 10 years, it would have appeared as a 4,000-word magazine article.” Instead, The Great Turtle Race site was visited by more than 650,000 unique visitors.
Stevens argues that “explanatory science journalism in particular can use games (in this case, a race) and social networking, as well as multimedia storytelling to provide useful and engaging information.”
Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future predicts that the online media revolution will bring about a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity, the new media equivalent of the burst of new species that flourished 530 million years ago.
Look for more of these types of sites to develop as this new story-telling medium evolves.