Notes on Good Podcasting
Podcasting for Hearts and Minds
by David Hoffman / August 12, 2024Hanging out at our company booth at the Bridge Conference in Washington D.C. last week, I noticed an almost overwhelming trend amongst the other exhibitors. This is an annual event that explores the intersections between fundraising and marketing in the nonprofit world; the attendees are largely executives from charitable organizations looking for ways to spread their message and secure more donations, and the vendors are all selling services and/or software that they believe can help do that. Strolling around and checking out the other booths, I saw that the vast majority of the solutions on offer were about efficiently upscaling […]
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Complexity Makes Podcasting Essential
by Oliver Cox / August 5, 2024Podcasting is necessary for companies with complex ideas to share. To survive and thrive in marketing today you must embrace your complexity and successfully communicate it to the world. This means, firstly, that you require a medium that can capture both the detail and people’s attention. Secondly, to utilize that medium to its full potential , you need a creative team that can reckon with and package the complexity of your company and your ideas into something special. The Law of Requisite Variety The “Law of Requisite Variety” is a concept from the field of cybernetics. Cybernetics is much misunderstood: […]
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Choosing the Right Podcast Hosting Platform
by Candice Chantalou / July 29, 2024If you’ve so much as dipped your toes into the world of podcasting, you know there’s more to it than just hitting “record”. One of the most crucial steps is getting your podcast out into the world, which means selecting the right hosting platform. With the growth of podcasting as of late, the number of podcast hosting platforms has grown exponentially and while it may seem like you can just point and choose, understanding what each platform offers can make all the difference. Here’s how to choose the best one for you: DistributionHosting platforms serve as your podcast’s HQ, enabling […]
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Dead Podcasts Society
by David Hoffman / July 15, 2024Here’s a statistic for you: somewhere in the neighborhood of 3.2 million podcast series have been published and remain available for listening. Of those, 44%—nearly a million and a half—published fewer than four episodes and then stopped forever. It’s heartbreaking, really—all of that enthusiasm to begin, a promising idea, then poof… done. It’s particularly sad because a new podcast cannot get real visibility without a critical mass of episodes. Many of these series presumably shut down because they didn’t show the momentum their creators wanted, but without a more substantial start there was no way for that momentum to build. […]
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Podcasting Isn’t a Technology Problem
by David Hoffman / July 8, 2024A lot of people want to start a podcast these days. And who can blame them? Podcasting is awesome. It’s a tremendously powerful medium for both self-expression and brand building, and also remarkably easy to get started in. The minimum equipment required is simple and inexpensive and the publication platforms are totally open. Drop a few hundred dollars on a microphone, some editing software, and a hosting subscription and bang! The rambling thoughts you recorded in your closet are available to the world, just like that flashy show the big network spent half a million dollars on. Not surprisingly, this […]
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Podcast Marketing Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All
by Candice Chantalou / July 1, 2024I recently attended The Podcast Show in London, an event busting with a mix of indie podcasters, industry professionals and everyone in between. It was organized chaos as I navigated through a sea of booths and talked shop for two days straight. I attended sessions focused on audience growth, metrics, current trends, and more, and a common theme emerged during every Q&A session: both seasoned podcasters and newcomers alike asked, “What’s the best way to market my podcast?” I heard a range of responses from podcast marketers advocating SEO strategies and social media engagement to salespeople pitching ad placements and […]
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Automation, Deepfake, and the Death of Podcasting
by David Hoffman / June 24, 2024Like the rest of the world, the podcast industry is currently obsessed with artificial intelligence. AI-driven start-ups are springing up like weeds, watered by millions in venture capital. Every day brings a new piece of AI software, three new AI-driven functions for every piece of software you’re already using, and five articles about all the AI software that is yet to come. Honestly, it’s to the point where it’s hard to talk about anything else. I was at a networking dinner last week where the topic was specifically banned, and so of course it was all we talked about all […]
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Content Marketing for the Uninitiated
by Anna Van Dine / June 17, 2024There’s a monthly magazine called The Furrow that’s been published for more than a century. It contains stories about farmers and farming, along with useful agricultural and business information. It’s something you might be likely to read if you were a farmer—which is exactly why the tractor company John Deere puts it out. This magazine is an example of something called “content marketing.” This is a phrase you may have heard before – and even if you haven’t, you’ve encountered it in one form or another. It’s the concept that brought us the Guinness Book of World Records, the Michelin […]
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Is There Any Such Thing As A Video Podcast?
by David Hoffman / June 10, 2024On one hand, that’s a ridiculous question. Of course there is. There are tens of thousands of video podcasts, with more published every day. On the other hand… no. There really isn’t, and there really cannot be. This is a paradox, and I believe it comes from a fundamental divide in the podcast community: two groups of creators with very different definitions of what a podcast is and what it is for. To find an answer to this question, then, let’s look at each of these groups—who I like to call “The Roganites” and “The Glassians”—and see what we can […]
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The Great Unanswered Question in Branded Podcasting
by David Hoffman / May 31, 2024While more companies and organizations are starting to see the potential power of a branded podcast series, these projects very often do not succeed. They are launched with great fanfare, but then fail to find a real audience and are soon abandoned. Frequently, this is because of a single, crucial question left unasked at the beginning of the project. That all-important question is this: “How do we make this good?” This may seem childishly simple and uncomfortably subjective – who am I to say what someone else will think is good? – but for a podcast series, the meaning of […]
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