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The day after The 2nd Canadian National Day of Podcasting
Transcript:
Today is the day after the 2nd annual Canadian National Day of Podcasting day and I think it’s a good opportunity to offer some thoughts about podcasting after 4 years of podcasting myself.
My earliest memories of podcasting were listening to two shows back in April of 2005, which was when Apple first began supporting Podcasts in iTunes. The two shows, both of which are still with us BTW, were Coverville, a great covers only music show and the Canadian Podcast Buffet.
I remember the first show and how fearless Bob Goyetche and Mark Blevis were talking about posting regularly, episodes that promoted Canadian podcasting. In those early, heady, days I hadn’t heard much at all about community and I found the concept pretty exciting. The CPB had a great combination of rough around the edges “let’s put on a show in the barn kids” can-do attitude as well as a good natured humor that kept me coming back every week.
We’ve been through a lot since those frontier days;
search engine optimization, file formats, controlling our media, equipment choices, content and format decisions and personal branding to name a few. Monetization… don’t hear as much about that anymore.
And now that corporations and broadcasting giants have virtually sucked all the air out of the podcast space with their deep pockets, we can wonder just how relevant podcasting is now, in regard to the single person. do it yourself. show.
I think it’s still relevant for people to produce and post their podcast because
creativity – encourages
personal growth – achieve
community – create
professional skills you can develop
__________ your idea here
But it’s hard work and that’s easily demonstrated by the number of shows that have fallen by the wayside over the years. For me, the struggle from the very beginning and the reason behind my late entry into this medium in 2007 has always been because of content.
There’s the major tension for me in the production of podcasts, screencasts videocasts. It’s all so time intensive to set up and maintain the platform your content sits on, to market yourself and develop a community. All of that effort eats into the time it takes to write, record and edit the thing you’re podcasting about.
It’s a snake eating it’s tail kinda thing.
Producing podcasts, and everything attached to it has been a great experience for me. It’s given me a reason and a platform to realize my imagination. It’s made me excited about creating videos and telling stories. It’s even motivated me to blog!
As a result I feel more self confident, I have developed an extended community which in turn has led to meeting and getting to know a lot of people I wouldn’t otherwise have known.
My own little world has become much roomier.
But I still have this problem with finding the time and making the time to produce content (is there a better word than the content? It’s such a brown boxy, indifferent word to use when you’re talking about the products of your imagination).
For the most part, the things that I can make and put online, short of a blog (and frankly, writing a decent blog post is no simple task itself) are very time intensive. I’ve gotten the production level up since I started, but that has only increased the time it takes to complete a well polished project or a post. And every sacrifice to quality that I make in order to meet a deadline hurts. I create the deadlines myself of course, but I’m imagining the expectations of my audience, I don’t want them to feel abandoned.
I wonder how long I can sustain this tension between content production and community.
To a certain extent a sense of obligation to my subscribers guilt’s me into posting on a regular basis. If I was a gallery artist or a potter I would be focusing on content production in mass quantity. Get a bunch of work done in a single creative burst, then, focus on getting it in front of people’s eyes, or ears.
I don’t have that worked out with podcasting yet. With all the things going on in my life podcasts tend come out of my mind one at a time. That’s also due to the very personal format I’m following, which is stuff based on whatever interests me, as opposed to a format like a talk show or an interview show. This very episode is a perfect example. I got the idea late at night November 30th. I wrote it up the following morning and then had to put it aside because my life got in the way. Finally I recorded it this morning, 8am Friday December 2 before work and finally posted in the afternoon a day later that I had planned.
It seems to me, if you’re community building through your podcast, you need to tend to your audience like a garden – that’s just another part of production process. That process squeezes out all the time you need to think creatively.
And it sort of forces a no-profit media producer into the same box as a for-profit media producer. All the responsibilities but none of the benefits, such as money, and a team, clear goals and a market strategy. In television or radio, relying on the audience to find the show is not a plan for success. And to be fair I think any podcaster who cares about their audience and community is going to feel that pinch.
So you have to produce content, attract an audience and manage expectations as far as consistency, quality and content is concerned. How long can any one individual continue to do this kind of time intensive work for little or no money? Where’’s the incentive, the payback?
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Well, social credit seems like a fair return for all this effort, say, as an alternative to getting money for return on your time. I believe you get more leverage and more value from social credit, in the long term than you do from money. (you can talk among yourselves for a few minutes)
And I believe you can never have enough friends
At the same time, If I’m honest, I would have to say I’m a wallflower type person, the kinda guy who hung back and winced at the roar of the crowd. I stayed in the safe anonymous shadows at the school dance, if I was there at all. My social skills managed to bloom later in life but I still prefer small groups over crowds of any size. For me podcasting is about the discovery.of ideas, my own abilities, talking to people of like interests but also people who have very different interests and amazing ideas. That’s what I get from podcasting
I’m not really a leader looking for followers, but while I like being a part of a community, I’m not a follower either.
This is just me thinking out loud and as usual it generates mostly questions. Are there any conclusions I can offer?
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I think creating podcasts will continue to be appealing to individuals as well as a much used medium for large media companies. It’s accessible, it has many outlets, you don’t need to be a technical person if you have YouTube. And you don’t need to learn marketing if you create a Facebook page. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough. If you need more control then you’ll have to face your own conflicting goals. In the end, you only need a few people to provide enough feedback in order to create a community and feel satisfied.
