Reports from the Asylum

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Transcript:

FIR 500

This is ”˜Professor’ Goetsch reporting from the Spectacular San Francisco Bay Area offices of the Podcast Asylum with my thoughts about what Shel and Neville will be discussing in the next 500 episodes of For Immediate Release.

I have no idea what the hot technology of the day will be when we reach Episode 1000—though I do hope we’re not going to be talking about Twitter in every episode between now and then. If Twitter sticks around, I’d like it to move into the background, like e-mail, and become a tool people take for granted and say “Remember, when Twitter was first introduced, companies wanted to block that.”

I do think that the broad outlines of the show will continue to be the same, though, because whatever new communications tools appear, we’re going to see some companies using them well and some companies really putting their foot in it. And there will be early adopters wanting to keep the whatever-sphere “pure” and non-commercial while others want to jump in and “monetize” as quickly as possible.

I think we can confidently expect to hear Shel say “New media don’t kill old media: old media adapt” a few more times in the next five years.

We might even find out whether he wins his bet about the persistence of print newspapers.

How to Celebrate

Now, here’s what I’d like to suggest everyone do to celebrate Episode 500. First, if you’ve never left a comment before, leave a comment.

Then go out and tell someone about FIR. I think we could easily double the listenership overnight if we did this. That’s not just a nice thing to do for Shel and Neville, but a service to anyone who’s interested in PR, communications, marketing, or social media. I sat next to a professional communicator on my last flight to Cleveland, and she was very keen to hear about FIR when I mentioned it in a follow-up e-mail. Heck, I got “Best Answer” on a LinkedIn question for pointing someone to the recording of the panel with Mark Ragan about how to convince your boss to use social media.

So go forth and spread the good news!

”˜Professor’ Goetsch, signing off.

Podcasting links for October 24th through November 9th:

• How to Create a Storyboard for a Podcast | eHow.com –
• The Savvy Author’s Guide to Podcasting –
• Mediafly: Digital Lifestyle –
• The $816 CPM Story – #BWE09 –
• twaud.io – Audio for Twitter –
• We Podcasted Today! So, Did you Learn ANYTHING? –

If you have somehow escaped listening to For Immediate Release in its nearly five years of production, now is the time to make up for that lack. Shel and Neville are about to produce the 500^th episode of their stellar podcast about the intersection of business communications and technology.

If you have any interest at all in social media, PR, internal comms, and the impact of new technology on old technology (such as  newspapers), you need to listen to this show. And I’m not saying that just because I record contributions for it now and then.

Go on over to the FIR website, listen to an episode or two, and leave a comment on the blog or call the listener comment line. Congratulate them on producing 500 episodes, and tell them ”˜Professor’ Goetsch sent you.

Podcasting links for October 15th through October 23rd:

• Novels by podcast: how to make money from ‘free’ –
• Podcasting for your Business: Interview with Chuck Palm : Inbound Marketing Strategies, SEO, Social Media Marketing –
• Phonecasting, a rising trend in mobile communications? : CloudRecruiting.net –
• Podcasts to Be Eligible for National Magazine Awards – NYTimes.com –
• How to Host a Great Podcast | paulgillin.com –

Podcasting links for October 7th through October 14th:

• Why would you do a podcast? – Unlearning – Education 21st Century Style –
• How to Create Screencasts You Can Be Proud Of » The Rapid eLearning Blog –
• 6 Steps to Professional Podcast Publishing –
• Are Only 10% of Podcast Downloads Consumed? @ scouta blog –
• Leo Laporte Rakes In $1.5 Million A Year Podcasting –
• The model of the new media model « BuzzMachine – Leo Laporte's Online News Association 2009 speech

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I intercepted Jenka Gurfinkel and one of her colleagues from EWI Worldwide after lunch and got their impressions of the AdWeek Social Media Strategies 2009 conference. Apologies for the background noise: we were sitting at a picnic table in a parking lot next to the harbor.

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Today’s Report from the Asylum is brought to you by Podcastus Moriturus, and well it should be: the topic is the latest outbreak of this syndrome, Leo Laporte’s claim in his keynote for the Online News Association that podcasting is dead and a combination of 24-hour live streaming and TV set-top box delivery is the way forward.

The main points of this report are as follows:

• While it’s absolutely true that finding and subscribing to podcasts is more complicated than it should be, you can listen to or watch most podcasts without even owning a portable media player, never mind knowing how to transfer files to them.
• Leo Laporte nets more than $1 million per year from the TWiT podcast network. His subscriber numbers might have plateaued, but that’s different from saying the medium is dead.
• Live streaming is just what some of us embraced podcasting to get away from. It’s not just the timeshifting factor, either: production values invariably improve if you don’t go out live.
• TV set-top box delivery is only valuable for video podcasters.

This report is included in For Immediate Release episode 490.

Podcasting links for September 22nd through October 6th:

• 9 Successful Techniques for Making Money from Podcasting –
• The business benefits to podcasting – KOAM TV 7 Joplin and Pittsburg News Weather Sports | –
• Podcasts: New Twist on Net Audio – A post from 2004–one of the earliest sightings!
• Mixcloud – Re-think radio –
• Creating podcasts for your workforce on a $200 budget | Article | Internal Article –

It’s been months since Michelle Rafter interviewed me for The Geek Weekly, so I had entirely forgotten about it by the time today’s article, ”˜The Business Benefits to Podcasting,’ appeared.

It’s possible that the timing of this particular article has something to do with Leo Laporte’s speech at the Online News Association conference on October 2^nd. (You know, the one where he said podcasting is dead because it’s too hard for listeners—that’s known as ”˜linkbaiting’—but simultaneously revealed that he grosses $1.5 million annual from his This Week in Tech podcast network.)

Funny, that sounds pretty healthy to me. Healthy enough, in fact, to provoke people into the very get-rich-quick delusions I warn people about in my interview with Michelle.

Yes, the first thing that happened to me after I picked up my press pass at the Social Media Strategies conference last week was that I got interviewed. The Social Media Marketing crew was still figuring out where to set up, as you can see from the people who keep walking in front of the camera.

I obviously have no clue how to be interviewed on video, because you never see my eyes. (Okay, yes, it was 8:00 in the morning and I would have been looking directly into the sun. That’s no excuse.)

Later in the day I interviewed one of the SMM team, president Jun Loayza. When I finally manage to edit my eight hours of raw audio files into an hour-max podcast episode, you’ll get to hear it.