Creating good podcasts
Posted on May 13, 2008 by tracyplayle in Podcast, PR PracticeI love reading updates from Mashable – the social networking blog – and their posts often provide content for my own blog posts for all the right reasons. Sadly, though, today they’re forming a blog post for all the wrong reasons. I decided while grabbing a quick bite to eat this lunchtime to delve into their post ‘For the Love of Podcasting‘ and listen to a few of their podcasts. I was really disappointed. I can see they’re aiming for a certain style and tone to these podcasts, but the attention to the quality of production is poor. The introduction is rushed, the sound quality is very bad, they don’t tell you (from what I can see) how long each podcast is, and the presenter doesn’t sound particularly well prepared. This is such a pity because the content should actually be quite good, and is certainly appealing, but the quality really put me off of listening beyond the first 30 seconds or so of each one that I launched.
So, while podcasts are a form of communications that you can produce yourselves, there are a few basic tricks really worth following in order to make them just that little bit more friendly on your listeners’ ears:
- be prepared for your podcast. Have a plan (this doesn’t have to be a script – in fact, it’s sometimes better if it isn’t scripted) of what you are going to say and what you might ask the person you are interviewing
- check correct pronounciations of names, and check job titles of the interviewee before you begin recording
- always log the length of the podcast for your listeners to know just how much time they need to put aside to listening to this
- slow down your speech just a little so that what you are saying is clear
- wherever possible, conduct interviews face-to-face. Using a telephone line isn’t ideal but it can be okay if face-to-face or ISDN interviews just aren’t possible
- invest in decent recording equipment
- edit your podcast. It’s well worth spending just a little time cutting out some of those ums and ahs or even full questions and answers that just haven’t quite worked to make the podcast flow better
- CIPR members should also check out Karen Ainley’s guide to podcasting for PR in the member area of the CIPR website (under PR guides).
I think this sort of podcast is following the gillmor gang model of a recorded conference call. Unscripted, unedited, stream of consciousness.
This gives it an authentic conversational voice and is thus the best sort of post-cluetrain PR ! Not to mention a feel that you are eavesdropping on the phone conversation of tech ‘insiders’.
I tend to listen to this sort of thing in the background as I work on other things. 90% of it I tune out but there are often little nuggets of gold in there that switch the brain into listening mode.
http://www.cluetrain.com/
http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/
That’s a really valid point and I certainly wouldn’t disagree at all that one of the real advantages of podcasting is the opportunity to capture that authentic conversational voice, as you say. It’s one of the things that makes it such a powerful medium afterall and I really do believe that the conversational approach is best – I could stand to listen to anything too scripted. That would be just cringe-worthy!
We can find nuggets of gold in even the most badly produced podcasts (or anywhere for that matter!). My real objection is partly when the sound quality is so bad that sadly you don’t stick around long enough to hear them. I think the content has to be really alluring to make me want to stick around when a) I don’t know how long the podcast is going to last, and b) the sound quality makes it difficult to listen to.