I reported recently on an ITWorld.com article that listed five reasons businesses should consider podcasting. One of them was that podcasts encourage two-way communication with listeners. Specifically, according to the author James Lewin,
Because podcasts are built on RSS 2.0, the lingua franca of the blog world, podcast content is easy to subscribe to and blog about. This encourages other publishers to add their meta-comments about a podcast.
Because podcast feeds are often built with blog-tools, they frequently support comments and track back, which encourage a two-way dialog about the content. This two-way conversation is important, because it creates 3rd party content about your podcast, and encourages links to your content.
I’m inclined to agree with Lewin’s observations, particularly in light of my own experience with “For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report.” So I was intrigued when Rebecca Leib, executive editor of ClickZ Network, wrote in an article titled WhyPod? that podcasts are flatly one-way:
Podcasts offer zero interactivity. Once downloaded, a podcast is an audio file-plain and simple. Nothing more, nothing less. The subscriber can listen. She can’t click, fill out a form, or navigate elsewhere.
Right. And, of course, you can’t click, fill out a form, or navigate anywhere when you’re in your car or walking your dog, but you can listen to a podcast. And because the podcast presumably is narrowcasted to your interests, when you’re back at your computer, you post something about it on your blog and include a trackback, post a comment to the podcast blog, send an audio file, call the comment line, or email the podcaster.
Neville and I often spend half of our show talking about issues raised by our listeners. It’s not a real-time conversation by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s definitely a conversation. While the podcat itself may well be nothing more than an MP3 file, in the context of the social network of which it’s a part, it is definitely an interactive tool.
Leib also suggests that marketing podcasts need to be more professional than the amateurish podcasts produced by individuals. “A low-rent approach doesn’t work for every brand.” I see a difference, though, between “a low-rent approach” and an authentic human voice that doesn’t sound like a professional broadcaster. GM cars are a pretty significant brand, but Deb Ochs sounds like a regular person when she conducts the Fastlane podcast interviews.
Leib makes a few other questionable statements. Quite correctly, the notes that podcasts are RSS-distributed feeds to which listeners subscribe. But she goes further: “Real podcasts don’t stream, nor are they individually downloadable, single files.” Really? “For Immediate Release” is a real podcast. It’s available by subscription through our RSS feed, and we hope more and more of our listeners will access it that way. But our statistics indicate most of our listeners download the MP3 file. Heck, even Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” is available for download. And recently, we’ve added a Flash-driven streaming player that lets anyone listen to our podcast directly from our site. Leib seems to want to have it both ways. It’s either a plain old MP3 file (which allows you to do with it whatever you will) or it’s not. To qualify as a podcast, you have to be able to subscribe to the feed, but there’s no rule that says you must limit your podcast to an RSS subscription.
Another point Leib makes:
If your podcast is high in informational value but lacks other audio bells and whistles, such as music, interviews, celebrity value, or sound effects (particularly if the audience is business-to-business), you may be better off with text.
Again, I don’t think so. It’s easy to dismiss the value of the sense of sound, but there’s just something about hearing a real person rather than reading their words. And, again, if I’m in my car, I can’t read anyway. “For Immediate Release” isn’t the only podcast that is largely just a couple guys talking. One of the most popular podcast out there is Dave Winer’s “Morning Coffee Notes,” which features Winer talking, coughing, sniffling, and making a host of other sounds. Even if your podcast is business- or marketing-focused, all you need is an interesting person with something to say to make it worthwhile. (Which is not to dismiss sound effects, music, and interviews, of course.)
Despite all this, Leib’s overarching point is a valid one: Don’t podcast just because you can. Make sure you have a strategy that supports it.
Links: ITWorld.com
Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.
As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.
