While those under 40 tend to embrace podcasting whole heartedly, that’s not necessarily true of the baby boomer crowd. In fact, if an informal poll of people I meet at networking events is at all accurate, the majority of baby boomers haven’t ven
tured into the world of podcasting at all – in fact, most have never heard of it.
So what is podcasting?
According to Wikipedia (the online encyclopedia), “A podcast is a digital media file, or a related collection of such files, which is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers.”
Translation:
All those young people (and increasingly older people as well) walking around with headphones plugged into a little device are using what is known as an iPod (if made by Apple) or some other brand of mp3 player. You probably already know they are used for listening to music. What you may not know is that iPods can be used to listen to other types of audio – and increasingly video. These audios may be billed as an online class (teleclass) or an online radio broadcast or podcast.
Individuals or businesses may create one-time podcasts for download from their website. If they are producing ongoing podcasts they will offer listeners the option to “subscribe” to the podcast via RSS – just like you can subscribe to this blog via the orange RSS subscribe button on the upper left of this page. Subscribers get notified whenever there is new content. They can then download the content to their iPod and listen on the go.
Why should you consider creating a podcast? Three reasons:
- Traditional broadcasting by radio or television is very expensive – out of reach to many small businesses. It is also hit and miss – if your target audience isn’t listening when your advertisement runs, you’ve missed them. Additionally, these media formats are rapidly losing market share to online media.
- It is becoming increasingly difficult to reach customers by email. Even legitimate email can disappear into forever into the receiver’s spam filter. Podcasts distributed by RSS bypass email entirely.
- People are becoming increasingly skeptical of obvious marketing messages. By creating a podcast of useful and entertaining information, you are building trust with your audience. You are giving them a chance to get to know, like and trust you in a very risk-free way. And because podcasts allows listeners to hear your voice, you stop being an anonymous business and become a living, breathing person.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about different ways to use a podcast in your marketing.
Andrea J. Stenberg
