Sound Out Communications

People ask me all the time “so who’s listening to podcasts?”.

According to a new posting on a blog by The Association for Downloadable Media , more and more people all the time. The post summarizes the latest findings of Edison Media Research on the current state of podcasting.

They also confirmed a hunch of mine — that people who listen to podcasts are also on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites.

My job now is to discover more and more ways to integrate the two — multimedia and social networking. It’s already being done, as evidenced by the huge number of videos and photos that are showing up on people’s pages.  There are so many more possibilities that haven’t even been thought of yet.

I’ll keep this post short — all the info you could want is on the two sites linked above.

I am out here at Laurier Brantford University unpacking boxes of cameras, microphones, recorders .. oh, it is so much fun.

Going through packing slips, orders, trying out gear etc. are perfect jobs to do while listening to podcasts. So that’s what I’ve been doing. And I’m hearing a lot of things that sound good and sound not so good. Here are my best tips:

a) recording quality has been very good this morning — clear miking, solid voices, quiet room (even though the podcasts this morning are recordings of talks at a conference)

b) descriptions of sessions on the print part of the webpage are good — I know what it is I’m going to be hearing, and whether or not the subject appeals to me.

c) the subjects are something I want to listen to .. so even though the presentations are 45 minutes (some would say too long for a podcast), I’m here for the whole 45 minutes. That’s because I’m interested in the subject. If I was just browsing, I’d want something shorter.

d) okay, now some of the flaws — edit, people, edit! You don’t need to start your podcast with “can we all take our seats, please?” Cut out the pauses … I go even further and cut out the verbals tics (the ums etc.) It doesn’t change the content, just makes it flow better and increases the chance of holding your listeners for a longer time.

e) Questions from the audience — either mike them, or cut them out of the podcast. The one I am listening to right now has 45 seconds to a minute of dead air. And there have been about ten questions.  That’s a lot of dead air.  And an audience killer. There are lots of creative ways you can add the questions later if you don’t want to have a floor mike.

f) Pretty it up — not necessary, but a little bit of theme music really makes your piece sound professional. Likewise, leaving some of the applause in creates a “you are there” kind of ambience which can be quite nice.

There are many people out there who can do a good recording. When you’re considering hiring a company to do your podcasts, consider hiring a podcast PRODUCER, not just someone who can record something and post it to the internet au naturelle. It’s the equivalent of going out in public with no makeup … you still look good but wouldn’t you rather look sparkly?

Call me — for podcast production — and I can teach you how to put on your makeup ..

I’ve spent part of the day poking around to find out where the multimedia and podcast/vodcast content for NAB is hiding … it didn’t make intuitive sense to me that there wouldn’t be anything at all.

I listened to Tim Robbins — not on the NAB site — I think it must have been recorded by someone with a little recorder that was smuggled in.  Sound quality could be heard clearly most of the times though there were times when the crowd buzz obscured the words (tip:  if  you’re going to bootleg, make sure you’re near a speaker so at least you have half a chance of getting a decent recording)

And I did find some multimedia video presentations on the NAB site.  Most of them were 3:00 pieces, fast paced with short clips of people talking about various aspects of the show.  Well produced, of course.  After all, these are broadcasters with the latest tools.

I am listening to a videocast on Business on the Internet — comes up on my computer in Windows Media Player — mostly audio with an occasional slide to illustrate a concept, or put a person’s name on the screen.  Mostly audio with minimal video.

The odd thing is that I lost the page on the NAB site where all this multimedia content is located.  So I’ve watched once, I’d like to watch again but I can’t find my way back.  The main menu of the NAB site doesn’t make it obvious where the multimedia is stored.  Everybody tells me that the NAB conference is so huge that you get lost onsite.  But do I need to experience the same thing on the web?  Lesson to be learned:  if you’re going to spend all that money creating on-line tv and radio content, make it easy for people to find!

I’m glad my faith is restored by finding that there is at least a bit of NAB online content.  But overall, I am still disappointed that all the great sessions that I couldn’t go to are not available in podcast form.  Heck, I’d even pay for it.  But they’re not giving me the option.  That’s what I mean when I say the broadcast industry can’t spot an opportunity when they see one.  If I would pay to listen, I’m sure others would too.

I don’t know very many people in broadcasting who isn’t at least a little bit intrigued by the idea of going to the big NAB conference. NAB stands for the National Association of Broadcasters, the big trade association for broadcasters in the U.S. , mostly of the commercial kind. The annual conference is THE event of the year .. huge blowout with outstanding speakers, and anybody who is anybody in North American broadcasting and beyond is there.

In terms of conference locations, Vegas is not my first choice. But I sure would love to wander around the trade show and dream about all the great equipment I could equip my studio with.

Alas, I’m not in Vegas this week. So I thought I would go vicariously by going to the conference website. I was hoping I could hear or see some of the presentations online. Especially the keynote address by actor, director and activist Tim Robbins (Mr. Susan Sarandon, you know him?). I am listening to his address right now as I write. Curiously, I did not find it on the NAB website.

I do remember reading that the Robbins address was broadcast on the NAB website — but it was in Real Time. Just like television. It is not archived anywhere. Just like television.

Looking further into the NAB website, I noticed that there is a conference stream devoted to learning about podcasts. But still no podcasts on the NAB site.

At first I was surprised. But thinking about it, not so much. What I think we’re seeing is that NAB is giving the nod to the idea that podcasting and vodcasting exists. And because they understand basic economics, the conference organizers know that there will be people who will pay a registration fee to learn about podcasting.

Here’s my theory — in the mind of some broadcasters, podcasting is a threat. I wonder if the reason that there are no podcasts on the site is that they think that podcasting might go away if they don’t encourage it. After all, the commercial radio industry is a child of the music business .. where the response to all things internet is to either a) put their heads in the sand b) loudly proclaim the death of our society if people download music or c) scare everybody by dragging college kids into court for downloading music. The idea that you create a business model which works WITH the new technology still is something which hasn’t caught on in with either the music or the broadcast execs.

Getting back to the conservative nature of the radio industry — I remember back to a conference of Ontario commercial radio broadcasters I attended about 15 years ago. One of the presenters (not a broadcaster) asked the question “what was the best decade for your industry?” The answer. The Fifties. THE FIFTIES ??!!! That response boggles my mind. And what we’re seeing is a 1950’s response to a 21st century technology.

So maybe that is a reason why there are no podcasts on the NAB site.

I’ve still been able to hear a lot of the sessions by listening to bootleg NAB podcasts all over the net. Including the keynote address by Tim Robbins. So much for the Head in the Sand theory ..

I just got finished doing a consultation and report from a travel organization wanting to beef up their website and add some more dynamic content.

It was a lot of fun travelling vicariously through the internet. I won’t be travelling again until the fall .. these sites provided me a good excuse to dream about where I want to go next as I looked at the wonderful pictures, browsed places where I want to stay .. much fun ..

Overall, the site-specific places where I want to travel are the ones which have lively, fun content .. not just listings about places to stay and things to do a la your standard tourist guidebook you get for free in government travel offices. These can be useful too, but a lot of them are written in a way that they are purely informational.

The best sites for me are the ones who present material in such a way that they encourage me to see myself in the picture. The more evocative the words, the more brilliant the pictures, the more likely I am going to imagine going there. And of course I’ll have to go to my dream places to fulfill the fantasy.

The Bay of Fundy blog does this very well. It’s received several awards and I can see why. It has personality profiles, it has recipes, it has dynamic writing and pictures .. as I read and look at the pictures on screen, I can see myself on the top deck of the Princess of Acadia across the Bay heading to Digby. And it’s done on the on-site blog site Blogger, so it likely didn’t cost them much other than good writers and content providers.

Philadelphia travel site – This site will keep me coming back because it provides so many useful tools for me to use. This is a great example of a Mashup — contains a trip planner from Travelocity on the front page. Weather update from Accuweather.com. Contains a personal itinerary builder to enable me to plan and save trip details without leaving the site. With my own trip details stored in my own account onsite, I will return to the site every time I want to make a change. Encourages repeat business.

Many more ideas that I’ll return to later .. in the meantime, I wonder if there are some great interactive sites about Guatemala .. my next travel destination.

Just wanted to say a big thank you to workshop participants Julia, Flavia and Zak at today’s workshop “Inventive Reality”.

The success of every workshop that I lead doesn’t depend just on me .. it also depends on the commitment, the enthusiasm and the willingness of the participants to dive in and contribute to the overall groupthink.  This was a really great group and truly a pleasure to work with.

The focus of the workshop was creating innovative documentaries out of everyday experiences, and to merge objective facts with subjective impressions.  The way I describe this process is .. imagine what would happen if  you sent a reporter and a poet to the same event, put them in the same room and told them to come up with a piece in three hours.

Even though I am often cast in the role of “teacher” these days, the ideas we explored today reminds me that I am always learning too.  And that my own personal creativity also depends on the community of others who understand what I do, and why.

Thanks to New Adventures in Sound Art for hosting this workshop, and my friends Nadene Theriault Copeland and Darren Copeland.

Watch the NAISA website and this blog for details about Deep Wireless, Naisa’s Radio Art Festival which happens in May.

A couple of days I wrote a blog post about a great little starfish shaped diagram I saw here showing a whole bunch of different social media tools in a really organized way.

There are some I haven’t heard of yet. So in between podcast editing, I checked out some of them (a nice break from the editing out of two thousand “ums” .. amazing how much better these guys sound now than they did when I first got the files)

Here are some of the things I’ve found:

Eventful — Other than the event functions on Facebook, I haven’t really looked into what other apps exist to promote events. This is a site where you can find events around the world. If anybody bothers to upload them, that is. A quick scan of events in my own city revealed just 15 events .. all church choir practices. Gotta say, some of the churches out there have a better handle on new technology than you would think … potential for other groups if they started to use it … but so far the pickings on Eventful are pretty slim … I might use it if there was more traffic … worth keeping an eye on.

Ning — I heard of Ning through my buddy Wayne MacPhail a few months ago but really didn’t pay much attention. On first glance, Ning appears to be a Facebook kind of site but organized around specific interests. For example, Inked-In is a social networking site for writers and musicians. The main difference between Ning and Facebook is that it is subject-driven rather than personality-driven. There are ways for members to communicate with each other but the personal pages aren’t front and centre like they are on Facebook. Best analogy … Facebook is a bar where people go to meet each other. Ning is the same bar, but everybody’s in the bar for a poetry reading.

Zoho — this would be a useful if, for example, you were collaborating with several people in different places on the same project. For example, say I was working with several journalists on a story about … say, internet use in different parts of the world. Through Zoho, we could share research; plan an online conference to talk about what we’ve found; look the drafts of each others’ stories before they post them on our collaborative website; and many more things that I don’t have the space to get into here. I think it will even let us share radio and video programs that we’re working on. Great way to work collaboratively with your editor.

Do some of your own exploring … there’s so much more out there to discover!

I talked to a client yesterday for whom I’d done a series of podcasts. This was their first venture into podcasting.

So naturally, I wasn’t just interested in how they liked the production now that it was up, posted and there for the whole world to hear. I also wanted to know what their stats were saying about traffic, what kind of feedback they were getting from other organizations in their community, supporters etc.

The client is a non-profit organization which focusses mainly on research. The biggest challenge of the assignment was that a lot of the research they generate is intended for policy makers, academics and others who are already “in the know”.

Yet they also wanted to reach a new audience. And like most communicators these days, they are still figuring out who they want to reach who they’re not reaching already.

What I had to do was help them imagine who those people might be. As the process continues, so do the questions.

One of the things that they’re wondering about is the impact on their traditional audiences … who tend to be older. This is a big question in social media … what do the traditional audiences want?

The perception is that Social Media is a young person’s game. And I think there’s something to that … but not entirely. Especially here in Canada. Interesting statistics from a presentation at Podcamp a couple of weeks ago. The presenters, Colin Smillie and Roy Pereira, did an excellent presentation on who’s on Facebook. Regardless of whether or not you dig Facebook, the trends they demonstrated say a lot about where social media is going. It’s one of those bellwether applications … Facebook really shows the way things are heading.

They compared Facebook use in Canada to the US and Britain. For the Brits and the Americans, the demographic is skewed towards the under-35’s. But not in Canada. In Canada, the demographics came out pretty evenly among the three age groups — youth, mid-career and 50-65’s.

Canada has always been a country quick to adopt new technologies (and create them too … no coincidence that our country is a world leader in both communications and transportation). We have an instinctive knowledge how to bridge distances.

The evidence shows that we are quicker to embrace new technologies. So, what I would say to my client is not to assume that none of those older folks are listening. There are probably more out there than we think. Especially if they’re trying to reach a Canadian audience.

That’s one reason to start doing social media. Because we know that there are a lot of people already participating. The other reason is to start exploring now. That’s what this is — an exploration. Social media is very new. We don’t know what’s around the corner.

But we do know that the internet is here to stay. We know it’s not the same internet as it was in 1998, and it’s not the same internet it’s going to be two years from now. The trendy applications right now aren’t going to be the same in two years either.

But here’s what we do know:

a) the internet is here to stay

b) it is changing the entire media landscape

c) it’s a “call and response” medium — think of the difference as a southern Baptist church service instead of a traditional Catholic Latin mass

d) television, radio, newspapers, magazines and the internet are converging

e) there are more people going to the internet now than there ever have been before .. and that upward trend is going to continue.

So jump on the learning curve now. It’s the best way to start to answer those questions about who you want to reach and how you want to do it.

No, we don’t have all the answers. We’re all still figuring it out. And what is really clear .. those who are figuring it out now have the advantage over those who say “I’ll do it tomorrow”.

Mike Kujawski of Public Sector Marketing 2.0 has come up with a really great little diagram showing all the Web 2.0 tools he’s found, and what kind of tools they are.  His diagram looks like a friendly little starfish with an even dozen arms — each arm represents a different type — photos, video, blogs, wikis, audio, sms and probably a few you haven’t heard of.

What’s better, each arm also has links to all the cute little names of things you haven’t found out about yet .. everything from Twitter to Digg, Ning, Zimbra … all the major players in one tidy little sea creature.

You can find it at  http://www.mikekujawski.ca/2008/03/05/social-media-explanatory-diagrams-and-statistics/

Thanks for your hard work, Mike!  There are a few apps there that I don’t know about yet!

Those of you who have known me for a while have known me primarily as a radio person. And, like most radio people, I have been watching the steady and speedy advance of the internet and wondering what changes it is going to mean for us whose hero is Marconi.

The response from a lot of radio people, and most notably, the corporate owners, has consisted of the usual handwringing and doing things that haven’t changed what we do. The most common adaptation has been this — put up an internet audio stream of the existing signal .. and to put up a website with the same information that is on the air. Essentially the response has been, stay with what works. Don’t change the product.

The problem is, the current way of doing radio doesn’t work. That’s why we’ve seen so much consolidation of ownership .. the way to make it work is to cut back on expenses by bundling up four radio stations together. Because individually, they’re not generating enough revenue to generate the profits that the owners want.

It’s a far cry from the little town radio station that made enough money to get by, where the owner lived in the same town. But old time radio is passe, done, history, right?

Maybe not. I am hearing more rumblings now that radio as we know it can carve out its niche by becoming once again what it used to be .. local. And personal.

Old time radio has much to teach us. In the “golden years of radio”, stations responded to their local community. They understood that a radio wasn’t a jukebox.

The stats are showing now that people aren’t going to radio stations to listen to music. The people who are really into music are going to the internet. Why? Because they don’t want somebody else choosing their music for them.

So with the music audience gone, who is listening to radio now? I was talking to a friend of mine who has sold radio ads nationally almost as long as radio has been around. He told me that it’s the office listening crowd that is keeping the ratings up.

Think back to the last time you listened to radio at work. How much attention were you paying to what was coming out of the speaker? Not much, right? Background music. And it’s only a matter of time before advertisers clue in to the idea that their expensive ads are also background sound.

I can’t understand why some people react to change by insisting the sky is falling and then retreating into a bunker to wait for the apocalypse. The world is not going to end for those far-sighted radio owners who understand the strengths of RF based radio.

I have a few ideas … and a lot of them relate to the idea that the radio transmitters that survive are going to be broadcasting material that matters to people in their own city. They want to hear the voice of the person down the road, not some computer. They won’t be turning on the radio to hear the newest releases from the music machine in New York and London. The internet will have it first.

What they can’t get from New York and London is the guy down the road who can talk about things on the way to work. Who can talk about what the weather is doing. Who somehow has a connection with the place where they live and work.

I have always believed that people don’t go to the radio to hear music. They want to hear the voice that can talk to them about the music. The key is, they want someone to talk to them. If they just wanted to listen to music, they’d pop in a CD. Or download.

When I was managing CFMU at McMaster University, our slogan was “Redefining Radio”. It’s still their slogan .. and I hope many stations also take up that challenge. Because if radio is going to survive, it needs to redefine itself …

and maybe we don’t have to invent something totally new. Maybe we just have to look back at what we were doing 75 years ago …