Corporate Podcasting Part 2

Thanks to Connie Crosby for making a slide presentation of the main points of our Corporate/Organizational Roundtable at Podcamp.

You can see it here

Audio Slideshows

I’ve had a lot of conversations with video documentary producers who teach. A couple of them have told me that their students don’t even get to touch a video camera until second year. During the first year, they are given still cameras and audio recorders and the assignment is to do a high-quality slideshow.

This isn’t just a good teaching technique … it can also create some really great products that stand on their own.

An example of a media organization that is doing this very well is the San Francisco Chronicle. They have a whole collection of Audio Slideshows.

What I really like about the audio slideshows is that it both a high quality listening and viewing experience. There is something really engaging about sound which is only loosely tied to the pictures. What it creates is an experience that flows out of one element and into another without the sound and pictures needing to be tightly anchored to each other.

And because the pictures don’t move, I can concentrate on the image more than I do when the image is constantly moving somewhere else. It also creates many possibilities for evocative audio … the soundtrack of the slideshow on the San Franscisco site stands alone as a great listening experience. Some of the soundtracks are every bit as good as some standalone radio pieces I’ve seen.

There are a lot of good reasons for organizations to do audio slideshows.

From a practical perspective, it provides another opportunity to use the excellent still photography produced by an organization’s photographers. Why use them just once?

It’s a widely accepted principle that one of the strengths of radio and sound is that the listening experience creates an intimacy with the listener that visuals alone can’t. But it’s also widely accepted that people want to see pictures on the web. So you can entice them with the pictures and then you can talk to them, creating a bond between your audience and your people that will be memorable.

Audio slideshows are easier to produce than full motion video. It’s a great entry point for the people in your organization who want to start to do multimedia for the internet. (I agree with my colleagues who teach documentary … move them into full motion video gradually .. there’s already enough bad video on the internet). And you can get going without any special software .. both Windows Moviemaker and IMovies will do the job well enough to start.

Slideshows take less bandwidth. Many of us still have clients out there either on dialup or in countries where high speed isn’t very speedy.

I like it. I’ve started doing some audio slideshows myself .. stay tuned.

Victoria the Corporate Podcaster

I just received a post from George Motoc, a person who attended the panel discussion done by Donna Papacosta, Wayne MacPhail and me at Podcamp. (thanks George)

The workshop was a round table on corporate/organizational  podcasting .. the challenges, the opportunities.  George did a great summary of the things we talked about.  I will post a written summary at the end of the day after I’ve done a bunch of client work.

For your listening pleasure, you can find the podcast here:
http://georgeradio.podomatic.com

In case you’re wondering why I’m not reposting the podcast itself here … it’s because I haven’t done the necessary upgrades yet to be able to do it here.   Some of you might know that wordpress.com has pretty basic functionality.  My goal is to get this blog moved over at some point another service that provides more bells and whistles.

Still researching that … and while I do that, I’ll enjoy working with text and images .. just like the way we used to.

My Weekend at Podcamp

My brain is full.
I just spent the weekend at the Toronto edition of Podcamp.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Podcamp Phenomena, it’s time to become familiar. There’s a lot you can learn and also a lot you can share.

Podcamps happen all over North America. Five or six generous and intrepid organizers find a location. They launch a Podcamp Wiki where just about everything is organized online. You register online, you volunteer to do a session on-line, you find out all the conference logistics online. You’re even supposed to print off your own nametag and schedule (though realistically, most people don’t)

And everybody does workshops for each other. It’s based on the premise that everybody has something to share, and most people want to share. So what we had was a whole smorgasborg of workshops with some very amazing people.

I did a workshop myself called “Soundwalking and Creative Listening”. The reason why I did it was because a) I had something I wanted to share and b) I wanted to meet more people who might be interested in what I do.

I also ended up taking part in a couple of other people’s sessions — Donna Papacosta of Trafalgar Communications did a roundtable on using tools like podcasting in a corporate/organizational environment. And I was also invited by Glenn McKnight of the Energy Conservation Society of Ontario to join his panel at a session about Greencasting .. podcasting for the environment.

What is amazing about Podcamp is that it is a tangible demonstration of how on-line communities are built. Many of us know each other from our various on-line communities. And we’ll know even more people at next year’s Podcamp.

It shows that Social Media works, and that the philosophy of cooperation rather than competition is alive and well. So good to see that the old kind of thinking (”I can’t tell anybody what I’m doing because they’ll steal my idea”) is becoming outmoded …

More later on some of the individual sessions … and my progress in finally understanding Twitter.