Thoughts on brands leveraging podcasting as a medium

A while back I gave Twitter Forrester’s POST treatment as a handy-dandy cheat sheet for brands considering entering the medium. I’ve decided its about time I did similarly for podcasting. After the jump you can expect the treasures of podcasting to be uncovered in front of your very eyes (or some such…).

People

• What audience does the brand want to appeal to…
• Customers?
• Prospects?
• Industry and thought leaders?
• Employees? (for larger corporations with a geographically disparate knowledge base podcasting can can be used as an internal comms medium to great effect)
• An effective branded podcast should know which audience it wants to target and then provide content that serves their specific interests (and needs…in a very loose sense)

Objective

• The brand’s objective(s) will be very much informed by the audience it wants to target; once that has been decided the brand should consider the following in forming its objective(s):
• When setting objectives brands need to remember that the quality of the content is of paramount importance. Theaudience don’t want a hard sell (they probably don’t even want a soft sell). What the audience want is great content – if your brand can provide this then your audience will associate you with a given topic or interest and see you as a voice of authority and it is in this area that objectives should be set
• It is imperative that a brand knows what content will best serve their chosen audience. Without a clear idea of what this content might be the podcast will fail
• To this end then, a branded podact must pick a topic or audience interest around which it will produce content
• Furthermore the brand needs to know it has access to enough content to fuel a podcast – this means developing a release schedule: if you can only produce enough content for a podact once a month; don’t commit to a weekly podcast!

Strategy

• Decide whether your podcast will be an audio podcast, a video podcast or a screenflow* podcast – this might well be informed by budget and available content
• It is important to consider distribution methods – obviously using RSS is key but having an on-browser player (and pop-out player) are pretty key too
• Call ton action: it is important that each podcast has a call to action. This might be an implicit or explicit call to action
• How will the podcast be measured? Downloads give you an idication of success but not every download equtes to a listen; more and more ‘dwell time’ is being used a measure of engagement (i.e. how long, on average, your audience spent viewing/listening to your conten) NB: this only works for content streed online (not downloaded content)
• It is important to let people know your podcast exists using any number of social media and advertising tactics (I won’t go in to these here but it is crucial that people know about and are driven to your podcast)

Technology

• Online: in browser
• Offline: on mp3 player, mp4 player or mobile phone
• Set up an RSS feed to ensure the audience is automatically sent the latest episode
• Run a blog in parallel to the podcast which provides a synopsis of the episode, links to anything mentioned in the podcast, possibly een the transcript of the episode. All of this will improve your podcasts SEO by making it more ‘findable’

And there you have, ladies and gentlemen, some introductory considerations for any brand thinking about getting involved in podcasting.

*Screenflow = a narated slideshow of images