Inside Chris’s Head

I was in Dallas on business last week and I have the good pleasure of getting together with Cali and Neal from GeekBrief.tv. Cali and Neal are getting ready to head out on a year long road trip (August) in an RV called the Big Trip. In addition to adding a new travel show for the Big Trip they have decided to shoot a new video show called “On Location” where they will interview bloggers and podcasters. As long as I was in town they shot the first episode of the show interviewing me about the Amateur Traveler podcast, my day job and whatever else the people in the chat room on ustream were asking about (besides “who’s the dude?”).

Popularity: 9% [?]

If you have ever been in a foreign country you have probably had a conversation similar to this:

“You are from California? I have a friend in California, maybe you know him!”

We always laugh when this happens because California has roughly 30 million residence and is larger in size than many countries (it is about the same size as Japan).

But if you had a conversation where you told someone you belonged to a particular church, graduated a specific high school in a given year, or had worked at a small company you would not be surprised to have the same conversation. What is the difference? The difference I would suggest is that a high school class is a community but California is not.

The point my seem obvious but I am surprised that this point of view does not always carry over to the internet. I was listening to the latest live call-in show for the excellent podcast For Immediate Release when I heard a caller express a comment that people should get involved in a community like Facebook. I am not trying to pick on Shel and Neville for their excellent show, but this comment mirrors an understanding of Facebook and similar sites that I have heard expressed on many occasions.

Facebook states in their press area that they currently have 70 million active users which is more than twice the population of California. Facebook and the other social networking sites host a great number of communities but are not communities. My daughter is a member of numerous communities on facebook like her college classmates and high school classmates. My son has many of the same high school friends but is attending a college all the way across the country. Their college communities don’t overlap. They are a similar demographic of course but demographics do not a community make. I also belong to facebook but my facebook friends tend to be podcasters and Amateur Traveler podcast listeners. I could try and befriend all my daughters classmates (creepy) but I would be treated as what I am, an outsider.

The distinction here is important. Many people confuse a community with a website or with a set of features. But communities are people. They are people who share something other than bandwidth. They share values, or experiences or interests. I have seen a number of people find no value in facebook or other social networking sites until they realize that they can use it to reconnect to their high school girlfriend or college roommate. They don’t find any value in it until they find community.

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As I was recording and editing the Amateur Traveler podcast this week I took the opportunity to document the process using the new ScreenFlow application on the Mac. I skipped a bit as I spend 6-8 hours creating the show and the total video here is 15 minutes long but it should be long enough to give you an idea of the work flow.

The Amateur Traveler is a weekly audio travel podcast that is heavily edited (for polish usually not for content). This particular episode was Episode 131 - Walt Disney World. I use 4 main programs to create the show: Skype, CallRecorder, Levelator and GarageBand. The choice of GarageBand will clue you in that this show is created on a Mac, specifically on a MacBook Pro. This episode was a little more work, not just because I was trying to record it and ScreenFlow was unstable (with my experience I would say that ScreenFlow is Alpha quality software, it caused my whole computer to crash a couple of times) but because I had significant audio problems with Skype including one hang up.

part 1:

part 2:

equipment:

Plantronics DSP-400 Digitally-Enhanced USB Foldable Stereo Headset
Apple MacBook Pro

software:

Skype (free)
CallRecorder ($15)
Levelator (free)
GarageBand (free with Mac or $70)

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Michael Geoghegan (who hosts the Official Disney podcast among other things) is stirring up the podcasting community again (like the good friend who comes over to your house for an intervention) with an article titled “Podcasting - It’s a Community Not an Industry“.

I agree that “this is the year that podcast advertising takes off” seems like the slogan every year. At each of the last 3 Podcast Expos there was a meetup group about monetizing podcasting. The first year the group was just Paul Colligan and I and it has grown over the last two years. My feelings back in 2005 was that the whole ad selling process was harder than people realized based on my experience during the dot com boom at an advertising supported company. My guess at the time, as I recall, was that it would take 5 years for podcast advertising to take off. I signed with PodShow in 2006 in part because I did not see anyone else out there that I thought would do a better job and I thought they would help me grow my audience. A lot of people thought a potential 3 year contract was way too long, but I was pretty sure that I would be done with the contract before things really took off in podcast advertising anyway.

Part of the problem is that the whole advertising industry needs to change and that is only slowly happening. The money going into television is not proportional with the value that advertisers are getting from that media. The agencies actually know this now and a number of companies know this as well now. GM just announced that half of their budget next year ($3B) will go to the Internet. I would love to say that all of that will be for podcasting but that would be naive. I think that GM’s decisions is the beginning of a good trend but also of a period of instability and upheaval within the advertising industry.

The other unrealistic expectation that Michael did not touch upon was that advertising will pay based on what influence do you have and who do you influence. I have known people who have quit their day job to podcast when they have 50 listeners. That might be a good plan if you have a podcast heard by 50 billionaires.

When I was selling advertising on my own i was getting a $50 CPM for advertising on the Amateur Traveler podcast. But people spend more money online on travel than any thing else and my audience is not just composed of travelers but they are the people their friends ask for advise about travel (one of my listeners in Istanbul told the story her friends keep asking how she knows so much about different destinations) so many podcasts should not expect rates at that level. So best case, even if I was able to sell out advertising every week, traffic of 80,000 downloads a month would pay me $4000 a month or $48000 a year. My wife and two kids are all in private college so that would not be quit your day job numbers for me. And as Michael points out, podcast are generally not selling out ad inventory every week.

So is podcasting done? I don’t think so. Is it taking off slower than most people expected? Certainly. Will some companies go through hard times? I think so (see the rumor that PodShow is doing layoffs). But I also see some positive signs.

• The audience for podcasting is growing. Dollars will eventually follow the eyes and ears.
• Well known brands are starting to get more regular advertising by big brands, at least in my sector of podcasting which is travel. If advertising comes to podcasting on a regular basis we should expect it to come first to podcasts from old media. I expect that advertisers will start with the people in their rolodex until their is more demand than supply and then they will branch out to the larger podcasts and then they will look at aggregation of smaller podcasts. This is what I expected in 2005 and what I still expect in 2008. Of course, I also still expect that 2010 is the year podcast advertising will come together.

My plan is continues to continue to grown my audience and keep podcasting… for now at least. My plan is not to quit my day job… for now at least.

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It occurs to me upon listening to a number of podcasts (I subscribe to around 100 podcasts) that many podcasters dabble with failure but never really fully embrace it. It seems like even the worst podcast has something that someone somewhere would value. But what, I wondered, if we combined the worst part of the worst podcasts. What would such a podcast sound like? Why would anyone even think like this? That I cannot answer but I can picture some practical applications if one really could devise the Titanic of podcasting (although even the Titanic had survivors). Say you wanted to quick podcasting and you did not want to ever have anyone ask you to return to it. This is the podcast that you would put out as your last episode that would cause the thought of you podfading to cause people to send you flowers and chocolates. So without further excuses, here is the recipe, in my opinion, for the world’s worst podcast.

Key Goals

• Practical - Don’t be
• Entertaining - Forget it
• Content - Avoid it

Sound Quality

Sure you could use a bad microphone, a noisy conference call service and the tried and true method of mumbling, but we these may just produce emails about your how your sound quality stinks. I used to record interviews on the same track as my guest and channel Dark Vader as I did heavy breathing over my guest talking and my show still grew. So to really fail we need to push the envelope here.

• Uneven Sound Levels - One particularly practical suggestion is to have an interview show with the two channels at vastly different sound levels. I don’t mean that one of the guests is hard to hear, I mean that even the dogs in the neighborhood are not sure that sound is coming from their iPods. Then you want that speaker to have long and presumably interesting monologs so that the user is tempted to turn the volume up, way up, “this one’s got eleven” up. Then when you have lulled them into thinking that this is the appropriate volume setting slam them with the loudest talker. Some shows (think Today in Podcasting) have actually reached sound differentials that can cause your ears to bleed. This is our goal.
• Clipping - A bad microphone is unimaginative, You can achieve much more annoying sound by simply setting your sound levels high enough that every unexpected laugh, sneeze or bilabial fricative (and we are going to want to do a lot of this) will clip in painful eye crossing ways.
• Drop Out - Don’t just make the sound quality bad. Make it bad at the worst possible time. “The secret to a six figure income is mumble pop squeak pop mumble”. “Wow Bob that’s incredibly simple. Anyone could do that!”

Pre-roll Ad

Clearly if we want to cause people to unsubscribe in droves we need to start with a preroll ad. We need to start with a long pre-roll ad. Ideally this ad needs to be totally inappropriate and offensive to the audience. We are looking for something here that makes the PodShow “Suck Less” campaign (one minute long) to become a fond memory. Think about the audience for your show. Annoying is easy but we are looking for rage or disgust. Have a Rock and Roll show? Consider a fund raising ad for the “George W. Bush Presidential Library”. Have a serious business podcast? Sure you could go with a Viagra Ad but people have been desensitized to such fare. Find words the repel like “bowel”, “sphincter” and “welfare state”.

Schedule

Of course you could skip a show or two and then spend the first 5-10 minutes of the next show apologizing or explaining just why your life is so busy, but who hasn’t done that. Try releasing two shows within an hour and then talk about the first show a lot in the second show since many users have iTunes and have it set to only download the latest show… then skip 4 weeks.

Intro

Your intro is very important. You have the listeners attention. Now is the time you want to lose it. Don’t be in any particular hurry to finish the intro. I know a show that extended the intro of their show, the part that was pretty much the same from show to show, to fourteen minutes. Fourteen minutes before they got to any real content. Can you do fifteen minutes? Tell them your email address, your blog address, what software you use to run your podcast, what cereal you had for breakfast and why, throw in an ad for “Go to My PC”. Don’t be entertaining. If you can’t help being entertaining then try the same jokes week after week. Script this portion of the show and try and not say this with any sort of personality.

Show Length

If your show is too short then you are not adding enough pain. Do people listen to your show at 30 minutes? Double it. Are this still listening at an hour? Double it. Don’t add more content, just add more time. Say things. Say them over again. Repeat them a third time. Insult your listener’s intelligence. When you are absolutely positively sure that even their toddler riding in the back seat of the mini van must understand your point by now, then dumb it down and say it again. Then repeat it again next week. Assume every email compaining about your show length is a complaint that you are not explaining sufficiently and explain it again. Don’t put in chapters in an iTunes enhanced version. That would save people’s time. Don’t just waste people’s time, waste lots of it.

Humor

Humor should be avoided at all costs. If you find this impossible, only use inside jokes that you never explain, preferably that defy definition. Some people fail to be truly awful because they try and make the humor offensive. This is a trap you should avoid. Never assume that there is a joke too low to stoop for. Someone out there likes that kind of humor. Some try and make the humor in their show impenetrable. That is also a trap. Someone will understand your joke about Attaturk or Micronesia. So again your best bet here is avoid humor or just beat the same shtick again and again.

Edit

Never never edit your show. Distain it. Insist that podcasts are not the same as main stream media. Shuffle your notes, take a bathroom break, stutter, Editing a typical half hour interview and you could easily remove 5 minutes of useless content, don’t.

Show Ending

If you have done your job correctly it won’t matter how you end your show. You could give away a free car to the first person who sends you an email and still keep the car.

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