2013: Is Podcasting the Same as Radio?

0:02 Welcome to my Digital Life show for May twenty six, twenty thirteen. I'm Rob Greenley, and thank you for downloading or just clicking play off of my website at Rob Greenley dot com. This is episode two of the radio show. In this episode, I'd like to talk about the blog posts that I made here over the last week titled is podcasting the same as Radio? And I made this post and it seemed to have picked up a lot of podcaster interests on Twitter and Google Plus, and just wanted to expand on it a little bit on my new show that I've launched here. It's kind of an experiment, more of a personal show. But I can be reached at Rob at Rob Greenley dot com and that's r O B G R e E N L e E.

0:55 Or I can be found on Twitter at Rob Greenley, or in iTunes or on Windows Phone podcast Area, which I manage for a small company called Microsoft. On Saturday mornings, I also co host the New Media Show from nine am to about ten thirty am Pacific Standard time with Todd Cochran, who's the CEO of Raw Voice, Blueberry and is the creator of power Press plug in for WordPress. And you can certainly catch that show live every Saturday at live dot Geeknewscentral dot com. So let's go ahead and dive into what I was talking about in my blog posts. I've been hearing quite a few kind of broadcast radio folks have been recently kind of plugged into listening to what people are talking about in the broadcast radio business, and specifically, my ear has been tweaked to listening for commentary about podcasting, and I've been hearing a lot of those folks starting to, you know, kind of welcome podcasting into their kind of broadcast radio world, and I definitely see a lot of trends around that. I get a feeling like they're kind of maybe a little bit trying to co opt it and try and fit it into their world instead of really understanding what the differences are between podcasting and broadcast radio. And they were

2:28 commenting about how best to produce a podcast, and they're like creating these lists of the things that you have to do and how to best produce a podcast, and it's like, you know, I've been around podcasting for a long time, and I know a lot of people in this space that have been doing it a lot longer than a lot of broadcast radio people and have learned a lot over the years, and this topic really hits at a very core level of why radio and podcasting have not really been kind of more to each other and been kind of supported that the podcast community kind of shies away from the broadcast radio side, and the broadcast radio side tends to kind of shy away from getting involved in podcasting, and I think it really does get back to the fact that it's it's kind of a different culture, it's a different format. I think that the broadcast radio side tends to think that podcasting is kind of like not as professional as they are, and so they tend to put it in it's in a kind of a user generated content area, which in a lot of ways is accurate. I got the impression they're not really understanding why podcasting is significantly different than radio and it really is not the same medium. Lots of people have debated this issue and they've talked about why podcasting is is really just like radio, but it's not the same medium, and I have a couple of key points to point out of why it's not the same.

4:01 First of all, podcasting the content segment concept that is also part of broadcast radio is not normally related to a commercial break, so broadcast radio is broken up into pieces. I did a broadcast radio show for many years and had to produce it in like four to six different down to the second segments. Believe me, I know as well as anybody how to produce a radio show, and producing a podcast is not like producing a radio show. This show is a perfect example what I'm doing right now. I have a structured topics list of what I cover in the show, and it's very structured, but it's not structured down to the second. That's what is really different.

4:52 I used to have to edit my pre produced segments for broadcast radio down to the exact second. And I don't know if anybody in podcasting that actually records segments down to the second and then ads like exit music and lead outs and then comes back with lead ins and intro music and stuff. And that's exactly what I used to do, and it just doesn't It's not necessary in podcasting, and it creates a lot of disruption to the flow of the content for the audience. And that's why podcasting is better. We don't need to go backwards and make podcasting like radio, it doesn't have to be that way. Most of the ads and sponsor messages, and this is my next point, are best delivered as part of the flow of the regular content. Right, So, as you're talking about a topic like I'm talking about here, it's very easy to kind of roll into talking about a sponsor. So let's say I'm sponsored by Audible or somebody or GoDaddy or some sponsor, and they just deliver like maybe a twenty second kind of message about that sponsor and then immediately just kind of go back into talking about the content. Right. Well, that is done somewhat in broadcast radio. It's basically called a host read, and they do do that on occasion, but that's not where the majority of the advertising is played in broadcast radio.

6:25 So that's kind of like special deals that happened between the host of the show and an advertiser that they want to get deeper engagement, which really exposes one aspect of podcasting that's very powerful, and that's the host read aspect. And you see a lot of successful podcasters doing this, and it's cutting out this whole segmented advertising breaks in the content to just focus on the type of delivery that a sponsor really wants. You know, I did a broadcast radio show for a long time, and the advertise are always wanted a host red spot over any kind of thirty second spot. That's what their primary. So you're going after the sweet spot by actually taking that content and wrapping it very closely with the advertiser instead of creating a break right that you break the attention to the audience. The audience maybe goes off and pays attention to something else, doesn't even listen to the ad They either go to the kitchen, or they on broadcast radio, they'll just turn the channel, right. It's it's about being more personal with you with your audience. My personal experience is a well produced podcast do have structure, and that structure is led by the content like what I'm doing here, and very loosely timed in the program. Sure, you can have a target for how long you want your show to be, but even that doesn't have to be tightly defined right because the audience doesn't really necessarily care. Though

7:55 I did get a lot of feedback over the years with my own shows that are at their audience member would like your show to be fairly consistent in its length, not down to the second, but down to like maybe you shoot for like a thirty minute show each each week, or you shoot for a forty five minute show. If it goes forty minutes or it goes thirty five minutes, the audience really doesn't care about that, right, That's not what's important to them. But what's also important is being able to cover whatever topic and content that you want to cover, but also what you feel like you've completely covered for your audience. And if you produce your content to go after a certain period of time, then it's easier to make it all work for what the content producer wants and what the audience wants. And that's the key.

8:47 So there is no reason to hit a certain time clock, right. And the thing about program length is is that it doesn't have to fit a standard model like radio. Give the length what the audience wants. No one size fits all, and it can also be different based on genre. So if I'm doing a podcast or a show about you know, it's like the one minute Bible or something like that, well it better be probably close to a minute, right. But if I'm doing a show like this, what I'm doing here is giving my thoughts in my opinion, it can be a ten minute show or it can be a fifteen minute show. It really doesn't make any difference. The audience just feels like they need to get something out of it. This discussion that I saw happening in the radio broadcast side was that all podcasts have to be short. This one I really take offense too, because it is completely misunderstanding the medium. Broadcast radio does, in a lot of situations tend to be short. But you can't take that same model and just say that's what works in another medium, and that's exactly what this is.

9:55 It's fine to do a podcast at short, but my own experience is that doing a podcast that short doesn't have a lot of value in it, and it certainly doesn't have a lot of long term value. The whole question was, well, you know, if you do a long podcast, will anybody stick around to listen to it? Well, the truth the matter is that podcasts are about engagement. It's on demand medium. Typically, it's a more personal thing. People can start and stop this show, they can come back to it later. On broadcast radio when it airs, it basically airs and there is no repeat. Typically in broadcast radio. Now there are broadcast radio shows that do make their shows available as a podcast, but that's kind of rare. Really, the whole issue of podcasts not being caught up in this whole thing of that radio has of flipping channels, right, So that's the big thing that drives short content in radio is the fact that it's so easy for a listener to just change the channel, right, So they have to always be doing the hot, most popular thing at the moment, and it's always about here in the now, because if you don't do it, then you're going to lose them, right, You're gonna lose your audience. Well, podcasts are not like that. It's much more difficult for a listener to change the channel in podcasting because then they have to stop the episode. Then they have to go find a new episode. Though I would say that the future technology and podcasting will make podcasting a little bit

11:26 more like radio in like a sequential playlist type of scenario, but it will still be on demand medium. So I know, I've talked about this a lot. To kind of wrap it up here on this topic, podcasts and broadcast radio can coexist. There's strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the fence, and podcasts can live with broadcast radio, but they can't be thought of as the same production. Right in an ideal world, there are successful podcasts that are broadcast radio shows that does to be more on the public radio side, which coincidentally doesn't have as many ads or ad breaks. So I would say the public radio side follows a little bit more with the model of podcasting than commercial radio does, which has this really dense level of commercial breaks to kind of boil it down.

12:22 Both can coexist, but they're not the same medium, and that the broadcast radio folks need to dive in and educate themselves about how podcasting is different, and the podcasters need to dive in and learn some of the things that the broadcast radio folks can teach them around personality, around content, around how to be engaging and fun, and things like that which are very important to the success of podcasts. Now, I haven't brought a lot of fun and excitement to this podcast, but this is this is a fairly serious topic, and there's definitely room for serious topics and there's room for comedy topics. So I had a few folks online that are podcaster podcast consultants that gave some feedback on my article and my commentary here, and one was from mister Adrian Bacon. He says, I'll say the same thing I said on Twitter about this, No podcasts are the same as radio. They are two different but somewhat connected worlds. I definitely agree, and that follows along with what I said in the article. Daniel J.

13:29 Lewis who does the Audacity to Podcast podcast He always gets really annoyed when when even podcasters call their shows online radio or some variant of that radio is something totally different technically than podcasting. The only time I mentioned radio is when I'm explaining what a podcast is to someone and I say that it's it's kind of like a radio talk show. That's some of the feedback. And I certainly want to get your feedback on my thoughts here, and we'll mention it on the show like I just did. So that's it for this week, and I'm Rob Greenley and I'm the podcast guy for a Windows Phone at Microsoft, And again, thank you for listening to my thoughts here.

14:15 Please reach out to me and offer your thoughts on this topic and other topics that you think are important for me to cover. And you can reach me by sending me a tweet at Rob Greenley and that's r O B G R e E N L e E, or in the comments area of my roggreenley dot com comment area. And if you're a podcaster and you want to get your podcasts into the Windows Phone Podcast catalog, then shoot your feed to me at Podcasts and that's with an s at Microsoft dot com. And I'm also on Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Facebook, so look me up, or you can just email me Rob at Roggreenley dot com.

14:59 So thank you very much for listening, and I look forward to having you back listening to the show next week. Bye bye,