To Podcast or Not to Podcast? Stitchered Up, and How to Create PR in the Spoken World

Podcasting is not only moving into the corporate branding arena, but is becoming a consumer lifestyle platform, and what a platform it has become. On March 19th of this year, Edison Research released The Infinite Dial webinar which suggests that there are currently over one million different podcast series and episodes out there. Apple Podcast is still the dominant distributor of podcasts and has over half a million active podcast shows including content in more than 100 languages. When I launched SPEAK|pr, I had to be mindful of any ambition for where the podcast could take me, and I am enjoying it and appreciate the feedback I receive in producing the show. When podcast listeners are surveyed, they say that they are primarily listening when in transit with 22% of people listening in the car. Listening at the gym or home tends to happen less, possibly because there are other mediums to log onto, watching, or doing, and the third place people are tuning into podcasts is at work. True crime and comedy happen to be the number one and two most popular genres.

There are a growing number of distribution platforms; while I am hosting this podcast on Apple podcasts, it is also going out through Stitcher, Podbean, and Spotify. When I host on Buzzsprout, it manages the hosting and then distributes the podcast to the other platforms through an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. Stitcher alone has over 100,000 independent podcasts listed on their platform, and last year they had 6.8 million episodes published. Interestingly enough, the top seventeen shows in 2010 are still in the top 100, possibly even the top 20. This shows that longevity is one of the keys to doing anything in podcasting if that were to become one of your plans. A separate report shows that episodes are getting shorter. On average, episodes are going down by approximately two and a half minutes, which suggests a trend towards either extremely short or extremely long-form content. The listeners, depending on what you are working to promote, appear to be in the eighteen to thirty-four age bracket, which represents the largest number of listeners. However, it's my age group, from thirty-five to fifty-five that are more dedicated in terms of the number of listening hours, as well as the number of shows that we add to our favorites. Generation X likely acts more as browsers while leaning towards other mediums, and then there are those of us who see podcasts as an alternative to radio. 

Podcasting is becoming a narrowcast for specific interest areas. Stitcher CEO Eric Diehn said that the data found in their report, which has just been recently published, shows that the unique appeal of podcasts makes its fans the most loyal and passionate of any medium. This prompted my interest, because I had recently watched a man named Finn McKenty on LinkedIn who shared an infographic of an inverted triangle. What this showed was his highest followers of 200,000 on Youtube gives him the lowest engagement, even though he puts out the most entertainment. On Instagram, he has 35, 000 followers, and his LinkedIn podcast has 10, 000, but receives the highest engagement, and produces the most information on the podcast and LinkedIn platform. What McKenty is saying is that podcasting enables us to create intimacy, as well as an understanding.

Public relations is about understanding and helping people's perceptions to be aligned to our view of ourselves, which seems to relate well to what Finn McKenty has shown us about podcasting. Public relations is about getting depth out of a story, which is why we like to try to have interviews, and having long-form articles published gives texture of what the company is doing - this makes podcasting a fantastic medium to be using. Stitcher reported that Monday through Thursday is the prime time for people to be listening, which mirrors the idea that most people are listening when commuting between work, home, the gym, or any other place. According to a statistical report, South Korea leads consumption with 55% of survey respondents saying they listen to podcasts, followed by Spain at 40%, Sweden, Australia, and the USA at 33%, and Italy, Canada, France, Japan, and Germany at 18%. In a recent press release, the Office of Communications in the UK has said that podcasts are booming and nearly 6 million adults are tuning in each week. What is undeniable is that as a medium, podcasts are here to stay, because it's a low cost, easy way to produce content. If hosting on a platform like Buzzsprout, you can also distribute to Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, and the recently launched podcasts by Google. At $12 a month, I can host two hours a month of audio, and you can increase the amount of storage and increase the payments. It is remarkably good value by anybody's terms if you're going to distribute content to those who aren't subscribed to the listing. 

One of the obvious implications is that the podcasting world is extremely crowded. It's similar to the old days when we used to publish company newsletters and people thought they could publish newsletters to compete with the mainstream media. But podcasts, like print newsletters we used to produce in-house require a lot of resources. I'm finding it takes me an hour to research a show, twenty minutes to record, and another twenty minutes to edit and upload. For every twenty minutes, it's taking me about two hours of preproduction and post-production, which is not incredibly efficient. While I'm just practicing and learning, it's going to take some time. Ryan Williams, who wrote an article about this in the Influencer Economy, suggests that it takes twice as long as you think it will take, and I have found that is absolutely the case. Of course, not everybody has to create a podcast of their own – being a brand, it's possible to create different strategies for podcasts without trying to post your own show. General Electric did this in 2017 with a program called The Message, and it was an eight-part science fiction podcast series that connected listeners with what the GE brand is all about. Even though their brand is science and its impact on the world without setting the GE brand, General Electric took the approach of being like a soap opera in the way that they were originally sponsored by detergent companies because they knew it was the housewives at home who were watching TV during the day. It was shows like Days of Our Lives that sponsored Proctor and Gamble, Unilever, and the like, and that's why they were named soap operas.

Shopify, the online e-commerce software, has a site called Thank God It's Monday about what works and what doesn't in entrepreneurial life. Mark McDonald, the content manager, prefers audio content over traditional advertising because they would rather be the content than the advertising because creating something people want to consume, rather than interrupting something they want to ignore, is more powerful. In other words, if you are creating the content that people are interested in, then you are getting the loyalty. Whereas, if you are simply interrupting them, you are probably creating a sense of annoyance. 

The Umpqua Bank created a podcast in 2017 called Open Account to discuss America's cultural taboo: money. They had frank chats about losing and living with money, but a quick check shows that they only got to twenty-one episodes. The Distance, from the people who created Rework, which is the software company Basecamp, had a strategy which is to interview companies that have been around for at least twenty-five years. These episodes were diverse, fifteen-minutes long, and achieved 258 episodes before stopping. The podcast is now Rework, which is the same name as their book which discusses how they built Basecamp as a culture and a product for people to work remotely. Sephora also launched a podcast in 2017 called Lip Stories, but they only managed to get to fifteen episodes. The team behind Zip Recruiter also launched a podcast called Rise and Grind with a man called Daymond John. They worked from Daymond John from the Shark Tank to create a series focused on the hustle and pursuit of success in business and achieved nineteen episodes. Podcasting is clearly more of a marathon. 

As I have reached my thirtieth episode, my goal is to get to 365 episodes with one episode six days a week. I produce this podcast six days a week because I think that, as entrepreneurs, it is necessary to think about the PR and the communications of their company; this comes from my experience from all the companies I have run over the last twenty-five years in Asia and the UK. There isn't a day when I'm not looking and thinking about how I can do it better, and I find myself listening to podcasts such as when I'm walking my beagle in the countryside. The key message for podcasting is that it needs to be aligned with your company brand. My company's role is to help other entrepreneurs and businesses to speak and share about what they do. As I'm doing this, the depth and texture of what we do are excellent because it is so much more vibrant than text. Text can be read, but it's impossible to communicate all the nuances with writing. Therefore, podcasting is a channel of communication and my work is to communicate. I am not trying to communicate with the entire world, but I do want to speak to business people or people in charge of marketing businesses. I have a niche and do not need to try and communicate, nor intend to communicate, with millions. Possibly tens or hundreds of people will find what I'm sharing and the insights and tools that I'm sharing to be of value. 

If you're looking to start a podcast, you need to think if you can follow through, or take the sort of approach that General Electric did. The cheapest, easiest, and least-commitment route into podcasting could be sponsoring, participating, or being interviewed by an established podcast that has the audience you wish to target. In my experience, podcasting takes more time than you think, but it can be very rewarding. Podcasting is part of an integrated strategy. In my view for my business to public relations, we have the podcasts, the newsletter, the website, and the Speak PR video series. Ultimately, it's part of a holistic approach to communicating what we do. Podcasting can be a fabulous way to learn and share information. To echo what the Stitcher CEO said, there's a belief in the unique and intimate appeal of podcasting, which makes people loyal and passionate, which is what we want from our employees, partners, and customers. 

I hope that by sharing on SPEAK|pr, I'm providing you with some engagement and sparking ideas with what to do with your business and your own PR. Maybe you will decide to come to our website, where we share this and more tips about how to get yourself noticed and build your company brand and business.

This is a transcript from our podcast which you can find on EastWest PR. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Cover Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash