May 26, 2013 • 15 mins
This episode is much more focused and becoming more like the vision that I have for the show. The topic this week gets back to my passion and that is the medium of “Podcasting”. This show will target one specific topic each week. These topics will generally be about new media and podcasting, as it seems those topics are on my mind more then others. I will write an article then do an audio episode about it to go into more detail on the topic. In this episode, I discuss the long-running issue of “Is Podcasting the Same as Radio?”. I also wrote an blog post on this topic here about a week ago. Give it a read and then listen to the audio episode. Thank you Adrian Bacon and Daniel J. Lewis for contributing with comments that you will hear in this episode. Please feel free to give me feedback on this show to: rob at robgreenlee dotcom or twitter @robgreenlee . Leave some of your thoughts here in the comments and I will respond to them in next week episode.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
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
(00:24):
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
(00:47):
at Rob at Rob Greenley dot com and that's r
O B G R e E N L e E.
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,
(01:09):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:56):
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
(02:18):
it into their world instead of really understanding what the
differences are between podcasting and broadcast radio. And they were
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
(02:40):
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
(03:01):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:45):
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.
First of all, podcasting the content segment concept that is
(04:06):
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
(04:28):
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.
(04:52):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:36):
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
(05:58):
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
(06:21):
the majority of the advertising is played in broadcast radio.
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.
(06:43):
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
(07:03):
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
(07:24):
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
(07:45):
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
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
(08:09):
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
(08:31):
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.
So there is no reason to hit a certain time clock, right.
(08:52):
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.
(09:15):
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
(09:37):
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.
It's fine to do a podcast at short, but my
own experience is that doing a podcast that short doesn't
(10:01):
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
(10:24):
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,
(10:48):
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
(11:08):
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
more like radio in like a sequential playlist type of scenario,
(11:31):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:19):
level of commercial breaks to kind of boil it down.
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,
(12:42):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:22):
different but somewhat connected worlds. I definitely agree, and that
follows along with what I said in the article. Daniel J.
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
(13:42):
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.
(14:05):
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.
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
(14:26):
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
(14:48):
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.
So thank you very much for listening, and I look
forward to having you back listening to the show next week.
Bye bye,
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
(00:24):
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
(00:47):
at Rob at Rob Greenley dot com and that's r
O B G R e E N L e E.
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,
(01:09):
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
(01:31):
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
(01:56):
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
(02:18):
it into their world instead of really understanding what the
differences are between podcasting and broadcast radio. And they were
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
(02:40):
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
(03:01):
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
(03:23):
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
(03:45):
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.
First of all, podcasting the content segment concept that is
(04:06):
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
(04:28):
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.
(04:52):
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
(05:14):
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
(05:36):
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
(05:58):
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
(06:21):
the majority of the advertising is played in broadcast radio.
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.
(06:43):
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
(07:03):
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
(07:24):
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
(07:45):
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
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
(08:09):
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
(08:31):
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.
So there is no reason to hit a certain time clock, right.
(08:52):
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.
(09:15):
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
(09:37):
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.
It's fine to do a podcast at short, but my
own experience is that doing a podcast that short doesn't
(10:01):
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
(10:24):
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,
(10:48):
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
(11:08):
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
more like radio in like a sequential playlist type of scenario,
(11:31):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:19):
level of commercial breaks to kind of boil it down.
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,
(12:42):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:22):
different but somewhat connected worlds. I definitely agree, and that
follows along with what I said in the article. Daniel J.
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
(13:42):
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.
(14:05):
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.
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
(14:26):
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
(14:48):
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.
So thank you very much for listening, and I look
forward to having you back listening to the show next week.
Bye bye,
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