A Quick Start Guide to Podcasting: Creating Your Own Audio and Visual Materials for iPods, Blackberries, Mobile Phones and Websites - Brossura

Harnett, Mark

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0749461454 ISBN 13: 9780749461454

Casa editrice: Kogan Page Ltd, 2010

Riassunto

We live in exciting times. The Internet is arguably the fastest growing cultural phenomenon in the world. Right now we are in the middle of a communications revolution. Look again at your business's web presence. Whether you are a farmer's wife or a fundraiser, an artist or an artisan, a musician or a manufacturer, a shop or a service, a global corporation or a neighbourhood charity, podcasting can enhance your website.

No matter what kind of business you are in you will find A Quick Start Guide to Podcasting is useful. It will help you to give your brand more than an internet presence: it will give it a voice. It will help you to establish an identity, corporate, commercial or individual, reach a different demographic than you have previously been able to tap into and crucially, entice potential customers or clients to your website.

All you need to start is a little imagination - and even if you're stumped for ideas, the examples in A Quick Start Guide to Podcasts should help to set your imagination free.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Mark Harnett has played key roles building and developing internet businesses and search marketing campaigns for a number of internet start-ups and small businesses. He has also built and launched successful online advertising and lead generation products at Vicinity, Move.com, Loopnet and Experian MetaReward. He is the principal at Drak Marketing where he advises firms on search marketing and customer acquisition strategies.

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

Introduction

Why podcast?

We live in exciting times. The internet is arguably the fastest growing cultural phenomenon in the world, ever. You and I are lucky enough to have been born in time to catch one of those moments in human history when everything changes. Right now we’re in the middle of a communications revolution.

Being online is essential for your business. There simply isn’t any other way to look at it. Even if you’re the sort of person who still reads books (and you must be, because you’re reading this one), buys a daily newspaper and watches the six o’clock news on television, you can’t afford to be left behind as your competitors elbow past you online.

So you already have a website. Great. (If you haven’t, you might want to get hold of our book on Google adwords to help you set one up.) Why would you need anything more than that?

Because, in the world of online business nothing stands still. You have to be continually changing and modifying and improving to stay one jump ahead.

Revolutions are almost always driven by technology. When the tools reach the hands of the masses, that’s when the world changes. Prehistorians will tell you it was the invention of the plough that turned us from nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled city dwellers. The internal combustion engine began the transport revolution of the twentieth century, but it was Henry Ford’s mass-production of his model-T car that really set us free to go where we wanted. Behind the current phase of the digital revolution is the rapid evolution of ever more mobile, portable computing technology. That’s why you need to consider podcasting as a way of promoting your business.

It was Apple’s invention of the iPod that made podcasting possible. Initially the iPod was simply another digital device that gave people a way to access their favourite music on the move and other manufacturers were quick to follow with their own MP3 audio players. As the first in the field, the iPod lent its name to the process of making available for mass consumption download any kind of audio, music or speech. Broadcasters were quick to spot the potential of ‘listen again’ for radio programmes but podcasting took the process a step further. Listeners could download audio material to their MP3 players to listen on the move; they didn’t have to be tied to their desktop computer or even to a laptop.

Although initially confined to audio this restriction was quickly removed. The devices got smaller while their memory capacity increased allowing video files to be downloaded too. Although for a while it became fashionable to use the term ‘vodcasting’ to describe the visual equivalent now most people use podcasting to encompass both audio and video downloads, and that is what we’ll do in this book.

To start with it was younger people who took the greatest advantage of podcasting technology but gradually the older generation have joined in. There must have been a similar turning point when the portable transistor radio was invented back in the 1960s. At first it might have seemed that the only sound that could be heard on a portable audio device was pop music. But now even your granddad has probably realised he can download his favourite radio programmes to listen to when he walks the dog, and grandma has worked out it’s a lot easier plugging the MP3 player into the car lighter socket than carting an armful of CDs back and forth when she’s driving to the shops.

Still, some might argue it’s fiddly to download audio or video material from your computer and onto a portable device. The kids might do it but can the average busy person really find the time?

Well, that might have been true once but now technology is moving on again and driving another phase of the revolution. Instead of buying specialised, dedicated devices like the i-Pod, increasing numbers of people on the move use their mobile phones as a multi-purpose communications and entertainment device. The holy grail of digital technology, the all-purpose handheld gizmo, is almost with us. The latest phones offer not only cameras but high quality video capture, FM radio and enough memory to store your entire music collection, e-mails and text. As well as interfacing easily with your computer at home, you can access the internet on the move through the phone and download virtually what you want, where you want, when you want. And it won’t stop here. The devices will become more efficient, more lightweight, cheaper, easier to use.

So look again at your business’s web presence. If you want to reach a younger generation of customers or clients, those who are the ‘early adopters’ of the latest technology, you should be podcasting already. But even if your customer base is more mature, it won’t be long before they too are accessing your website via their mobile phone.

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ says my sweet old-fashioned aunt, ‘You might do these things, nephew dear, but you can’t tell me that I’ll be accessing the internet via my mobile phone any day soon. What would I want to do that for?’

Oh yes you will, auntie. You soon got the hang of texting, didn’t you? Not only are humans adaptable creatures but the drive is always for the mass of the technology to get simpler and easier to use. You’ll be wandering round your favourite park accessing a website to find out the name of that lovely crimson rose cascading over the pergola, and where you can buy one for your own garden. And because when you sit down on the park bench to read the details on the small screen, you realise you’ve forgotten your glasses, dear auntie, you might even find it easier to access some of the information in audio mode.

We have been brought up to think that reading the written word is the best means of assimilating information, and indeed reading has many advantages. Reading a message is quicker than listening to the same message and it is easy to glance back and read something over again to clarify and understand it.

But effective communication is about horses for courses. There will be times, especially when people are on the move, when an audio or video message exactly hits the spot. There are some things, for instance, that simply beg to be seen. While I was writing my book on Google ad-words, I talked to a farmer’s wife who had successfully used ad-words to attract visitors to her website promoting her business selling organically-reared geese. But she’d also realised that using words to describe the conditions in which the geese were raised was not enough. Her customers wanted to see for themselves. So she filmed her geese wandering free-range in the apple orchard where they spend most of their days, and uploaded a clip to her website. Sales soared.

Convinced yet? You should be. Whether you’re a farmer’s wife or a fundraiser, an artist or an artisan, a musician or a manufacturer, a shop or a service, a global corporation or a neighbourhood charity, podcasting can enhance your website. No matter what kind of business you’re in you will find it useful. It gives your brand more than an Internet presence; it gives it a voice. It will help you establish a corporate, commercial or individual identity. You’ll find that you can use a podcast to reach a different demographic than you’ve previously been able to tap into. If you get it right and make the podcast so interesting and compelling that people want to share it with each other, you’ll find it’s a way of enticing potential customers or clients to your website.

Although you might think that video trumps audio every time, you’d be wrong. If that were so, radio would have died a few years after television was invented. Indeed, plenty of people back then thought it would. But radio still thrives. Audio podcasting can be just as effective as video and still has its place. After all, when people are on the move, they may not be able to devote all their senses to communication. You might be able to watch video on the train or plane, but you can’t walk along the street with your eyes glued to a small screen without running the risk of bumping into something, and you certainly can’t drive your car at the same time as watching video. But you can listen, and that’s why audio podcasting is often especially effective as a means of reaching people who’ll download material they don’t have time to read and take it with them on their daily commute or when they go for a run or to the gym.

We’ll look at both audio and video podcasting in this book, through examples of people who have found how useful podcasting can be to help their business grow. Podcasting is a phenomenon so new and exciting that there are no hard and fast rules, although there are certainly guidelines that can help you make a success of it. What I want to do is to give you enough help to start you off: then it’s up to you to be creative. It doesn’t matter whether you want to reach a global market, or simply speak to a few dozen people. Podcasting can help you establish your own online identity and community.

It’s not difficult either. Mass communication was once regarded as an esoteric craft, a matter for professionals. There was a kind of Brahmin class of ‘experts’ who were the only ones who knew how to use the specialized equipment that made broadcasting possible. But you don’t have to invest thousands, or even hundreds, to make a podcast possible. You can even upload video captured on your mobile phone, though it’s true if you spend a little money the results may be easier on the eye and the ear. Often the most successful podcasts have been those incorporating a clever and creative idea that has somehow captured the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times.

We’ll start simple by devoting the first part of the book to audio. Second for second, audio files are smaller than video. I’ll show you how easy it is to devise and create your own sound podcast, recording and editing it yourself before uploading it to your own website or to a site like iTunes where it can attract new visitors to your site. In the second half of the book we’ll look at how to make a video podcast for use on your website and via networking sites such as YouTube.

All you need to start is a little imagination and even if you’re stumped for ideas the examples I’ll share with you should help to set your imagination free.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Kogan Page Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2010
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0749461454
• ISBN 13: 9780749461454
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 126
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
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