What makes an effective business podcast?

Continuing what is quickly becoming a ‘week of podcasting’ this post deals with when and how you should podcast effectively in business. It’s kind of a continuation of the professional ways in which you can use podcasts in your business but is more of a theoretical slant at the differences between podcasts and blog posts and how you can podcast well… or very very badly.

Essentially there are three main things that you want to consider when developing your podcasting strategy, time, audience and value.

One thing that you have very little of when you’re trying to communicate online is time. Forget the ‘average 30 seconds’ that most people apparently spend at your site, they’re most likely browsing 3 other sites simultaneously and taking in, um, about 2 sentences of what you’re offering. If you don’t believe me then have a read through the 1 minute site manifesto and you’ll get what I’m talking about a bit more.

This is where podcasts absolutely suck, very much so, in every sense, and blogs - especially pretty bite sized blog posts - come up smelling of roses. Your non-surfing audience use news aggregators because they help them manage / access large amounts of information *very quickly*, they are going to love your two paragraphs but are certainly not going to give you even 5 minutes and so now you’re podcasts are not being listened to by surfers OR subscribers… who exactly are you producing podcasts for?

Well, your answer to that one should probably be something like ‘people who care’ because, quite honestly, those are the only people who will listen and hence the only people who matter. These people are only going to tune in to something that offers them particular value. Huge fans of your product or service will tune in pronto to what you’ve got to offer, employees should definitely be interested in what the executive have to say (if they’re not, that’s a problem that podcasting ‘aint going to help and there is always a market for recognised experts.

So, for effective business podcasts, focus on products or services with established interest bases and people that you know your audience will happily give up 10 minutes of their time to hear. Or waste a lot of your time… and none of anyone else’s.