How traditional media should employ podcasts at Piaras Kelly PR

How traditional media should employ podcasts

Published January 26th, 2006 in E-PR

Traditional media like radio stations normally use podcasts as a means for listeners to download their show if they have missed it. However if the public have already tuned in, what’s the point of downloading the show again?

In a recent conversation with Adam Maguire, he pointed out to me that the success of Ricky Gervais’ podcasts were because the content was not available anywhere else. Surely radio stations should use this reasoning and use it when creating a podcast strategy. They could offer extended interviews or tips from one of their guests which they weren’t able to do on the show due to time constraints.

Technorati Tags: Adam Maguire, Piaras Kelly, Podcasting

One Response to “How traditional media should employ podcasts”

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1 Adrian Jan 29th, 2006 at 10:03 pm

It’s an interesting point and one made by Dusty Roads (or however he spells his name — I’m talking about the DJ and radio producer) on a podcast (Ireland Digital) we shared last week. He argues that a podcast might work in a situation where an interview was going well but time drew to a close. And the interviewer could say: “I’m sorry, folks, we’re out of time, but we’re going to give this discussion another 20 minutes and you’ll get that on [podcast name]…” The only problem I can think of with that is whether the presenter and the guest would be willing to devote another 20 minutes of, essentially, work to something likely to be heard only by a small fraction of the traditional show’s listeners.
Incidentally, the reason that Ricky Gervais’s podcast took off was probably that it got a full page advertisement in the Guardian for weeks. It would want to have been a disaster not to have succeeded with that kind of push.
Probably for a podcast to be downloaded by a mass audience, it needs killer content, over and above anything we hear on the radio at present. The fundamental question is: why would someone bother to tune in and listen to a given podcast? The hurdle here is, in my opinion, much higher than why people turn the radio on, which can be simply out of habit or to distract from utter boredom in a car. So why would they? I think that the quality of the content has to in the ballpark of what makes someone go into HMV or Tower and browse, say, an audiobook or a live comedy concert. It has to be really, really good.
The only thing I can think of in recent Irish radio history that would, to me, have passed this test easily is the late Dermot Morgan’s Scrap Saturday. (Though perhaps Today FM’s Gift Grub might do it for some.) Because it has to be something that makes people go out of their way to turn on the computer (so NOT peole who do this as a matter of course anyway), log on, go to iTunes (or wherever) and download to their MP3 player. This is the test, if you ask me. Ricky Gervais’s high reputation as a comedian, together with a massive ad push from the Guardian, got people to do this.