Podcasting - Don’t believe the hype otherwise we’d all be drinking Diet Coke
Published April 18th, 2006 in E-PRI flicked through my headlines last week only to be confronted with this story from the BBC that people downloading podcasts are in a minority…well duh!
The Beeb reports that a Forrester Research report uncovered that “tech savvy, young males are most likely to listen to take away audio“. The only thing I find startling about that finding is whether someone actually paid to uncover it, when it’s about as obvious as rumours of Paddy Power, the online bookmaker, organising the world’s largest game of strip poker on April 1st being untrue.
The thing to remember about all these new tools that are emerging online is that they are good for targeting particular segments of the public, but in terms of mass communication their use should only form a subset of an overall communications strategy.
No blogs won’t replace press releases, just as Diet Coke won’t replace regular Coke. Just look at any soft drinks manufacturer, they’ll have a variety of products to target individual segments. The thought that all individuals act and respond the same is the exact same prehistoric thinking why there are some PR professionals out there at the moment scratching their heads saying, “What do you mean teenagers don’t read newspapers!?”
Technorati Tags: Piaras Kelly, Podcasting, PR
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So, what you’re saying is you do not have a Diet Coke ‘to hand’ while posting?
It’s one of the things that sometimes annoys me about some of the new media stuff. People who are involved in it say that the press release is dead, that the old media is dead and that the wave of the future - blogs, podcasting, the web 2.0 - is here. But these communication methods are still new, still haven’t reached critical mass and in reality reach only small audiences. Now to be fair, that may well change over the next few years, but the hype isn’t justified just yet.
The best word I’ve heard on the subject is ‘narrowcasting’. The new communications methods let you reach a specific market, in much the same way that home improvement channels on digitial TV allow advertisiers to reach a very selective audience, increasing the value of the marketing spend. The new comms will lead to a specialisation of the audience, which will lead to a lot more opportunities for PR in the future.
agreed - I am one of those ‘ People who are involved in it’ and Im not claiming it to be any bigger than it is. My april 12th IIA talk on the subject of podcasting is recorded here http://www.netvisionary.ie/brian_greene.mp3 and the slides are here http://www.briangreene.com/april12/
there is a supply / demand issue with narrow casting, like digital TV too much channels too little on (on some stations, like ones that begin with babe..)
64,000 podcasts to 20M agents (estimate) numbers are not reflecting broadcast figures, therefor the hype is driven by the content shift, broadcast radio = boring, 64K of pods = choice.