In this solo episode of the Speak PR podcast, host Jim James explores podcasting as a powerful public‑relations and branding channel. He begins by noting the rapid growth of the medium—over 1 million series and half‑a‑million active shows on Apple Podcasts—backed by recent research from Edison Research/Infinite Dial. He outlines listener habits (transit, gym, work) and demographics (dominant 18‑34 age group, highly dedicated 35‑55 cohort) and highlights platform diversity (Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Podbean) and hosting options (Buzzsprout, Libsyn) with a brief technical note on RSS feeds. Jim discusses trends such as shortening episode lengths and the importance of longevity, citing Stitcher data that top shows remain dominant over a decade. He estimates production effort at roughly two hours of work for a 20‑minute episode and references Ryan Williams’ claim that podcast creation takes twice as long as expected. The episode then surveys corporate podcast examples—GE’s sci‑fi series “The Message,” Shopify’s “Thank God It’s Monday,” Umpqua Bank’s “Open Account,” Rework’s interview series, Sephora’s “Lip Stories,” and ZipRecruiter’s “Rise and Grind”—showcasing varied strategies and typical episode counts. Jim stresses aligning a podcast with brand identity, targeting a niche business audience rather than mass appeal, and integrating the podcast with other PR assets (newsletter, website, video series). He advises newcomers to consider sponsorship or guest appearances as low‑commitment entry points, while also sharing his ambitious goal of 365 episodes at six‑days‑a‑week cadence. Throughout, he underscores the medium’s intimate, loyal audience, quoting Stitcher’s CEO and Finn McKenty’s engagement comparison, and invites listeners to subscribe to his newsletter at eastwestpr.com.
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Welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host, and on this podcast I'd like to share some thoughts and some insights and also some technologies that you can use for PR. I've been helping companies to get noticed for over 25 years, and I've also run my own companies and built them through using public relations. Now I want to talk today about podcasting. Obviously, we're listening to one now, so you may be a convert already. But I noticed that one of my former clients recently has announced that they are going to be having a podcast. Now, this is interesting to me because it shows that podcasting is moving into the corporate branding arena as well as being a consumer lifestyle platform. And what a platform it has become! There was some research just released on the 19th of March this year by Edison Research, Infinite Dial, and it suggests that there are currently over 1 million different podcast series and episodes out there. Now, Apple Podcasts, which is really the— still the dominant distributor of podcasts, has over half a million active podcast shows Including content in more than 100 languages. So as I launch introduce Speak PR, I think I have to be mindful of any kind of ambition for where this podcast is going to take me. But I'm enjoying it, and I'm really loving the feedback that I'm getting from producing this show. So podcast listeners, when they've been surveyed, say that they are. Listening by and large in transit. 22% are listening in the car. The other places are in, for example, the gym. And home seems to be where people are listening to podcasts the least, I suppose because they've got family, friends, but they've also got the other, the other mediums to, to be logging on to and watching or doing. Slightly contradictory though is that crime and thrillers and comedy Uh, are the number 1 and number 2 genre, and yet the workplace, um, is the number 3 place where people are listening. So does that mean they're, they're actually tuning and listening to thrillers and local crime stories whilst they're at work? Maybe, but that's really none of my business. Um, I'm hosting this podcast on Apple Podcasts, but also it's going out through Stitcher. Through Podbean and Spotify. And so there are a growing number of distribution platforms. I'm hosting on Buzzsprout, and that manages the hosting, and then it distributes to these other platforms through an RSS feed. So, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, if anybody would like to know. Now Stitcher have over 100,000 independent podcasts listed on their platform. And last year they had 6.8 million episodes published. Now, interestingly enough, or perhaps sensibly enough, the 17 top shows in 2010 are still in the top 100. I'd imagine they're probably still the top 20, really. So it shows that longevity is going to be one of the keys to doing anything in podcasting if that becomes one of your plans. Now, what another report has been showing is that episodes are getting shorter. On average, the episodes are getting down just by, you know, 2.5 minutes. So it seems to be there's a trend towards either extremely short or extremely long-form content. Now, the listeners, depending on what you're working to promote, appear to be the 18 through 34 age group, which are the largest number of listeners. But it's my age group, the 55 down to 35s, that are more dedicated in terms of their number of listening hours and also the number of shows that we add to our favorites. So it seems that Gen X are probably more browsers, but they're also looking at other mediums as well. Whereas those of us that are seeing this as an alternative to listening to radio, for example, like instead of listening to Radio 4, I now listen to my podcasts. So it's really becoming a narrowcast for specific interest areas. So we've got, um, apparently as well, the Stitcher CEO Eric Dane said that the data that they found in their report, which was just recently published just this week, shows that, um, unique— the unique appeal of podcasting makes its fans the most loyal and passionate of any medium. Now, this was backed up and prompted my interest because I had watched a chap called Finn McKenty on LinkedIn, and he shared, shared an infographic which is really an inverted triangle. And what McKenty had shown was that on his YouTube channel he has 200,000 followers, and he says that gives him the lowest engagement, but he puts out the most entertainment. On Instagram he has 35,000 followers, and on podcasts and LinkedIn he has 10,000. But he says he gets the highest engagement and produces the most information on the podcast and LinkedIn platform. So what he's saying is that podcasting enables us to create intimacy and also understanding. Now, from a PR point of view, of course, this is golden because public relations is about understanding and helping people's perceptions to be aligned to our view of ourselves. So if public relations is about getting some depth of story, which is why we always like to try to have interviews and why we also like to have long-form articles published, because these give more than the headlines, they give the texture of what the company is doing. Then podcasting is a fantastic medium to be using. Now, weekly engagement seems to be, according to this report from Stitcher, that Monday through Thursday is the prime time for people to be listening. And it mirrors this idea that most people are listening when they're in transit, when they're going, for example, to work or to the gym or in between places. Interestingly enough, South Korea, according to a Statista report— that's a hard one to say— South Korea leads consumption with 55% of respondents to a survey saying they listen to podcasts, followed by Spain at 40% of their respondents, Sweden, Australia, the USA at only 33%, Italy, Canada, France, Japan, Germany, And only 18% of respondents in the UK said that they listened to podcasts. Well, Ofcom, the Office of Communications in the UK, say in a recent press release that podcasts are booming, and they're saying that nearly 6 million adults are tuning in each week. So there's various statistics being banded around here, but what's undeniable is that as a medium platform, podcasts are here to stay because it's such a low-cost and easy way to produce content. And if you host on a platform like Buzzsprout, as I do, um, or you can also use another one called Libsyn, for example, you can distribute to Apple iTunes, to Stitcher, to Spotify, and to the recently launched podcast by Google at no charge. I pay $12 a month to host 2 hours a month of audio, and you can increase the amount of storage and increase the payments, but it's remarkably good value by anybody's terms if you're going to distribute content to people that are subscribed and are listening. Now, one of the obvious implications though is that the podcasting world is extremely crowded. In a way, it's a bit like in the old days when we used to publish company newsletters and people used to think they could publish newsletters to compete with the mainstream media. But podcasts, like print newsletters that we used to produce in-house, require a lot of resources. Now I'm finding that it's taking me about an hour to research a show and then 20 minutes to record and 20 minutes to edit and upload. So for each 20 minutes, it's possibly taking me 2 hours of pre-production and post-production. Now I'm not very efficient, I'm just practicing and learning, but for sure it's going to take some time. And Ryan Williams, who wrote an article about this in The Influencer Economy, suggests it takes twice as long as you think it will take. And I think I'd found that's probably absolutely the case. Now, not everybody, of course, has to create a podcast of their own. So being a brand, it's possible to create different strategies for podcasting without trying to host your own show. Now, General Electric did this some years ago, about 2017, with a program called The Message. And it was an 8-part science fiction podcast series that connected listeners with what the GE brand is all about, which is about science and the impact of science on the world, without selling the GE brand. So GE took the approach of being a little like the soap operas, which— the reason that they're called soap operas is because they were originally sponsored by the detergent companies. Because they knew that the— it was the housewives at home who were watching TV during the daytime. And so shows like Days of Our Lives were sponsored by Procter& Gamble and the like, and Unilever. And that's why they got the name of soap operas. Um, the, um, Shopify, the online e-commerce, has a site called Thank God It's Monday about what works and what doesn't work in entrepreneurial life. And the way that Mark McDonald, who's the content manager there, says they prefer audio content over traditional advertising because they'd rather be the content than the advertising, because creating something people want to consume rather than interrupting something they want to ignore is more powerful. In other words, if you are creating the content that people are interested in, then you're getting the loyalty. Whereas if you're simply interrupting them, then you're probably creating some sense of annoyance. Now, the Umpqua Bank, which is U-M-P-Q-U-A Bank, created a podcast back in 2017 called Open Account, and they had a high-profile podcast host, and they wanted to talk about America's cultural taboos, which is money, and they had frank chats about making, losing, and living with money. But a quick check shows that actually, um, they only got to 21 episodes. Now, The Distance, which is from the guys that created Rework, which is Basecamp, the software company, they had a strategy which is to interview only companies that have been around for at least 25 years. It was diverse, and it was 15-minute episodes, just a bit shorter. Now, a look at their website shows they got to 58 episodes, and then they stopped. And now it's called the Rework Podcast, which is the same name as the book that they've got, which is talking about how they have built Basecamp both as a culture and as a product for people to work remotely. Sephora. Launched also in 2017, um, a podcast called Lip Stories, which I thought would be brilliant for my daughter, um, but they just managed to get to 15 episodes. Now, the, the ZipRecruiter guys, who most of us will have heard recently on pretty much every podcast, um, launched a, a podcast as well called Rise and Grind, which with a chap called Daymond John. So they worked with Daymond John from Shark Tank to create a series focused on the hustle and the pursuit of success in business. Now plainly there was maybe more hustle and more pursuit than there was actually success, because they also only managed to get 19 episodes out of that. So podcasting is a little bit of a marathon. As I reach my sort of 30th Uh, episode. I have a target to get to 365 episodes. I really want to get an episode 6 days a week, with entrepreneurs working, in my experience, um, 6 days a week. If we're lucky, we get Sunday off, and I think we should, because otherwise our health starts to suffer. So I produce this podcast 6 days a week because I think that's as often as entrepreneurs need to think about the public relations and the communications of their company. At least I know that for all of the companies I've run over the last 25 years in Asia and in the UK, there isn't a day when I'm not looking and thinking about how I can do it better. And I find myself listening now that the children are a bit older to podcasts when they're doing something else, and when I'm walking Binky, my my beagle in the countryside. So I think that the key message then for podcasting is that it needs to be in alignment with your company brand. My company's role is to help other entrepreneurs and businesses to speak about what they do, and sharing, as I'm doing like this, the depth and the texture of what we do is fantastic because it's so much more vibrant than text. Text can be read, you know, 800 to 1,000 words, but it's impossible to communicate all the nuances really simply with the writing. So podcasting is a channel of communication and my work is communication, so they're in alignment. I, I'm not trying to communicate with the whole world. I just want to speak to business people or people in charge of marketing businesses. So I have a niche, and I also don't need to try and communicate nor intend to communicate with millions, but maybe tens or hundreds of people will find what I'm sharing and the insights and the tools that I'm sharing to be of value. So I think what we have to do if we're starting a podcast, or if you're thinking about starting a podcast, is think if you can follow it through, or if you can take the sort of approach that someone like GE has done and sponsor or participate in podcasts, or to be interviewed by people that have already got podcasts who have got the audience that you want. That's the easiest and the cheapest and the least commitment route into podcasting. If you do want to get into podcasting, my experience has been it takes more time than you think, but It can be very rewarding, but it's also part of an integrated strategy. In my view, for my business, the public relations business, we have the podcast, we have the newsletter, we have the website, and we have the Speak PR video series. So it's part of a holistic approach to communicating what we do. So podcasting can be a fabulous way to learn information. And also to share information. And ultimately, to echo what the Stitcher CEO said, there's a belief in the unique and intimate appeal of podcasting which makes people loyal and passionate. And ultimately, that's what we want from our own employees, from our partners, and from our customers and future customers. And I certainly hope that by sharing on Speak PR I'm giving you some engagement, making you feel maybe some passion as well about what you can do with your business and your PR, and that you may even decide that you'll come to our website and subscribe to our newsletter, which is on eastwestpr.com, where we share this and more tips about how you can get yourself noticed and build your company brand and your business. So with that, I say thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR, and I wish you Great health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating. Thank you.
