Does Video Make Sense For An Audio Podcast - The Podcast Report Episode #38

Does video make sense for an audio podcast? It's The Podcast Report episode 38 show notes, links, conversation and more@the podcastreport.com 38. It's the Podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul the big idea. Reaching your audience is more important than your format. If you're going to reach your audience with video, you should be doing that. You and maybe you move it to audio and make a podcast, maybe you don't. Let's chat about it. My name is Paul Calligan. I am a 7 time best selling author. Got a bunch of books about podcasting. Have been in podcasting since day one. I love this industry. I love podcasters. I love the trials and tribulations. But the ones that I love are not the which microphone do I use and which hosting platform do I work with. But my questions go a little bit deeper. What's happening in the industry that really counts and really matters? And that's what the podcast report is about. Been in this since the beginning, have been so since day one. Two audiences for the show. Number one, the podcaster. Those of you who are podcasting, enjoy. Thank you. I appreciate what you're doing. Hopefully I'll help you ask the better questions, get the better answers, make a better show. Of course there are those of you thinking about getting into podcasting as well. Welcome to the podcast report. Not a massive play, but a deep one. All right, let's chat about the topic. Why this topic? Why am I talking about video and audio and that kind of stuff in the podcast Right now Meerkat and some of you might be listening to the past archives of the show and curious that this was once a thing and kind of laugh about it. But at the time the recording meerkat was a huge issue. People were talking about it. The buzz is everywhere. And if you don't know Meerkat, I've got a link to it in the show Links. It's a iPhone app only right now, by the way, show links are@thepodcastreport.com 3 8. What Meerkat has done is it has made live video streaming incredibly easy. It's been easy before, but it's almost painfully easy. And because it's so easy, a lot more people are doing live video. And I've chatted before on this podcast about the idea of maybe one day taking the podcast report to recording it at the same time every week, doing it live, doing a video version of this. So I've been thinking about this. There are other who are doing it I'll put a link in the show. Notes to Podcasters Roundtable, a great, great show. They get together on Google Hangouts, they do video, and they do stuff that'd only be done by video. It's. It's fun to be in a conversation where you chat with other podcasters and find out what's going on. And Ray does a great job with that show. So there are people who are creating their audio podcast content from video initially. One client of mine is moving his video show to an audio podc, and we're doing that for him now. So there's some transitions there. Ed Dale with his Walking with Larry podcast. Ed's always been a hero of mine. Ed's doing some great things. I caught him a couple of days ago on meerkat walking with his dog Larry, and thinking about the idea of maybe taking that video from Walking with Larry and making it a actual audio podcast as well. And the thing that's interesting about this topic, the thing that's interesting about taking your audio podcast from your video, is that it's really everything that I've been teaching and everything I'll probably continue to teach in the podcasting space. Reaching your audience is more important than your format. You know, this idea that, you know, is video okay for audio? Well, it doesn't matter. What matters is reaching your audience in the way that makes the most sense for them. And if it's possible to reach more people with less effort, for goodness sakes, as communicators, why wouldn't we want to do that? So I'm going to give some best practices, I'm going to give some ideas to this. But on the concept, on the idea of communicating to a lot of people, this gets really, really interesting. All right, so why does this matter? Well, first of all, audio is easier to consume. The amount of times that I have the ability to be listening to audio, be it driving in the car, be it going on a walk, being it working on the computer, something happening in the background, it is easier to consume audio than it is video. That's one of the reasons why audio podcasts do so. The best chances, all things being equal, for a podcast download, is an audio podcast. Yes, video podcasts are a thing. Yes. PDF cast are a thing. Yes, there are casts that are not necessarily audio. But I o podcasting wins because it is so easy to do. It is so easy to be part of this whole thing. So you want to think that through. So what do we do with this live video? Live video is getting easier to produce than it ever has been before with things like Meerkat. And again, meerkat's not the only one because it's easier to produce than ever before. And then you add to it a high value perception of video versus audio. I mean, if you want to learn about a certain topic and there's a video and there's an audio, video is going to have a higher perception to it. So if it's getting easier to create and there's a higher perception to it and you can reach more people with it, things start to get really, really interesting. You got MEERKAT, you got YouTube video, you got Ustream. If this means an extended audience, then things are really, really excited. And of course, if I can take this video, you know, and I'm not talking the jump from an audio podcast to live video streaming, I'm talking live video streaming, of which the content becomes the audio content for your audio podcast. So it's not a jump from A to B. It's a combination of A and B, using the best for best, both. Hope that makes sense. And then the other thing that's really interesting, and this is one of the reasons why with this show, I'd like to go what we call live to tape. Going live creates a certain energy. You know, if I and we chatted last week to the different types of podcasts, but when you, when you go live, when you hit the record button and you're not going to hit stop until it's done, that creates a certain energy. When you go live, that creates even more of a certain energy. I remember the first time I went live with Meerkat. I was in my car and I just heard about it and all the safety issues. Don't worry, I was a good boy. But I hit stream, and as I'm driving down the street, I'm seeing people pop up. And with no marketing, no nothing, I think there were about like 13, 14 people in the chat room all interacting with me. And that live buzz, that knowing that people are watching you, knowing that people are looking at you, gives you a certain energy, gives you audience interaction, you can move the content to what it is they want to think about, you might say something and, you know, I created my outline for this, and the outline's not perfect by any means. And if I were to do this live, video or audio, of course someone could interact and go, hey, what about this? And I might not have thought about that, and I can go deeper with that and be better to you. Now, live interaction obviously isn't only a video thing. You can go live interaction with audio. I've done some play with Spreaker and there's some other tools out there, but we have options. We definitely, definitely have options. But so we have this thing and what do we do with it now is meerkat. It? Is meerkat the golden child of all this? No. Is it a flash in the pan? I don't know. There's politics, there's all sorts of issues with meerkat. But I'll tell you, I saw one thing. I've been debating meerkat. I've been thinking about meerkat. I've been wondering what it means. I've been thinking about doing an episode here, the podcast report about it. But then I saw something a couple days ago that really changed my opinion of it and it was Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy Fallon has started to record the practice for his monologue on meerkat. Now, I don't know who holds it, obviously he doesn't do it, but somebody's streaming him, practicing his daily monologue. And it's a secondary screen thing. You know, it's a before the event, it's, it's a behind the scenes type of thing. But I think what's interesting is it's not meerkat as a primary form of distribution, but it's like a secondary one for the fans. And the majority of you are going to listen to the podcast report on audio because every Tuesday when it comes out, and if you're listening to this later date and we're no longer coming out on Tuesdays, deal with it. But every Tuesday when it comes out, you're in your car, the podcatcher says you've got a new episode, you listen to it. That's great. That will always be more than are on video, but, but it's interesting there. And, and you know, man, if you knew, I mean, you know how it is. You see somebody on radio and you wonder what they look like and if you could see them performing it live, that would be interesting. So the Jimmy Fallon example, I think there will be others. It's definitely worth exploring. Meerkat's not going to be the winner, but on demand video streaming will already today ustream. Who was, I think if not the original, one of the original live video streaming platforms, they basically announced kind of their own platform that's going to let other people basically be their own meerkat. So this world of live video streaming is coming fast. Two things not here on my outline, but they just came to me. Number one, my iPhone 6 Plus has a great camera. I'm streaming from my iPhone 6 Plus looks fabulous and data makes it possible. And I'm a T Mobile user and I've got the unlimited data plan with T Mobile and with T Mobile it's actually real and, and pretty much where I go. I've got full access to T Mobile, so I've got a great camera, I've got unlimited streaming, I've got all this capacity so it makes a bunch of sense. And whether it's the second screen, maybe it's me practicing for things like Jimmy does, or maybe it's me going live and maybe it's keeping the video, not keeping the video. Maybe, you know, you just get the camera as I record this and then the microphone that I use for the podcast is something else. I don't know. But it's all worth exploring. I thought I'd take a thought on a couple of best practices. If you're going to do this, if you're going to take your video and go to audio, best practice number one, don't forget where your numbers come from. I, yeah, there's probably someone who's going to start with video or move to video and find out the video does better for them than audio does. But for most of us, our numbers are going to come from the audio podcast. And if we get so excited about the video and we start worrying about the makeup and the lighting and the acoustics and the studio and the green screen and all these things and we're performing, we're taking 90% of our effort for 10% of our audience, that's a bad idea. So you don't forget where your numbers come from. And it's the live video recording of an audio show is what you want to produce. If you do a big animated intro. Some people do video, you know, they get a really fancy intro done and it's a minute long and maybe it's just audio with great visuals, but it's just music or that type of thing. Thing. If you were to take a two minute audio from a video intro that looked great but was just music, you'd, you'd upset your audience, you'd frustrate your audience. So if you're gonna do this, definitely think about the intro. I would make that short as is possible or at least speak over it or that type of thing. If you do something visual on the show, you know, like I'm holding up my hand right now and you can't tell how many fingers I have holding up, what you do is we say I'm holding up four fingers right now. If you do anything visual, just speak to it in audio form and you do that and you don't have to worry about any visuals lost. And one thing you can do if there's, if there's a piece of visual that does get lost, you can give people an opt in process to get it. And I'm going to do so right now. If you text the show hotline 503-897-1290 and you text EP38 hashtag, that's the pound sign EP38, I will text you or I will send you the transcript from today's episode and the mind map that I worked from here. That's a way to get you the visuals so you're listening to the audio. It's a way to get the visuals. It's a way for me to build an opt in list. There's some really interesting options there. So if anything's visual, speak to it and give them the opportunity to grab it. And then the flip side of this though is give them something to look at. If your show is mostly audio, you know, if you are doing an audio podcast video and it's just video of you and your mug talking into a microphone, that's really boring and that's not that exciting. So you want to give them something to look at and that could be anything from you begin to be more animated which makes for better audio, which gets funny. Maybe you have, I don't screen shots in the background, something like that. Definitely give them something to look at if they are coming into video. So the big four were, don't forget where your numbers are. Number two, beware the big animated intro gets lost in the whole audio thing. Number three, if there's anything visual, speak to it and make it available. And then number four, give them something to look at. If it is mostly just audio. So what am I doing? I am reexamining everything. I almost did this episode on meerkat but to be honest, I couldn't find a stand to put my phone on that would have made this possible. I've chat about this in past episodes. A live video version of this is eminent and I'm looking at it. I'm reexamining. I'm pondering recording this show live. The other show that I'm working on, pondering that as well. What you can do is I would definitely recommend going live once and just seeing what it's like. And the funny thing is, even if you don't have an audience, the possibility the potential that someone might jump in live is intoxicating. And what happens is if you go live, the adrenaline kicks in, the excitement kicks in, it becomes a lot more fun. And so try going live once, see if it changes anything. You might find that you've got some new enthusiasm and some new ideas that you don't have before. If you've gone live and you have any thoughts, go ahead and share it. I would love to hear your experience. You can head over to the podcastreport.com 38 so there's a few thoughts on does audio make sense? Does video make sense for an audio podcast? This is the podcast report@the podcastreport.com thepodcastreport.com Twitter, Facebook, all the social links are there. The blog is up common away. The podcastreport.com 38show hotline is 503-897-1290. I've got some links over at the website, the podcastreport.com 38 got a link to my book how to Podcast that's doing well. You guys have kept that in the charts. Thank you so much. I've got a link to Meerkat for you. I've got a link to the Podcasters Roundtable. A podcast that's done video first comes out on audio. I link actually to the episode that I did with the guys late last year. I put this up in the Google community. I asked if there were any thoughts that people had on going from video to audio. I know there are a lot of people in there who do that, so I'll see what they have to say. Gotta link to that Spreaker, which is the audio version of Going Live. I definitely should put that in there. And then I've got a link to Ed Dale's Walking with Larry podcast that I watched recently and we'll see what happens there. If you have not subscribed to the podcast report, please do so. It is the power of podcasting that lets you get a new episode every time that is released that makes podcasting so powerful. So thepodcastreport.com iTunes if you're an iOS user, Stitcher if you're an Android, type Pocketcasts Android as well. Tunein if you're Microsoft Spreaker, iheartradio Overcast we're there. We've got on all these places. If you want to email me, it's the podcastreportoutlook.com of course. Again, one last time, the website is the podcastreport.com My name is Paul Colligan. This is episode 38. Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you next week. Bye.