What's The Problem With Most Podcasting Consultants ? - The Podcast Industry Report Episode #104

We are seriously confusing expertise with experience and it's doing some real damage in the industry. It's the Podcast Industry Report, episode 104. Show notes, links, conversation and more@thepodcastreport.com 104 My name is Paul Culligan. I'm a big fan of this industry. The show is about my passion, the podcasting industry. More than a decade of podcasting and podcast production under my belt, experience and expertise. We'll be talking about that in this episode. The author of a few number one books, Amazon, about the topics of podcasting and new media. And for my day job, I run a boutique podcasting consultancy for some amazing clients. You've heard of many of them. This is season three. It moved from the podcast report to the podcast industry Report. We're going to take a look at the industry. Today's focus is consultants. See, this is the show where I show you, the podcaster, how to reach more with your message, how to profit more from your content, all by understanding the industry that you're playing in. This is the Podcast Industry Report and I can't wait to get to. Has been an interesting couple of weeks. Two weeks ago, chatted about the itunes, spoken editions, what that would do for the industry. Well, it launched last Tuesday. My podcast did not. We'll chat about that in a second. It launched last Tuesday to zero hoopla, zero excitement. I haven't read about it, heard about it, seen it anywhere. Maybe I got it wrong. I'm not sure. If you missed, that's thepodcastreport.com1:03 we'll still be monitoring it, but man, if you wanted to catch it on the early hype, it isn't there. Don't worry about it. Last week I was at the Genius Network annual event in Scottsdale, Arizona. Was launching the Genius Network podcast. That's one of the things I do is launch podcasts into number one. We're at the event, I'm positioned correctly, all is well, I get on stage, the screens are big, the audience is excited, and I ask everybody, hey, did you have a great time? Audience goes crazy. They had a great time. The next question I asked them, did you feel like this event was a gift? And they did. They did feel like the event was a gift. It was an amazing event. I say, how would you like to give a gift back to Joe Polish, the guy who put together the event? Audience goes crazy. I say, okay, pull out your iPhones now. This is not an Android versus iPhone thing. The demographic for that room was the majority of them were iPhones. And again, we were doing a number one run. So it made sense. Pull out your iPhones. They pull out their iPhones. And on big screens, the left and right of me, I've got a screenshot of the iPhone where they go in and they typed geniusnetwork.com subscribe. And the idea was, the technique was, the theory was that that would redirect to the subscribe page on the podcast app on the iPhone, because it's a lot easier to say go to Safari and type in geniusnetwork.com subscribe than it is pull out the podcast app. Not everybody in that room would even know that exists. Click search. Many people would even know how to do that. And the fact of the matter was, the podcast had just launched. So even if you typed in Genius network and search, it was like the third. So this is what you do. You make it easy on your audience. So I stand up and say, okay, Everybody type in geniusnetwork.com subscribe. Easy. They are at the Genius Network event that's on the big screens to the left and the right of me, and I look out to that audience. You want to see the success. You want to see the light bulbs. You want to hear the I got it, I got it, I got it. Couple got it. But then pretty quickly, I started seeing those eyeballs that you don't want to see when you're on stage, those eyeballs of confusion, those eyeballs of something's gone wrong. And, well, basically, the server crashed. Now, server wasn't mine, and that's a whole other story. And we'll maybe do another episode about, you know, making sure your tech is good. But the server was down, and the audience took my advice, and they kept typing in it over and over and over again, hoping for a different result, hoping that this time it worked. They wanted the podcast, they wanted what was happening. But the problem was the server was broken. See, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. We weren't going to see different results until we changed the server. And here's the interesting thing about the industry. I think we're not going to see any different results until we actually change the way things are happening in this industry. And here's the thing. This is what I realized. I was at the event. I got so many leads, it isn't even funny. I'm going to probably have to hire some new for the consultancy. It's crazy what happened from that event, but it was because of the positioning, and it's because of the expertise, not because I was experienced. And this is important. This is huge. So podcasters, podcasting consultants, podcasting pundits, we tend to brag about our experience. Experience just means we've done the same thing over and over again. Experience could be everybody in that room had great experience typing in geniusnetwork.com subscribe. That doesn't mean anything. So you do the same thing over and over and over again. That could be insanity. It's definitely experience, but it's not expertise. I did in prepping for this, I did the lowest form of research. I went to Wikipedia, which is never wrong, and I typed in expert. And here's something that it said that I thought was interesting. I don't know if this is the universal definition, but it's what's in Wikipedia, so it has to be right. An expert is someone who obtains results that are superior to those obtained by the majority of the population. See, the expert is someone who obtains results that are superior to those obtained by the majority of the population. This is the thing that's different. See, an expert sees results. Someone who's experienced has just done the same thing over and over and over again. And right now, in the industry, we talk about people who've been doing this for five years, six years, 10 years, more than a decade. Why are we talking about experience when what we should be looking for is expertise? So Ed Dale, a friend of mine, business associate at times, if you don't know Ed, Ed is fantastic. I will put a link to this in the show notes. Ed posted to Facebook a couple days ago a podcast recommendation. And this podcast recommendation was for a show that he said was amazing, was important, was mind blowing, was, you know, all these things, you want a podcast. But the funny thing was this podcast episode was actually recorded on a telephone. It was low fidelity. It's the very thing that most podcast consultants, those of us who have experience, would say, oh, this is bad. You need to have a good microphone. Why are you doing this on the telephone? You don't have to do this on the telephone. But here's the thing. Ed didn't care about the fidelity. The value of the podcast wasn't about the fidelity. The value of the podcast was about the expert advice given on the podcast. So here's this podcast that's going to change lives, it's going to change businesses, that was Heralded, was recommended, and it's the type of thing that most podcasters would go, blech. We got to move from experience to expertise. Now, as I mentioned, at the event last week, a lot of leads, a lot of people want their podcast done. Very, very interesting. But let me tell you a couple things. One, nobody asked how long I'd been consulting. Nobody asked how many podcasts I'd gotten out the door. Nobody asked what my microphone choice was. Nobody asked whether or not I use WordPress and I host my own feed or somebody else host their own feed. All the questions that are all the rage in the podcasting space right now, none of those questions were asked because what the audience wanted was they wanted results. They wanted somebody who obtains results superior by those obtained by the majority of the population. They had heard the hoopla about podcasts, and they'd maybe read, Read some books, read some articles. They knew that the results my company shows, Joe spoke to them, other people spoke to them, I spoke to them. That's what they wanted. They didn't want experience, they wanted expertise. There's nothing sadder than the podcast consultant with the day job. You know, I'm sorry, but that's what it is. You've got to get the expertise to deliver what it is. See, experience in the podcasting space might not be a good thing. Experience might only show insanity and nothing else. Let me give you a couple of examples. First one comes from me. I've been dieting, sadly, for most of my life. Haven't really done that well. I have a tremendous amount of experience with dieting, but very little expertise in dieting results. Would you take dieting advice for me? No. But I have all this experience. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Experience and expertise are two different things in this industry. This is one that always frustrates me. There'll be the tech pundit who every time a new technology comes out, every time for the last decade, they'll go, this is the hot new thing. This is the hot new thing. This is the hot new thing. They'll say hot new thing eight or nine times a week, and then four or five years later, when they get one of them correct, they go, check me out. I understand the future. No, you don't. You just know how to play the numbers. So you have experience in calling things the hot new thing, not expertise in understanding what the hot new thing is. What about the author with 30 books, none of them that have been published? We've met that type. Sure, great experience in writing, but no expertise in publishing. The janitor who gets turned down for pay raises five years in a row because of some standard work experience in cleaning, but no expertise in doing it. Well, the Teenage girl who posts 50 makeup pics a day to Instagram. Lots of experience, but don't hire her. She has no expertise in results. The podcaster who does a daily 90 minute show that no one listens to. Lots of experience, maybe recorded more in the last year than I have in the last 10, but not expertise in seeing results. What about the fast food employee who can only be trusted to sweep out the driveway? Yeah, sure, experience in fast food, but not expertise in the industry. See, we are as an industry getting our terms mixed up. So and so, so and so has been doing this for 10 years. Have they been doing this well? Have they seen results? Are they seeing results that other people haven't seen? Are they seeing results better than the industry? Is the only result that they're in the hundreds, maybe the thousands on their podcast? That's not the same thing. How do we respond to this? What do we do with this? Well, here's the thing. If you are looking for a consultant and maybe with SEO, somebody is going to come through. Listen to this episode. If you're looking for a podcast consultant, you want to look for expertise. You want to look for people who have seen amazing results. In my world, my two big things are frictionless production and strategic marketing. Those are my expertise. I've seen amazing results. Every time somebody comes through, my organization follows the directions. We make number one in the topic and we make top 100 in iTunes. Some top 10. 1. We even got to number one of all of itunes, we have the expertise. Yes, some experience with expertise is more important. If we only did a couple dozen podcasts with that, did far less than the person who does a daily show every day for six months, we could have less experience. But more expertise. That's what you want. So if you're looking for a consultant, ask for results, find the expertise, know the difference between the two. If you are trying to position yourself as a consultant, which would be many of you listening to this, are doing that, I would really recommend you sit down with a piece of paper and you try to figure out what is my experience and what is my expertise. Because they are very, very different. And I'll tell you this, trust you, me, this know, you, me, this, people don't care about your experience, they care about your expertise. And if Your website is 10 years of experience and experience in this and experience that nobody cares. And if anything, it's doing more damage than good. And then outside for both of us, I want us to start looking at the industry, not who's been doing it for A long time. Who has the highest amount of production, who has the fanciest microphone, who's been to the most events? But what have we actually done? When we move to expertise, I think the industry is going to do amazingly well. So if you're looking for a consultant, look for expertise. If you're positioning yourself, if you are positioning yourself as a consultant, position your expertise, you'll be at a better place, the industry will be at a better place and you know, it's just going to be a better place. I cannot stress that enough. If you head out to the podcastreport.com104 for episode 104, I've got links, lots of them. I've got a link to the Ed Dayo mentioned inside of Facebook. Again, a podcast that most experienced podcasters, most long time podcasters would go, it's just on a phone. But the fact of the matter was the content was fantastic. The expertise presented is why it got the attention we need. More like that. I've got a link to Joe Polish's Genius Network podcast we launched. Number one. Lot of fun. Got a link to the VidSummit event in LA a little bit later this month. I don't normally promote events, but this one's interesting. And we'll be chatting about, not experience, not how many times we've done it, not how long we've been doing it, but expertise in the industry. Some numbers, some things that really work. Got links to the three books. The new how to Stream Video Live book made number one at Amazon. I'm thrilled about that. We've got a link to it. How to podcast 2016 and YouTube strategies 2016 are there as well. We've also got the ability for you to keep up to date with a couple of apps. Got an app here for the podcast industry report and we've got the how to Podcast app. Links to those at the website as well. Would love to have you subscribe to the podcast. Get this thing automatically. That's the power of podcasting. ThePodcastReport.com iTunes ThePodcastReport.com Google ThePodcastReport.com Stitcher whatever platform you use, we are there. Same goes true to social. We love the interaction. The podcastreport.com Facebook thepodcastreport.com Twitter thepodcastreport.com Pick the social network of your choice. Subscribe to the show so that it comes next week. Follow us on social, interact with with us on social so that we can do more for this industry. But between now and then, my friend. Make sure you don't confuse experience with expertise. Maybe help the industry do the same chat next week by.