PLA Blog

Clinton Alvord, Leesa Barnes, Chris Brogan, Christopher Penn, John Wall, and Adam Weiss presented on the Podcast Formats Panel this afternoon, with Bryan Person as moderator. The goal of the discussion was focused on making the best podcast possible, the different flavors of podcasts, and how to best leverage them (more information about the session can be found on the wiki). While the session did cover some of the issues on the agenda, the best bit was the tips brainstorming session at the end.

Some of the tip gems include:

• Choose interviewees well. Even the most prominent people in a field can end up as bad interviewees.
• Have a good conversation, which good questions that you plan in advance.
• Toss out the bad stuff. It might be hard, especially with important people, but if it’s bad, don’t save it, and for the good of all, don’t publish it.
• Audio needs to be engaging, video makes it more fun, speaking in analogies helps a whole lot.
• Focus on a niche audience, even if you end up with a broader audience. Starting with a focus helps.
• Say your name right away, before any intro music, and the episode ID information, so people know whether or not they’ve heard the episode early, instead of 5 minutes in.
• Don’t let your intro music go on for a whole minute before you start talking!
• No housekeeping at the beginning of your podcast, and don’t apologize for not updating for a while.
• Experimentation is great, just don’t overhaul the podcast when you have thousands of listeners.
• If you do want to experiment, but you have an established template brand, you can have an episode every now and again that is understood to be a free-form episode.
• Get feedback from your listeners.

Tags: PLA Blog, PodCamp Boston, podcasting

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 10th, 2006 at 12:03 am and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.