Public Relations and the Power of Podcasting

The mar­ket­ing world is abuzz with the notion of blog­ging and pod­cast­ing as tools for greater sat­u­ra­tion, vis­i­bil­ity, touch, what­not. We’ve been has­ing out some of those con­cepts around here and I thought I’d take a minute to out­line them.

I started exper­i­ment­ing with pod­cast­ing last month for a pub­lic rela­tions course I just wrapped up. It was a small class, a good one full of guinea pigs for my tech machi­na­tions. The course is offered as a hybrid — on ground one week, online three weeks, on ground one week — so I pitched to the stu­dents that it might be a fun experiement to try pod­cast­ing my online lec­tures for the three weeks we’re not together.

Using Garage­Band, a new con­denser micro­phone, a PreSonus break­out box, and my pre­vi­ously typed lec­tures as my scripts, I jumped in. The feed­back was won­der­ful. I had stu­dents telling me that the whole con­cept changed the way they inter­act with the con­tent. That they gather around their com­puter with their fam­i­lies and lis­ten together — a la some sort of post-modern “Fire­side Chat”.

Hyper­bole aside, it helped me, too. Being able to pro­vide the tone of the lec­ture along with the slides allowed me to con­nect with the mate­r­ial in a new way, to con­nect in a way I hadn’t expe­ri­enced with the tra­di­tional on ground lec­tures to boot. They’re focused. They’re tan­gi­ble. They’re tac­tile, in a strange way, know­ing that the stu­dents are out there ware­hous­ing my mate­r­ial on their iPods makes the whole process bril­liantly fused with dis­tance edu­ca­tion.

When I finally took the lid off my lit­tle exper­i­ment for Uni­ver­sity admin­is­tra­tion, the response was guarded, but pos­i­tive. While the tech­nol­ogy was daz­zling — cer­tainly daz­zling to those who have no expe­ri­ence with this sort of wiz­ardry day-to-day — the cyn­ics and tech­ni­cal folks ral­lied against the con­cept for every rea­son you can prob­a­bly already imag­ine: too expen­sive to host, too expen­sive to serve, can’t put Uni­ver­sity intel­lec­tual prop­erty on a pub­licly acces­si­ble site, etc, etc, etc.,

But it sparked dia­log, and gave me a soap­box to talk about this tech­nol­ogy from a PR per­spec­tive. Here are my points:

1. This tech­nol­ogy frees orga­ni­za­tions from the whims of pro­fes­sional media.




2. This tech­nol­ogy allows orga­ni­za­tions to develop the elu­sive “Trans­par­ent Rela­tion­ship” with their publics.




3. Orga­ni­za­tions who ignore this tech­nol­ogy risk alien­at­ing a large new mar­ket seg­ment that expects otherwise.

The Whims of Pro­fes­sional Media

The PR role is a tricky one. Align­ing an organization’s mes­sage with the needs of the media pub­lic is not an easy job. To do it well, it requires a mind-numbingly detailed aware­ness of media out­lets in the mar­kets and within that under­stand­ing, a grasp of the time­li­ness of news as it passes through the pub­lic fil­ter. When hard news is heavy, when trends fall out of favor, get­ting your pitches acknowl­edged can be chron­i­cally dif­fi­cult.

Our con­tract and in-house PR pros are won­der­ful. They get it. They under­stand our mes­sage and they drive to spread the word by defin­ing and craft­ing mes­sages and deliv­er­ing sto­ries to media out­lets with whom they have a sound his­tory — a rela­tion­ship. But if the news cycle dri­ves our seg­ment out of the spot­light, our story is canned no mat­ter how strong the reporter rela­tion­ship is.

What this tech­nol­ogy deliv­ers orga­ni­za­tions is oppor­tu­nity. Oppor­tu­nity to define and craft your mes­sag­ing, define your core audi­ence, and deliver your mes­sage your­self in a cost effec­tive medium. Orga­ni­za­tional PR pros can now con­trol the dis­tri­b­u­tion of their mes­sages and take advan­tage of time­li­ness and tar­get­ing that com­pli­ments the news cycle, not com­bats it.

Trans­par­ent Rela­tion­ships

I’m a sub­scriber to the idea that mar­kets are con­ver­sa­tions. The brains that have lead the charge on that front are cer­tainly greater pros than I at this stuff. So, what I have to say here really serves to amplify a point that I’m not sat­is­fied is trum­peted loudly enough.

Publics expect the con­ver­sa­tion.

Mar­keters do their level best to fig­ure out how to start the con­ver­sa­tion because it feels like value-added to let our cus­tomers in on our lit­tle secrets. Value-added is no longer of value, it’s assumed. If we stand on our walls and open doors for min­ions to enter and behold our inner-workings, we’re shut­ter­ing the rest of the world — we’re invit­ing the masses to go else­where, to find the con­ver­sa­tion.

We’re not doing our cus­tomers any favors by build­ing trans­parency into our oper­a­tions. We’re doing just what they have expected all along.

Igno­rance is Alien­ation

The time to start the dia­log is yes­ter­day. The tech­nol­ogy is far too easy to adopt, to build upon, to pro­duce pass­able con­tent. With another day that goes by, so goes another of our peers lever­ag­ing these tools against us. The gen­er­a­tion we’re mar­ket­ing with, the Echo Boomers, Mil­lenials, Flip-Floppers, Thum­bers, they are already the MySpace gen­er­a­tion. They’re raised on dis­tance edu­ca­tion. They’ve stud­ied their online games, they’ve IM’d across fan­boards and now they’re Skyp­ing all around us while we’re just get­ting used to DSL.

Con­tent

But it’s more than just the tech­nol­ogy. Right now, blogs are read if they’re per­ti­nent. Pod­casts are devoured because they’re cool. If that time­line per­sists, blogs should be com­pletely out­moded in three years and pod­cast­ing will be a vast new adver­tis­ing spon­sored audio­vi­sual black hole. Pop­u­lar­ity will be defined by util­ity: the level at which we’re able to deliver use beyond cool.

Here are a few things I’m work­ing on right now.

1. Reme­dial Skills Devel­op­ment It’s not really fair to call them “reme­dial skills”. Many stu­dents who hit our classes don’t have the basic for­mat­ting, com­put­ing, and crit­i­cal think­ing skills to feel com­fort­able in our pro­gram. To help out, we’re launch­ing a pod­cast show, talk radio style, inter­view­ing our best fac­ulty across dis­ci­plines giv­ing stu­dents tips and tricks on basic aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance. Not sure how to for­mat and APA paper? We can talk about that. How about Pow­er­Point? We can get you started there as well. Need to know what is and is not con­sid­ered pla­gia­rism? We’ve got you cov­ered. These will be hosted cen­trally and offered as an enroll­ment tool for aca­d­e­mic coun­selors and fac­ulty with stu­dents not quite ready to for prime time academia.




2. Trends and Issues This is a round­table dis­cus­sion show tak­ing on the issues of con­cern to our stu­dents. Where will the jobs be in tech five years from now? What’s it like to leave school and join a union as a teacher? I’m 23 and my older class­mates don’t under­stand me — what’s with that? We’ll bring in fac­ulty experts and toss around and issue for an hour, hop­ing to build a resource for our stu­dents to sink their teeth into; some­thing that will help them feel more safe and con­fi­dent in clas
   s. They’re not alone, and we understand.

They’re weather bal­loons, but we’re doing our best to get on board now. Does the orga­ni­za­tion under­stand it? No. Is it our charge to push, and keep push­ing until they do? Absolutely. Our cus­tomers expect it.