Podcasting 101
By Lon S. Cohen
A friend of mine recently asked how she could incorporate podcasting into her communications strategy. She needed a Podcast 101 lesson so I wrote up this primer for her. I decided to share it here for my readers. This is geared for her corporate communications plan but you can use the tips and advice here for any type of podcast you’d like to create. Of course cohcom does help companies get set up with podcasting for any purpose. Just contact us. Enjoy!
A podcast is an episodic audio or visual performance delivered to your computer on a subscription basis as a compressed file and playable in a portable device.
Podcasting relies on a set of very simple concepts strung together in a logical way so almost anyone can do it for very cheap and quite literally, in a matter of hours. If you have listened to 
my own podcasts (and shame on you if you have not) then you will have two very different samples to draw upon. I will highlight the differences later but for now let’s get you started. (Disclaimer. I had a podcast that I no longer do and let the domain name run out so it is not available anymore. The name was SciFi Guys. My friend and I had a great time doing it and we thought it was good but podfade got the best of us. If anyone wants to hear any episodes of it email me and I’ll link to the mp3s.)
But you can still subscribe to a podcast I did of my novel, Erosion. Click here to register and subscribe for free.
Your first question may be: What’s the best recording method for a quick broadcast, for example, management telling employees about a new goal? This is a typical use for a podcast in a corporate environment when speaking directly to employees as a audience.
With podcasting, the answer is much the same for a quick or not quick recording and the software used does require a little bit of a learning curve.
First, if you have access to an Apple Macintosh. A really good amateur recording and mixing program is Garage Band. It does require a little time to learn but the outcome is a professionally sounding and mixed podcast recording. It’s a basic audio track-mixing program, with its own quirks but “close enough for Jazz” as they say.
Don’t have time to learn Garage Band or the thought of multi-track recording making you go “huh?” Then try a free download available for both Mac and PC and a standard in voice recording and tracking called Audacity. Did I mention, it’s free? Well, it’s free. Again, there is a little bit of a learning curve here too but it’s not a steep as with Garage Band, almost as good, is Quick & Dirty and did I mention free?
So now you have two options on software, but, well, now you’re asking me, how the heck am I going to get my voice into said program? Stop your whining girlfriend! OMG! I’m getting to it.
You have a few options here. If you own any type of newish laptop computer then you have a microphone built in. So just open up the software, choose “built-in” mic and let ‘er rip. Hit record and start talking little lady. Let me warn you, it sucks. The sound is tinny and all the background noise gets sucked right into your recording, making it hard to hear the speaker and worst of all very unprofessional.
So go get yourself a decent microphone. A very good microphone can cost up to $1,000. Not kidding. But you shouldn’t spend more than say, $75 – $100. Most of the good ones are USB. (Mine is – cost $75).
Click here for a good resource for picking a microphone.
This is my microphone and I LOVE it.
Also, you’ll want headphones to hear yourself in. You want to listen to your voice when you record and you don’t want it just coming out of your laptop speakers to cause severe feedback in the recording. Headphones also provide a layer of protection from the outside world when you record. Lastly, you just look cool.
So now you have your Mic, your headphones and your recording software. Obviously, the next step is something to talk about. Seriously, this is harder than it sounds. It’s great to write up a speech, another thing to give it to a group of people and a whole different thing to record something. You will probably want to test it a few times before committing.
One of the good things about both Garage Band and Audacity is the ability to go back and edit a recording so, to put it bluntly, you don’t sound like an idiot. You can take out the pauses, the ums and ahhs and the mess-ups. But be careful. If you take out every breath and pause, it will sound unnatural and robot like. Unless that’s the effect you are looking for, then go nuts. Editing is a fine art.
What’s the best file format for posting online (and where did you post them?)
Good question, glad you asked. The standard file format is MP3. Let me tell you. Both programs (Audacity and Garage Band) can output to MP3 format. Both have their own file formats that need to be converted. They can both be converted very easily to MP3. Here is what I usually do. I usually record voice in Audacity (if it’s a monologue) and then put that track into Garage Band and add my other tracks (music, sound effects, etc.) and the whole thing is exported to MP3 in the end.
So the short answer is MP3 file format any day of the week.
This can then be imported into iTunes. I use iTunes. It’s simple. That way you can add the tags and other data, like file name, author, date, images, etc. associated with the MP3.
Lastly, any other tips?
My friend then asked me this in our email exchange: “We’re going to put a podcast on an iPod and give it away at a team-building event in a few weeks and post the link on the website with supporting communications.”
OK. Now you’re pushing it. Free marketing advice? You do know that I have kids at home and a mortgage to pay, don’t you? Just kidding. For an internal podcast, marketing can all be handled by internal communications. What I do suggest is that initially, you can post it on your corporate website for people to grab and listen to on their MP3 players or computers. You can easily put the MP3 file onto an iPod the same way you would put any song file (also MP3) on an iPod.
Now if you want to build up a Podcast RSS feed, which is the real magic of podcasting then that’s for another day (but I will cover it very briefly below).
There are so many to websites and books that will get you more information. I got most of my advice by looking everything up on the Internet. I do have a couple of books. The best basic book is “Podcasting for Dummies,” no kidding. I know the guys who put it together. Well, I have communicated with them online and one of them worked on the website that hosts my podiobook. For a basic primer on podcasting, get up, go and get yourself some petty cash and head over to Borders bookstore and buy it.
Here are some other helpful websites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/teachersites/oald7/wotm/wotm_archive/podcast?cc=global
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2005/07/20/WhatIsPodcasting.html
Some places that you can look up to submit your podcast:
AmigoFish
Digg!
iTunes
Pluggd
Podcast Alley
Podcast Pickle
Let’s get back to the differences in recording quality for a moment. My podiobook, “Erosion” was done by me at home. I bought a microphone (Samson C01U) and used Audacity to record my voice. I then bought a CD of royalty free music and used that for the background. The sound effects came from the suite of free ones that come with Garage Band. I used Garage Band to mix it all together. The guys at podiobooks.com hosted it and provided the RSS feed so I did not have to do anything for that. Magic. I have a podcast. The quality is OK. The editing needs work. But there you have it.
On the flip side, my podcast SciFryGuys was recorded in a room in my cousin’s house, which we converted into a recoding studio. He used a mixing board and we used his microphone equipment and such. Basically, he was the board guy doing all the engineering. I helped mix the episodes on Garage Band. (We still used Garage Band though in the end we considered using a more expensive and sophisticated mixing program.) The sound quality and mixing are much better.
Here are some useful tips:
- Record in a room filled with stuff. Really, no background noise but lots of stuff. Stuff (especially soft stuff like carpet and curtains) dampens the echo. It provides a softer, mellower, more natural sound. Empty rooms have too much echo.
- Rehearse. Rehearse. Rehearse. Don’t get frustrated by screw-ups. It’s all comes out in the editing!
- RSS Feeds explained! – An RSS Feed is like a syndicated channel. It is really the backbone of podcasting. What it means is debated but I like Real Simple Syndication—No joke. What happens on a basic level is your information is pushed out to subscribers to the Feed whenever you choose to update that information. So for instance a blog, when you update the post gets pushed out to the RSS text reader. A podcast when posted, gets pushed out the podcatching software, the most popular being iTunes. If you subscribe to my podcasts (scifryguys or erosion) through iTunes’ podcast area on their site, you will get the information whenever I update that particular feed.
- On the other hand if you go to any of my blogs (plug!) cohenside.blgospot.com and subscribe to the feed, you can get it send by email or to a feed reader (there are many of which Google has a popular one).
- The reason I bring up blogs is that podcasts and blogs are intimately linked. You can use any blogging software (WordPress comes to mind) to encapsulate your podcast MP3 into an RSS feed. Once you have the feed link (it’s a static link created by the blog software) then you can republish that RSS Feed link to Apple iTunes, which is FREE! (Free comes up a lot in Podcasting and bloging.) Speaking of marketing, one of the best marketing distribution tools is iTunes. It’s very, very popular and easy to use. While not the only one, Apple has cornered the market on podcast distribution. And… it’s free!
Hope this helps you get yourself on the way to the joys of Podcasting.