Tag: socialmedia

Podcasting 102: Becoming a Podcaster

podcast podcasting podcaster

Once you’ve gotten some familiarity with podcasting as a consumer (see Social Media 106/Podcasting 101: Introduction to Podcasting), you may want to explore producing a podcast of your own.

The great news is that for a couple hundred dollars you can get equipment and hosting services that will enable you to produce and distribute a high-quality podcast for your business or academic, non-profit or not-for-profit organization. You can do something that will reflect well on your organization and that will enable you to communicate with and engage your key stakeholders, employees, customers or prospects.

The even better news is that through Social Media University, Global you can get experience as a podcaster in a safe environment and learn how to do it without putting your organization’s reputation at risk. You can see just how easy it is to produce a podcast, so that you will know the steps involved. Then you can go back to your work colleagues and supervisors and/or your IT department and be well-armed for the discussion when they tell you it would be too technically difficult or expensive to produce a podcast.

I’m not going to cover the strategic considerations behind podcasting yet; I will get into those in the 300-level courses. For now let’s just say that you have an audience to reach or a public to engage, and you want to know:

  1. What steps are required to produce and distribute a podcast?
  2. Is it realistic for me or for my organization to have a podcast?

The answer to question #2 is definitely yes, and I will prove it to you by answering question #1 with the rest of the 100-level courses in the Podcasting curriculum.

The best news of all is that, in keeping with SMUG’s tuition-free policies, your cost for production and worldwide distribution of your podcast will be exactly:

$0.00

That’s right. Assuming you have access to a computer (and the fact that you’re reading this suggests you probably have that part covered), as a SMUG student you will create a podcast for literally zero dollars. Not “three easy payments of $19.95.” Not “nothing down and no interest for 90 days.” Nothing. Ever.

And you’ll have a built-in focus group. Your fellow SMUG students will be able to subscribe to your podcast and comment on it, offering suggestions for improvement. And you can do likewise for theirs.

I’m going to use this course as an excuse to start my SMUG podcast, too. I’ll experiment with some different methods, and let you know how they work. You’ll be able to hear the results of each production choice. And as I create the distribution system for my podcast, as a SMUG student you’ll be able to add your podcast as a channel for free. I’ll walk you through step-by-step how I did it, and then you can take what you’ve learned back to your business or organization and maybe spend a little more for a dressed-up version.

Get ready for a hands-on learning adventure in podcasting!

If you haven’t enrolled in SMUG yet, you can do that here.

Photo credit: Frank Gruber

Exploring in DC

What do you do on a Saturday night in Washington, DC? If you’re a geek who happens to also be a basketball fan, maybe you do what I’ve done: watch a couple of NCAA basketball games while checking out some newer social media sites and services.

I’m not quite that pathetic. I did take a ride on the Metro this evening after the conference to go see the cherry blossoms on the Mall. It was beautiful:

jeffersonmonument.jpg

But after that, I did come back to the hotel to eat and watch UCLA put away Xavier, and for the last couple of hours I’ve been multitasking, checking out some social media sites, services and applications while watching a closer contest between North Carolina and Louisville.

I may be doing some reviews of these after I get a little more experience with them, but here are some initial impressions.

I like Twhirl, a desktop client for Twitter. I think it can help me have more of the real-time experience of Twitter that would be more helpful. Twittermail looks like a good service, too. Dennis McDonald shared his Twitter rules this week, and I agree with most of them.

One thing I’d like to know is whether I can get Tweets from only selected accounts via SMS. I think I’ve tried this, by signing up for one user’s Tweets. This would be particularly helpful if I could have a high-priority class of Tweets (e.g. family members) that came to me by SMS. Does anyone know whether this works?

I also signed up for Utterz, having seen Chris Heuer use it. My profile name is leeaase. Pretty original, huh? I’ll probably use it to do some blog posts, and then may give it a review.

Probably the coolest thing today is FriendFeed. It pulls in data from 33 other services, including Twitter, YouTube, a blog, Flickr, LinkedIn. Again my account is leeaase. I’ve read a bunch about this and look forward to getting more experience with it.

So what has your experience, if any, been with these services?

SMUG Extension Class in Green Bay

I’m on Packerland Drive in Green Bay at the corporate headquarters of Schneider National, a transportation firm with lots of orange trucks, for the monthly meeting of the NE Wisconsin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.

Here are the slides I used for my presentation, which was entitled Not Your Father’s Media (Yet).


Here are five immediate steps the PRSA members can take to dive into social media:

  1. Comment on the presentation in the post below, and ask any questions we didn’t get to cover.
  2. Join Facebook and “friend” me.
  3. Sign up for Twitter and “follow” me.
  4. Sign up for Google Reader, take the tour, and subscribe to some RSS feeds (including SMUG’s). If you want it by old-fashioned e-mail, get that here.
  5. Enroll in SMUG by joining the Facebook group.

This should all maybe take another 30 minutes or so to get started, but it hopefully will launch you on a lifetime of social media exploration.

Skype Videoconference Tutoring

I first experimented with Skype when I stayed at a hotel in central Wisconsin in which there was no cell phone reception. It was a great way to avoid the obscene per-minute charges for the hotel’s phone service.

I haven’t really needed it since then. Until today, when I wanted to set up a videoconference for tomorrow. We have a videoconferencing unit at work, and when I called an external collaborator to get the IP address for her videoconferencing service, she replied, “We just always use Skype.”

While we were still on the phone, I downloaded Skype on my (relatively) new MacBook Pro and signed in using my previously established account. Within a minute or so I got a message telling me that videoconferencing was enabled using my built-in iSight camera. A few seconds later we were talking face-to-face.

My main point in writing this post is to call your attention to Skype if you haven’t used it previously. I expect to be using it all day tomorrow for a videoconference (which will be free, like everything else you see here.) And when my daughter and her husband move to California next year with our first grandchild (who’s due in September), I’m sure we’ll be videoconferencing regularly.

But meanwhile, if you’re a SMUG student and would like to have a “Chat with the Chancellor” for some videoconference tutoring, send me an e-mail (leeaase at gmail.com) and we can arrange virtual office hours.

Welcome Frost & Sullivan eBulletin Readers

A few weeks ago I got a Facebook message from Caryn Brown from Frost & Sullivan, saying that she wanted to feature my blog as a “Recommended Read” in the eBulletin, a quarterly electronic publication for past participants in Sales and Marketing: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange. (I guess they ordinarily feature a book in this section.) I asked Caryn to let me know when the eBulletin would be distributed, so I could welcome you properly and share links to some of the posts I’ve done about Frost & Sullivan events. She kindly obliged, so here’s a quick intro to Social Media University, Global — or SMUG.

SMUG is the University of Phoenix without the football stadium…or the tuition…or the accreditation. It’s a place for lifelong learners to get hands-on experience with social media tools, which are changing the way people communicate.

With well over 100 million blogs and upwards of 68 million active users of Facebook, I’ve said previously that for PR professionals, unfamiliarity with these tools borders on malpractice. The same is true for those involved in sales and marketing.

Especially when you can learn about them for free!

Continue reading “Welcome Frost & Sullivan eBulletin Readers”