A quick introduction to podcasting and some tools to get started

On Friday last at Bond University I co-presented with Associate Professor Michael Rees a masterclass on developing a social media roadmap for business.

We had a great group of people to work with and Michael and I really enjoyed the interaction.

We also had a lot of material to get through and with some topics we inevitably only skimmed the surface. So in the course of the day I promised more information on several topics, one of which was podcasting.

These notes on podcasting are for people who just want to know enough to get started.

Real experts would want you to know a lot more!

According to Wikipedia, a podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded through web syndication.

In fact, most people restrict the term podcast to audio. (Note: Wikipedia definitions are useful but to be taken with a grain of salt).

I prefer to describe podcasting as Internet radio – I know that is limited and technically suspect, but it helps answer the question “so why would I want to know about podcasting?”.

The answer to that is in another question: “How would you like to have your own radio station?”

“Podcasting may be the ultimate democratization of radio. Anyone with an Internet connection and some inexpensive audio equipment can produce a podcast and make it available online.”

Ed Grabianowski “How to Create Your Own Podcast”

There are lots of resources online.

First, there are sites that are really set up as online broadcast platforms, like BlogTalkRadio and Talkshoe, where all the tech stuff is taken care of and all you have to do is phone in, hit a couple of buttons and broadcast.

BlogTalkRadio and Talkshoe

BlogTalkRadio and Talkshoe are available free and are open to anyone to use – for the free version they have some advertising but it is not obtrusive.

They are both very good. A drawback is that they control the copyright of anything you broadcast, so if you wanted to, say, re-purpose some sessions and sell them on a CD for instance, you would need their permission etc.

For people outside the USA, you need to phone in to a US number. Australians can get a phonecard from GoTalk and in my experience you shouldn’t have to pay much more that $2-3 for a one hour call. Your listeners can access the broadcast via the Internet and can call in via phone if you want to do Q&A or talkback.

Roll Your Own

You can spend as little or as much as you want on a roll your own solution, but my recommendation, for starting, is in three parts: a) download free audio editing software  b) subscribe to an audio hosting service and c) get yourself a free Skype account, a Pamela for Skype account and a headset with microphone, to plug into your computer:

a) Download (open source, free, cross platform sound editor) Audacity

There is a good guide/tutorial here, which also explains how to download the LAME encoder, which you will need if you want to export your audio files as MP3s – and you will! (I’m pretty sure LAME basically installs itself).

If you are on a Mac you may not need Audacity but there is a Mac version. Mac people can use GarageBand which I’m told comes with iLife and the upgrade costs about US$99, AU$120 for 2 years.

b) Audio  hosting service – about US$20 a month.

Is this essential? No. Will it save you a lot of trial and error and generally make life a whole lot easier? Yes.

Audio Acrobat ($19.95 a month – used by many coaches)
BYOAudio ($19.95 a month – used by me)*

Both Audio Acrobat and BYO Audio have affiliate programs so if you recommend them successfully to others you can before long find they are not actually costing you anything.

c) For recording, there are all sorts of microphones and mixers. I have done podcasts, recording straight onto the computer, using Skype audio, which is free, and for recording sessions I have used Pamela for Skype successfully with an around $10 headset (the one with the microphone “boom”) from Kmart. I also have a Plantronics headset from the USA and a new one on the way, the .Audio 470 USB (not available here in Australia, just over US$31 from Amazon).

Pamela has a 30 day free trial. I recommend you then buy the Professional edition for 19.95 Euros, for life, including upgrades etc.

Other stuff about podcasting

There is no end to what you can learn about podcasting.

If the idea of a book about podcasting appeals, there are Podcast Academy: The Business Podcasting Book, by Greg Cangialosi and colleagues, Gigavox Media & Focal Press and Podcasting for Profit by Leesa Barnes.*

There are podcasting networks, like The Podcast Network set up and run by Cameron Reilly.

There are local experts. Glenn Goodman on the Gold Coast, Australia, where I live, has the Aussie Techhead site and is a true walking talking expert on podcasting. If you ask around you will probably find local experts where you live or among your friends and acquaintances.

You can spend a lot of time acquiring knowledge about podcasting, especially about equipment, but I believe you don’t need very much knowledge or equipment to get started.

And if you have already started podcasting or are in fact an accomplished expert, why not share your own tips here?

*BYOAudio link is an affiliate link and book links are to my company’s Amazon Associates site

Image credit: Podcast Wallpaper, by ollyhart, via Flickr with Creative Commons license.

I’ve been on a new learning curve over the past several days, having said blithely to some colleagues that a recorded Skype video would be forthcoming. Sooner said than done.

The video was needed to help promote the one day Social Media Roadmap workshops I’m presenting next week and the week after, in Brisbane (Sept 29) and on the Gold Coast (Australia) (Oct 2), in tandem with my friend and colleague, Associate Professor Michael Rees of Bond University. The workshops are being coordinated by Bond University’s Centre for Executive Education (CEE) and there are more details on the CEE website. (Update: Brisbane event now postponed to a date to be fixed; Gold Coast event proceeding as planned.)

The video up on the web now – and embedded below in this blog post, but there were definitely some anxious moments and while it is quite short there have been literally hours of learning and experimentation in turning the idea into reality.

One thing we learned was that Skype wasn’t up to the task – our pictures “froze” with our voices still going – but ooVoo was (there was a fee, but it was worth it). I’ll write more about the whole “adventure” in a separate post.

In the video we talk about what the workshop participants can expect and we emphasise that the day is focused on helping those attending acquire information and tools they can put to work immediately.

In a separate post I will be sharing some of the things I learned about the practicalities of recording and uploading the conversation.

I may well have left my run a bit late, but I’ve just now registered interest in being one of the 100,000 people who from September 30 will be helping test the new online communication and collaboration tool, Google Wave.

Some time ago I took time out to watch a presentation done for developers. I’ve embedded the link below. If you haven’t yet watched it, be warned, it can get you in. It’s about 1 hour and 20 minutes long and, if you are as interested as I am in new ways to enhance communication and collaboration, you won’t be able to stop watching once you’ve started. I was utterly fascinated by what was demonstrated and I believe this tool could be a terrific asset for small business.

And I’m not biased by the fact that this product was developed in my home town of Sydney. 

Whether or not I get to be one of the testers, I’m looking forward to the day when Google Wave is generally available.

If you want to try your hand at Google Wave, there is a simple online form for registering your interest.

I’ve been having an interesting time – for “interesting” read “time-consuming and frustrating but I hope it’s worth it” – working out how to communicate a particular message to friends on Facebook. For experienced Facebook users what I’ve learned the hard way will probably seem terribly obvious, but someone might find some value in my sharing the experience.

And in the glorious tradition of blogging, I’ll have had the pleasure of getting it off my chest.

Background is that in my previous post on my current adventures with Facebook, I promised to write about making my new Social Media Roadmap page on Facebook more functional.

In looking at putting some time into the project I had been gratified and encouraged by the very positive response I’d had to inviting people to sign up on the new page, first in the somewhat pressured context of the Facebook page name “landrush” and subsequently. From the initial minimum 100 “fans” I had needed to be able to submit my name of choice for the page, the number has grown now to 186.

But as I was about to start on the process of pimping the Social Media Roadmap page I noticed that on my Facebook profile I have some 763 friends. It occurred to me that some of those friends might want to know about the Social Media Roadmap page and might not have picked up on my invitations, on Twitter, on my Facebook wall, etc.

Should be easy, I thought: just send a message to my friends.

Because they’re my friends, right? So where is the button to message all my friends? Can’t find it. Ask around. “Oh no”, I’m told by a friend (as in the offline version of “friend”) who knows about these things, “Facebook won’t let you send a message to all your friends at once.” This is apparently to protect us all from spamming: understandable, but right now that’s a pain. So what can I do? “Simple” says my friend, “you create groups and message them. But remember there can’t be more than 20 people in a group.”

Here’s where it got interesting. Whether by design or indifference, the Facebook setup is extremely user-unfriendly when it comes to linking friends together in groups.

And one of the first things I learnt in the process was that, technically, what I needed to create were not “groups” but “lists” (“group” means something else in Facebook).

First I had to click on the Friends tab in the main menu bar. That gave me pages of friends’ names and photos and at the top of the list a new menu bar with three tabs: Create New List, Edit List, Delete List. I noticed also that on the left hand side I already had some lists I had created at some point: but they were fairly selective and would not do for the current purpose.

Only the tab Create List was highlighted at this point, so I clicked that and a popup box appeared, with a field for the group name, and friends’ names and numbers displayed three across. There are two ways to add a name to the group, namely by typing into a separate field the beginning letters of a name or by clicking on a member’s picture. As you add names a tally is registered at the top of the box (“Selected”). The aim for me with the current exercise was to add no more than 20 to a list.

A complication I made for myself, consciously, was to exclude from the lists any of the people already on the Social Media Roadmap page. I did not think it would be a good look to be sending a notice about the page, or invitation to join, to someone already on the page.

As I could not find any way to export the list of names on the Social Media Roadmap page (as I can do, for instance, and with email addresses, with my connections on LinkedIn), I set up a spreadsheet and put in some time copying each name from the page into a spreadsheet.

I then cross-referenced that list of those already on the page with each of the new lists of friends and removed the duplicates from the friends’ lists.

So the current situation is that I have 36 lists of names of Facebook friends who have not yet become fans of the Social Media Roadmap page. As I understand, one of the advantages of the new page setup is that I will be able to message everyone at once without having to do sub-lists.

Over the next day or two I will message the 36 lists of friends progressively about the Social Media Roadmap page and hope some of them will see that as something of sufficient potential interest and value to them to consider becoming “fans”.

Then I will look at ways to make the page more interesting and helpful. And I intend to post about that in due course.

I’m currently re-jigging my business presence on Facebook and finding myself on a new learning curve about the platform and how it works.

I don’t mind going through that learning process, because I believe that understanding how Facebook works and being able to manage how we use that for our brands and how it can affect our brands has now become – for the time being at least – an essential part of basic social media literacy and competence.

I had been pretty slack about Facebook

I had been aware for a while that I needed to “do something” with Facebook, but it was on the “I’ll get around to that soon” list not the “priority to do” list. And I have to admit that although I routinely include favorable reference to Facebook in my presentations on social media for business, my own involvement with Facebook, while lengthy enough, has been pretty much to the lyrics of “Will you won’t you, will you won’t you join the dance?”

And insofar as what I post about here on Thinking Home Business is a reflection of what I’m currently focusing on, you could be forgiven for thinking I haven’t paid any real attention to Facebook. And you would be right, as is evidenced by the fact that the last time I posted here about Facebook was just a month short of two years ago, about how careful we need to be with our online identities.

Although I have just checked and found from a post on my Des Walsh dot Com site that, as far back as eighteen months ago, I was at least thinking seriously about Facebook as a social media platform for business.

The land rushes for URLs woke me up

The recent “land rushes” for Facebook profile username URLs and for “fan” page (or “vanity” page) username URLS finally focused my attention more seriously on the question of where Facebook fits in my business planning.The immediate task was to get my own preferred username – deswalsh – for my Facebook profile page.

Profile page URL

Having a name that is not very common, I was not unduly anxious about scoring my own name for my personal page on Facebook, although I did make sure I was on the case as soon as the flag fell for the land rush. I registered mine in the first five or ten minutes, so I now have the convenient URL http://www.facebook.com/deswalsh: and the cognate versions /DesWalsh, /des.walsh and /Des.Walsh work equally well as the /deswalsh one.

Page URL

Then there was the option of having a Facebook “fan” page and a related URL. I was more anxious about that, for the fairly basic reason that I didn’t yet have a fan page, although knowledgeable colleagues had told me that was a good thing to have for business.

Setting up the page was initially a challenge but I was able with a bit of help to figure it out. if you have yet to do that, and to save you the “mystificatiion” phase I went through, the steps are: 1. find at the bottom of your profile page the word Advertising (in blue) and click on that 2. On the page that click takes you to, find the word “Pages” at the top (there is a little orange flag) and click on that 3. Go through the instructions and then when you are ready click on the green button with the words Create a Page 4. Follow the steps set out there.

Note: it is not required that you take out a Facebook ad to help you find new fans; I skipped that step.

At first I wasn’t too anxious about getting the username I wanted, because once the gate was opened, so to speak, I would need only 20 fans to be able to register a preferred URL. Then there was a hitch: when I got to just over 20 I found that Facebook had changed the rules to require a minimum 100 fans. I launched a “fan raising” exercise – as did many others! – and within 24 hours, with the help of friends old and new, I had reached the requisite minimum. During the intervening time I was optimistic, although nervous. But the wait ended well: I now have my Social Media Roadmap page set up with the URL http://www.facebook.com/socialmediaroadmap

Coming up

For the next post on this topic I intend to look at the experience of making the Facebook page more functional and hopefully more helpful to the community that is forming there.

If you have any tips on what to do or avoid with a Facebook page, I hope you will share those in the comments section below.