Getting your audio podcast into Facebook and Google+

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 15, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, PodCamp, Podcasting, Technology | 3 comments

Over the weekend at PodCamp NH, I gave a presentation about marketing your podcast. One of the little tidbits in there was how to load your podcast to Facebook and Google+. The trick with both of these services is that they have in-content video players, but no audio players. There are obviously apps in Facebook’s case, but those aren’t helpful to you for people who don’t have those apps installed or aren’t browsing your page.

So how do you load up a podcast episode? Very straightforward: turn it into a video. Start with a still image that accurately reflects the podcast. In the example below, I used a photo of John Wall and me at the doughnut shop where we record Marketing Over Coffee.

If you were really clever, you’d put some text on the photo such as calls to action or letting people know that it’s a video still and won’t be moving.

Drag and drop that photo into iMovie or the video editor of your choice. Adjust its duration to the maximum length allowed; for iMovie, that’s 10 minutes. Copy and paste as many times as you need until you’ve got enough “video” for the duration of your audio clip, then drop in your audio clip.

Once you’ve got everything lined up, render the project to a completed video file and upload to the respective services.

After the content is loaded, you’ll be able to have social conversations in-network about the audio, which is handy, especially if your own site doesn’t garner much in the way of comments or discussions.

Obviously, if you have actual video content, load that instead, but this is a fast and very simple way of getting your audio content into social networks using their default players.

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How to Market Your Podcast

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Aug 13, 2011 in Advertising, Conferences, Marketing, PodCamp, Podcasting, Presentations | 1 comment

For those folks attending PodCamp NH 2011, this is a mindmap of the presentation, How to Market Your Podcast.

If you’d like to download a high resolution, printable PDF, click here.

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How to make better interview videos with Levelator and iMovie

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 15, 2011 in Conferences, Podcasting, Technology, White Belt | 6 comments

At a variety of events I’ve been to recently, people have been shooting videos using handheld video cameras, like Flipcams and the built in video capabilities of the iPhone. These devices are wonderful – compact, good quality video recorders. However, they all suffer from one major deficiency:

The sound is usually terrible. Why? Most of the handheld video cameras simply have small, poor, or incorrectly aimed microphones that fail to record audio in nearly the same quality as the video. There are a number of ways to try to work around these limitations.

1. Get a wireless microphone setup. Talking with Tom does this using a wireless lavalier mic that brings focused sound into his iPhone. Not cheap, but very effective.

2. Record audio separately. This is what I do most often if I’m doing an interview that really matters. I’ll use a Zoom H2 discreetly placed out of field of view and record audio on it, then sync it up later in the video. Effective, great quality, but has a moderate financial cost and a significant time cost.

3. For video shot on the fly or if you don’t want to shovel money at the problem, your best bet is to use Conversations Network’s Levelator. This very simple sound cleaning software takes an existing audio file and tries to clean it up, fixing volume disparities (a very common problem when the interviewer is talking much closer to the camera than the interview subject), and other audio oddities.

The Levelator is fantastic at cleaning up conversation. One caveat: the same tech that lets it clean up speaking also mangles music, so don’t use it on any musical files.

Here’s how to do it in iMovie very simply:

1. Arrange things and know which clips you want in your project (and for how long).

2. Select Detach Audio.

3. Select Export via Quicktime and choose Sound to AIFF.

4. Drag and drop the audio into the Levelator. Let it do its thing.

5. Drag and drop the cleaned audio file back into iMovie and align it with the clip if need be.

6. Delete the original audio clip (purple) and publish your movie.

Here’s an example of a clip of Steve Garfield and Ewan Spence before levelation:

Note the volume differences between Ewan and Steve.

And here’s the clip afterwards:

Ewan and Steve sound roughly the same, and you don’t need to crank the audio all the way up.

Special thanks to Steve Garfield and Ewan Spence for their comedic skills at Blogworld NYC.

Updated: Doug Kaye from the Conversation Network left some clarifications in the comments.

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PodCamp Boston 5: Prepared for the future

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 27, 2010 in Conferences, PodCamp, Podcasting, Social media, Technology | 1 comment

PodCamp Boston 5 has come and gone, celebrating 5 years of what started as a goofy little experiment and turned into a worldwide movement. Chris Brogan and I have you to thank for taking our idea and running with it, and we hope you continue to do so. I’ll let Chris expound on his takeaways from the event, but here are a few of mine and some thanks.

First, a gigantic thanks to this year’s organizing team: Doug Haslam, Ellen Rossano, Carissa O’Brien, Steve Sherlock, Chris Brogan, Chris Bowen, and especially to lead organizer Michelle Wolverton. These folks did an amazing job, and everything you saw and experienced this weekend happened principally because of them.

Great huge thanks are also owed in quantity to sponsors Microsoft R&D New England, my employer Blue Sky Factory, CC Chapman, Batchblue Software, and Boloco. These folks provided the hefty infrastructure that made PodCamp Boston 5 possible.

Finally, thanks are owed to everyone who learned, shared, and grew their new media skills.

The theme of this year’s PodCamp Boston was preparing for the future, and I think a good part of the content fit that theme very well. We all shared things from basic social CRM to mosaic branding, from blogging 101 to competitive intelligence practices. There wasn’t a lot of waxing rhapsodic about social media’s effervescent qualities or actionless dreaming about quitting your day job, but instead there were plenty of takeaways, even for PodCamp veterans like me. I’ve got a nice list of things I need to check out and learn more about, and to be perfectly honest, that hasn’t happened at a PodCamp or any conference in quite some time.

As I mentioned at the kickoff and during my podcasting session, it’s time for folks to re-look at podcasting. It was 5 years too early and most of the folks who burned out and left have missed the opportunity. The research done by firms like Edison Research point to huge potential in an audience that very few people are serving. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t the hype of the early days of podcasting. It’s still much harder work than nearly any form of new media except video production, it still requires a ton of commitment and passion, but the audience you have access to now, 5 years after PodCamp 1, is gargantuan compared to the audience we had back then.

Podcasting is an incredibly poor vehicle for the casual prospect, for the casual browsing sort. Tools and platforms like Twitter or quick hits on YouTube are much better suited for low-commitment, short attention span crowds. Podcasting is an ideal vehicle for the highly engaged, highly committed customer or prospect because these are the folks who will make room in their day, their workout routine, their commute for you because they love you and everything you produce. There will not be many of them compared to audiences like Twitter followers, but they will follow you to the ends of the earth as long as you continue to serve them well.

Finally, the preparation for the future is ongoing. Everyone who attended PodCamp got to expand their personal power and reach, expand their knowledge, expand their networks, and these are good, important first steps. Keep doing them, keep growing, but start to leverage that power. Start to use your awakened superhero powers to make something happen in the world. Take what you’ve learned and apply it. If you have no opportunity to do so at work, find a local charity and volunteer to start them down that road.

To everyone who has been a part of the PodCamp adventure since that fateful weekend at Bunker Hill Community College 5 years ago, thank you for being a part of the adventure, and thank you for continuing to make the world a better place in all you do. I hope that PodCamp continues to help you in your quest!

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Podcasting as intent

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Sep 24, 2010 in Marketing, Podcasting | 4 comments

Following someone or something on Twitter indicates a small amount of intent. It takes literally less than a second to follow someone. Replying and conversing does show more intent.

Becoming a Fan on Facebook is the same. Liking something on Facebook indicates a small amount of intent.

Subscribing to someone’s newsletter takes slightly more intent. Reading, forwarding, sharing, and clicking through indicates greater intent.

What does it say about someone, though, who watches all of your videos or listens to all of your audio podcasts? What does it say about someone who tunes in all the time? What does it say about someone who shares every piece of content you create with their social circles and relentlessly flogs other people to tune in?

They are a true fan. They’re dedicated. They believe in you and the information you have to share.

The question is, how well are you treating them? Or are you spending all your time chasing new audience, and ignoring the gold mine you’ve already got subscribed to your podcast?

If you don’t know who your evangelists and true fans are, you probably don’t deserve to have them, and in fairly short order if you continue to neglect them, you won’t.

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What content are you sitting on?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 25, 2010 in New media, Podcasting, Video | 13 comments

I was going through my archives the other day, sifting out stuff that I didn’t need to hold onto any more, and found some pretty amazing content collecting dust. I have hours and hours of video, text, and all kinds of media, some of which has never seen the light of day but is incredibly valuable. Other stuff used to be posted online, but has since vanished due to changes, time, even companies going out of business.

Here’s a really simple exercise for you to try: wherever you keep your archives and backups (you do keep backups, right?), go sifting through them for 15 minutes at some point today and see if there’s something in there that is worth bringing back to the light.

Why? Your network, your audience is ever-changing, ever-shifting, and hopefully ever-growing. There are people you are friends with today that had never heard of you a week, a month, a year ago. While your old stuff may be dusty to you, it may be brand new to them – and more valuable than it ever was. Rather than discard old stuff simply because it’s old, take a look at your old stuff and see if it’s worth rseurrecting.

Here’s an added twist: with what you know now, see if your old content improves. Do you have access to better tools, better knowledge, better processes? Here’s a photo I shot way, way back in 2001, which is practically the stone age in digital terms.

What’s different is that today, I have access to tools like Aperture and Adobe Photoshop. When this photo was taken, I would have been using Adobe Photoshop 6.0. Today’s version, CS5, is technically version 12.0 of that same software, and the tools have just gotten better. I used Aperture’s basic auto-enhance tools on this photo and it looks better than it ever did back then.

Here’s a video clip of world-renowned master martial arts teacher Stephen K. Hayes from 2007.

What’s changed? iMovie 9 has motion stabilization and audio normalization, so what would have taken me a ridiculous number of steps back then to edit took relatively few today. You get to enjoy the content – which is still as valuable as ever – but re-creating the content is much less painful.

Back when I did a daily podcast, years ago now, I would go to concerts and with the artist’s permission, record stuff live. All those old recordings are still sitting around in raw form, collecting dust in the archives. When I dug back into them to resurrect something, I found that they definitely needed editing – but my editing skills have changed and improved vastly in the 4 years it’s been since I made the recording. Here’s an example, Rebecca Loebe’s song Grace recorded at a bar in Cambridge, MA about 3 1/2 years ago (MP3). Sounds better than ever with better audio editing knowledge.

So what are you sitting on? What stuff seems old and stale to you but your newest friends might really, really enjoy? It’s a summer Friday – go take a few minutes and bring something back from the past. If it’s still high quality, all of us will appreciate enjoying it again, whether we’ve seen it or not.

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