MWGblog

I’ll be at the Podcasting Summit this weekend. If you are there stop by for one of my sessions:

• Growing Your Audience
• Making It: Lessons Learned on the Path to Podcasting Success

I plan to drop by both the Disney & the Content Creator parties on Sunday night and I’ll be on the show floor Monday. Look me up or follow on Twitter.

I accepted an invitation to speak again this year at NAB. I’ll be doing a session and a panel for the Podcasting Summit:

• Growing Your Audience
• Making It: Lessons Learned on the Path to Podcasting Success

You can see the entire schedule here. I’ve participated as a speaker at this event for the last three years. It has always proven to be a good learning event and one to check out if you’ll be at NAB.

One of the most common complaints with podcasting is that there are no established metrics like in radio. People expect exact number of listeners, downloads and impressions for digital media. I am all for it, and we are working diligently on it at GigaVox but I constantly find it amazing that advertisers are completely satisfied with hand filled rating diaries for radio.

Mark Ramsey posted a perfect example today on Hear 2.0. (Mark is a well known radio consultant.)

In fact, if that one diary of listening were added to the station’s audience pile, it would have been worth an estimated .2 share among persons 25-54…. The station would have leaped five rank positions…. I don’t need to spell out the revenue consequences.

Make sure you read the whole post on his blog. This is amazing to me: One listener, one diary, five rank positions! These are the numbers they rely on to drive a $20 billion dollar ad market for radio. (And yes all you math wizards, I understand sampling sizes and all the fancy math behind this.) All that said: One listener, one diary, five rank positions.

Knowing this, I am confident that podcasts (and new media in general) can already give advertisers and sponsors more accurate and detailed data - now it’s just a matter of educating the marketplace. Two years from now, the pendulum will swing the other way and advertisers will then be hammering magazines and radio about why they can’t provide the same metrics as podcasts.

I am looking forward to NAB this year, lots of questions buzzing around in my head.

At NAB this year, one of the sessions I am leading is: Setting Up an Audio Podcasting Studio on Any Budget. I would like to feature some other podcaster’s setups. Cost is not the point, simple to complex, cheap to ungodly expensive I want to share with the audience what real podcast producers are using. If you are interested here is what I need:

• Picture(s) of your gear. (Suitable to be displayed on a large projection screen.)
• A detailed list of the equipment including names, numbers etc.
• A large format graphic of your album artwork for your podcast. (450×450+)
• The name of your podcast and the podcaster(s).
• URL for your podcast page.
• What you think/know you spent on the setup.

I’ll use this information to put together a couple of slides to cover your setup including the branding of your show using the album artwork etc. Always nice to get some extra exposure as well as have a bunch of radio professionals learn about your show.

I’ll need it by Monday the 9th to be considered, however, first come first serve. So if you want to get in, get in early. If interested, please send the info to Michael AT MWGblog DOT com. Thanks!

I’ve agreed again this year to speak at NAB. I’ll be doing two sessions for the Podcasting Summit:

• Setting Up an Audio Podcasting Studio on Any Budget
• Encoding Tools and Techniques for Audio Podcasting

From the look of the schedule it promises to be a comprehensive event. Should be fun.

Ben Williams from CodedSignal.com just sent me the link to the video presentations he was asked to prepare for this year’s NAB. They include an interview I shot with Scott Sheppard about podcasting. You can see all the videos including interviews with James Cameron and Regis Philbin at NAB Interactive.

After today’s NAB sessions a few podcasters met up for drinks. From left to right: Tim Bourquin: Podcast Brothers, myself, David Brady: Walt Disney World Podcast and Tim Street: French Maid TV. We had a great conversation. There is lot of good stuff happening in podcast land.

Wow, podcasting has a lot of buzz around NAB this year. I am participating on a panel tomorrow at the NAB Podcasting Summit (they have me listed as Michael Gregory - links to the correct bio though). When I came here last year with Tim Bourquin we had to explain podcasting to 98% of the industry people we met - not anymore. I’m taking a quick break, but the summit has a packed room of 300-400 paid attendeees here to learn all about podcasting. We’ve come a long way.