• Even though you may feel and sound like you are on the radio, you don’t have to deal with one of radio’s biggest problems: identification. Your listeners know what they are listening to. They have come to your website, subscribed to your podcast feed, or downloaded an mp3. This means that you don’t have to tell people who and what they are listening to every few minutes — they can always just look at their iPod or the computer screen.
• When you are interviewing someone or playing a recorded piece, you don’t need to both introduce and close out the segment with the person’s info (“That was Astrophysicist Neal deGrasse Tyson joining us from New York”). Radio hosts do this (along with the show ID every few minutes) in case people start listening in the middle of a segment. With podcasts, no-one will never start in the middle of your show unless they choose to. It doesn’t hurt to do this, but leaving it out is a good way to save some time or complexity.
• Text descriptions are vital for podcasts because Google and other search engines can’t hear — they can only read. On the radio, you have your timeslot and your station has its built-in audience. That is not true of podcasting, so you need text to augment your audio — something radio people never thought was necessary.
• Length is a variable, not a requirement. Radio shows must be timed down to the second, whereas podcasts can vary in length. That said, the length of your podcasts should be fairly consistent, and you should never talk about one topic for too long — just like they do on radio. No matter how long your show is, make sure that each component is less than ten minutes long. If it is a long-form interview with one person, make sure you significantly change discussion topics a number of times. People will drift away if you spend too long on one thing. If it helps, try to think of your show as a series of “mini-shows” that all fall under one umbrella.

That’s actually a really good question to be asking if you aren’t used to using all of these sites every day. Not “Where so I start?” or “How do I get into it?” but — especially if you are only doing it to further your business — “What, specifically, are these tools for, and how do I use them to my benefit?”

So, for those of us you who want a roadmap before you run out into traffic, I’ll try to explain a few of the big sites people are excited about right now. The goal isn’t to get you to use all of these, but to help you understand the tools in a basic way that allows you to decide whether or not to try them.

Twitter

Twitter asks “What are you doing?” right at the top of their site. It was originally designed as a way to let your friends know what you were up to in short, easy-to-share portions (”I’m about to get a drink at Starbucks on Washington St. if anyone wants to join me.”). It quickly morphed into a public forum where anyone can talk to anyone — and everyone — else about what interests them.

Now, you can easily send messages to a few different groups through Twitter:

• People who are interested in what you, personally, have to say (your followers).
• People who are interested in a specific topic (through hashtags or Twitter Search).
• Any individual you want to send a specific message to, or you want to ask a question of (using the “@” sign and their Twitter name, e.g. @AdamWeiss).

Twitter is good for connecting with like-minded people, or for keeping up on the absolute latest news in a particular area. In a mundane example, you could track all mentions of “MBTA” to get a feel for what is happening on Boston’s public transit system. While that is mainly just a curiosity for most, if you are a PR person for the agency, it could be quite useful information. If you have a brand — or just a concept that is very important  to your business — Twitter can provide a window into the latest news, attitudes, and happenings in any field.

Oh, and putting your recent Twitter updates on your website is a great way to always have fresh information for visitors.

Facebook

Facebook is the current 800-pound gorilla in the social networking world. It is a place to connect with people you know, both personally and professionally. You set up a profile, with your picture, work and education vitals, interests, and basic contact information. You then find friends, colleagues, and old classmates and ask to be their “friend.” This lets you both keep current on what the other is doing and exchange messages.

Whenever you publicly do something new on Facebook (add a friend, comment on a photo), everyone you know is able to see that and decide whether to check out the profile, website, or photo that you just visited. This can be a bit disconcerting at first, with everyone seemingly “stalking” your online life. However, it is really a way for you to spread your influence quickly and efficiently. If you post a news article you found about your industry on Facebook, everyone you know will have the opportunity to see it if they visit your page. If one of your friends likes it enough to post it themselves, all of their friends will see it was well.

So, when you say “I just met with my client ________, and we talked about their new great service,” you are broadcasting your expertise and your client’s work to a large number of people. Better yet, if one of your friends makes a comment as simple as “Congratulations!” on something you’ve posted, all of their friends will see that note, along with the information you posted to get the praise. If two friends respond to you, you will have reached twice as many people without doing much work at all.

There are many more things you can do with Facebook (create pages for your business, become a fan of your favorite TV show, post Twitter-like “status updates,” etc.), but the above is where you should start. You’ll be surprised at the number of friends you’ll have just after you sign up — my mom recently created an account completely by accident, and she had 50 friends by the end of the week!

LinkedIn

LinkedIn, when taken rather simplistically, can be considered “Facebook for Business.” It is a place where you can connect with people you have professional relationships with, get references and job referrals, and ask the experts in your contact list questions about their industries. It is also a good “mini-resume” and an automatically-updated Rolodex for people you do business with.

In my opinion, the one place where LinkedIn really shines is in its ability to help you find connections with the people you want to be talking to. If there is a particular expert or prospect who you want to get in touch with, a LinkedIn search will tell you who you know that knows them — and give you the option to ask for an introduction.

At this point, many people are using Facebook for a good number of the things LinkedIn is designed for, so — unless you know that a lot of people you want to interact with are already on LinkedIn and not on Facebook — I would recommend choosing Facebook over LinkedIn if you only want to sign up for just one of the two.

Delicious

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site. That may be a bit of an odd concept, but it is a useful one. Delicious is like the bookmarks feature of your web browser, posted online. There are a lot of cool things that can be done with delicious, but the “beginner” version is pretty simple: you can bookmark sites that you like, organize them, and share them with other people in your field.

Adding a link to your delicious bookmarks on your website (or embedding the actual list there) can instantly turn you into an industry resource. If your opinions are respected by others in your field, they will want to see what you are reading online. Delicious is a simple way to do that without much effort at all.

Digg

Digg is based on a very simple but powerful concept: people want to look at the stuff other people like. If there is something you like online, you can submit a link to Digg, and millions of people will have the chance to vote on whether to put it on the front page of the site. If a link makes it onto the front page, it could get hundreds of thousands of clicks.

Digg ignores one of the best things about the web — the ability to find what is useful to you, regardless of whether it is popular — but getting noticed there can get you more attention than you can handle (servers routinely crash if a site gets “Dugg”). If you have a strong interest in one of the categories of sites Digg covers, you can find great information every day. Also, if you produce great information, submitting it to Digg gives you a shot at being seen by millions.

YouTube

Everyone has heard of YouTube, and almost everyone has used it at this point. Millions of videos are watched every day on the Google-owned site, so if you are producing videos for any reason, they should probably be there. YouTube is also a great resource for your blog or website — it is extremely simple to put a YouTube video that is relevant to your work on your site using the “embed” info next to YouTube’s player. This gives you access to great content for free, and allows your video to easily spread throught the web — something I just experienced when my GV Mobile demo got 60,000 views in just a few days.

YouTube is just the search and delivery system for the videos; you have to have one to put it up. You can go the “quick and sloppy” route and use your webcam, or you can work with a producer or videographer to put up some really high-quality footage using YouTube’s HD playback feature.

Video can add a lot to a website, but it can also detract. The merits of the medium is beyond the scope of this post, but if you are going to be making video, put it on YouTube.

If this overview was useful to you, use it to try out some of the technologies I talked about: Tweet a link to it on Twitter, post it on your Facebook profile, save it on delicious, submit it to Digg, or even make a video about it for YouTube. The great thing about all of these tools is that they are easy to try, and it won’t really hurt anything if you decide not to get involved and delete your account. So, if one — or all — of these sites sounds good, give them a try!

My Articles

How to Interview Someone – a guide to the basics of interviewing for radio/podcasting

Proper Microphone Placement – A $1000 microphone that is used improperly will just sound like a microphone being used improperly. Save the $1000 and get the placement right.

Microphone Types – What you need to know to pick a mic for you.

Recording Phone Interviews with Skype – Cheaper, easier, and (when done right) at least as good as dedicated hardware.

Promoting Your Podcast to Get More Listeners – Podcasting is better with an audience.

Why and Editing is Important, and How to Do It – When the interview is over, the work has just begun…

Outside Resources

Transom.org – a great educational resource for anyone interested in radio

Pulling Back the Curtain – NPR’s On The Media did an eye-opening piece on what really goes into making radio

Select List of Nationally-Recognized Clients

I have had formal business relationships with these organizations (or their podcasting contractors):

Alliance for Climate Protection
California Academy of Sciences
Cone, Inc.
Dallas Wind Symphony
Forrester Research
Fort Worth Symphony
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Museum of Science, Boston
San Francisco Bay Joint Venture
Tulsa Symphony Orchestra

I have provided help to these organizations, but haven’t entered into a more formal consulting arrangement:

National Academy of Sciences
New Scientist Magazine
New England Aquarium
Ontario Science Centre
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry
Union of Concerned Scientists

I’m co-hosting this short weekly show of brainteasers with David Leschinsky, the owner of Eureka Puzzles, a popular puzzle and game store in Brookline, Massachusetts. The premise is simple: we pick a puzzle type for the week, explain how it works and do an example or two. We finish each episode with a harder one for the listeners to work on until next week’s show (when we’ll give the answer).

The motivation for starting this show was actually this episode of This American Life. After listening to that show, I was inspired to do some more puzzles, so I went to my computer to find some puzzle podcasts. I figured there would be dozens of them, so I was shocked to find exactly one: the NPR Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz. Now, I do like this segment, but it focuses on one specific type of word puzzle — and it is really just part of a longer radio program.

So, with the strong feeling that there should be a good puzzle podcast that featured puzzles of all types, I decided to start one. I quickly registered PuzzlePodcast.com, contacted David (who I knew from this interview I did with him for Boston Behind the Scenes), and got recording.

I’ll write a more technical post about setting up the show soon, but for now I’d like to invite you over to PuzzlePodcast.com to try your hand at our puzzles. I’ve attached the first episode to this post, and there are two more already up on the main site. If you hurry over today, you’ll still have a chance to with this week’s prize before the next episode goes out tomorrow.

As David always says, Happy Puzzling!