Podcasting: Hype or Opportunity?

Thanks to Sanj Selvarajah, AIMS member and volunteer for sending in his thoughts on podcasting and the questions he wants answered at our upcoming event - "Should Your Company Be Podcasting?"

"I'm debating whether podcasting would be a worthwhile initiative to suggest to my company's marketing department to pursue here in Canada.

According to a Forrester report released in April 2006, only 1% of online households in North America genearlly download and listen to podcasts.  I expect the upcoming AIMS event will answer questions such as provided the lack of adoption for podcasts, is it worth it for businesses and marketers to allocate resources to such an initiative, when other online initiatives may target more users and result in greater ROI?

There's a lot of hype over podcasting and I suppose podcasting is not for every company.  I'd like to know what things an organization should consider before launching a podcast.  Can we have some examples where podcasting has NOT worked and why?"

Comments

[June Li]

Sanj,
You're right to be cautious. No point in doing cool stuff that fritters away your hard-earned money without any return to your company.
My suggestion is to ignore the general stats and figure out if your most profitable target audience does (or is likely to listen to) podcasts. If they do, the answer is easy. If they might, do a small experiment. If they don't, you might still want to do a small experiment. Always get feedback.

There are so many options for connecting with customers that there's no one right answer for anyone.

As Kate Trgovac (http://www.mynameiskate.ca") said recently here
http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/12/11/rewind-06-fast-forward-07-kate-trgovac, in 2007, "niche rules".

Good luck and do share with us how things unfold, if you can,

~June

[Michael Seaton]

I think organizations, like in any other communications initiative, need to understand the space they are getting into and address what the core audience needs - versus the marketing department wants to do. To jump on the band wagon and say "we did it" and be all about "you" versus "them is clearly not the answer.

As part of my presentation at the AIMS event, I will speak to why we felt it was a natural extension of what we were doing in other digital channels.

And, the panel will most certainly address which companies may have missed the mark in terms of the content & audinece quotient.

Looking forward to seeing you there.