One of the great sessions that I attended at PodCamp Boston 4 was about Podcasting, led by Guido Stein. Guido covered many great tech tips about podcasting, from Recording to Editing to Posting and Interacting with your listeners. All of Guido’s great tips are available online. One of the things that was discussed is the importance of editing your recording before posting so that you are presenting a quality podcast to your listeners. All of these tips immediately sprang to mind when I was listening to a back issue of an SEO podcast. Seriously, those people needed to be at Guido’s discussion.
The podcast in question started out okay enough – catchy into music, brief description about what the podcast was about, and what they would be discussing in the episode. Then it went downhill. In that episode, they were interviewing the creator/spokesperson for Knowem.com, a web service for checking the availability of your branded or favorite username at hundreds of different social media sites. Great concept, and I was really interested in learning more about it. However, the podcast was filled with lots of dead air as the hosts were busy checking out websites and having a private tour of some of the enterprise level and soon-to-come features of the service. Hearing the hosts say “Wow” over and over made me want to know what they were looking at but since it was a sneak-peek that couldn’t be shared with the audience yet, it left me frustrated not knowing what they were so excited about. I think a better way for this to have been handled would have been to share the sneak-peek with the hosts off the air and have them talk about it during the podcast, and not spend/waste so much time with checking email and viewing websites that you can’t even describe and discuss with the listeners.
So, this brings me to my podcast point of the day: if you’re going to be intereviewing someone during your podcast, be sure to have your questions/topics outlined before you start, and be sure to edit out dead air before posting.