If you, like me, tend to put your faith in technology a wee bit too much, this article on RFID hacking from Wired will freak you out just a bit.

MobilBLU (now there’s a terrible company name for you!) says its new $130 MP3 player gets 150 hours of battery life and is preconfigured to download podcasts with one click, according to this story in InformationWeek. This the first device I’m aware of that was designed specifically for podcasts and I’m sure we’ll see more innovation in this area.

BTW, the story quotes In-Stat research forecasting that digital audio player sales will reach 286 million units in 2010. If you do the math, that figures out to about one unit per U.S. resident. Hmmm. I dunno about that. Unless they’re giving away MP3 players in cereal boxes by then. But not everyone likes cereal…

Congratulations to Doug Kaye and friends for Podcast Academy, a touring roadshow that offers two days of nuts-and-bold advice about podcasting. At $275, it’s a great deal (one of the nice things about social media is that so few people are making money at it that the conferences are still cheap!). You can listen to the proceedings at the link above.

A few broad observations:

This is a “just do it” phenomenon. You don’t have to invest thousands in recording equipment and you don’t have to be all that polished. Just get out there and start podcasting. You’ll get better as you go along. And everyone’s still making this up. One of the best sight gags came from Michael Geoghegan, who showed a screen shot of the ID3 file accompanying the first podcast produced by General Motors on its FastLane podcasts. The file was empty except for a single cryptic file name, somdthing like Lutz1. The slide got a hoot from the audience and it made a point: even the biggest, most resourced companies are feeling their way along in this new media.

Words and audio need to be tightly connected. You need to fill out your ID3 tags and publish shownotes to accompany the podcast. This is crucial to getting indexed by search engines and found on iTunes.

There’s no good ROI model. A couple of speakers took stabs at this topic but I didn’t hear anything really useful. Even the most successful podcasters aren’t quitting their day jobs. Podcasting should be part of your PR campaign and it burnishes your image in ways that are hard to measure. Geoghegan used the example of Rightlook Radio, a Los Angeles-based mobile car wash company that’s using podcasting to educate small business people about franchising. There’s no hard return to measure but this company is engaging with customers on a whole different level than its competitors.

People use podcasts differently than the use radio. For example, Dan Bricklin pointed out that podcast listeners always start at the beginning, which means that you don’t need to constantly remind people of what your program is about. Doug Kaye noted that a lot of people listen to podcasts while exercising, which means they give you more time to stretch out and explore a topic. The differences aren’t immediately obvious but they’re pretty significant when you think of them.

Quality counts. There was a lot of talk about equipment and technique. Doug Kaye gave a great talk on the physics of sound and Paul Figgiani had a comprehensive examination of equipment options. It’s clear that while the entry cost of podcasting is low, the cost to do it well is not. Expect the bar to move higher as successful podcasters gain traction and buy better equipment.

If you’re serious about podcasting, the Podcast Academy is worthwhile investment.

Podcasting guru Michael Geoghegan is a partner with three other wine enthusiasts in Grape Radio, a podcast devoted to wine. It costs $1,300 to buy a sponsorship of one of the weekly shows and Grape Radio is almost sold out out. Geoghegan expects the venture to do $55,000 in revenue this year with about $12,000 in expenses. That’s a very respectable gross profit of over 75%.

He breaks out weekly expenses this way:
$300 for audio editing

• $100 for hosting and bandwidth
• $200 for gifts for guests
• $250 for miscellaneous

Grape radio is registered as an S Corporation in California. Capital costs were as follows:

• Professional studio: $25,000 (Geoghegan says a professional-looking studio greatly enhances your sponsorship appeal)
• Portable audio equipment: $2,000
• Miscellaneous studio equipment (sound deadening, microphone booms, etc.): $2,500

The biggest benefit, though, is that Grape Radio is becoming a major influencer in the wine industry. It’s the 7th most popular wine blog and the top wine podcast. The $55K is just a start. The partners can build this franchise into a top media influence in its market with a diversified revenue stream if they choose to do that.

Final comments from Tony Kahn’s talk. Emphasis added:

”People sometimes ask us how they can use podcasting to get into radio broadcasting. My advice is ‘don’t.’ Traditional radio is struggling with how to hold on to its assets. It doesn’t have a disposition to take in a new voice or style. To the extent that you have this conversation with your audience, do that, enjoy the process and let it be as much fun as possible. And then let broadcasting come to you. As a broadcaster, I’m starting to make calls to podcasters to have them come into the fold because we need new blood. Podcasters are doing things that broadcasting stopped doing long ago.”

Tony Kahn, a 35-year radio vetera and host of Morning Stories, a wonderful broadcast and podcast on WGBH public radio in Boston, talks about creating a voice for yourself and the differences between broadcasting and podcasting:

”’Podcasts need to reflect personality and passions of the podcaster.

”Appreciate how big podcasting is, how much bigger it’s going to get. Stand back in awe because it IS a revolution.

”Podcasting audiences are very, very different from broadcast audiences. When it comes to emotional attachment and a desire to participate creatively in what you’re producing, they’re nowhere near what a podcast audience is.

”Podcast audiences aren’t just on your side. They want to get into bed with you. They want to be part of what you’re doing. Ask a podcast listener to do something for you and an amazing number of them will come through for you. Two weeks ago we asked people to write reviews, hopefully favorable ones, to help our visibility on iTunes. Overnight, we got 20 of them, all five-star reviews. And people were saying we had changed their lives.

”There was a survey of 40,000 podcast listeners; I don’t remember who did it but there were forms filled out from links on podcast sites. When asked how much of a podcast they listened to, 88% said they listened to all of it, 11% said they listen to three-quarters of it. Talk about supporting the local team! This is not your average broadcast audience.

”They also said these were the most important attributes of a good podcast:

• 9.3 out of 10 said content was cruicial
• Second most important was the quality of the host
• Third most was audio quality
• Fourth was reliability, meaning that new episodes were available when promised.

”The way I read this is that the audience is interested in the subject and is looking for people who are as passionate about the subject as they are. And they want people to show up. It’s like a dating relationship.

”Podcasting is a community, really a collection of sub-communities built around a topic or an idea. Podcasters feel they’re more part of a movement than a market. It’s more about making connections than making money.”

He said Morning Stories tries to get people to tell stories. They want to capture gasps and sighs and hesitations and the little nuances of speech that make the speaker sound human. They try to keep people from reading and encourage them to associate. Maybe they’ll be telling a story and they’ll mention a red couch. So we’ll ask them to stop and talk about that red couch for a while. What experience do they remember with it?

”We tell stories to make sense of an experience, to give something as an experience to somebody else and to explain ourselves to ourselves. In our interviews, we’ll sometimes have someone tell a story for the first time. They’ll tell that perfect five-minute story out of an hour interview and boy, is that a gift. It doesn’t happen very often.”

I’m at the Podcasting Academy at BU today. Doug Kaye of Conversations Network is talking about podcasting basics and has some harsh words for conventional webcasts.

Paraphrasing:

I don’t like webcasts, not because they’re commercial but because companies make them hard to get to. Typically, they put some executives in front of a camera and give you a little video feed and then ask you for all this information before you can see it. That’s so they can generate leads. So they get 100 people who sign up and maybe 50 who show up when the webcast occurs. And then the salespeople are all over you.

I have a proposition for marketers. Podcasting’s marketing value is, rather than getting 100 or 50 people, put your show out there for free, put it out anonymously and you’ll get magnitudes of people listening to it. Think of it in a marketing context. Would you rather have 50 leads or 10,000 people who have listened to your program and are aware of your product? I think experience is proving that this is a better approach. And don’t interview your CEO, don’t interview your VP of marketing. Get the guy who wrote the code or designed the product to speak of things that they’re passionate about.

I’m a huge fan of Southwest Airlines. Years ago, they surveyed customers and discovered that what they wanted most was on-time departure, on-time arrival, courteous staff, comfortable seating and quick baggage delivery. They built an airline around those principles and they are the envy of the transportation world as a result.

If they keep at it, they will be the envy of the corporate blogging world, too. Because the Southwest Airlines Blog is what a corporate blog should be. Its multiple contributors write about a combination of business and personal topics but they never lose sight of the smart light-heartedness that makes Southwest so delightful to deal with. It meshes completely with the company persona.

It’s still very early, but I hope Southwest can maintain the tone of these initial blog entries. This blog has the potential to serve as an example to other corporations who want to extend their voice into the blogosphere without compromising their corporate culture. Southwest has done it right. Let’s hope it can continue.

From Bridge Ratings’ Audience Erosion study 2005 Q4 Update:

“AM/FM radio listening among 18-34 year olds was significantly off fourth quarter 2005’s pace as its increase in weekly quarter hours to “other media” than radio jumped from 50 to 60 quarter hours affecting the trend for both 12-24 and 25-49 year old metrics.”

” MP3 device usage can consume as much as 80% of a radio user’s audio entertainment during initial ownership weeks and months. This number tends to be generally lower among 30+ women and 35+ men.”

“…music-specific radio stations are vying for the attention of their constituencies as MP3 players continue to be more pervasive than ever (75 million sold). Podcasting is beginning to show evidence of cannibalizing radio’s time-spent-listening.”

If you’re terrestrial RM radio, what do you? All-music format is being eroded by satellite and MP3. Talk is AM’s domain and very competitive. I’d like to see a radio hook up with a podcast network and syndicate the best shows. It would cut their costs to virtually nothing and maybe be a sustainable format. But you can’t make that model work in 20,000 markets.

From CBS MarketWatch:

FeedBurner said it’s now managing feeds for 47,000 podcasts and facilitating delivery of 1.5 million episodes a day. Eighteen months ago, it managed 6,000 podcasts.

The average podcast has 35 subscribers.

“101 Uses for Baby Wipes” has more than 20,000 subscribers. Careful, though, because that show is about a lot more than Baby Wipes.

Podcasting News quotes Feedburner as saying that the number of podcasts it manages “now exceeds the total number of radio stations in the entire world.” (emphasis theirs). That’s a great sound bite but totally an apples and oranges comparison. The cost of launching a podcast is about the same as the cost of a class III radio license. It’s way more difficult to launch a radio station than a podcast.

Cool chart, though: