Best Practices for Starting a Podcast
Transcript
Robert Hornsby:
We’re going to go and get started. If you could unmute yourself when you want to ask a question, or raise your hand and I can unmute you.
Cassandra Nathan:
Yes.
Robert:
Thank you all for coming in. We're gonna—as it says in the chat—we're gonna dispense with introductions. If you have a question or comment, introduce yourself at that point with your name, your title, and your school, department, or your unit. And we're going to dive right in to talk about podcasts with our guest Laura Lechner.
Cassandra:
Yes, and she is the Senior Associate Director of Creative Content for Columbia Business School. As part of the school strategic communications team, she also produces video, photo, and audio content for CBS’s digital spaces. And outside of her time at Columbia, she also produces and directs short films. She's an active member of Film Shop, which is a New York based collective of independent filmmakers committed to developing new work through peer support and collaboration. So, you guys can also check out her work at lauralechner.com; I will post that in the chat.
And go ahead; we'll let you go, Laura. Thank you so much for coming and agreeing to give our members some tips around starting a podcast.
Laura Lechner:
Of course, yeah. Happy to do it. Excited to see some familiar faces from our class this Spring. So hi, everybody. Yeah, I'm just gonna share some—what I call to my presentation—best practices about podcasting with a heavy caveat that, you know, this is sort of a work in progress.
I inherited, actually, Columbia Business School’s podcast. It kind of predated a bunch of members on the team, so we've all sort of, kind of, been figuring out on the fly, you know, how to put something together. But happy to share, you know, what we've learned and also happy to take questions.
So, I do have a presentation, a few slides, so I'm going to share my screen. But yeah, so I have a few sort of slides to take us through talking about content creation, preparation, production. I have a few examples of marketing and promo materials that we put out for our episodes. And then, yeah, happy to have an open discussion. Would love to hear from anybody else if your team is producing a podcast or is thinking of starting one.
Robert:
So try it now, Laura.
Laura:
Fantastic. Looks like this is up and running.
[Screen share begins]
All right, let me just play.
[First slide: Title slide]
All right. And yes, here's my email address as well if anyone wants to chat further. Yeah, happy to have continuing conversations about anything podcast related.
[Second slide: Content Creation]
So, in terms of kind of getting started and creating a podcast, I would say the first question to ask yourself would be, why a podcast? You know, it is a very kind of specific medium, so I think it's good to have a conversation with yourself and your team about why the content you're putting together might best be served by this format versus a video or an article or any other kind of piece of multimedia content. So, why you would think that this is the best kind of vehicle for your content.
And it's also important to think about, you know, who your audience is. Sort of the genesis of Columbia Bizcast, which is the podcast that we put together, is our team brought in a millennial consultant and decided that, you know, this could be a really cool way to reach our younger audience. So that was sort of our impetus behind putting something together. And we are finding that a key part of our audience is current students and also prospective students.
I feel could be a really good way to reach people who are maybe interested in your program, interested in Columbia. It's often something that can pop up when people are googling the school. So, we've kind of, based on that information, really started tailoring a lot of our episodes to that particular audience.
And then another question is just kind of, what is your message? And that can be sort of a tricky question when you're dealing with podcasts just because their very nature is, you know, episodic. But I do feel like it's important to think about sort of the overarching tie or theme that kind of connects all of your episodes.
So something that we like to continue to touch upon is our series is, you know—yes, a lot of our episodes are, you know, they're individualized stories and it is an interview kind of based podcast—but the sort of underlying message is always connecting it back to the Business School community and making it less about each individual person and more about the school, and really kind of leaning into that community.
And yeah, as I was saying earlier, you know, talking about why it's best suited for podcast, I do think, like, the podcast kind of format really creates more of, like, an intimate experience with your audience, because typically people, you know, are listening to this on their own; it can feel really personal if you have your headphones in. So, I feel can be a good way to really draw people into a conversation.
[Third slide: Preparation]
In terms of preparation, I'm kind of framing this in terms of preparation for less so, like, each individual episode and more creating a show kind of top to bottom.
Something that I've found helpful is researching any kind of peer schools or other institutions’ podcasts. There's a lot of podcast content out there, and I've found that a lot of schools, individual units, departments are putting out podcasts. So that can be really helpful to kind of, you know, see what else is out there, see how you might add to the conversation, get inspired. Or if you think something, you know, doesn't work so well. It's kind of nice to hear that too, and you can kind of formulate your podcast based on what others are putting out there.
In terms of considering the format, by that I really mean kind of the structure of the show. Is it an interview podcast? Which is primarily what we're producing. Is it more of a docuseries where you're telling a story, and it has more, kind of, post-production on it where you're doing more editing instead of just letting a conversation or an interview play out?
On a more technical side, consider what podcast hosting platform you want to use. There are a lot out there. Some of the more common ones are LibSyn, which is what we use.
[Quietly, referring to the next bullet point appearing on the slide] You know, backup.
There's other ones such as SoundCloud.
What we found is we prefer hosting on LibSyn; we get some more concrete analytics based on it; you get some more options in terms of customizing your podcast player. There is a fee associated with LibSyn: it's about $15 a month, which I think is very reasonable. And as opposed to SoundCloud, you do get better SEO kind of information. With LibSyn, you're easier to find, and it connects better with any kind of, like, third-party podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts. You're able to push out to a bunch of different players just from one place.
Another thing to think about, too, is your release schedule because really, consistency is key. You want to be on a consistent release schedule so people know when your episodes are coming out, when they can look to you for new content.
It doesn't necessarily have to be constant. You know, you don't have to do weekly or even bi-weekly. Maybe it's, you know, you just push out something once a month. But I think it's important to stick to, you know, a day and an approximate time so that people really know when to expect stuff from you.
And then in terms of measuring success, there are kind of lots of ways to do that. And just speaking from a metrics perspective, you can look at information such as, how many unique downloads; where people are getting your content from—is it from iTunes, Apple, Spotify, is it directly from your website; what areas of the world are people tuning in from. So, it's nice to kind of keep track of that, so you get a stronger sense of who your audience is and how they're finding you, how they're playing your content.
Outside of LibSyn, a couple of third-party tools that I've used are– It’s something called Podtrac where you can track analytics, and then Chartable as well. I'm just starting to use Chartable, and it seems like a really cool option because in addition to tracking a bunch of stats for you, you can also use it to create single kind of smart links. And so instead of, you know, say on your website where you'd have to list out “Oh, Spotify, iTunes, blah blah blah,” you put a single link: it hits out to all your different platforms, and it's easier to track then where people are finding you.
[Fourth slide: Production]
In terms of production, this is just what my team has developed, so I thought I'd share with you kind of how we put together each episode. So typically, every semester we've been putting out an episode every two weeks. Since we've all sort of gone remote, and in response to COVID-19 and sort of the ongoing crisis, we have switched to a weekly release schedule, so we are putting out new episodes every Friday.
So what we've done is break our team down by roles and responsibilities. I guess we kind of have the luxury of having a larger communications team, and so that's been helpful because we can tap in our graphic designer to do our logo. We have a writer on team who writes kind of the show notes and the episode information that goes up on the website. We have a social media manager who develops some marketing and promo materials. I sort of act as a project manager, just keeping track of all these kind of moving pieces.
So, we've found it's helpful to be pretty specific about who's doing what. In addition to the kind of production team we do, our host is an alum actually, so we work with him as a contractor to do the interviews, be the on-air host, and he does the editing of the episodes as well. So, we do have weekly team check-ins to bring everyone together to kind of go through our episode-by-episode schedule; we discuss research for each episode.
Something we found has been helpful is doing a pre-interview with each subject, so a non-recorded just kind of off-the-record conversation to get a better sense of what their story is, how comfortable they are on air, talk about, you know, any kind of questions that might come up. And that's helped us develop stronger episodes because it's not the very first time we're talking to somebody, so we can really develop a strong set of questions based on that pre-interview.
And then another thing to consider—and this is kind of pre-COVID—was location. If you don't have access to a dedicated studio, it definitely can work to go to someone's office, to do it in a classroom. You just want to be considerate of, you know, external sounds that may be coming into the space.
And in terms of production, that's, you know, when we're actually recording the episode. Like I mentioned, we do work with an alum who's our host, and he's the one conducting the interviews. We have purchased recording equipment for him to use, so he has a package of microphones, some digital recorders, so he's using that equipment then to record the conversations.
And then in terms of post-production, what we found that's worked is taking the entire raw audio from the recorded conversation, and we put together a transcript of it so that our team then can work on what we call a paper edit. So going through that transcript, marking things we want to cut, maybe rearranging the order of things to create more of a seamless, episodic structure.
And we are doing all of this in Google Docs, which I think is really helpful. So we can really kind of all be working on it at once if we need to. We do a lot of commenting right in those docs, so we find that's a really nice collaborative tool, especially now that we're all working remotely. It's really helpful to be able to kind of, in real time, work on projects together like that.
And once we have our paper edit together, we pass that edited transcript onto our host Fahad, and then he uses his audio editing software to make the cuts, add in music—he records an intro and outro to each episode, so he's really putting together the package for us. And he uses software: He uses Adobe Audition. You could also use Audacity, Pro Tools if you do have access to that. But there's some pretty easy audio editing software that I can answer more questions about if need be.
[Fifth slide: Production (cont.)]
And then the final step is distribution, so that's really kind of pushing it out into the world. So we upload it to LibSyn, which is our podcasting hosting platform. We can add a show image, a logo, show notes that will show up in people's podcast players, and then you can schedule your release date there as well. And then what we do once we have that audio in LibSyn, we create an embed link that we then put on an individual web page for each episode. And then it gets pushed out to our various channels.
[Sixth slide: Bizcast webpage]
And I have a sample here of what we build for each episode. So, we'll put together a webpage that sort of reads like a little article. We'll put together a cover image. You can see this is the episode embed here that people can listen on your page as well. And then a little information about the episode and the guest. And then we'll always include subscription links at the bottom so people can find us on iTunes and Spotify, etc.
[Seventh slide: Building an Audience]
And in terms of building an audience, these are the various kind of channels that we've found has been a good platform to push stuff out on. So, we use social media a lot. We experimented with having a separate channel or a kind of handle for the show, but we've discovered that, you know, we already have a lot of followers on our just Columbia_Biz channels, and so we've decided to kind of scrap the separate podcast handles and just post everything on our main channels but with a specific hashtag for the podcast.
We'll often send them out in our newsletters, especially now that we are weekly. We've kind of synced up with Ideas at Work, which is the Business School’s newsletter that's dedicated to faculty—thought leadership, in particular. But we have been using that as a channel to push stuff out weekly.
We also are working with different student groups on campus, and we do have a current MBA student who's working with us on marketing and promotion, and so she has access to different student groups at the Business School. The student Slack channel is really active, and so she's able then to push out episodes on that, which has been really nice.
And I'm going to show a couple of examples of promo materials that we've put together.
We like to put together what we call audiograms, which are, you know, short snippets—15 to kind of 40 seconds, I think, is the sweet spot—but a really compelling clip from the podcast. This is kind of visually what they look like, so it's something that we'll put up on our Instagram channel, LinkedIn, Facebook, various social channels. And yeah, it'll be this little audio clip. We put text on it so it's visual and also accessible, and then we've played around with kind of different stylings. But this is a pretty typical one that will have, you know, our show logos on it, a photo of the guest. So we've found that those are kind of nice ways to advertise each episodes.
We'll also do what we call quote cards, so it's a still image so it's even easier for people to look at. They don't have to even listen or watch anything: It's just a strong quote from the episode. We did a whole interview with Bruce Craven who's a professor at CBS who wrote a book. It's called Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones. So we really kind of capitalized on the final season of Game of Thrones coming out, and we pushed this out right when that season premiered last Spring.
Sometimes we'll do something as simple as just a photo carousel on Instagram. This was an interview with one of our students who in her former life was a Rockette, and we pushed this out around the holidays, so we had some photos of her.
And then for each episode, we'll put together a cover image that we put on the webpage. Then we can also use this to push out on other social channels.
[Eighth slide: Questions?]
And that's all I have, so I'm happy to answer any questions. Like I said, you know, we're kind of figuring this out too as we go along. This is now our– I believe the podcast started in October of 2017, and then I started in the following Fall, so I've been working on this about a year and a half, and I feel like we've gotten into a nice rhythm with things. We are on a pretty consistent production schedule. But yeah, always open to learning more from others, too, if there's any other podcasters in the group.
[Screen share ends]
Cassandra:
Wonderful, wonderful. So, we are opening up for questions. While everyone's gathering their thoughts, I'm just kind of curious, Laura. From start to finish, how long does it take to produce one episode, would you say?
Laura:
Well, we are doing it now, you know, on a weekly schedule. So, we'll typically come together early in the week on a Tuesday, and we'll have our audio from our interview because our host Fahad has been doing interviews now on Monday or Tuesday, so we'll get a transcript back, you know, within a day from that. Make edits on that. So, we really can put it together fairly quickly. In our case, because we are doing now shorter interviews, we'll only have, I don't know, tops maybe 30, 40 minutes of raw audio that will condense down to, you know, anywhere between 10 to 25 minutes–
Cassandra:
Wow.
Laura:
–I think, is the typical length of our episodes.
Cassandra:
Great. So, we have some questions that are rolling in. Kyu wants to know, “How do you pick what to do each episode, and do you have a plan for the entire season?”
Laura:
We did have a plan. It kind of got thrown out when all of this stuff started to happen. But we were trying to plan out, I mean, almost as much as a semester. For the Spring semester, we had about 10 episodes that we had planned out.
We—in terms of thinking about what, you know, what to focus on, who to interview—we kind of used the academic calendar as a structure, even holidays like around Thanksgiving. We knew we had some previous episodes with alumni and students and faculty who talked about issues around food and social change and stuff like that, so we put together kind of, like, a highlights episode that we pushed out around Thanksgiving. Similar for Veterans Day. So we found it's helpful to find, like, some kind of tie-in because that can kind of broaden your reach, and maybe people who aren't already subscribed would find your episode that way.
Cassandra:
Sure. And I'm not sure if you overtly touched upon this, but Miller wants to know, “How far out do you plan your content?” We kind of talked about that a little bit. But, you know, considering with all that's going on with the pandemic, How far out are you guys planning? Like your new plan for your new season. How far are you planning this?
Laura:
I mean, really now it's almost week to week, maybe a couple of weeks in advance. At these weekly meetings that we'll have, we'll just kind of get together and brainstorm possible guests. We feel like we have been moving more quickly now where, you know, if we think of an idea, if there's somebody we can reach out to, we'll put out those feelers, approach people to be guests. And just try to, yeah, do it probably within a week at this point.
Cassandra:
Jen wants you to talk about–
Robert:
Hey, Laura, guys. Let's do this. Instead of having Cassandra read each question, Laura, can you open the chat and see that. And then you can just respond to the questions as they come up.
Laura:
Yeah, definitely. Let me try to catch up because now there's a few in here. How far–?
Robert:
So, we just got to Jen's question. “Can we talk about the learning curve?”
Laura:
Sure. In terms of learning curve, I think what we've been the most kind of adaptive around and open to change around is, a little bit, the structure and also kind of the focus of the episodes. Because we do partner with an alumni, and he has a strong connection to our alumni community. I feel we had a tendency to maybe overload with alumni guests. And we were really finding that students wanted to be more reflected in the podcast. And so we've tried to be more cognizant of who is tuning in and who we're speaking to.
So in terms of content, that was sort of a learning curve. And in terms of production, I would say because, like, I do come from a video background and have worked with a lot of, like, educational technology and production technology, I feel it was pretty easy to get up off the ground. So if you do have any kind of background in video editing, any kind of audio editing, obviously that's really helpful. If you were talking more about, you know, the technological learning curve.
Looks like Julie's asking about measuring success.
What we mainly keep track of and what we're looking to do is to broaden our subscribers and our unique downloads for each episode. So, we do use those various analytics tools that I was talking about to kind of keep track of how many people are listening, where they're listening from. At our weekly meetings, I put together an agenda and I show how many new listens we have each week. So we're kind of keeping track of growth of listens per episode.
Marcus asks, “Can you share the time that your staff spends on episodes?”
Okay, yeah. I mean in terms of my workload, I would say maybe 25% of my work week goes towards the podcasts, and that counts the weekly meeting, the uploading, any kind of, like, tech stuff that I'm doing on it.
In terms of financial costs, yeah, we do have a budget for it. Because we do pay our host, and then he subcontracts out a couple of audio production responsibilities as well, so we are financially investing in it.
Another financial piece would be—and we don't do this every time, but we have for more high profile guests—we've rented studio space on campus. Uris Hall has a studio. I know the Journalism School also has a studio that can be used for podcasting. Barnard has a relatively new studio, as well, that I think all Columbia affiliates have access to. So those are some costs that come into play.
George asks about how the podcast fits into the communications ecosystem. “Does content start on one and migrate, translate?”
I mean, yeah. It's definitely part of our overall communication strategy, and there is a lot of crossover. Most people on our kind of editorial team also touch the podcast in one way or the other. And we do try to integrate episodes into kind of other pieces that we're working on. So for example, we're doing an interview that we know is going to be in our weekly newsletter. We'll often do a corresponding interview, or if we've done a piece on somebody earlier, in the show notes of the episode we'll link out to a previous interview. So just really trying to connect the content as much as possible.
In terms of arriving at the format, which for our show is an interview format, it just seemed like a nice fit. Kind of one of the early ideas for the show was that it was featuring the voices of Columbia Business School, so that kind of conversation format just seemed like a natural fit.
“How have you–?” Oh, this is a great question. “How are you recording interviews remotely?”
Yeah, that's definitely something that I'd like to touch on. There are a couple of ways that are pretty easy to do it. You can get pretty high quality audio out of Zoom, even more so if people are using USB microphones or even these little headphone microphones or their AirPods. The best way to record it would be, instead of recording to the cloud which I think is almost the default setting on Zoom, is make sure you're recording locally. And that'll save a local file on your hard drive. And if you choose to save locally, you'll have the option to save separate audio tracks. So you'll get both a clean track of the host and then the guest. That's really helpful in editing so you don't have any issues with overlapping audio.
There's also some, like, add-on tools you can purchase for a pretty low cost. I know for Skype, there's an app called Ecamm—E-c-a-m-m—that is really nice. It kind of just supplements the recording capabilities of Skype. Again, you can, like, break it out into multiple audio tracks. You have a little more control over even mixing the audio tracks in real time, so that's really helpful.
You also can experiment with, you know, recording on your iPhones or recording with other kind of mobile devices as well. It's definitely possible, and I think you can get, you know, pretty high quality audio. It's never going to sound the same as being in a studio with really high-grade mics. You can definitely make it listenable.
In terms of who manages outreach to guests, that's sort of a combination between members of our stratcom's team, the host and his kind of alumni connections.
So, we tend to go with if somebody has a, you know, an existing relationship with a guest that we want to approach. But if not, yeah, typically we'll ask our host to even just, you know, send out a cold email; reach out to people. And we've had good luck. People are usually pretty receptive to appearing on the podcast.
Oh. “How did you settle on this particular alum to host the podcast, and is he compensated?”
He actually is like the very originator of this podcast. It was something he started as a student when he was in the EMBA program at Columbia. And my predecessor, when they were thinking about starting a podcast, approached him because he knew that he already had an interest. He did have a pretty big network of students who are now alum, so kind of developed from something that he originally worked on.
And yes, he is compensated. We do pay him. He's sort of paid in kind, in a way too, because we've purchased the equipment that he's using, but we do financially compensate him as well. And then he—I think I mentioned—subcontracts out, then, to an audio engineer who helps him set up mics for interviews when we're doing in-person interviews and who masters the audio tracks as well.
Oh, and a great tip for recording remotely, I'm a fan of Zencastr, which I've heard about but haven't checked out, but I'll definitely take a look at that too.
Let's see, are there any other questions? Anybody want to share anything either?
Robert:
So, I had a question. How many listeners are you averaging now, and how long did it take you to build up critical mass of audience?
Laura:
We average– I would say low numbers for us would be about 500 unique downloads per episode. I would say average, the high average, might be close to 900. And you definitely do see them accumulate over time, so episodes that we've published, you know, even a year ago continue to get active listeners because people will go back and listen to your archives.
And so yeah, we've been producing this podcast since, yeah, Fall 2017. So I feel like that's one of the nice things about podcasts. I feel they—depending on topic—but they tend to be a little more timeless than articles or videos. I feel people have a more tendency to go back and listen to older episodes.
Robert:
And starting at 2017 with zero listeners, How long did it take to get 100, 500?
Laura:
I feel like right out of the gate, looking back at the numbers, we had some strong listeners. I feel if you, you know, really promote that, “Hey, I have this new podcast. Here's how you can listen to it. Here's how you can find us.” We really saw, you know, a spike in the beginning where people were eager to check out this new kind of thing from the school. And then yeah, it's been pretty consistent. I feel we've had compelling guests. We've found, you know, a way to push it out to all of our constituents. We try to get alumni, students, perspectives, faculty, staff. So yeah, it's been pretty consistent in terms of listeners.
Kyu Lee:
Hey, Laura. Thanks so much for all this. This is really helpful.
Laura:
Yeah.
Kyu:
I'm just wondering, it sounds like you have a pretty– By the way, my name's Kyu, and I'm with the Earth Institute, and we started our own podcast earlier this year. We have about– I just uploaded our sixth episode a couple hours ago.
The one thing it sounds like you guys have is a great team that's working on all this stuff, you know, all of it together. I'm curious, did it take some sort of internal convincing within your department that you needed to put these resources into the podcast itself? Assuming that a lot of people here are thinking about starting podcasts or about to start it, you know, you probably don't have that sort of, those kind of, resources right off the bat. I'm just curious, like, did you go through a certain process to get to the point where you are?
Laura:
I'll try to answer this as best as I can. I feel because this is sort of a project that, like I said, I sort of inherited, I'm not as familiar with, you know, exactly how this got off the ground outside of yeah, they truly brought in, like, a millennial consultant to go through kind of the content that the Business School was putting out, and this seemed like a gap that was missing. So, I do think we had the benefit right away of the highers-up understanding the value of podcasting.
And in terms of bringing in the team, that seems that was fairly organic. We used to really outsource, I would say, a good 75% of the podcast to our host, but I think we kind of recognized the value of making it more of a Columbia or a Business School product. So, we wanted more editorial control over it. We wanted to really tighten up the interviews. Make sure that we're always bringing it back to Columbia Business School. So, making sure that questions, like—especially if you're interviewing, you know, a student or an alum, like—Why Columbia Business School? How did that impact your career? Those kinds of questions were always in there. So yeah, it sort of gradually happened where we brought in the rest of our communications team.
So, I know that definitely is a luxury, and not everybody has a more robust team than the Business School seems to have. But I do think it's possible to do it with a smaller team. But maybe you just can't push out as many episodes, because it can be time consuming to even just schedule the interviews and edit the content and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know if I answered your question, but hopefully there was [laughs] something helpful.
Kyu:
No, no. That was good.
Laura:
[Laughs]
Kyu:
I mean, I went through, like, I don't know, four to six weeks just going through YouTube videos trying to figure out how to plug in a microphone–
Laura:
[Laughs]
Kyu:
–a mixer. So no, this is– I feel like I'm definitely progressing.
Laura:
Good. Excellent. [Laughs]
Robert:
So, there are a couple more questions that came in.
Laura:
Okay, let's see. Oh, “Have you seen a rise in number of viewers since the pandemic?”
You know, we haven't really yet. And I think because we are releasing weekly, they aren't out as long as the other ones would be when we were just– When we were doing bi-weekly, we'd have, you know, two weeks of stats each time to kind of compare. The past few weeks, even from day one, I think I've seen about four, yeah, probably about 400 listens kind of right out the gate. And those typically are the people who are subscribed to your podcast, so they probably have it set up where your podcast is automatically kind of downloading into their queue.
But yeah, so I think it takes a little bit of time to really compare the stats and really get any meaningful information out of it. But at least, like, the unique downloads right off the bat have seemed pretty consistent.
In terms of including a video component, that's something we have done more so in the beginning where we tried to put out either clips of the interviews, so we'd actually film the interviews and try to do, like, a highlights or something from that or some kind of behind-the-scenes footage. You know, my personal opinion is it hasn't been as valuable as I thought it was. As somebody who does a lot of video, I was really gung-ho to try that.
But I feel, especially on social, like those quote cards or an audiogram, something that's quick and easy for people to digest that they—especially with the quote cards—they might not necessarily even have to have their sound on. Because I feel a large percentage of people on social aren't even listening. So having that quote card or the audiogram that has the text transcription, I think those are stronger promo pieces than a video.
And I think there's one more question. “Did you gain or lose listeners?”
Oh, okay. Yeah. Again, not quite sure yet. I think it'll take a bit of time for me to get any kind of meaningful info on that. But it looks like it's pretty consistent. Again, probably because that subscriber base has remained pretty consistent.
Robert:
So, I had a quick question and I want to go back to Kyu, and then we can do some crosstalk. Kyu, you ask Laura about editorial; Laura talked about editorial decisions. How do you manage editorial on your side?
Kyu:
Well, you're kind of looking at it, I guess. It's a bit more about, like, the overall mission of, I guess, the podcast itself, like what we're trying to achieve. And there are lots of ways, I guess, going about it. You know, we’re—at least for what we're doing—I want to, you know, have people know who the researchers and scientists are at the Earth Institute and get to know them beyond the actual work that they do. So, however way we can get to that point, you know, whether it's through these kind of interviews or whatever, that's all up for question.
The other also, like, underlying principle of what we're doing, I kind of went into it not trying to make, like, a wonderfully produced, you know, Emmy Award-winning whatever podcast. You know, I think we really just want to sort of experiment with it and see who kind of gravitates towards it, really sort of build, you know, some chops around it essentially. Get people not only to be interested in it but, you know, people to kind of see if they could flex themselves in this sort of format, like how they would react with, how they would possibly thrive in it. And see which sort of scientists and researchers might kind of, you know, I guess be good at it, and then kind of take it from there.
So yeah, we haven't really settled on, like, any sort of real consistency, I guess, in that sense.
Robert:
That’s okay.
Kyu:
Yeah.
Robert:
Well, you're listening to your audience and you're seeing what you've got. My question is really more about who makes the decision about which subjects or interviews to go ahead with. Is that you, or you have to do that by committee, or do you consult other people?
Kyu:
Yeah, no, it's really me.
Robert:
Okay.
Kyu:
I mean, I talk it out with, you know, my host, and we kind of discuss, like, some of the big things that are going on, and make sure that we're, you know, covering the big topics. At the same time, making, you know, the people who aren't heard from as much throughout the Earth Institute. We want to highlight their work for sure, you know, and figure out, again–
Robert:
Cool.
Kyu:
It's just seeing what we can find.
Robert:
So, we're at 2:45 and we have the luxury of Laura's attention for just a few more minutes. So, if there are other questions, you can unmute yourself and we can get some crosstalk going.
I wanted to see who here is entertaining doing podcasts at the moment. Are you, like, here because you're getting ready to do it? Or you're considering to do it? Or, you know. So, who's got a podcast in a plan now?
[A few people raise their hands]
A couple. Who would like to do a podcast but they haven't started?
[A few people raise their hands]
Okay, okay.
Kyu:
You know, the one other thing I wanted to mention, and maybe Mindy might want to talk a bit more about this. But, you know, I've talked a lot with Mindy, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for sort of cross podcasting too. Working between schools to create, whether it's episodes or whatever, considering that we have a lot of faculty that have different, you know, positions throughout the school, you know, the university itself. So, I don't know, maybe if you want to kind of talk about what we're trying to do.
Mindy Farabee:
Oh, well, yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do. So, I mean, that's something that we just noticed when we were looking to do– We're kind of looking at it in conjunction with the magazine in terms of podcasting, and so we had a story where I realized all of the faculty that we wanted to focus on, and I realized that all of the faculty were also actually your faculty.
So, it just seemed to make a lot of sense, and it seemed like there was an opportunity for synergy. And I guess that is something also I'd be interested in hearing about other people from or whatever because that seems to be all around the school. You know, there seems to be so many opportunities, and it can offer ways to tell stories in different ways and bring out different angles and aspects.
Robert:
Any ideas folks? No one?
Kyu:
Me personally, I find this, like, super helpful. I feel I'm a total babe in the woods when it comes to this stuff. It'd be cool to, like, continue this dialogue with folks who are doing this in the early stages. And I mean I'm learning, like, exponential amounts and realize I have so much more to learn as I'm doing this on all these different levels, both on the, you know, the production side, the interviewing side, the, you know, the technical side. There's so much to kind of grasp. If people want to form smaller groups and do this some more on a consistent basis, I’d be very happy to kind of share experiences and hear from other people too.
Cassandra:
Yeah, if anybody can just mention that in the chat. That way, we can keep record. If you're interested in forming a small group, you know, you can say that. And then, you know, Robert and I—we can create a platform for you guys to all come together. But if you can just mention it in the chat, that way I can keep in touch with you and target you guys specifically. That would be helpful. That's a great idea, Kyu.
Wonderful, wonderful. I see the comments coming in. That's awesome, awesome. Wonderful.
And Laura, you also have some resources for the group. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Laura:
Sure, yeah. So, I just put together—let me pull this up so I can look at it—put together just a list of some resources that we've used: A couple of the things that I mentioned, linking out to a couple of other podcasts at Columbia that I think are really great, links to some of the different hosting platforms that I talked about, the analytics platforms, transcription service that we use. There's a great audiogram creator that's, you know, free kind of web-based software called Headliner that you can use to put together those little audiograms, so I've linked to that.
And then also there's a really nice course on, I guess, LinkedIn Learning, which is what Lynda.com is called now, and there's a Producing Professional Podcasts multi-part course that has some really good information. And they go through everything from setting up studios and audio, best practices for recording and editing, and then some marketing and branding tips as well. So, I think Cassandra's gonna share that doc with the group.
Robert:
While Cassandra's doing that, I wanted to ask– First, thank you so much for a great presentation. Let's give her a round of applause.
[Many people applaud, but most of them are on mute]
So that was really really superb. And we're at 2:50, so I want to sort of wind down.
I had a sort of final question. Laura, in your opinion, what is the best first step people can take to get started?
Laura:
I would say, you know, think about your current resources. Is it just you, or are there some other teammates that you can pull in? So, thinking about that in terms of who you can use to generate content, to help you build content, and then really think about who your audience is. I think those are two kind of key first steps.
Robert:
Well, this group certainly knows about audience.
Laura:
[Laughs]
Robert:
So, we talk about that really a lot. So, that was great. Does anybody have any final question they'd like to throw out? Anybody got a program they want to plug or a project that they've got going they want to mention before we close up?
Agh, I know you guys are so busy and you all have projects, but I'll let you have a pass on this one.
Okay, we're gonna wrap up then. Thank you so much. Thank you, Cassandra, for organizing this and pulling the resources together. And thank you, Laura, for the presentation. Thank you all for showing up. We'll try to reconvene maybe in two weeks, and in the meantime we'll work on setting up maybe to Kyu’s question. Do you think, like, a weekly podcast group meeting would be okay?
Kyu:
Yeah, I mean that could be cool too. Even if it's like a– It could start up as like a Slack channel, I’d be really–
Robert:
Okay.
Kyu:
Just to throw out ideas, or people want to share. I don't know, I mean–
Robert:
Yeah.
Whatever the group wants to do is fine.
Robert:
Yeah. So, what we can do is put together all the names of people who are on this group. Feel free to invite other people. And then we can either set up a Slack channel or set up some sort of listserv so people can begin conversations. And then let the group decide, you know, how often you want to meet or, you know, when. You can always use my business Zoom account so you can get any number of people together.
Kyu:
Oh, I had one more question for Laura.
Robert:
Go ahead.
Kyu:
Really quickly, do you get a lot of feedback? Do you respond to feedback?
Robert:
Good question, good question.
Laura:
That is a good question. We get, you know, some reviews, mainly on Apple Podcasts. But I do feel that it's sort of the missing piece of the– There's not like a true feedback loop. Like occasionally, we'll get reviews. We do have a podcast email address, so we have had some people reach out to that. That's something I'd like to figure out, too. Like, how can we really make sure we're communicating with our audience?
Robert:
Well, this is the crowdsourcing group, guys. What could Laura do to get feedback? Come on, it's in half your plans. Think. Spot polling? Surveys? What else?
Kyu:
I mean, it's hard–
Robert:
I understand.
Kyu:
–to kind of think about because, like, in one respect your podcast audience is a podcast audience. Are you trying to integrate, say they're integrated with your rest of your communication plan audience? You have your social media audience, you have your newsletters. I don't know if that makes sense.
Robert:
Maybe at a more basic level is, Do they like it? Do you get suggestions about changes or different kinds of content? Or, you know, some sort of feedback loop would be good. To be determined.
Laura:
Yeah, because we do, you know, try to put some sort of call to action at the end that the host has in his outro talking about, “Hey, if you have, you know, something to contribute to this topic, you can reach out to us here.” So, hopefully that will kind of robust as we go on.
Kyu:
I was wondering if you considered things like a mailbag or something like that, for example, in your podcast, or I don't know. But anyway.
Laura:
To be continued. We can talk more about that.
Kyu:
Yeah
Robert:
Sara, go ahead.
Sara Patterson:
I was going to say, I wonder how most people are accessing that week's episode. So, if a lot of traffic is coming from the page you create, you could probably drop a little survey or a poll or a little comment box or something in there, and so it's all built into the same space.
Robert:
Oh, that's a really good idea.
Laura:
Yeah, that's a very good idea.
Robert:
See? This is what this group is for. All right. we're at–
Cassandra:
Sara, could you just write that inside the comments so we can hold that?
Robert:
Okay, we're at 54 minutes in. Thank you for a very tight and fast-moving and super informative workshop. We'll do again as soon as we need, and hopefully we can get this group together in about two weeks on a Friday afternoon.
You guys have a great weekend. Stay safe, and we'll see you soon. Bye, everyone.
Laura:
Thank you. Bye.
Robert:
Thanks.
We’re going to go and get started. If you could unmute yourself when you want to ask a question, or raise your hand and I can unmute you.
Cassandra Nathan:
Yes.
Robert:
Thank you all for coming in. We're gonna—as it says in the chat—we're gonna dispense with introductions. If you have a question or comment, introduce yourself at that point with your name, your title, and your school, department, or your unit. And we're going to dive right in to talk about podcasts with our guest Laura Lechner.
Cassandra:
Yes, and she is the Senior Associate Director of Creative Content for Columbia Business School. As part of the school strategic communications team, she also produces video, photo, and audio content for CBS’s digital spaces. And outside of her time at Columbia, she also produces and directs short films. She's an active member of Film Shop, which is a New York based collective of independent filmmakers committed to developing new work through peer support and collaboration. So, you guys can also check out her work at lauralechner.com; I will post that in the chat.
And go ahead; we'll let you go, Laura. Thank you so much for coming and agreeing to give our members some tips around starting a podcast.
Laura Lechner:
Of course, yeah. Happy to do it. Excited to see some familiar faces from our class this Spring. So hi, everybody. Yeah, I'm just gonna share some—what I call to my presentation—best practices about podcasting with a heavy caveat that, you know, this is sort of a work in progress.
I inherited, actually, Columbia Business School’s podcast. It kind of predated a bunch of members on the team, so we've all sort of, kind of, been figuring out on the fly, you know, how to put something together. But happy to share, you know, what we've learned and also happy to take questions.
So, I do have a presentation, a few slides, so I'm going to share my screen. But yeah, so I have a few sort of slides to take us through talking about content creation, preparation, production. I have a few examples of marketing and promo materials that we put out for our episodes. And then, yeah, happy to have an open discussion. Would love to hear from anybody else if your team is producing a podcast or is thinking of starting one.
Robert:
So try it now, Laura.
Laura:
Fantastic. Looks like this is up and running.
[Screen share begins]
All right, let me just play.
[First slide: Title slide]
All right. And yes, here's my email address as well if anyone wants to chat further. Yeah, happy to have continuing conversations about anything podcast related.
[Second slide: Content Creation]
So, in terms of kind of getting started and creating a podcast, I would say the first question to ask yourself would be, why a podcast? You know, it is a very kind of specific medium, so I think it's good to have a conversation with yourself and your team about why the content you're putting together might best be served by this format versus a video or an article or any other kind of piece of multimedia content. So, why you would think that this is the best kind of vehicle for your content.
And it's also important to think about, you know, who your audience is. Sort of the genesis of Columbia Bizcast, which is the podcast that we put together, is our team brought in a millennial consultant and decided that, you know, this could be a really cool way to reach our younger audience. So that was sort of our impetus behind putting something together. And we are finding that a key part of our audience is current students and also prospective students.
I feel could be a really good way to reach people who are maybe interested in your program, interested in Columbia. It's often something that can pop up when people are googling the school. So, we've kind of, based on that information, really started tailoring a lot of our episodes to that particular audience.
And then another question is just kind of, what is your message? And that can be sort of a tricky question when you're dealing with podcasts just because their very nature is, you know, episodic. But I do feel like it's important to think about sort of the overarching tie or theme that kind of connects all of your episodes.
So something that we like to continue to touch upon is our series is, you know—yes, a lot of our episodes are, you know, they're individualized stories and it is an interview kind of based podcast—but the sort of underlying message is always connecting it back to the Business School community and making it less about each individual person and more about the school, and really kind of leaning into that community.
And yeah, as I was saying earlier, you know, talking about why it's best suited for podcast, I do think, like, the podcast kind of format really creates more of, like, an intimate experience with your audience, because typically people, you know, are listening to this on their own; it can feel really personal if you have your headphones in. So, I feel can be a good way to really draw people into a conversation.
[Third slide: Preparation]
In terms of preparation, I'm kind of framing this in terms of preparation for less so, like, each individual episode and more creating a show kind of top to bottom.
Something that I've found helpful is researching any kind of peer schools or other institutions’ podcasts. There's a lot of podcast content out there, and I've found that a lot of schools, individual units, departments are putting out podcasts. So that can be really helpful to kind of, you know, see what else is out there, see how you might add to the conversation, get inspired. Or if you think something, you know, doesn't work so well. It's kind of nice to hear that too, and you can kind of formulate your podcast based on what others are putting out there.
In terms of considering the format, by that I really mean kind of the structure of the show. Is it an interview podcast? Which is primarily what we're producing. Is it more of a docuseries where you're telling a story, and it has more, kind of, post-production on it where you're doing more editing instead of just letting a conversation or an interview play out?
On a more technical side, consider what podcast hosting platform you want to use. There are a lot out there. Some of the more common ones are LibSyn, which is what we use.
[Quietly, referring to the next bullet point appearing on the slide] You know, backup.
There's other ones such as SoundCloud.
What we found is we prefer hosting on LibSyn; we get some more concrete analytics based on it; you get some more options in terms of customizing your podcast player. There is a fee associated with LibSyn: it's about $15 a month, which I think is very reasonable. And as opposed to SoundCloud, you do get better SEO kind of information. With LibSyn, you're easier to find, and it connects better with any kind of, like, third-party podcast platforms like Spotify, Apple Podcasts. You're able to push out to a bunch of different players just from one place.
Another thing to think about, too, is your release schedule because really, consistency is key. You want to be on a consistent release schedule so people know when your episodes are coming out, when they can look to you for new content.
It doesn't necessarily have to be constant. You know, you don't have to do weekly or even bi-weekly. Maybe it's, you know, you just push out something once a month. But I think it's important to stick to, you know, a day and an approximate time so that people really know when to expect stuff from you.
And then in terms of measuring success, there are kind of lots of ways to do that. And just speaking from a metrics perspective, you can look at information such as, how many unique downloads; where people are getting your content from—is it from iTunes, Apple, Spotify, is it directly from your website; what areas of the world are people tuning in from. So, it's nice to kind of keep track of that, so you get a stronger sense of who your audience is and how they're finding you, how they're playing your content.
Outside of LibSyn, a couple of third-party tools that I've used are– It’s something called Podtrac where you can track analytics, and then Chartable as well. I'm just starting to use Chartable, and it seems like a really cool option because in addition to tracking a bunch of stats for you, you can also use it to create single kind of smart links. And so instead of, you know, say on your website where you'd have to list out “Oh, Spotify, iTunes, blah blah blah,” you put a single link: it hits out to all your different platforms, and it's easier to track then where people are finding you.
[Fourth slide: Production]
In terms of production, this is just what my team has developed, so I thought I'd share with you kind of how we put together each episode. So typically, every semester we've been putting out an episode every two weeks. Since we've all sort of gone remote, and in response to COVID-19 and sort of the ongoing crisis, we have switched to a weekly release schedule, so we are putting out new episodes every Friday.
So what we've done is break our team down by roles and responsibilities. I guess we kind of have the luxury of having a larger communications team, and so that's been helpful because we can tap in our graphic designer to do our logo. We have a writer on team who writes kind of the show notes and the episode information that goes up on the website. We have a social media manager who develops some marketing and promo materials. I sort of act as a project manager, just keeping track of all these kind of moving pieces.
So, we've found it's helpful to be pretty specific about who's doing what. In addition to the kind of production team we do, our host is an alum actually, so we work with him as a contractor to do the interviews, be the on-air host, and he does the editing of the episodes as well. So, we do have weekly team check-ins to bring everyone together to kind of go through our episode-by-episode schedule; we discuss research for each episode.
Something we found has been helpful is doing a pre-interview with each subject, so a non-recorded just kind of off-the-record conversation to get a better sense of what their story is, how comfortable they are on air, talk about, you know, any kind of questions that might come up. And that's helped us develop stronger episodes because it's not the very first time we're talking to somebody, so we can really develop a strong set of questions based on that pre-interview.
And then another thing to consider—and this is kind of pre-COVID—was location. If you don't have access to a dedicated studio, it definitely can work to go to someone's office, to do it in a classroom. You just want to be considerate of, you know, external sounds that may be coming into the space.
And in terms of production, that's, you know, when we're actually recording the episode. Like I mentioned, we do work with an alum who's our host, and he's the one conducting the interviews. We have purchased recording equipment for him to use, so he has a package of microphones, some digital recorders, so he's using that equipment then to record the conversations.
And then in terms of post-production, what we found that's worked is taking the entire raw audio from the recorded conversation, and we put together a transcript of it so that our team then can work on what we call a paper edit. So going through that transcript, marking things we want to cut, maybe rearranging the order of things to create more of a seamless, episodic structure.
And we are doing all of this in Google Docs, which I think is really helpful. So we can really kind of all be working on it at once if we need to. We do a lot of commenting right in those docs, so we find that's a really nice collaborative tool, especially now that we're all working remotely. It's really helpful to be able to kind of, in real time, work on projects together like that.
And once we have our paper edit together, we pass that edited transcript onto our host Fahad, and then he uses his audio editing software to make the cuts, add in music—he records an intro and outro to each episode, so he's really putting together the package for us. And he uses software: He uses Adobe Audition. You could also use Audacity, Pro Tools if you do have access to that. But there's some pretty easy audio editing software that I can answer more questions about if need be.
[Fifth slide: Production (cont.)]
And then the final step is distribution, so that's really kind of pushing it out into the world. So we upload it to LibSyn, which is our podcasting hosting platform. We can add a show image, a logo, show notes that will show up in people's podcast players, and then you can schedule your release date there as well. And then what we do once we have that audio in LibSyn, we create an embed link that we then put on an individual web page for each episode. And then it gets pushed out to our various channels.
[Sixth slide: Bizcast webpage]
And I have a sample here of what we build for each episode. So, we'll put together a webpage that sort of reads like a little article. We'll put together a cover image. You can see this is the episode embed here that people can listen on your page as well. And then a little information about the episode and the guest. And then we'll always include subscription links at the bottom so people can find us on iTunes and Spotify, etc.
[Seventh slide: Building an Audience]
And in terms of building an audience, these are the various kind of channels that we've found has been a good platform to push stuff out on. So, we use social media a lot. We experimented with having a separate channel or a kind of handle for the show, but we've discovered that, you know, we already have a lot of followers on our just Columbia_Biz channels, and so we've decided to kind of scrap the separate podcast handles and just post everything on our main channels but with a specific hashtag for the podcast.
We'll often send them out in our newsletters, especially now that we are weekly. We've kind of synced up with Ideas at Work, which is the Business School’s newsletter that's dedicated to faculty—thought leadership, in particular. But we have been using that as a channel to push stuff out weekly.
We also are working with different student groups on campus, and we do have a current MBA student who's working with us on marketing and promotion, and so she has access to different student groups at the Business School. The student Slack channel is really active, and so she's able then to push out episodes on that, which has been really nice.
And I'm going to show a couple of examples of promo materials that we've put together.
We like to put together what we call audiograms, which are, you know, short snippets—15 to kind of 40 seconds, I think, is the sweet spot—but a really compelling clip from the podcast. This is kind of visually what they look like, so it's something that we'll put up on our Instagram channel, LinkedIn, Facebook, various social channels. And yeah, it'll be this little audio clip. We put text on it so it's visual and also accessible, and then we've played around with kind of different stylings. But this is a pretty typical one that will have, you know, our show logos on it, a photo of the guest. So we've found that those are kind of nice ways to advertise each episodes.
We'll also do what we call quote cards, so it's a still image so it's even easier for people to look at. They don't have to even listen or watch anything: It's just a strong quote from the episode. We did a whole interview with Bruce Craven who's a professor at CBS who wrote a book. It's called Win or Die: Leadership Secrets from Game of Thrones. So we really kind of capitalized on the final season of Game of Thrones coming out, and we pushed this out right when that season premiered last Spring.
Sometimes we'll do something as simple as just a photo carousel on Instagram. This was an interview with one of our students who in her former life was a Rockette, and we pushed this out around the holidays, so we had some photos of her.
And then for each episode, we'll put together a cover image that we put on the webpage. Then we can also use this to push out on other social channels.
[Eighth slide: Questions?]
And that's all I have, so I'm happy to answer any questions. Like I said, you know, we're kind of figuring this out too as we go along. This is now our– I believe the podcast started in October of 2017, and then I started in the following Fall, so I've been working on this about a year and a half, and I feel like we've gotten into a nice rhythm with things. We are on a pretty consistent production schedule. But yeah, always open to learning more from others, too, if there's any other podcasters in the group.
[Screen share ends]
Cassandra:
Wonderful, wonderful. So, we are opening up for questions. While everyone's gathering their thoughts, I'm just kind of curious, Laura. From start to finish, how long does it take to produce one episode, would you say?
Laura:
Well, we are doing it now, you know, on a weekly schedule. So, we'll typically come together early in the week on a Tuesday, and we'll have our audio from our interview because our host Fahad has been doing interviews now on Monday or Tuesday, so we'll get a transcript back, you know, within a day from that. Make edits on that. So, we really can put it together fairly quickly. In our case, because we are doing now shorter interviews, we'll only have, I don't know, tops maybe 30, 40 minutes of raw audio that will condense down to, you know, anywhere between 10 to 25 minutes–
Cassandra:
Wow.
Laura:
–I think, is the typical length of our episodes.
Cassandra:
Great. So, we have some questions that are rolling in. Kyu wants to know, “How do you pick what to do each episode, and do you have a plan for the entire season?”
Laura:
We did have a plan. It kind of got thrown out when all of this stuff started to happen. But we were trying to plan out, I mean, almost as much as a semester. For the Spring semester, we had about 10 episodes that we had planned out.
We—in terms of thinking about what, you know, what to focus on, who to interview—we kind of used the academic calendar as a structure, even holidays like around Thanksgiving. We knew we had some previous episodes with alumni and students and faculty who talked about issues around food and social change and stuff like that, so we put together kind of, like, a highlights episode that we pushed out around Thanksgiving. Similar for Veterans Day. So we found it's helpful to find, like, some kind of tie-in because that can kind of broaden your reach, and maybe people who aren't already subscribed would find your episode that way.
Cassandra:
Sure. And I'm not sure if you overtly touched upon this, but Miller wants to know, “How far out do you plan your content?” We kind of talked about that a little bit. But, you know, considering with all that's going on with the pandemic, How far out are you guys planning? Like your new plan for your new season. How far are you planning this?
Laura:
I mean, really now it's almost week to week, maybe a couple of weeks in advance. At these weekly meetings that we'll have, we'll just kind of get together and brainstorm possible guests. We feel like we have been moving more quickly now where, you know, if we think of an idea, if there's somebody we can reach out to, we'll put out those feelers, approach people to be guests. And just try to, yeah, do it probably within a week at this point.
Cassandra:
Jen wants you to talk about–
Robert:
Hey, Laura, guys. Let's do this. Instead of having Cassandra read each question, Laura, can you open the chat and see that. And then you can just respond to the questions as they come up.
Laura:
Yeah, definitely. Let me try to catch up because now there's a few in here. How far–?
Robert:
So, we just got to Jen's question. “Can we talk about the learning curve?”
Laura:
Sure. In terms of learning curve, I think what we've been the most kind of adaptive around and open to change around is, a little bit, the structure and also kind of the focus of the episodes. Because we do partner with an alumni, and he has a strong connection to our alumni community. I feel we had a tendency to maybe overload with alumni guests. And we were really finding that students wanted to be more reflected in the podcast. And so we've tried to be more cognizant of who is tuning in and who we're speaking to.
So in terms of content, that was sort of a learning curve. And in terms of production, I would say because, like, I do come from a video background and have worked with a lot of, like, educational technology and production technology, I feel it was pretty easy to get up off the ground. So if you do have any kind of background in video editing, any kind of audio editing, obviously that's really helpful. If you were talking more about, you know, the technological learning curve.
Looks like Julie's asking about measuring success.
What we mainly keep track of and what we're looking to do is to broaden our subscribers and our unique downloads for each episode. So, we do use those various analytics tools that I was talking about to kind of keep track of how many people are listening, where they're listening from. At our weekly meetings, I put together an agenda and I show how many new listens we have each week. So we're kind of keeping track of growth of listens per episode.
Marcus asks, “Can you share the time that your staff spends on episodes?”
Okay, yeah. I mean in terms of my workload, I would say maybe 25% of my work week goes towards the podcasts, and that counts the weekly meeting, the uploading, any kind of, like, tech stuff that I'm doing on it.
In terms of financial costs, yeah, we do have a budget for it. Because we do pay our host, and then he subcontracts out a couple of audio production responsibilities as well, so we are financially investing in it.
Another financial piece would be—and we don't do this every time, but we have for more high profile guests—we've rented studio space on campus. Uris Hall has a studio. I know the Journalism School also has a studio that can be used for podcasting. Barnard has a relatively new studio, as well, that I think all Columbia affiliates have access to. So those are some costs that come into play.
George asks about how the podcast fits into the communications ecosystem. “Does content start on one and migrate, translate?”
I mean, yeah. It's definitely part of our overall communication strategy, and there is a lot of crossover. Most people on our kind of editorial team also touch the podcast in one way or the other. And we do try to integrate episodes into kind of other pieces that we're working on. So for example, we're doing an interview that we know is going to be in our weekly newsletter. We'll often do a corresponding interview, or if we've done a piece on somebody earlier, in the show notes of the episode we'll link out to a previous interview. So just really trying to connect the content as much as possible.
In terms of arriving at the format, which for our show is an interview format, it just seemed like a nice fit. Kind of one of the early ideas for the show was that it was featuring the voices of Columbia Business School, so that kind of conversation format just seemed like a natural fit.
“How have you–?” Oh, this is a great question. “How are you recording interviews remotely?”
Yeah, that's definitely something that I'd like to touch on. There are a couple of ways that are pretty easy to do it. You can get pretty high quality audio out of Zoom, even more so if people are using USB microphones or even these little headphone microphones or their AirPods. The best way to record it would be, instead of recording to the cloud which I think is almost the default setting on Zoom, is make sure you're recording locally. And that'll save a local file on your hard drive. And if you choose to save locally, you'll have the option to save separate audio tracks. So you'll get both a clean track of the host and then the guest. That's really helpful in editing so you don't have any issues with overlapping audio.
There's also some, like, add-on tools you can purchase for a pretty low cost. I know for Skype, there's an app called Ecamm—E-c-a-m-m—that is really nice. It kind of just supplements the recording capabilities of Skype. Again, you can, like, break it out into multiple audio tracks. You have a little more control over even mixing the audio tracks in real time, so that's really helpful.
You also can experiment with, you know, recording on your iPhones or recording with other kind of mobile devices as well. It's definitely possible, and I think you can get, you know, pretty high quality audio. It's never going to sound the same as being in a studio with really high-grade mics. You can definitely make it listenable.
In terms of who manages outreach to guests, that's sort of a combination between members of our stratcom's team, the host and his kind of alumni connections.
So, we tend to go with if somebody has a, you know, an existing relationship with a guest that we want to approach. But if not, yeah, typically we'll ask our host to even just, you know, send out a cold email; reach out to people. And we've had good luck. People are usually pretty receptive to appearing on the podcast.
Oh. “How did you settle on this particular alum to host the podcast, and is he compensated?”
He actually is like the very originator of this podcast. It was something he started as a student when he was in the EMBA program at Columbia. And my predecessor, when they were thinking about starting a podcast, approached him because he knew that he already had an interest. He did have a pretty big network of students who are now alum, so kind of developed from something that he originally worked on.
And yes, he is compensated. We do pay him. He's sort of paid in kind, in a way too, because we've purchased the equipment that he's using, but we do financially compensate him as well. And then he—I think I mentioned—subcontracts out, then, to an audio engineer who helps him set up mics for interviews when we're doing in-person interviews and who masters the audio tracks as well.
Oh, and a great tip for recording remotely, I'm a fan of Zencastr, which I've heard about but haven't checked out, but I'll definitely take a look at that too.
Let's see, are there any other questions? Anybody want to share anything either?
Robert:
So, I had a question. How many listeners are you averaging now, and how long did it take you to build up critical mass of audience?
Laura:
We average– I would say low numbers for us would be about 500 unique downloads per episode. I would say average, the high average, might be close to 900. And you definitely do see them accumulate over time, so episodes that we've published, you know, even a year ago continue to get active listeners because people will go back and listen to your archives.
And so yeah, we've been producing this podcast since, yeah, Fall 2017. So I feel like that's one of the nice things about podcasts. I feel they—depending on topic—but they tend to be a little more timeless than articles or videos. I feel people have a more tendency to go back and listen to older episodes.
Robert:
And starting at 2017 with zero listeners, How long did it take to get 100, 500?
Laura:
I feel like right out of the gate, looking back at the numbers, we had some strong listeners. I feel if you, you know, really promote that, “Hey, I have this new podcast. Here's how you can listen to it. Here's how you can find us.” We really saw, you know, a spike in the beginning where people were eager to check out this new kind of thing from the school. And then yeah, it's been pretty consistent. I feel we've had compelling guests. We've found, you know, a way to push it out to all of our constituents. We try to get alumni, students, perspectives, faculty, staff. So yeah, it's been pretty consistent in terms of listeners.
Kyu Lee:
Hey, Laura. Thanks so much for all this. This is really helpful.
Laura:
Yeah.
Kyu:
I'm just wondering, it sounds like you have a pretty– By the way, my name's Kyu, and I'm with the Earth Institute, and we started our own podcast earlier this year. We have about– I just uploaded our sixth episode a couple hours ago.
The one thing it sounds like you guys have is a great team that's working on all this stuff, you know, all of it together. I'm curious, did it take some sort of internal convincing within your department that you needed to put these resources into the podcast itself? Assuming that a lot of people here are thinking about starting podcasts or about to start it, you know, you probably don't have that sort of, those kind of, resources right off the bat. I'm just curious, like, did you go through a certain process to get to the point where you are?
Laura:
I'll try to answer this as best as I can. I feel because this is sort of a project that, like I said, I sort of inherited, I'm not as familiar with, you know, exactly how this got off the ground outside of yeah, they truly brought in, like, a millennial consultant to go through kind of the content that the Business School was putting out, and this seemed like a gap that was missing. So, I do think we had the benefit right away of the highers-up understanding the value of podcasting.
And in terms of bringing in the team, that seems that was fairly organic. We used to really outsource, I would say, a good 75% of the podcast to our host, but I think we kind of recognized the value of making it more of a Columbia or a Business School product. So, we wanted more editorial control over it. We wanted to really tighten up the interviews. Make sure that we're always bringing it back to Columbia Business School. So, making sure that questions, like—especially if you're interviewing, you know, a student or an alum, like—Why Columbia Business School? How did that impact your career? Those kinds of questions were always in there. So yeah, it sort of gradually happened where we brought in the rest of our communications team.
So, I know that definitely is a luxury, and not everybody has a more robust team than the Business School seems to have. But I do think it's possible to do it with a smaller team. But maybe you just can't push out as many episodes, because it can be time consuming to even just schedule the interviews and edit the content and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know if I answered your question, but hopefully there was [laughs] something helpful.
Kyu:
No, no. That was good.
Laura:
[Laughs]
Kyu:
I mean, I went through, like, I don't know, four to six weeks just going through YouTube videos trying to figure out how to plug in a microphone–
Laura:
[Laughs]
Kyu:
–a mixer. So no, this is– I feel like I'm definitely progressing.
Laura:
Good. Excellent. [Laughs]
Robert:
So, there are a couple more questions that came in.
Laura:
Okay, let's see. Oh, “Have you seen a rise in number of viewers since the pandemic?”
You know, we haven't really yet. And I think because we are releasing weekly, they aren't out as long as the other ones would be when we were just– When we were doing bi-weekly, we'd have, you know, two weeks of stats each time to kind of compare. The past few weeks, even from day one, I think I've seen about four, yeah, probably about 400 listens kind of right out the gate. And those typically are the people who are subscribed to your podcast, so they probably have it set up where your podcast is automatically kind of downloading into their queue.
But yeah, so I think it takes a little bit of time to really compare the stats and really get any meaningful information out of it. But at least, like, the unique downloads right off the bat have seemed pretty consistent.
In terms of including a video component, that's something we have done more so in the beginning where we tried to put out either clips of the interviews, so we'd actually film the interviews and try to do, like, a highlights or something from that or some kind of behind-the-scenes footage. You know, my personal opinion is it hasn't been as valuable as I thought it was. As somebody who does a lot of video, I was really gung-ho to try that.
But I feel, especially on social, like those quote cards or an audiogram, something that's quick and easy for people to digest that they—especially with the quote cards—they might not necessarily even have to have their sound on. Because I feel a large percentage of people on social aren't even listening. So having that quote card or the audiogram that has the text transcription, I think those are stronger promo pieces than a video.
And I think there's one more question. “Did you gain or lose listeners?”
Oh, okay. Yeah. Again, not quite sure yet. I think it'll take a bit of time for me to get any kind of meaningful info on that. But it looks like it's pretty consistent. Again, probably because that subscriber base has remained pretty consistent.
Robert:
So, I had a quick question and I want to go back to Kyu, and then we can do some crosstalk. Kyu, you ask Laura about editorial; Laura talked about editorial decisions. How do you manage editorial on your side?
Kyu:
Well, you're kind of looking at it, I guess. It's a bit more about, like, the overall mission of, I guess, the podcast itself, like what we're trying to achieve. And there are lots of ways, I guess, going about it. You know, we’re—at least for what we're doing—I want to, you know, have people know who the researchers and scientists are at the Earth Institute and get to know them beyond the actual work that they do. So, however way we can get to that point, you know, whether it's through these kind of interviews or whatever, that's all up for question.
The other also, like, underlying principle of what we're doing, I kind of went into it not trying to make, like, a wonderfully produced, you know, Emmy Award-winning whatever podcast. You know, I think we really just want to sort of experiment with it and see who kind of gravitates towards it, really sort of build, you know, some chops around it essentially. Get people not only to be interested in it but, you know, people to kind of see if they could flex themselves in this sort of format, like how they would react with, how they would possibly thrive in it. And see which sort of scientists and researchers might kind of, you know, I guess be good at it, and then kind of take it from there.
So yeah, we haven't really settled on, like, any sort of real consistency, I guess, in that sense.
Robert:
That’s okay.
Kyu:
Yeah.
Robert:
Well, you're listening to your audience and you're seeing what you've got. My question is really more about who makes the decision about which subjects or interviews to go ahead with. Is that you, or you have to do that by committee, or do you consult other people?
Kyu:
Yeah, no, it's really me.
Robert:
Okay.
Kyu:
I mean, I talk it out with, you know, my host, and we kind of discuss, like, some of the big things that are going on, and make sure that we're, you know, covering the big topics. At the same time, making, you know, the people who aren't heard from as much throughout the Earth Institute. We want to highlight their work for sure, you know, and figure out, again–
Robert:
Cool.
Kyu:
It's just seeing what we can find.
Robert:
So, we're at 2:45 and we have the luxury of Laura's attention for just a few more minutes. So, if there are other questions, you can unmute yourself and we can get some crosstalk going.
I wanted to see who here is entertaining doing podcasts at the moment. Are you, like, here because you're getting ready to do it? Or you're considering to do it? Or, you know. So, who's got a podcast in a plan now?
[A few people raise their hands]
A couple. Who would like to do a podcast but they haven't started?
[A few people raise their hands]
Okay, okay.
Kyu:
You know, the one other thing I wanted to mention, and maybe Mindy might want to talk a bit more about this. But, you know, I've talked a lot with Mindy, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for sort of cross podcasting too. Working between schools to create, whether it's episodes or whatever, considering that we have a lot of faculty that have different, you know, positions throughout the school, you know, the university itself. So, I don't know, maybe if you want to kind of talk about what we're trying to do.
Mindy Farabee:
Oh, well, yeah, that's exactly what we're trying to do. So, I mean, that's something that we just noticed when we were looking to do– We're kind of looking at it in conjunction with the magazine in terms of podcasting, and so we had a story where I realized all of the faculty that we wanted to focus on, and I realized that all of the faculty were also actually your faculty.
So, it just seemed to make a lot of sense, and it seemed like there was an opportunity for synergy. And I guess that is something also I'd be interested in hearing about other people from or whatever because that seems to be all around the school. You know, there seems to be so many opportunities, and it can offer ways to tell stories in different ways and bring out different angles and aspects.
Robert:
Any ideas folks? No one?
Kyu:
Me personally, I find this, like, super helpful. I feel I'm a total babe in the woods when it comes to this stuff. It'd be cool to, like, continue this dialogue with folks who are doing this in the early stages. And I mean I'm learning, like, exponential amounts and realize I have so much more to learn as I'm doing this on all these different levels, both on the, you know, the production side, the interviewing side, the, you know, the technical side. There's so much to kind of grasp. If people want to form smaller groups and do this some more on a consistent basis, I’d be very happy to kind of share experiences and hear from other people too.
Cassandra:
Yeah, if anybody can just mention that in the chat. That way, we can keep record. If you're interested in forming a small group, you know, you can say that. And then, you know, Robert and I—we can create a platform for you guys to all come together. But if you can just mention it in the chat, that way I can keep in touch with you and target you guys specifically. That would be helpful. That's a great idea, Kyu.
Wonderful, wonderful. I see the comments coming in. That's awesome, awesome. Wonderful.
And Laura, you also have some resources for the group. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Laura:
Sure, yeah. So, I just put together—let me pull this up so I can look at it—put together just a list of some resources that we've used: A couple of the things that I mentioned, linking out to a couple of other podcasts at Columbia that I think are really great, links to some of the different hosting platforms that I talked about, the analytics platforms, transcription service that we use. There's a great audiogram creator that's, you know, free kind of web-based software called Headliner that you can use to put together those little audiograms, so I've linked to that.
And then also there's a really nice course on, I guess, LinkedIn Learning, which is what Lynda.com is called now, and there's a Producing Professional Podcasts multi-part course that has some really good information. And they go through everything from setting up studios and audio, best practices for recording and editing, and then some marketing and branding tips as well. So, I think Cassandra's gonna share that doc with the group.
Robert:
While Cassandra's doing that, I wanted to ask– First, thank you so much for a great presentation. Let's give her a round of applause.
[Many people applaud, but most of them are on mute]
So that was really really superb. And we're at 2:50, so I want to sort of wind down.
I had a sort of final question. Laura, in your opinion, what is the best first step people can take to get started?
Laura:
I would say, you know, think about your current resources. Is it just you, or are there some other teammates that you can pull in? So, thinking about that in terms of who you can use to generate content, to help you build content, and then really think about who your audience is. I think those are two kind of key first steps.
Robert:
Well, this group certainly knows about audience.
Laura:
[Laughs]
Robert:
So, we talk about that really a lot. So, that was great. Does anybody have any final question they'd like to throw out? Anybody got a program they want to plug or a project that they've got going they want to mention before we close up?
Agh, I know you guys are so busy and you all have projects, but I'll let you have a pass on this one.
Okay, we're gonna wrap up then. Thank you so much. Thank you, Cassandra, for organizing this and pulling the resources together. And thank you, Laura, for the presentation. Thank you all for showing up. We'll try to reconvene maybe in two weeks, and in the meantime we'll work on setting up maybe to Kyu’s question. Do you think, like, a weekly podcast group meeting would be okay?
Kyu:
Yeah, I mean that could be cool too. Even if it's like a– It could start up as like a Slack channel, I’d be really–
Robert:
Okay.
Kyu:
Just to throw out ideas, or people want to share. I don't know, I mean–
Robert:
Yeah.
Whatever the group wants to do is fine.
Robert:
Yeah. So, what we can do is put together all the names of people who are on this group. Feel free to invite other people. And then we can either set up a Slack channel or set up some sort of listserv so people can begin conversations. And then let the group decide, you know, how often you want to meet or, you know, when. You can always use my business Zoom account so you can get any number of people together.
Kyu:
Oh, I had one more question for Laura.
Robert:
Go ahead.
Kyu:
Really quickly, do you get a lot of feedback? Do you respond to feedback?
Robert:
Good question, good question.
Laura:
That is a good question. We get, you know, some reviews, mainly on Apple Podcasts. But I do feel that it's sort of the missing piece of the– There's not like a true feedback loop. Like occasionally, we'll get reviews. We do have a podcast email address, so we have had some people reach out to that. That's something I'd like to figure out, too. Like, how can we really make sure we're communicating with our audience?
Robert:
Well, this is the crowdsourcing group, guys. What could Laura do to get feedback? Come on, it's in half your plans. Think. Spot polling? Surveys? What else?
Kyu:
I mean, it's hard–
Robert:
I understand.
Kyu:
–to kind of think about because, like, in one respect your podcast audience is a podcast audience. Are you trying to integrate, say they're integrated with your rest of your communication plan audience? You have your social media audience, you have your newsletters. I don't know if that makes sense.
Robert:
Maybe at a more basic level is, Do they like it? Do you get suggestions about changes or different kinds of content? Or, you know, some sort of feedback loop would be good. To be determined.
Laura:
Yeah, because we do, you know, try to put some sort of call to action at the end that the host has in his outro talking about, “Hey, if you have, you know, something to contribute to this topic, you can reach out to us here.” So, hopefully that will kind of robust as we go on.
Kyu:
I was wondering if you considered things like a mailbag or something like that, for example, in your podcast, or I don't know. But anyway.
Laura:
To be continued. We can talk more about that.
Kyu:
Yeah
Robert:
Sara, go ahead.
Sara Patterson:
I was going to say, I wonder how most people are accessing that week's episode. So, if a lot of traffic is coming from the page you create, you could probably drop a little survey or a poll or a little comment box or something in there, and so it's all built into the same space.
Robert:
Oh, that's a really good idea.
Laura:
Yeah, that's a very good idea.
Robert:
See? This is what this group is for. All right. we're at–
Cassandra:
Sara, could you just write that inside the comments so we can hold that?
Robert:
Okay, we're at 54 minutes in. Thank you for a very tight and fast-moving and super informative workshop. We'll do again as soon as we need, and hopefully we can get this group together in about two weeks on a Friday afternoon.
You guys have a great weekend. Stay safe, and we'll see you soon. Bye, everyone.
Laura:
Thank you. Bye.
Robert:
Thanks.