Cameron Is Available For Hire… and Needs Your Help

As some of you know, the main source of my income at the moment is producing podcasts for companies and government departments. Check this site for the basic pitch. I can produce podcasts for anyone anywhere in the world. Obviously video podcasts are limited to where I can get with my camera, but I’ve been recording audio interviews with international guests since 2004.

Who needs a podcast? Anyone in:

– Marketing
– PR
– HR
– Training
– Internal Comms

Especially in this time of financial tightening, podcasting is a tool more companies should be using. It’s a very cost-effective way to reach the key members of your audience on a weekly basis. And, of course, if you’re going to produce social media, you should work with someone who has actually some experience producing media for large audiences and isn’t just all talk.

There are a few different kinds of podcasts my clients tend to be using at the moment:

1. The External “Transparency” podcast – this kind of podcast aims to make a client more accessible to their clients. It can be either video or audio and involves me doing interviews with people inside the company about what they (and their division) actually do. This typically suits a very large org that wants to soften or humanise it’s image. The strategy is that their clients/customers will subscribe to the podcast to get a better understanding of what each of the divisions is working on and how best to engage with them.

2. The External “Value-Add” podcast – this kind of podcast usually has content completely unrelated to the actual services and products of the org, but which is designed to be valuable to the target audience. Typically it might involve interviews with world leaders in the same field. Each podcast is wrapped with an audio or video header and footer, “This podcast is brought to you by….”, to keep the client’s message and brand in front of their audience every week.

3. The Internal Management podcast – this podcast involves video or audio interviews with members of the management team (CEO, CFO, COO, HR Director, etc) on a regular basis to go out to the employees via their intranet. It allows the senior leadership of an org to efficaciously communicate business updates with their teams around the country and world on a weekly basis and in a personable manner. It might also involved interviews with employees throughout the business. Who are they? What do they do? What is their focus? This is a great tool for encouraging cross-collaboration in large orgs.

4. The External Product/Service podcast – this podcast has to be handled cleverly. Most people aren’t going to subscribe to a podcast that’s just a marketing vehicle UNLESS it’s actually cool and informative or very funny. Often the best way to handle this kind of podcast is to get your customers involved. Get THEM talking about or demonstrating your products and services. Make it about THEM, not about you.

Demographics: There’s a common misconception that podcast audiences are still only the young tech savvy folks. While this was probably true back in 2004/5, it certainly isn’t any longer. The success of Apple’s iPods and iPhones, combined with the marketing of podcasts by mainstream media like the ABC, has actually skewed the demographic to a 40+ audience (according to the surveys I run on TPN’s audience each year).

So, here’s how you can help – if you know of anyone who might be interested in using my services, make sure you point them in my direction. In addition, if you email me the names, email addresses and telephone numbers of the people in your company that fulfill the above roles, I’ll contact them directly and give them the pitch (ideally using you as a point of introduction but, if you’re not comfortable with that, I’ll leave your name out of it).

Here are my contact details to make it easy:

Cameron Reilly
CEO, The Podcast Network
tel: +61 400455334
email: cameron@thepodcastnetwork.com

Thanks for your support!

the brave experiment starts tomorrow

Tomorrow (that would be Friday Jan 30) at 10am Sydney time I have Antony Loewenstein, journalist, blogger and author, back on the show to discuss the recent and current events in Gaza.

The brave experiment is this:

With the help of my two filthy assistants (sorry Tim and Jonathan, I’ve been reading Transmetropolitan too much tonight), I’m going to be doing a LIVE TWITSTREAM of the interview. You can follow it on the gdayworld twitter account.

If you want to ask questions of Antony during the interview, or debate one of his points, then send a reply to gdayworld and we’ll feed it into the interview!

I’m going to try to take twinterviewing to a new level.

Thanks to Darryl King from iReckon for seeding the filthy idea into my head today over coffee.

Be A Devil

TPN needs your help. Support indy media by donating a small amount of money towards TPN’s operating costs each month. For the price of a latte you can make the world a better place by supporting original indy media.

Click here for the TPN Pledge.

(Thanks to Bob Seal for the toon!)