Valuable piece from the influential blog Mashable about the decline of podcasting and the rise of videocasting…But it really makes the point that it’s not really about things declining but rather about choice rising.
And there’s a sharp point here relevant to the mother-of-all-podcast-sources, radio.
It’s an evolution towards choices. If you’re out to start a popular online show, you can’t just make an audio version – you’re going to fall by the wayside….Hell, nearly every podcaster told me that a successful podcast needs a successful and consistent blog. Being able to offer your viewers, listeners, and readers multiple options to take in your work, your opinions, your interviews, and your personality is becoming more and more apparent. You need to complement your video show with not only podcasts and blog posts, but live streams, twitter conversations, and even mobile video. Think about how many sources you have for your news – TV, blogs, newspapers, magazines, RSS feeds, and email lists just to start. So podcasting is far from obsolete – it’s just become an integral part of larger campaigns to reach current and new users. In the end, it’s about engaging your audience. But since users take in information from different sources and different mediums, the best podcasters and videocasters must do the same and spread their message across multiple platforms.
So the evolution of podcasting is towards engaging the audience via more media tentacles at the center of which lay the brand itself, not the channel of distribution.
Shouldn’t this apply to radio as much as to podcasting?
“Radio,” after all (in the current vernacular) is a distribution channel, but what you have on your radio is the brand (or at least should be).
So where’s your brand’s podcast? Your videocast? Your twitter feed, etc?
Stop analyzing. Just do something.
What are you doing to engage with your audience across all platforms?