In talking with one of my old friends who’s figuring out how to market his software, I realized that I’ve come to rely on company produced MP3s as part of my means to learn about a company.
Podcasts are great medium to get information and pitches to content hungry people like myself. The key in my mind is time-shifting: having a conversation in non-real-time. I see info workers and esp. influencers working more and more with time-shifted information and data.
I realize that RedMonk is somewhat of a freak in it’s work setup — I always jokingly call it The New World of Work — but information workers are increasingly distributed across many different geographies and time zones. The tools of the ‘net-life are all time-shifted: email, blogs, and even IM. IM may seem weird, but about half of the conversations I have in IM are delayed: someone IM’ed me an hour ago, and respond to them. Then they respond 10 minutes later, etc.
Content for Research
For example, I’m not a long-time expert on Pervasive, so when they asked me to be part of their ISV round-table earlier this week by going over trends in IT, I downloaded all of the MP3s they had available to listen while I cleaned the house, mowed the lawn, walked the dogs, and worked.
I of course sucked in all the text, PDF, wikipedia, and conversations I could get my hands on as well. In the end, I was still not what you would call an “expert” on Pervasive, but RedMonk in no way professes to be vertical experts at everything (except those things we’re passionate about ;>). Instead, I’d achieved the RedMonk goal (at least my RedMonk goal) of understanding Pervasive in context of the software industry, their users, their products, strategy, all with a handful of deep drill-downs, like Pervasive’s micro-kernal architecture.
That is, I could have a conversation and give actionable advice about Pervasive as a member of the software ecosystem, and I’d know the questions to ask to get more detail as needed.
As you can imagine, I come across a lot of company’s podcasts. What I’m looking for when I’m in research mode are very narrowly focused podcasts that are technical in nature. I don’t really want speculative podcasts that seem to show off how forward-thinking a company is. For example, IBM has a series called “The future off…” where they talk about broad industry and cultural issues. That might be good for some folks, but there’s plenty of that sort of stuff out there already.
Pervasive’s podcasts (not technically podcasts as there’s no RSS feed) were exactly what I was looking for: info on PSQL v9, their integration offerings, and even some Btrieve info.
Each “episode” was short, to the point, and there were plenty of them on many of Pervasive’s products and thinking.
The Series
On the other hand, my consumption of those podcasts is topic driven: I listen to them when I have a specific company, product, industry, etc. that I want to bone up on. I don’t subscribe to podcasts like those and listen to them regularly.
For that, what I’m looking for is more of a “gang” format, where there’s the same core group of people with the occasional guest. Preferably, there’ll be people on the podcast from outside the company, and not just “high-level” folks who’ve gone through media training and can be “trusted” to talk to the public.
Having the same people makes the podcast more episodic in the sense that I know more of less what topics, no matter how broad, to expect and allows me to build up a relationship (though one-way) with the podcast. The Java Posse is a good example of this sort of podcast (though it’s not run by Sun [why not sponsor them with hosting or something else?] it’s all Java all the time), and I have high hopes for the Sun IdM podcast to be like this instead of the usual rotating VP’s with talking-points podcast.
With these podcasts, length isn’t such a big deal. After getting the same “gang” of people each week, the primary things I look for are being as casual as possible and “real.” That seems to be quite a challenge for most companies, but it’s just a mind-set shift from being scared-poopless about talking in a human voice in public. I think there’s some book on the topic for those who need paper-tonics.
Recent Comments