Social Podcasting for Business
February 12, 2008
Big in Japan pioneered the concept of ’social podcasting’ in 2005. The idea is simple, instead of a single author publishing audio to a single rss feed, social podcasting allows multiple authors to publish audio into the same channel. Our first social podcasting implementation was called PodServe. PodServe users could create social or public podcasts and allow one or more other users to contribute content to their podcast. We call our most popular social podcasting application FanPodCast. It is used by several television shows including Nip/Tuck, The Shield, The Riches, Rescue Me, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Dirt.
How it works: Each FanPodCast install is custom, but in general they all share similar functionality. The following screenshots are from the Nip/Tuck version of the application. Written using Ruby on Rails, the system allows for quick and easy customization.
Each FanPodCast implementation starts with the creation of one or more podcasts. The idea is to create an interesting property that meets the goals of the television producers. For most shows there are two primary objectives:
- Generate interest in the television series from non-viewers.
- Retain existing viewers through enhanced interaction with the program.
The screenshot to the left shows how producers can create a new podcast. Everything is included to facilitate inclusion in the iTunes music store. In the case of Nip/Tuck the show is one of the most popular cable programs with more than 2.5 million viewers. By exposing the show, through the FanPodcast, to iTunes users the show is exposed to up-to 60 million listeners. Even a small .5-1% exposure can result in huge gains for a program.
Most producers do not have the resources to generate additional content to attract iTunes users so working with existing viewers to generate content (i.e. recordings from the FanPodcast system) can accomplish the second primary goal of enhanced viewer interaction as well content creation to help attract non-viewers. Moderation becomes important when your content is user generated.
Our moderation engines are customized to meet the needs of each property. In the case of the Nip/Tuck fan comment podcast outsourced moderators use our tool to quickly listen to each recording and either delete or ‘publish’ it into the fanpodcast feed and in iTunes. The Nip/Tuck fan interview podcast allows fans to interview the cast and crew each week. Each week the producers select the top five questions, rank them, deliver them to the cast member requesting a response. The FanPodCast system then merges each of the questions and the response into a single mp3 once the producer presses the ‘publish’ button. As seen to the right.
The value of the content is fairly constant in the case of the interview podcast, but the fan comment podcast might get a little stale. The podcall interface allows producers to modify the IVR system, by inserting new recordings for specified time periods. For example, the producers may want to prompt user for different comments each week based on the content of the show or based on current events. This feature can be seen to the left.
Statistics are important for any media outreach program. FanPodCast provides statistics on a podcast and recording level. iTunes subscribers, RSS subscribers, number of downloads, number of player “plays”, number of calls made and number of calls completed are just some of the stats collected by FanPodCast. Additional stats are easily provided.
Finally, our system can be integrated into a typical Flash based site vie our simple API or we can generate a static pop-up sitting outside of the programs website as we did for Nip/Tuck. For more information about Fancast give Alexander Muse a call at 214.550.2003 or email him at amuse@biggu.com.
