We love to tell great stories. We love to hear them, too. That's why our ears are always perked for good ones. And sometimes, good stories come in the form of podcasts.
In a nutshell, a podcast is an audio file, distributed over the Internet, which is ready for playback on your computer or a portable MP3 player.
Although they started out as a way to distribute radio-type shows, podcasts are also being used to market new products, distribute class lessons to students and share news. Podcasting and other forms of social media like blogging and photo-sharing are popular and effective ways of telling a story. And a growing group of associations are embracing the trend as a new and popular way reach out to their members and potential members.
Here are a few good ones we've noticed recently.
- National Association of Manufacturers
- National School Boards Association
- National Parks Conservation Association
If you're ready to produce your first podcast and need some help getting started, our talented team is wired for sound. We can help you focus your story as you prepare to record and share it. We've also compiled a great list of tips and tricks for making your podcast the very best it can be.
Here's a sidenote of podcasting trivia: Rex has been writing about podcasting on his blog since the very beginning of podcasting -- or, at least, the beginning of when the term started showing up on Google. (The link Rex's post had to Doc Searls no longer works, but later, he noted that on that day, the term "podcasting" returned only 24 citations on Google.)
And if you're into geeky, philosophical and really, really long "future-trend" predictions, check out this series of posts Rex wrote in 2005 on what he predicted would be the impact of Apple's decision to start supporting the distribution of podcasts. Can you believe that was only three years ago? Reading what he predicted back then is why we sometimes joke that Rex lives in the future.
