Dennis Miller
Mansfield University

Welcome To The Podcast Universe

“College gives you a chance to totally reinvent yourself.”

“When my mom drove away she tapped her brake lights like she did when she took me to day care. This time I was on my own.”

“There aren’t the cliques that there are in high school.”

These are just a few comments from my interviews with freshmen on the Mansfield University Podcast. When I began thinking about doing a podcast last spring, I knew we had to have a show that was compelling, entertaining, educational and real. I decided to find four freshmen and interview them weekly about their experiences from the moment they arrived on campus through the rest of the year.

I had some rules:

1. The interviews were unscripted. I wanted a sense of immediacy and reality. The students didn’t know what I was going to ask and I didn’t know how they would answer.
2. I would, with minor edits, use whatever they said.
3. I would not use the show to promote Mansfield. I wanted our students to share their experiences to help high school students be better prepared for college.
4. I would keep it short. Most shows are 15-18 minutes.
5. I would keep it as light and informal as I could.

I also kept it honest. Students had glowing things to say in some areas, and less complimentary things in others (such as the food, of course). One girl dropped out of my program with no warning. I announced it on the next show that she was very busy and no longer on the show. The show, like life, takes unexpected turns. On another show, a student and I were both sick. I joked about it and we went into our interview.

I, of course, learned a lot over the course of the first semester. I found early on that I would have to break one of my own rules. I would have to edit out some things. During an informal conversation with a female forensic student, I learned she had moved to a larger room and painted it. I asked her about it during the next interview. “Well,” she said, “the room was disgustingly dirty so we got permission to paint it.” I agonized over it and finally decided that in the face of such brutal honesty, discretion is the better part of valor. I deleted it.

Matt, a criminal justice major with a goal of joining the FBI, said he wanted to buy a gun and learn to shoot. A lot of our students hunt and fish in our surrounding lakes and mountains. “I need to learn to shoot,” he said. “Besides, everybody up here has a gun.” Innocent – and legitimate — as it was, the statement conjured up an image that had to go. Such edits are not the norm, though. Most editing is to take out long pauses, coughs and the occasional garbled word.

Marketing

Podcasting was very new when we started and few people had heard of it yet. So we turned it to our advantage and made our podcast the subject of our 2006-07 marketing efforts.

• We ran four-color ads in magazines aimed at high school students
• I produced two radio spots using clips from our students in which I explained podcasting. We ran the spots throughout Pennsylvania and part of New York State.
• I ran ads on myspace.com
• We created a slogan (Freshmen reveal their secrets), a design and ran it on billboards
• I was interviewed by several nationally distributed magazines and newsletters for inclusion in articles about this emerging technology.
• Through luck as much as anything else, we named our show the Mansfield University Podcast
• It’s simple and almost banal. But if you do a search for “university podcasts” Mansfield usually comes up first and second out of 11,500,000 entries.

The beauty of podcasting is the almost limitless ways you can use it.
Examples:

• We have a series of five-minute shows in which the admissions director gives tips on finding the right college.
• In another series, the financial aid director gives tips on getting the most – and right kind—of financial aid.
• I followed our fisheries students into the mountains and talked with them as they shocked fish for a project. The show is full of the wild sounds of footsteps, the rushing creek, discussions and banter among the students and professor.
• This spring I’ll go whitewater rafting with the geography club and hope that I – and my iRiver—survive.

Right now I’m in the process of interviewing interesting people around the campus, including a retired communications professor who made a professional recording of the New Testament, our TV services specialist who makes nationally distributed science fiction movies, and our nationally recognized expert on serial killers, among others.

Our former president, much beloved by faculty and alumni, gave the commencement address in December. I recorded it on my iPod, added a quick introduction and uploaded it. As of March – three months later – it is still being downloaded.

In April, a drummer with a musical group collapsed after a performance here. It was later found that he had inhalation anthrax. Within hours we became the object of international attention. The evening of the day it was discovered, the Pennsylvania Health Department hosted an open forum to answer questions. I recorded it and uploaded it a half hour after it was finished. We had more than 3,000 hits the next day. People thanked me for providing the public service.

The uses of the technology are nearly unlimited. Podcasts could be developed in the alumni relations, constituent relations, sports and many other areas.

Creating A Podcast

The mechanics of creating a podcast are easy. Most people in PR know how to interview so you’re already ahead of others. You need a good mic or two, a mixer and a computer. If you’re doing field work, an iPod or iRiver with a good mic are sufficient. I use a dell laptop for editing and mixing.

There are a lot of software mixing programs available, ranging from the free (Audacity, Garageband) to the professional (Audition, Protools).

The learning curve on mixing is fairly quick. I do a rough mix, lay down the music beds, then do a final mix, convert it to an mp3 file and upload it onto our site.

As soon as you upload your show, it is automatically downloaded to everyone who has subscribed to it. They can listen to it on the computer or copy it onto their listening device, (iPod, iRiver, etc.) Then they listen to it at their leisure.

Podcasting is outside the FCC, so every subject is fair game, though no one in a college setting in these politically correct times is going to be too radical.

There are no time limits. My longest show is the 32-minute anthrax forum. My shortest are the five-plus minute shows with admissions and financial aid.

Content is the key. You have to keep the listener’s interest.

Recording and producing a 15 minute show takes 5-7 hours, depending on the complexity of the mixing. To save time, I use a student intern to do the rough mix.

Within a week of our first uploads, we were seeing over 800 hits a day. As of March we were up to about 1,300 hits a day. My goal for this year is 3,000 hits a day.

The Future

Listening to podcasts isn’t limited to young, tech-savvy people listening to podcasts. I have a listener who’s 85 years old. This is going to become the norm in the future. The number of people downloading TV shows, movies, music and podcasts is growing everyday. They are choosing what they like and listen or watch when they want. Once people get a taste of this, there’s no going back. This is part of the reason commercial TV and radio audiences are declining.

Podcasting and vidcasting are quickly becoming important alternatives to traditional media and communications.
Once you’ve produced and uploaded your shows, work at building your audience.

Being at a college, you have a big advantage over individual podcasters. You have the resources to promote your podcast through your publications, your website, your PR department or your sports information department, depending on what your content is.

Podcasting is still in its infancy. Its potential is limited only by your time and imagination.

Tags: podcast, podcasting,

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 7:00 pm and is filed under marcom, advancement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.