The other day, I was watching Oprah and I was amazed at how quickly she has embraced podcasting and social media. She’s running weekly webinars using Skype and another tool, she has a podcast that rocketed to #1 in iTunes and she has a channel on YouTube. All this in the past 6 months.
Is Oprah going to save the Internet? I didn’t know it was lost in the first place. So, no, Oprah won’t save the Internet.
However, what Oprah is doing is bringing these tools to a mainstream audience that’s in the millions. Oprah is going to make them much more popular.
My question to you – Can your business benefit from Oprah’s audience? In other words, how can you use podcasting and social media to attract Oprah’s audience to your business?
Hi,
Over here in the UK the BBC and traditional press are doing a great job to popularise podcasts. Remember the Queen has been podcasting her annual message to her subjects for the last 2 years.
Check out the BBC listings of their top podcasts at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/siteusage/
One of the fun metrics we use to help our clients measure how popular their podcasts are is to compare their audience figures to the BBC’s.
We of course also have to justify podcasts ROI versus our clients traditional communication programmes. So far podcasting has always worked out very cost effectively. The cost per ‘listener’ usually runs at 50 cents to $2. Now compare that to the low costs of direct mail at about $2 per mailer (printing, envelope and postage included) and you see the real ROI. If you want to compare ‘response rates’ you have to embed calls to action in the podcast itself. We have done that with some of our conference podcasts where we have linked PowerPoint presentations to the audio file. About 40% of people open the PowerPoint. Now show me a DM campaign with that sort of response and I would be really happy.