What are the best business applications for podcasting? That's what E-Centric recently asked Lisa Wehr, founder and CEO of OneUpWeb.
E-CENTRIC: For corporations and in a business sense, what are the best applications of podcasting?
WEHR: I've seen everything from lead generation to product launches to inside training, particularly for franchisors. It's a good way to keep information up to date quickly. I think publishers were among the first, in the business community, to wrap their arms around podcasting. Now, it's all over the place. I don't know of a business that couldn't benefit from participating in podcasting in some form or fashion. I think today its where the Internet was in the late 1990s. Podcasting has a huge potential to grow, because it's a serious business application too. It's not just about downloading music, it's not the equivalent of a MySpace account. It has the potential to be much more powerful.
E-CENTRIC: Can a podcast help a company's search engine marketing strategy?
WEHR: A podcast provides you with additional content that you can use to support the optimization of a Web site. So if you're going to do a podcast series, that gives you the opportunity to write content around that podcast series and promote each episode separately on the site, and that gives you good content to promote in natural search.
E-CENTRIC: What's the best way to promote a podcast?
WEHR: Through all of the traditional avenues we're accustomed to—press releases, online advertising, paid search, natural optimization, e-mail, newsletters, sponsorships. However you can promote it and target your audience, that's how you've got to get it out there.
E-CENTRIC: What would you suggest as the best length for a podcast?
WEHR: One of the studies we did shows that the majority of business related podcasts are averaging 15 minutes in length. That is our recommendation, the 15 to 20 minute range, just because of commute times and attention span.
E-CENTRIC: What metrics do you use to judge the ROI of podcasts?
WEHR: We have the ability to track, in terms of downloads and who's listening, how loyalty that subscriber base is, are they coming back for subsequent episodes, that sort of thing. You can take more of a direct marketing approach, and insert bumpers in there that include 800 numbers. One of the best ways to do it is to encourage [listeners] to go to a landing page and download a white paper or complete a form. You've got to push them to the Web or a unique 800 number to really track what's happening on the conversion side.
