Things to consider on the road to a successful podcast:
- Sound quality matters! Microphones are critical to getting the work done well – a $100 USB mic makes a huge difference. With experience and a plan, there is a lot more equipment that can be added. OSU also has recording studios in Columbus and Wooster, and I expect some of the resources will continue to improve, but there is a lot we can do from our desks.
- Have a plan to edit. Learn Audacity and Adobe Audition. Lynda.com/LinkedIn Learning is probably a better place to go than Youtube (at least it was for me). Lynda.com is available from OSU and from many public libraries.
- Editing takes more time than most of us realize.
- Plan a workflow to follow to finish the whole job. This workflow should consider a specific number of episodes to start with, how you can measure any impacts, and how you will go from raw files to finished product.
- My approach was to take advantage of existing audiences and create supplemental content for those audiences…for example Agronomy Team CORN Newsletter and Beef Team Newsletter. This is about trying to use something that already exists and limit the effort you have to put into creating all new things. Let those newsletters carry the load for audience distribution and overall identity (in my opinion, avoid creating your own identity and “media empire”). Piggyback as much as possible on good things that already exist.
- We were not very aggressive with social media, but obviously there are many platforms out there to boost outreach. Part of the tension here is I did not want to use my personal accounts and was trying to keep the identity under OSU resources.
- Learn how podcast distribution works…I went with anchor.fm, but there are downsides to that. There are more robust platforms, but complexity and cost add up. Check with ODEE before you establish any accounts.
- Things that can trip you up: OSU branding compliance and digital accessibility issues can also create some technical headaches for us creating products in Extension. Do your homework on these as much as possible. I am happy to share more about what we did and did not do correctly in our particular efforts.
- Once you have considered everything on the list above and armed yourself with knowledge and general concept of what you are trying to accomplish, talk to Thomas Evans with ODEE, Open Learning Manager, Instructional Development Specialist, ODEE Digital Scholarship. Reach out to him or other ODEE contact early in the process before establishing any accounts with any hosting platform. They may already have some things in place that you can take advantage of.
OSU Beef Team Podcast 2020-2021 Summary and Workflow
Page content developed by Clifton Martin, Extension Educator (contact: martin.2422@osu.edu)