30 Posts in 30 Days #16 & Thing #38: Marketing

audiopodcasticonThing #38 in the Nebraska Learns 2.0 program is about marketing. We’re asked to talk about some 2.0 tech that we are or could be using to market our library. Well, I’m the producer of the NCompass Podcast and yesterday I posted the 62nd episode and decided to see just how much content we’ve published and I was amazed. (Technically it’s the 88th episode but we launched in January 2009 and started over with the episode numbers.)

ncompassLiveMedIn total our podcast feed (RSS / iTunes) has 4.92GB of available data totaling 3.4 days of content. About 25 hours of that content is just from this year alone! How do we produce so much content?

imageStep one, record everything! We’ve got a cordless mic and we connect it to many of our presenters. We also have a weekly online show names NCompass Live and that’s automatically recorded by the GoToWebinar software. (That’s pretty much a guaranteed hour worth of content right there.) The GoToWebinar content is actually a video file which I convert to a .wav audio file using our video editing software. Presentation recorded directly to audio are recorded with the free Audacity software.

Levelator-2.0-screenNext I run the raw audio file through Levelator to even out the audio and make sure all the voices are generally the same volume. I then pull the audio into Audacity and do some very basic editing, usually just trimming the beginning and end of the file of extraneous material.

Audacity-logo-r_50pctI then add opening and closing music and the opening and closing narration recorded at my desk by yours truly. The result then gets exported to an .mp3 file by Audacity. I then make sure the metadata is correct on the mp3 file and dump it to our Web server.

listgardenlogo48I write a blog post linking to all the relevant information and downloadable files along with an embedded player for those that don’t want to download the file before playing it. Lastly I use ListGarden to add that episode to the RSS file also stored on our server for those that subscribe to the Podcast directly. (iTunes usually automatically picks up the new episode within the day.)

Overall, excluding the actual recording of the content in the first place, producing an episode take me about 20-30 minutes a week. Sometimes I get behind but I’m doing my best to keep up with all the content we’re generating.

So, that’s just one way the Nebraska Library Commission is using 2.0 technologies to market what we do: the NCompass Podcast.

One Reply to “30 Posts in 30 Days #16 & Thing #38: Marketing”

  1. Wow. I had no idea how many steps, and how many different programs, you used to put out the podcast. But, it only takes about a half hour to do one? Pretty good ROI, I’d have to say!

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