Why a Podcast?
Single Shot episode with Matt Bailey
In the single shot episodes, Matt will respond to listener questions, comment on past guests, and bring up news beyond the headlines.
In this single shot episode, Matt talks about online engagement, the nature of podcasting as a medium, and answers a listener questions about podcasting in both personal and data terms.
Join the discussion on the Endless Coffee Cup Slack channel!
Slack: #endless-coffee-cup-podcast
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matt Bailey: Hey everyone. This is Matt. I just want to say thank you for listening. I’m also starting a new format alongside the regular guest conversations. It’ll be just you and me every other week. I’m going to go behind the headlines and provide some insights based on data, experience, and a little common sense. More than ever, I think that we need to be vaccinated against the hype and look at things more rationally. So, thanks for joining me. And oh, by the way, for you, dear listener, I have something to announce, but it’ll be after the intro.
[00:00:47] Bumper Intro-Outro: Welcome to Endless Coffee Cup, a regular discussion of marketing news, culture, and media for our complex digital lifestyle. Join Matt Bailey as he engages in conversation to find insights beyond the latest headlines and deeper understanding for those involved in marketing. Grab a cup of coffee, have a seat, and thanks for joining.
[00:01:19] Matt Bailey: Hey, yeah, I hope you noticed, new music. I hope that you enjoyed it. I was looking for something a bit more upbeat and had some friends in a ska band that were able to put something together just for us.
So, before I get into this single shot podcast, I do have a special offer. You’re going to have to get it in a few minutes, so be patient and get ready to jump on this, but after this brief update. Now, as a new feature of the Endless Coffee Cup podcast, I’m going to start some single shot episodes. These are going to be shorter episodes in between the longer guest-centric episodes.
There’s a few reasons for this, but the main one is that many listeners have asked to hear a bit more of my thoughts and I’m not so sure why. I’m also going to be answering some listener questions. I’d say almost weekly I get questions ranging from, “What do I think about this?” to digital marketing, to even this week’s question, “Why a podcast? Why do a podcast?”
Well, let’s just start with this. Doing a single shot episode, I can’t tell you how difficult this is. Conversation has been my lifeblood and even during COVID and the lockdowns, moving from training in-person to training over Zoom, it takes more of a physical and mental toll that I could have ever imagined.
I mean, in-person I can train all day long and I’ll be tired and exhausted, but I’m also excited and motivated from working with people all day. The moment I live for is to see that “Aha!” moment when someone puts it together and they find a way that’s going to make their job better, it’s going to make a difference in the organization, and they’re motivated and they’re excited and that’s what me, makes me excited.
But I found when I’m training over Zoom, you just don’t get that. And also, what makes it more difficult is when people turn their cameras off. And I found a direct correlation between the number of cameras turned on and the conversation that happens in a Zoom call. When no cameras are on, there’s no conversation. And training without any conversational feedback, to me, it’s almost worthless.
To me, the whole point of training is for the audience, the company, to internalize the information and apply it to their situation. I love it when conversations happen in middle of a training and people start asking, “How do we do this here? How do we make this better?” And that’s the whole purpose of it. To introduce new information, or really, information that’s not so new, but have the audience reflect, respond, and synthesize the content into their own situation or framework. And that just doesn’t happen with disengaged audiences.
Now, all that to say, I used to intern at a radio station and, and did a short stint at my college radio station. It’s hard to sit here and talk into a microphone with no one on the other side. And that’s why I created the original podcast the way I did. I want it to be conversational. In good conversations I feel like I’m at my most attentive and contemplative.
By participating in a conversation, you naturally will learn about others. You’ll learn new things, you’ll think new ideas. And, and I find that thoughts serendipitously, ooh, serendipitously invade the conversation because we discover more about each other and ourselves, and here are the perspectives and it makes you think new things. But now to bring some commentary by myself into an empty room.
Wow. Uh, part of the fun, though, of answering questions, alright, is you watch people form the question and the response. When you watch someone form a response, you, you watch their non-verbals, you watch how they come up with the answer. And, and for me, it helps me to guide me in the response and, and to know if I’ve answered the question. If I can see someone and I’m responding, to see their face and how they respond, it lets me know if I’ve gone way off into the weeds or I’m answering the question. So, in these single episodes, you’re going to have to bear with me. I don’t have a live response mechanism to guide me.
But okay, so back to the question, “Why a podcast?” To be fair, I love listening to podcasts. I’ve listened to them for years. Now, part of this is also learning what kind of podcasts you like. I, there were some podcasts I love listening to, but they were too short. They were about 25, 30 minutes and I felt like just as they started to get interesting, they would wind down and stop. That frustrated me. I, some of my favorite insights or some of my favorite conversations were those, but they just ended too early.
Now, I started listening to longer and longer podcasts, ones where people could more formulate. And I, and I liked group podcasts, sometimes with 4 or 5 people in them because of the ideas bouncing around and how they worked.
Then I got hooked into hardcore history, which you’ve heard me reference a few times. The episodes are 4 or 5 hours long. It’s also one of the most listened to podcasts on earth, and it demonstrates that the claim that people have a lack of attention may not be true. It’s not about the lack of attention. It’s about the lack of great and interesting content. So, it didn’t take long to realize that I was drawn to long-form conversational podcasts.
Not really the overproduced and slick professional ones. It, it’s really just the smart conversation that sometimes has raw or poor audio, and some episodes are going to be better than others. It’s natural. It’s, it’s the genuineness of participating in a candid conversation. You have, you know, those where it’s just authentic. The most realistic conversations, I enjoy those the most. Real conversations, they ebb and they flow, there’s pauses, interruptions, there’s laughs and stumbles. Those types of conversations I enjoyed listening to and so that really set the stage for Endless Coffee Cup.
Now, from a data standpoint, yes, I had to bring this in. There’s a huge difference in creating a podcast than writing blog posts. Okay? After spending hours writing a post, there were maybe a few thousand people that would read it over the next year or so. But the average time on the page was usually 40 seconds, maybe a minute or more for about an 800-word article. Now, I don’t know about you, but what can you get in an 800-word article in 40 seconds? It’s hardly any time to scan anything relevant except for a headline or subheading or a couple things.
But with podcasts, I think the last number I saw was that 90% of people listen to the entire podcast. The downloads are trackable, and some platforms are providing some listen times and instead of engaging with written content for seconds, people listen to podcasts for hours. This is real engagement, and this leads to the next reason, a long-form podcast.
The last reason is that we’ve become people of the sound bite, the Insta in Instagram, the short fleeting bite of content. This is my way of pushing back on the junk food of newsfeed content. Snack food content, newsfeed pablum, it’s forgettable and fleeting. You don’t remember even what you read as you doomscrolled, just like the likes that people use to support it.
[00:10:00] I want content that makes us think. Long-form content challenges our attention span, it challenges us by maybe giving us information we may not want to hear or read, or even information that’s new or in a new context. Information that causes us to pause, think, and reflect. That, I believe, is the information and conversation that we need to experience more.
This is why most of the guests that I bring on the show are contrarian to the headlines. I like talking to people that bring a new or unheard view to the conversation. We need to hear alternative views instead of the right or the left or the false dilemma or the clickbait headline. Let’s dig in and really listen to those that aren’t often heard in the absolute deluge of information that we receive each day.
So, whether over coffee or another beverage, the conversation was had, and that’s the point. Coming to a conclusion or an agreement, that’s really not the goal. To listen, consider, process, that’s the point. That’s the point of a conversation. So, thank you for coming on this journey with me.
Okay, now the special offer. I started a Slack channel for the podcast. If you are on Slack, which, by the way, I love it because it reminds me of the old ICQ for those geeks of yesteryear that are listening to the podcast. If you used ICQ, you might like Slack. Go to Slack and look for endlesscoffeecup.slack.com. Endless Coffee Cup’s there. You can hit the link in the show page.
I’d love to hear from you and start our own conversations about the podcast, our guests, the content, whatever you want to talk about, bring it to the Slack channel. I, I would love to have your input on the things we cover, and I want to know what matters to you. So, I’ll also be posting special offers, discounts, uh, all kinds of things, uh, that we get from providers.
I will post them just for the Endless Coffee Cup community. So again, go to Slack, look for endlesscoffeecup.slack.com, join our community right now and be part of our conversation. Alright, we’ll see you next time. Thank you for tuning in, dear listener. I appreciate all that you do.