My fledgling career as a podcaster began when I was on a conference call with a client and one of our account managers. While we were waiting for my interviewee to get on the line, the three of us discussed ideas for some interesting things that we could do with the project. Someone brought up the idea of turning the calls into a podcast.

"Oh, Wade is our podcasting expert," said the account manager. "He knows about podcasting, RSS feeds, all of that stuff."

"Hmm," said the client. "Well, that's good and all, but that sounds like mostly theory. We're looking for people who've actually done a podcast."

What could I say? He was right. I could do a podcast if given the opportunity, but had nothing to show that would prove it. To date, all that I had was book learning and an iPod full of other people's podcasts.

At that moment I knew that to preserve my honor as a Web2.0 geek, I had to create a podcast. And I had to do it SOON, before I was forced to have another conversation like that one.

When you start something like this you never know if other people in the company will get it. (For example, they may wonder why a writer is mucking about with audio production, which is clearly not writing.) I'm happy to say that we had a lot of support--two of our account directors had recently heard some exciting buzz about podcasting as a customer advocacy tool and were glad to offer their backing. My boss in Editorial saw it as a great opportunity for our team to contribute something new and different. And of course we had the encouragement of Steve and Andrew, whose "learn by doing" approach is responsible for this very blog you're reading now.

I assembled a crack team of cross-disciplinary talent in the Seattle office and we began brainstorming. Our first venture would be an internal company podcast to be published on Metia's intranet. We wanted to go beyond the obvious format of interviewing notable individuals in the company--that had already been done in video form. We decided that we would also interview project teams and have them share what they'd learned in the course of their projects with the rest of the company. That way the podcast would tie into the intranet's function as a peer to peer knowledge sharing tool.

Now, how could we do this without spending any money?

Easy! I already had a portable mp3 recorder, an iRiver iFP-790. The Community Server publishing platform was already present in the intranet. All we needed was audio editing software. I downloaded Audacity, a free audio recording and editing program that was recommended by just about every podcasting resource I'd read.


Fig. 1 - the iRiver iFP-790, a podcaster's portable pal

Oh, yeah. I also needed people to interview.

To be continued...


Tags: podcasting, iRiver, customer advocacy, getting it