The Storytelling Capabilities of Podcasts

Click the image above to watch our Instagram Live chat on the power of podcasts

Dog Ear’s Mo Harmon is packing her bags for San Francisco and the Editors Forum next week. She’s uber psyched about a hotel room with cable and no kids. (Oh, stop it. She loves them. She just needs a minute.) She’s also pretty psyched about the session she’ll be presenting with Sean Li of Alumni FM about communications teams’ ability to add podcasting to their storytelling toolbox. 

As a precursor to that session, she connected with Kelly McMurray of 2Communiqué on Instagram Live to give a sneak peek to her presentation and to talk shop about the challenges and opportunities for storytelling in higher education. 

You can watch their full conversation, but in case you don’t have 50 minutes to spare, here are the highlights:

• Consider this: Those deep-dive features you run in your magazine? How many can you get out per year with an average of two issues annually? Six? Eight? Compare that with a biweekly podcast, which would give you 26 opportunities to go in-depth with subjects and engage your audience. We’re not saying ditch the mag—we’re saying complement it. 

• Don’t go creating a podcast with some random audio files. Like a magazine, a podcast needs a focused mission, audience, and creative strategy. Build that first, get the whole team on board, and only then consider hitting the record button.. 

• Think you don’t have the resources and staff to pull off a podcast? The costs and bandwidth spend might surprise you.

And if you see Mo in San Francisco, please stop by and say hi! She’s a far way from home. And her kids.