NCCE Podcasting Presentation

Below is an auto-generated transcription of a presentation that I recently shared with the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce Executives. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

Introduction

Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and

Voiceover Talent 0:10
community. And now, your host, he wonders what your favorite episode of the podcast has been. Here’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Brandon Burton 0:20
Hello, Chamber Champions. I am Brandon Burton, your host of Chamber Chat Podcast and it is my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to better help you serve your Chamber members and your community.

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I decided to do something a little different for this week’s episode. And in the past, I’ve I’ve done a couple book reviews where I kind of summarize books. I’ve shared a couple thoughts of my own in the past. But most of the episodes that I do, as you know is I interview other chamber professionals and get some of their insight and expertise on different topics. But for this episode, I’m playing a recording that I did with the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce executives group on a presentation that I’ve presented to them a couple months ago around podcasting and had the hows and whys and all the reasons I guess why a chamber should consider podcasting. So I want to put a shout out i Thank you to Justise Roden for inviting me to present to the Nebraska chamber executive group, and for that opportunity, but for this episode, I’ll just be playing the recording. Granted when I did the presentation live, it was over zoom. So I had a slide deck and everything on PowerPoint. I don’t think you need to see the visuals to get the concept and the overall ideas about why a chamber should consider podcasting. So I’m just I’m going to play the recording. You’re also welcome to visit the show notes page, which will be listed at the end of this episode, and have any links to anything that I mentioned. So with no further ado, we will get into the recording as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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My focus on this presentation today is going to be around chamber podcasting. And I’m curious how many of you on the call, have a podcast for your chamber. I just like to see how big the choir is that I’m preaching to see justice if if there’s others maybe even just, you know, put it in the chat. And I’d love to know the name of your podcasts. I can check it out afterwards.

But often as I come across somebody who isn’t familiar with podcasts, I don’t really come across that anymore. But about three years ago when I was kicking around the idea of starting a podcast, I had several people ask me what a podcast is. And the easiest way that I found to explain that was to think of a streaming platform kind of like Netflix, but For audio, so radio type of content in a streaming platform you can take with you anywhere. So a lot of ways I think it’s better than a Netflix platform because you can participate in a podcast while you’re doing lots of different things. But I’m going to try to share my screen and see if this will work too. Hopefully guys can all see that. So in this presentation today, I’ll be covering some of the stats, the reasons for having a podcast, the data, the ROI, and even a free resource as we get along in this. But as we start off, I don’t know how many of you let’s see, I’m not getting my slides to change. Here we go.

I don’t know how many of you have read Casey Steinbacher, his new book From Relevant to Essential. It’s a quick read, fantastic book. But in it, one of the main points that she makes is how chambers need to accept their role as an influencer in their community. And she tells the story of the 16 year old girl who sits in her bedroom with a laptop, a cell phone and a camera, and makes a million dollars a year as a social media influencer, telling other young women how to apply makeup and what clothes to wear. And Casey kind of correlates this to chambers being influencers, and pointing out the fact that chambers need to figure out how to monetize their influence in their communities. So in this example, this teenage girl, her platform was social media. Whereas a chamber you can have a lot of different platforms. But I’d like to explore podcasting as a platform for you. You may not realize it, but I will be presenting today with Casey Steinbacher as I share some of the quotes from her new book, because she’s just full of great value. So some of the quotes just to get us started. She says in just about every leadership book ever written, the ability to influence is valued as a key trait of great leaders. chambers have been slow to understand both the value of influencers and the role of content. And lastly, if the mission is prosperous communities, and the key strategy is transformational influence, then the core tactic for successful execution of that strategy is constant, high quality, diverse community nuanced, widely distributed content. So with that, let’s get into some of the stats with podcasting. So 75% of the US population is familiar with the term podcasting. Half of US households are podcast fans. 16 million people in the US are avid podcast fans, I think I would fall into that category as I subscribe to several different podcasts. But I find the age of the podcast listeners interesting. So a lot of those listeners fall into those age demographics of like the millennials and Gen Xers. So as you try to think of content and staying relevant to those upcoming generations, podcast could be a very effective way to do that. And some of these other stats just cover like income levels, and education, so forth, for podcast listeners, which could come in handy when you go about getting sponsorships for a podcast. But listener habits. So some of these stats are pretty intriguing. So 90% of podcasts are listened to while at home 64% of podcast listeners listen while driving. The big stat that stands out to me is this 93% listened to all or most of each episode, which is huge. If you think of your engagement on your social media platforms or your email content opens of your your emails that have 93% of your listeners listen to all or most of your content is outstanding. And then 65% of podcast listeners had been listening for less than three years. So this is a newer medium that people are adopting, and and kind of jumping on to. And then the most popular genres for podcasts are comedy, education and news. I’m not sure where a chamber falls in necessarily as far as a genre goes. But I think definitely could could fall under Education and news as you talk about what’s going on in your community and in keeping your community up to date. But hopefully it can be engaging and maybe maybe you can mix some comedy into your podcast as well. But I’m going to run down just real quickly. 10 reasons why you should maybe consider having a podcast for your chamber. So one would be to engage your members and your community at large to spread The mission and purpose of your chamber to promote and share your advocacy efforts to showcase your business community, to introduce your audience to their chamber leaders. I know a lot of times chamber leaders may may kind of seem untouchable, you can’t get time in front of them. But maybe being on a podcast can help connect with your community to encourage discussions for good in your community, to introduce a new source of non dues revenue, to leverage existing programs and events that your chambers already doing, to introduce a new offering to your tier dues model, and to be a resource for educating your membership. So let’s talk about engagement. I like to use this example this yellow highlighter exercise. So if you were to print out a list of all of your Chamber members and go through with the yellow highlighter to mark up the list, and anybody who has any level of engagement with your chamber, whether it’s you know, they attend all the luncheons and networking events, or they’re a sponsor of some program, maybe they are frequent commenter on your social media posts, whatever engagement if you just mark up that list, and then figure out what percentage of your membership does not engage on a regular basis. Now, Casey is quote on this slide here says that a few, a select few will engage in active leadership and support of the chamber. But most are too busy and appropriately focused on growing their own businesses to have more than a transactional interest with the chamber. And this is where I see podcasting fitting in because I call by podcast is a net activity, it requires no extra time to listen, you can listen while you walk the dog while you drive the car while you fold the laundry. Whatever you’re doing, maybe not while you’re engaging with your members. But anything outside you can, you can be listening to a podcast at the same time. You can also hold different contests to engage your membership. And maybe the winner of a contest can have a Business Spotlight or an interview on your podcast. And next podcast can be used to connect with your community. And Casey’s quote here says that chambers need a much larger platform and audience than it currently has. It needs to talk more frequently to the larger community and not just limit its conversations to the business community. And for that matter, primarily just its members. So I like the idea of having a a name for your podcast that is inclusive of the entire community. I used a couple examples here on this slide of chambers that I found that that have podcasts that that reflect that their names of their podcasts kind of reflect their greater community. So the first one is, It’s Happening in The Haven. So this is the Winter Haven, Florida Chamber. And nowhere on this cover artwork, do you see the name of their chamber, but you do see a guitar you see, you know, the fun and activities and events. So if I’m a resident of Winter Haven, Florida, I want to listen to this podcast to know what’s going on in my community. So I think that’s a great job that they’re doing there. The second example that I have on here is the St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce. Their podcast is called B’s Table Talk. So their president and CEO is B Kyle. So I recently had be interviewed for my podcast, and she explained the name of their podcast to me, which I thought was interesting. She said, if you can imagine when you’re at Thanksgiving dinner, and your nephew brings his new girlfriend to Thanksgiving, everybody in the family, they all kind of scooch and they make room at the table for the newcomer. And she said that’s the goal for their podcasts in their community is to scooch and and bring, you know, newcomers to the table. So everybody has a voice and a inability to to talk there. So I thought that name was fantastic. It takes a little bit of explaining but once you get it, it really resonates. But your podcast can be an entertaining wait for your community to be in the loop while also learning thing a few new things at the same time. And you can introduce your your audience to new businesses in your community as well.

So we’ve all heard that Chambers need to be storytellers. What uh, what better platform is there for telling stories than a podcast? So you can interview your members and entrepreneurs to learn how and why they started their business. You can have valued members come on your podcast to tell the story of how the chamber has been there to serve them and help them through maybe a difficult time. You can have fun with things like National Donut Day, there’s a day for everything. So you can have, in this example, maybe a local bakery or donut shop, come on the podcast and just have some fun with it to engage your your greater community. You can use your platform to tell about your advocacy efforts. You know, let your community know what you’re doing on their behalf. And show your diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by interviewing all segments of your community. So the KC quote here is that chambers need to understand how to engage and activate more voices in that larger platform, their bigger audience, help them feel welcome to the conversation and that their voices matter. See, so create valuable content. So I love this, the quote that Casey has here says your meaningful content provides an incentive for your audience to share their influence with their network on your behalf, which is, and we’ve all heard of things going viral on social media, and so forth. So if you create good, valuable content, then your audience will create the legs for that to get out deeper into your community. But you can take some trainings and programs you already have at your chamber and maybe repurpose those into a podcast episode or vice versa, you might have a good podcast episode that you can repurpose in other ways. You can provide some how to lessons to give your listeners a quick win. So for example, maybe you start off each episode with some type of a social media tip that they can pull up their phone because their chances are they’re already listening on their phone, and they can pull it up and do whatever tip you’re telling them on social media and, and have that quick win to have them coming back for more. And I love this point here is that you can create an immense amount of goodwill, by shining light on a certain business or even a potential community partner by having them on the podcast and learning more about them sharing their story in your community that that goodwill is kind of immeasurable. And next we’ll, we’ll talk about non dues revenue, we all want to see what what can a podcast do for your chamber, right. So as we get in this conversation of non dues revenue, I’d like to think of there’s also non mana, non monetizing monetization and qualitative objectives such as re engaging members who haven’t been participating for some time, but maybe they hear your podcast and say I didn’t realize that the Chamber does XYZ, whatever it may be. But as far as non dues revenue go, you can leverage your podcast for existing programs and events by promoting them on your podcast increase attendance and or sales. You can teach business owners how to podcast, you can rent out your podcast studio or equipment. And of course, there’s sponsorship and advertising as well. And the KC quote around revenue is as you create content and use it effectively to monetize your influence in your community.

The some advertising stats around podcasting, hopefully this, this resonates with you, but 81% of podcast listeners pay attention to podcast ads. As you compare that to other media. 63% say they ignore TV commercials 66% Ignore digital ads. 61% Ignore billboards and 59% Ignore radio commercials. But 60% of podcast listeners have bought something from a podcast and even stretch that out a little more 72% of people who’ve listened to a podcast for four or more years have made a purchase. And Casey says it consistent high quality and engaging content influences audience decision making more than any other technique. And again, that goes back to being an influencer and being able to talk about these brands that you might have as a sponsor and and things like that to to really get people to make that decision to make a purchase. Now, I recently conducted a chamber podcasting survey. I looked up as many chambers as I could find that had a podcast. There’s not a whole lot right at the moment and again, it is a newer, newer platform, but of those that I that I got survey responses back from about half of those surveyed said that their target audience for their podcast is their community at large. And then the other half was kind of split up between being directed directly towards members and the other towards the general business community. 80% of the chamber surveyed have had their podcasts for less than two years. And that I saw a big uptick with chambers through the COVID shut downs, where they’re trying to find a way to stay engaged with their membership. And a lot of chambers did pivot to podcasting to stay connected, continue providing valuable content to to help their their businesses through that bet crazy time. And time spent. So of those surveyed 68% of the chambers that have a podcast spend between one to three hours a week on their podcast, so it’s not terribly labor intensive. And chambers of every size, are are in the podcasting game now. So the excuse of I’m just a one person show at my chamber, I’m too small, it’s not true chambers of every size are in this and succeeding at it as well. And then the format of podcasts. So 82% of chambers surveyed said that they do an interview based podcast. And all the rest had a combination of either sharing information or repurposing chamber programs and having interviews. So in the end, 100% of the chamber surveyed have some type of an interview based podcast which helps on creating the content so it’s not on you, as a chamber to create the content for each episode. Now the monthly expenses. I’m curious what what you guys would think monthly expenses would be for a podcast. With this survey, 65% of the chamber surveyed spend less than $20 a month on their podcast. So it’s not very time labor intensive, again, one to three hours and for most chambers less than $20 a month. And then the monetization side of it. Not a whole lot of chambers had figured out or applied monetization to their podcast yet only about 17% have about 35% say they would like to and about half of the chambers surveyed said that they don’t monetize your podcast. So whether that’s a choice, or they just haven’t gone down that road yet. I’m not sure I need to dig in deeper to that answer. But of those that are monetizing their podcasts, they’re seeing between five to $10,000 a year, income generated from their podcasts. And I imagine that number will will only increase the more the podcasting becomes popular light popular, I can’t say that word becomes more popular.

But I do have a free gift or resource for you guys. So during the the beginning stages of the shutdowns with COVID. I was thinking as I was about a year into my podcast at that point, and I was thinking of all the chambers that I work with, and how are they going to stay in contact with their members and help, you know, get information out there. So I put together a free chamber podcasting guide. It’s a downloadable PDF that goes over the software to be used for podcasting, the hosting platforms, the equipment, and resources for all of that as well as an outline to kind of structure your first 10 episodes. So if you would like to check it out, you can access that link there chamber chat podcast.com/pivot There’s some other things on that page. But you can look for that cover of the chamber podcasting guide to request request your free copy. And of course I would love to connect with with any of you that are on this call. My contact information is there my email, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And of course, I would love it for you guys to subscribe to my podcast. So if you wanted to check out your your podcast app on your phone and search for chamber chat podcast, hit subscribe and you’ll get a new episode each week in your your podcast app. But with that we can open it up for questions.

Unknown Speaker 24:42
Brandon that was That was fantastic. I feel like he just literally gave us a playbook here in Seward County. So thank you. Thank you. I am I am curious. For those that have smaller chambers, I mean hat maybe give a couple of like easy way to wait easy ways to get started, because I think I was probably even overwhelmed with this concept until we had an awesome summer intern that put some of this stuff together for us. Sure. Do you have like a like a 101? Like people don’t even know what equipment to get or any of that stuff? Can you? Can you kind of briefly walk through some tips and tricks there?

Brandon Burton 25:22
Yeah, absolutely. And I just shared the my slides as well in the chat. So if anybody wants to access that, there’s some hot links on there for for some of the things that I covered. But I know a lot of chambers got into really upping up upping their social media game, especially through COVID doing live videos and things of that nature, some, you know, invested in doing YouTube videos, and they invested in in some equipment, you know, cameras and microphones, and so forth. And a lot of the equipment that you may already have around your office could work for doing a podcast. I’m, I mean, the sound quality is important. But you can get a I mean, even the microphone I’m using here at this is like $100 for the microphone and the arm and everything and it works great. And actually have a link to this microphone in the chamber podcasting guide. So the equipment, so there’s there are some, some hosting platforms, there’s one that’s called an anchor, that’s a free podcast hosting platform, which means that’s where you would upload your mp3 for each episode. And then it sends it out to all the different podcast directories to be downloaded. And anchor is a it is a free podcast hosting platform. And I’ve seen a lot of chambers utilize a anchor because it is free, so it fits the budget really well. The other ones that I know are good I use Libsyn is my hosting platform. And another good one that I’ve heard a lot of good things about is Buzzsprout. So both Libsyn and Buzzsprout are at pay for hosting platform Lipson, I spend, I think $15 a month to host. But when I was personally trying to decide what hosting platform to use, finger a lot of times on the free platforms, you kind of get what you pay for, although you get a lot with the anchor platform. So my son 15 years old, he’s he started a podcast and he uses anchor, like man, he got some good resources on there. But I get a little bit leery on the free platforms just because at any time that’s that model can change. And oftentimes, you’re giving away your rights to your content as well when it’s a free platform. So as long as I’m paying for it 15 bucks a month, I know it’s mine, I’ve got full control over it. For me it was worth that investment. So if you’re looking to to pay I think Lipson like for a decent package is about $15 a month, I think by sprouts around 20. So

Unknown Speaker 28:15
hey, Brandon, I have a question about like editing. Because we have our podcast and it. We sit down with our members for about an hour, go through an hour of content, and kind of edit down all those arms oz or anything that like sounds weird because like I’m used to it. And I probably spend three hours editing one podcast. I just was curious how long it takes you stop

Brandon Burton 28:45
it? No. No. So what I do, I record the majority of my interviews over zoom, because I used to use Skype a lot. And through the pandemic, everybody became familiar with Zoom overnight, and that nobody uses Skype anymore. But people understand how zoom works. I record on Zoom. And then I edit in a program called audacity, which is it’s a free editing platform that’s pretty user friendly once you get the hang of it. As far as the editing of it goes, I tell my guests right up front. I say I try to keep this raw, we keep it real. I don’t go through and edit out all the VMs and and and I mean sometimes there’s a reason to, I try to make sure that at least the introduction of the podcast is clean. But once we get into the meat of it, I just keep it raw and just just keep it going. You figure if it was video, you’re not going to go through and cut out all the ads and ohms because it’s chopping up the video too. So just just keep it real. Just get the sound quality right so it’s not too loud and too quiet.

Unknown Speaker 30:01
What would you recommend is the best target length of a podcast session?

Brandon Burton 30:07
Yeah, that’s a great question. So one of the things I encourage anyone to do who is creating a podcast is they say create your avatar, think about who your target audience is. And when is that prime time that they would be listening? So it may be some guessing on the front end as to who that audience is until you can get some feedback. But try to think about when that primetime is, if it’s on their drive to or from work, how long is their commute? Is it five or 10 minutes? If they’re going to be listening, when they’re out walking the dog, maybe 2030 minutes. I think beyond 3035 minutes, it kind of gets intimidating. You know, I know myself, I have some podcasts that I love. I mean, the content is great. But every now and then I see an hour and 45 minute episode, and I just don’t have the time today. And then it gets chopped up over several days of listening. And I’d rather get it all in one or two sittings. So I would say try to target for sure under the 3035 minute mark, but it may be quite a bit shorter than that to

Unknown Speaker 31:15
time. Because I am a fan of your podcast. What is your personal favorite or most memorable?

Brandon Burton 31:24
Oh, man, most favorite and most most memorable? So there’s been a lot of good ones. And that’s the politically correct answer, right. But I did I really enjoyed. They’re almost around the same time, and I’m gonna narrow it down to two. Because about the same time Dave Atkinson was coming out with his book, horseshoes versus chess, and Casey Steinbacher, with her book relevant to essential so I think it was within a week or two that I had them both on the podcast. And they both just bring so much knowledge of a career in the industry. And packaging it in a book that is so well done. They they both delivered a ton of content in those episodes. Another one that I really enjoyed was with Toby teeter from the Joplin chamber. And he was talking about how they use social media for their economic development and employee attraction to their to the Joplin area. And that was that was very fascinating. So they got really techy, it might be more than what most people are willing to dive into. But I really enjoyed that one. Thanks for being a fan to justice. Appreciate it. All right. I hope you enjoyed the chamber podcasting presentation that I did to the Nebraska chamber executives, it really was a blast to be able to do something like that it was the first time that I really presented in that type of format, but definitely open to doing it for others as well. So if you have a chamber group in your region, or your state that you would like to consider having me present to feel free to reach out to me, my email address is Brandon at chamber chat podcast.com. But in the episode, or I guess in the recording of that presentation, I did reference a couple of free resources. And I know I put them out there before. But I do have a free chamber podcasting guide that is accessible to anybody who’s who wants that and really just kind of helps to chart out your first 10 episodes, and tells you all the software and you know the ins and outs of how to how to get started. But I also recently conducted a survey, a chamber podcasting survey where I reached out to many chambers, who I know had a podcast to get some insight and feedback from them about the value of podcasting to them. There’s a lot of very insightful data in that and I’ve referenced some of that in the presentation. But if you want access to either the chamber podcasting guide or those survey results, you can find them at chamberchatpodcast.com/pivot But as usual, the show notes for this episode will be found at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode152 And it’s been a pleasure presenting this this chamber podcasting presentation with you today. Hope you found a lot of value out of it. And even if you don’t decide to make the jump into podcasting, hopefully at least opens up your mind to other ways to become an influencer among the business community in your region. So with that, I will let you go and look forward to gotten with you again next week.

Brandon Burton 30:28
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