If your podcast isn't available on mobile, does it make a sound?
If your podcast isn't available on mobile, does it make a sound?
How you distribute audio content is key to whether anyone listens.
When we launched The Mind Tools L&D Podcast in May 2016 (as The GoodPractice Podcast), our first episode was downloaded just 50 times in the following seven days. Three of those downloads were doubtless the participants: myself, Owen and James. A further two could be accounted for by my mum and my grandparents.
At the time, we had to tell people what a podcast was. ‘It’s like a radio show, but you play it whenever you want from your phone.’
There was a general sense of: ‘Why would anyone want to do that?’
For podcast nerds like us, this question came as a suprise. According to the team at Riverside (where we record our show), the term ‘podcast’ was first used in 2004; true crime podcast Serial won a Peabody Award in 2015; US President Barack Obama appeared on WTF with Marc Maron in 2016.
But podcasts were niche.
🔮 Times have changed
Today, that’s no longer the case. Since 2019, the number of global podcast listeners has almost doubled. In 2020, Spotify paid $100 million for exclusive rights to stream The Joe Rogan Experience. The music streaming giant agreed to pay Prince Harry and Meghan Markle $20m that same year in a deal that turned out less well for either party.
And in the humble world of L&D, podcasts have become the norm. If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably have a podcast. If you don’t, your partner or child probably does.
For us, the growing popularity of podcasts is easy to explain: Over half of the world’s population own a smartphone, so can listen to a podcast at any time - wherever they are. No matter how niche your particular interest is, there is surely at least one of those three million available podcasts that can fit your need (I was delighted to see our own show appear in the top 1.5%). They are cheap to produce and free to distribute.
And they can be paired with another activity.
Like music, you do not need to ‘make time for podcasts’. You tend to listen to them while doing something else. They are additive.
🏃🏽 How we ‘make time for podcasts’
This was clear at last week’s World of Learning exhibition, where our friends at Assemble You had created a clever opportunity to do some live data collection.
Adam and the team had designed their stand to show a series of blank charts, which visitors then populated with stickers. You can get a quick tour of the results with the video below.
What really struck me was the question: ‘What do you do while listening to podcasts?’
Respondents tend to travel, exercise or do chores. They very rarely ‘work’ while listening to podcasts.
I think there might be some selection bias going on here. World of Learning caters for L&D and HR professionals, most of whom likely sit at a laptop all day. If the team had polled fruit pickers or truck drivers, the answers would probably have been very different.
But there’s a key insight here for those of us who believe that podcasts present an opportunity to provide high-quality, targeted content to help people grow in their careers: You have to make sure that they are available ‘on the go’.
Which means you have a few options:
1️⃣ Post your podcast publicly
This is what we do with The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, hosting on Libsyn and then making the show available via Apple, Spotify and Google Play. The time-honored ‘wherever you get your podcasts’ approach.
2️⃣ Offer a private link
This is what we do with our Pain Points podcast, available only to Mind Tools members and produced by our content team. Each week, you can listen to my colleagues debate key workplace challenges, via your podcast app of choice. But you can only add the podcast to your app via a private link. Check out Transistor FM for guidance on how to provide this option.
3️⃣ Make sure your platform offers a mobile experience
This is the worst of the three options, as podcast fans must leave their app of choice and instead listen to your content on a separate platform. Since we now know that most people do not listen to podcasts at a laptop, this really means providing a mobile version of your Learning Management System (LMS) or a responsive website. Mind Tools users have access to 270 expert interviews with folks like Dan Pink and Amy Edmondson in this format.
⚠️ What not to do?
The flip of these options is, of course, to put a podcast on an LMS that can only be accessed while your colleagues are sitting at a desk.
I know some graphic designers who listen to podcasts while working. But for those of us who spend our days thinking about words and numbers, listening to someone speak while doing so is likely to be distracting at best - and downright stressful at worst.
For audio learning content, think mobile.
The Mind Tools Custom team are increasingly creating audio content not just for non-desk-based workers, but also as accessible versions of desktop content. If you’d like to explore how we can help you, get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
Speaking of which, we continued to explore the evolution of technology in this week’s episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast. Ross Dickie and Ross Stevenson (yes, a triumvirate of Rosses) joined me to ask: ‘Should you care about new AI tools?’
This was a nice follow-up to Ross Dickie’s last newsletter: A contrarian take on AI in L&D. RD was essentially arguing that you don’t need to worry about it. AI will be integrated into all tech products, so you can just sit back and let that happen.
But if you do want to be in the AI vanguard, RS gives you a few ideas in this episode for getting started.
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
What parts of your job do you find most stressful? In a survey of 1,000 Mind Tools members, the top results were:
Sensitive issues involving emotional stress
Employee underperformance or inefficiency
Effective communication, feedback and understanding
Career progression, training and growth
Employee behavior (such as attitude, misconduct and interpersonal issues)
Changes in structure, policy or strategy
Resolving conflicts and disagreements.
What struck me about these results is that the issues have little to do with the formal aspects of management: Prioritizing workloads, recruitment and tracking finances. Instead, they’re all related to emotive issues where there’s a risk of hostility, resistance to change, or somebody getting upset.
For all that managers can be supported by models and frameworks that help them make decisions, the thing they most need to overcome the stresses outlined above is practice.
Mind Tools (2024). ‘January 2024: Mind Tools for Business Newsletter’.
👹 Missing links
🫁 Are you breathing right now? (Seriously)
When a cat is about to pounce, it holds its breath and becomes very still. It’s hyper alert, and ready to kill. This is also how our bodies respond every time we receive an email: focusing in on the message to assess whether it’s a threat. And if you’re like me, you receive a lot of emails. In this piece for The New York Times, health reporter Alisha Haridasani Gupta suggests that we can reduce our sense of constant threat by using larger screens, taking breaks, and setting up ‘breath reminders’. What have we become?
😮💨 On the topic of breathing…
I very much enjoyed the latest episode of Lenny’s Podcast, featuring the founder of Nervous System Mastery, Jonny Miller. In the show, Jonny argues that when we feel anxious or panicked, we tend to seek out an external solution. ‘I am anxious, which must be because of X’. Instead, he advocates controlling the physical sensations first, and then allowing the mind to follow. I’ve been trying his breath techniques all week and highly recommend!
🗣️ Now let’s raise your stress level
On the flip side, a recent piece in The Atlantic argues that colleges often claim to teach us ‘how to think’, but in reality tell us ‘what to think and how to justify that thought’. I don’t totally buy it, but I do like this suggestion: If you are absolutely certain about something, try to make the case for the exact opposite. This exercise will either validate your initial ideas, or reveal cracks in your argument that you didn’t know existed.
👋 And finally,,,
I ‘Laughed Out Loud’ at comic Elle Cordova’s conversation between fonts: especially the appearance of Comic Sans. Enjoy!
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👍 Thanks!
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