WLP182 Podcasting: Behind the Scenes

A bit of a different show for you today. We share a glimpse behind the curtain, in the production of the 21st Century Work Life podcast, and also tell you about our new in-house podcasting service.

3.08 Helping organisations create their own podcast.

Having an in-house podcast not only shares information and updates, it’s a great way to ensure continuity in connectedness and communications, making sure the teamwork flows at every level. It’s especially helpful when transitioning to a more flexible way of working. 

It helps everyone learn about each other’s roles, and how we all respond to the same challenges and issues at work. And whilst there can be barriers to approaching people to chat for the first time over purely online tools, if you’ve heard that person’s voice it can really help with overcoming that.  Speaking is so much more rich and intimate than a typed chat message, and a podcast is also a great way to learn and keep up with information from the organisation, without always sitting in front of a screen.

With help from Virtual Not Distant – at any level from initial consultation through to full management and production – you can easily design and create your unique in-house radio show. 

(And if Maya can launch the Crypto Confidence Podcast https://www.blocksparks.io/category/podcast/, this is proof that anyone can learn this stuff and get it done. Not an in-house show, so if you’re curious about blockchain or cryptocurrency stuff, or Maya’s “other hat”, then do check it out)

BTW special hats are not essential for creating YOUR podcast, and the entry-level hardware and software is very accessible. We’ll help you every step of the way.

Learn more here. https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/inhouse-podcast/

  

15.20 Learning Out Loud – Creating a Podcast For Your Team

If you really want to learn something, or simply to grow as a team and create something together, then why not make a podcast about it?  Sharing the process, improvising, having a go… It’s a great experience, and you can do it entirely remotely or in a colocated space, as you choose.

The process of planning and chunking your content, of structuring the episodes and putting it all together, is incredibly insightful. And at the end of it, you’ll have a set of episodes you can use for training, on-boarding, or presenting your work externally.

And of course Virtual Not Distant will be there for everything, from facilitating the initial discussion to helping you produce and share it however you like. Find out more! https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/learning-out-loud

 

24.40 Behind the Scenes: How We Create The 21st Century Work Life Podcast

In this segment we are joined by Ross Winter, our very own Podcast Polisher, who helps us sound at our best every time. https://podcastpolishing.com/

As we’re all in different countries, we work through Trello, sharing checklists and links to content, so we all know what our different roles and deadlines are. 

And once the recordings are in, Ross does his thing – cleaning up the audio and adjusting the levels, making sure we all sound like we’re in the same conversation. He gets rid of our clips and clicks, our hisses and pops, to make it all sound professional. And he also magics away the background noise, that always happens however carefully you prepare the environment – every room has echoes and reverb, laptops have fans, and so on. It makes the sound a lot cleaner and sharper, once all this is removed.

Once he’s finally cleaned it all up, he can compile the episode itself, from all the different recordings and music/effects, mixing and editing to put it all together and create the finished podcast.

It all ends up a single audio file which Maya then listens back to, in order to create the shownotes (that’s what you’re reading now).  Rather than a transcript, these are intended to act as a kind of teaser for the show, as what we really want you to do is listen – for all the reasons above, the podcast itself is the aim of the game. It also has to work as a standalone bit of content for itself.

We make sure those notes are tagged into the podcast syndication tool, as well as published on this website, for the date the podcast goes live.

52.27 Recommended tool: Alitu

We welcome Colin Grey, to introduce this great tool for getting started with podcasting. Alitu https://alitu.com sounds like ‘Ross-as-a-service’  – an automated way of transforming your raw audio into a clean and podcast-ready file.

Not everyone wants to learn to edit and produce their episodes, nor invest in professional outsourcing. And now there is a middle ground, which can help make podcasting truly accessible and affordable to anyone - you just need to get your content out of your mouth, and into a mic! Alitu will then do all the work to convert it to a finished show, even uploading it to your host of choice.

Colin also runs thepodcasthost.com, where he teaches podcasting, from all the geeky technical stuff to extensive resources to help people learn about podcasting from choosing equipment to planning a schedule. There’s a free newsletter and a ton of great resources, so if you’re curious about this space at all, do check it out! @thepodcasthost