The BBC Academy Podcast

What are the differences between a digital team and a traditional broadcast team? What kind of skills and people do you need to build successful digital products? With Simon Smith to discuss building the perfect digital production team are guests Paul Bennun, director of digital at Somethin' Else, Dan Heaf, digital director BBC Worldwide Ltd and Katherine Campbell, senior content producer of Radio 4's History of the World.

Simon Smith and guests discuss the practical techniques that content producers can use to build audiences. They look at examples of good social media practice, how to find your audience and then connect with the people who will influence them. Also under discussion is viral marketing, what works, what practical steps can be taken to make your content go viral and how to plan for when it all goes wrong.Simon is joined by Caragh Salisbury, editor of the BBC’s user acquisition team, Marie Corin, senior marketing executive for 4oD and Chris Quigley from Rubber Republic, a specialist in viral marketing and social media advertising.

Simon Smith brings us his report on transmedia storytelling from South by Southwest (SXSW), the annual music, film and interactive conference and festival held in Austin, Texas.

A mobile application, or app, is a downloadable piece of software that allows rich interaction with services and content via your mobile phone. As well as being complex and useful, apps can also be stupid, silly and fun. In this week’s CoP Show the rapidly growing mobile apps market is put under the microscope as host Simon Smith asks why you should or shouldn’t think about creating an app.Magnus Jern, managing director and founder of Golden Gekko Ltd, a developer of mobile marketing apps, Jessica Gwyther, global content manager for the Vodafone group and Mark Bamber from the BBC mobile applications team join Simon in the Academy studio.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is used to improve the visibility of a website or web page in search engines via the 'natural' or unpaid search results. Very few of us look beyond the first few results we get from a search engine. The higher a site appears in the search results list, the more likely we are to click on it.So what are the tricks of the trade that content publishers use to lift pages higher in search results? To answer this question Simon Smith is joined by Duncan Bloor, a BBC search specialist; Jo Pham, a BBC producer and Doug Platts, head of natural search at iCrossing, a digital agency specialising in search.

Exactly what it is that makes a podcast a podcast? What does it offer content producers and how does a format that allows fans to subscribe and download audio onto their portable device somehow change or influence the way a podcast episode is put together? Joining Simon Smith in the studio are Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann from the award-winning Answer Me This! comedy podcast; Andy Jones, Radio 2 and 6 Music’s podcast guru; and Jamillah Knowles presenter of Radio 5 live’s Outriders technology podcast.

In this CoP Show we look at Twitter, the microblogging service used worldwide by an estimated 190 million users. Simon Smith hosts the discussion on how Twitter can influence programmes and brands, what it offers and how to do it better. Joining him is champion of Twitter and Father Ted creator Graham Linehan; journalist Alex Hudson who looks after BBC Question Time's Twitter feed; and comedy writer Steve Saul more famous as the Twitter voice of the X-Factor.

Blogs have been used by TV and Radio programme teams to offer an insight into the production process, to add extra information for audiences and offer an immediate and responsive means of getting feedback via the comments on posts. They are easy to use, ubiquitous and inherently a part of the world of web 2.0. But all too often things don’t always go the way you want, the wrong tone, the wrong message, and poor moderation can often lead to disaster, sometimes very public disaster. So how can you make sure that a blog is a good addition to your programme, and if it is, how should you get the best from it? To answer this question Simon is joined by Jem Stone, Dan Biddle and Barry Pilling, who are all at the heart of the BBC’s blogging success.