Podcasting to improve the Influence

I've been planning on writing a blog post on podcasting for a while. This has grown in its consideration far more after my company Ideal Interface has starting working recently with a start-up who is using both audio and video as their main product and therefore their delivery mechanism.

Podcasting is just one of the many channels that companies have available for distributing content, and is the primany way of delivering audio (and increasingly video) to time-shifted listeners. Whilst a lot of podcasts are 'homegrown' operations done with a mic and some free software, quite a few companies are using this medium to get their message across.

This has been particularly adopted by media companies that already produce high-quality content. Obvious examples are:

The BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/directory/


The Guardian Newpaper:
http://www.riverisland.com/gfw/?_ctId=j6i2fUdEqsi9BTk5pz6ugGvEq4eznMpgEzs7w/K08us=

There have been stories recently that raise the question of whether Podcasting is failing? However, these reports are a little premature and do not really understand how the 'Long Tail' can be leveraged successfully by podcasting. The "Power to the People: Social Media Tracker" study in April 2008 estimated that just over 14% of US Internet users downloaded podcasts in 2007. eMarketer also predicts in a recent article that US podcast ad spending will grow to $435 million by 2012 from $165 million in 2007

It should also be noted that Podcasting has additonal benefits such as Search Engine Optimisation, if done correctly:
http://advertising-for-success.blogspot.com/2008/04/optimizing-podcasts-for-seo.html