Time for Your CU to Podcast? Pretty Soon, Perhaps

Posted by Lisa Hochgraf

I'm certainly not the first to say that producing podcasts might not yet be low-hanging fruit for most credit unions. Check out Tony Mannor's excellent post on CU Hype.

But a personal experience and some recent reading made me want to join the conversation about the "to podcast or not to podcast" issue.

First, the personal experience. My husband, way more a techie than I, was recently watching some vodcasts from Australian television, The Chaser's War on Everything. (Viewers caution: These guys push the envelope on a wide variety of social and political stuff.)

The point is they were compelling and funny, doing things like testing a vacuum company's claim that their sweepers were strong enough to pick up bowling balls. They actually went to the bowling alley and tried to do so, with quite hilarious results.

I thought to myself, "Why, even non-techies like me would download and watch these. But would I get one from a credit union? Maybe not, unless it was as off the wall, even a bit crazy. But then again, do I want my credit union to get crazy?"

Some credit unions are trying out podcasting, according to this compilation by my fellow CUES Editor Theresa Sweeney. And before last week, I would have said they were, indeed, a little bit crazy. Then I picked up the Aug. 6 report from Forrester Research titled "Youth Podcast User Profile." And now I can see where they're coming from.

The Forrester study found that almost two-thirds of youth listen to one or two podcasts regularly. That's quite a few! If you're targeting young people, this could be a good media for reaching them.

The study also found that 82 percent of young podcast viewers say they tell their friends about products they find interesting. Wow! So if you make a credit union believer out of one young person, they just might tell another? Cool!

But a third statistic from the report provides the sticky wicket: TV programs, Internet radio stations and radio programs are the content formats most often listened to by these young podcast consumers. This points to my personal experience that podcasts have to be entertaining.

In all, podcasting and vodcasting, while not currently low-hanging fruit for credit unions, may be something to watch and do later. If you do decide to produce them, be sure to first check out these tips from the sharp minds at Trabian.

Comments

[Trey Reeme]

Great point about the importance of producing compelling, entertaining content. I've seen a few CUs getting salesy with social media and podcasts in particular.

While it's pretty inexpensive to produce a podcast, the amount of time that goes into recording and producing a podcast (in my experience) is far greater than making a blog post - where I may spend around an hour on a blog post, we can easily collectively spend 10 on producing a podcast.

[Lisa Hochgraf]

10 hours on a podcast? That's a great statistic to keep in mind.

[Trey Reeme]

Of course, we're slow - we have to edit out some of the mess-ups not fit to publish. Usually it involves me stumbling over my thoughts - I'm more comfortable behind a keyboard than a microphone.

[Lisa Hochgraf]

Not slow at all. I'm sure it would take me twice as long! I know how long it takes me to research and write a feature story, but have no idea how I would budget time for podcasting. Thank you so much for giving me a ball park idea!