Like so many people – between a quarter and third of everyone in the UK, depending on who you believe – I love podcasts.
I mean, I really love podcasts.
by Adrian Stirrup
The last few years have seen a steady rise in their popularity and they’re becoming a powerful medium for sharing untold stories and amplifying diverse voices. I’m often in awe at the creativity and variety of the medium, from news and personal stories, to TV episode deep-dives and dads writing terrible pornography – there are millions of voices to choose from, and all available at the touch of a button.
In the UK, a fifth of people aged 15+ listen to at least one podcast per week, with reach highest among 25-34-year-olds (27.9%). In fact, the number of younger listeners has soared in recent months. When you dig deeper into the latest figures, which Adam Bowie has done brilliantly here, it’s evident that podcasts are the way to reach young people.
Another figure that stands out from Adam’s analysis of the Ofcom figures is that nearly half of people from ethnically diverse backgrounds listen to podcasts each week (48%), and those who identify as either Mixed or Black ethnicities are even higher, at over 60%.
In 2017, my dream was to find a way to combine my love of podcasts, my experience of radio production and newsreading, and my career in comms. Darren Caveney and I set about making a podcast about brilliant communicators for brilliant communicators. The Talking Comms podcast was born.
With our trusty microphone - nicknamed Don King due its fluffy muff - we sat down with some of the country’s finest comms pros to talk about things like building a successful comms team, harnessing Yammer, GDPR, the 2022 Commonwealth Games, wellbeing, being on-call over Christmas, and Curtis Stigers (no, really).
Then the pandemic happened, and after a grinding day of mixed government messages and shouting “you’re on mute!”, chatting about comms after work wasn’t quite so fun anymore. We gamely soldiered on for a few more episodes, reflecting the challenges of internal comms during Covid, the impact it had on NHS comms colleagues and in February 2021 how comms supported the very first vaccinations.
That was the last episode... until now! I hate podcasts that just stop out of the blue so we’re back for one last hurrah... well, sort of.
See, not long after we started Talking Comms, we were asked if we did podcast training. The honest answer at the time was no, but in 2019 after a few phone calls, many cups of coffee and one very long evening in Darren’s kitchen struggling over PowerPoint, our first podcast training session was born.
In the intervening years, we’ve adapted training for all sorts and all sizes of organisations; short sessions, long sessions, online ones, in-person ones, public sector, private sector. We even ran a session for individuals, lots of them freelancers, who wanted to upskill and learn about podcasting.
In the training, we talk people through the whole process: the kit you need; scripting, presenting and recording tips; accessibility and transcripts; how a podcast fits into your wider comms planning; and maybe most importantly of all, how to promote your podcast so people get to hear it!
We’ve trained a huge range of different organisations to create, edit and promote their own podcasts and the results are there to see (or technically hear) in Wigan’s absolutely fantastic podcast, Borough Life.
So, although the very final episode of Talking Comms has dropped, we’re not going anywhere – in fact, we’re now on the lookout for new organisations and people to work with and train up. We can’t wait to get cracking so more great comms people can go off and create brilliant stories of their own.
Do you want to reach your audience through podcasts? If it sounds like something you’re interested in, get in touch with Darren or me at talkingcommspod@gmail.com to start the conversation.
Rather than being a sad affair, recording the last Talking Comms Podcast was an absolute pleasure and reminded me and Darren of the great people we’ve spoken to over the years. You can listen to the very last episode here.
(Oh, and I now also do a non-comms podcast called Like A Magic Spell and the second season launched this week! In it, my guests and I are on a mission to unlock the joy of ABBA, one song at a time. It’s really good fun, and I’ll let you into a secret: there are a lot of random tangents, so you don’t have to even like ABBA to enjoy it. You can listen to Like A Magic Spell here).
When he’s not wanging on about podcasts, Adrian Stirrup is Internal Communications Manager at Lewisham Council.
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