A discussion about corporate and business podcasting with tips and guidelines

Jason Lee Miller has a post on Web Pro News about some stats that he learned while at the recent Podcast and Portable Media Expo. While I know this is just an accumulation of sound bites from the expo and not Jason's personal thoughts, the article serves as a good example that the industry itself presents a very confusing front to the world.

Some interesting excerpts:

• Podzinger's Alex Laats states "There's still no way to know if a download was full or partial, or if was deleted before listening."
• Laats then goes on to state "According to Laats, music gets the longest play time at an average of 30 minutes, though the average podcast is played for six minutes. In video podcasts, the longest listened to was religious content, at 12 minutes."

These two statements are incongruous. If it's not even possible to tell if a show was downloaded in its entirety, how is is possible to know how long it was played for?

• Daryl Van Dyke from Bridge Ratings states that "According to age group...those ages 12-24 listen most"

That flies in the face of every study and poll I've seen to date (1, 2) that put the bulge somewhere around the 25-45 range.

• Van Dyke goes on to say that "the number one barrier to broader adoption is the complicated process of downloading to a computer and transferring to a portable media device."

Again, this disagrees with stats that are showing that as few as 50% of listeners ever transfer media files to a portable device. More than half of podcast listeners listen to shows on their computers, therefore negating Van Dyke's point about complications surrounding the transfer of files to a device.

The confusion generated by us, internally, is part of what spooks advertisers. They can read this article as well as you or I and with informaiton like this out there, I don't blame them for wandering away with a headache.

We like to deride PR departments as icons of corporate drudgery, but at least they can provide a united front. We need a podcast PR department.