← The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
The How To Podcast Series - Podcast Co-Hosts, Practical Podcast Tips, and Podcast Community
E610 - Mayor, Community Leaders, Boost transparency and civic engagement - Podcast Ideas For Professionals
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Okay, we're rolling. Hey, welcome back to the how to Podcast series. It's Dave with you. Glad to be with you. We are doing this little mini series you and I around podcasting for professionals and why professionals should really link into the power of podcasting. I am encouraging our local leaders in this episode to consider the power of podcasting in a world where radio stations that used to have people who lived in our neighborhood now pipe in music from some mega station far from where we are. And the radio people don't live where we live, and they don't know anything about what's going on in our city anymore because they don't live there. And that's unfortunate. And so we have that, and then we have the mass exodus of newspapers where we used to be able to read about Aunt Marge and Mary down the street and what's happening with so and so. That's all gone, right? Even the whole newspaper industry is, like, hemorrhaging right now. It's just local has left the building. And what's left? What's left? AM talk radio. You want to listen to that all day? Oh, okay. Please. No. So we don't have that. We're lacking a voice in our community. And I think, again, you know, I'm biased, but I think that podcasting could be the answer that brings local voices back to our local communities. And I'm going to try to convince you, oh, honorable mayor and community leaders and people who are tired of not having a voice in your community. I'm talking to you. I'm coming for you in this episode. And I'm going to try to convince you that a podcast is probably one of the best ways for you to bring your community together, raise local voices, talk about things that are happening in your community. Mayors, you need a podcast. I'm going to try to prove it to you. Let's think about real local news coverage. Like, real stuff, okay? Let's be real here, even. Okay. Let's add television to the mix, too, okay? I live in a city with like150,000 people. We don't have a TV station. We don't have any local news. We have a station that's miles away from us, and we are like a. A afterthought. If anything happens in the news, they don't even really have, like, reporters who live here. They. So if something happens here, they gotta jump in a car and drive miles and miles and miles just to get to us. It's over before they get here. So we are just a. An Afterthought, we are just whatever, right? We don't even have local coverage. 150,000 people here and no TV. Our local radio, yeah, it's, it's, it's there, it's okay, but it really doesn't, it really doesn't have great local coverage. And it's sad because we used to have great, great things in our community. Really tied the place together and we all knew about each other and what was happening. I think local news coverage has been shrinking across the country a lot in the US as well. And like our newspapers are disappearing. Community radio is often replaced by syndicated content from major markets. And the personal connection between our civic leaders and the residents has quietly been eroded. But there's a modern way for us to bridge the gap. I think it's through local podcasts. What I hear from the podcasting community and people who are in the the know about podcasting is they, they're pointing towards local content as being the untapped world for podcasting. So that's why I'm coming for you, honorable mayor and council members and people who, who lead our communities. You need a podcast. Why the local podcast matter? I'm so glad you asked. Podcasts give communities something they've been missing for, for a long time. A real, true local voice. They offer, they offer a direct, unfiltered channel between leaders and the people that they serve. Instead of relying on journalists or press releases, or a mayor or city councilor or community director, you can all now speak directly and authentically to your community. And you don't need to capture the attention of the news and the press to get your message out. You can just create a podcast and release it to your community. It doesn't have to be a global focused content. It can be completely local. And it travels really well with all of the different apps that we now have on our phones. With computer access, you can download it and listen offline. So you don't even need to be connected to the Internet. There's a lot of great upsides to local content distributed through podcasts, where a radio signal fades out when you cross a certain state line or right, it just fades. It's gone. Podcasts play. They don't need a radio tower, they don't need a signal, they don't need. There's no boundaries. You can listen to this anywhere. And if I grew up in a certain city and I now live on the other side of the planet, I can still get my local news through a podcast without having to go onto a radio station. App to do so. So podcasts travel well. They travel far. They can be free for people to access. You don't need to be a tech wizard to figure out a podcast again. You can download it, listen to it on a plane with no WI fi. You can take it anywhere. You can listen in a tractor in the middle of the field, far from any WI fi signal and still have hours and hours of content for you to listen to about your community through a podcast. It's that easy. So I'm on this kick of saying, hey, community members, you need a podcast and I'd love to help you start one for your community. Reach out to me. HowtoPodcast ca. Let's talk about this. Podcasts give communities something that they really been missing again, that real voice and that direct, unfiltered connection, right? We've been talking about with their audience. When a town's leadership launches an official or community podcast, 4 Things Could Happen just by you starting your podcast. What are they? First, increased transparency. As through a podcast, we can discuss decisions, explain how policies are made. Do a recap of the last town council meeting, right? Just the good points, not all the other stuff, but just a summary so people know and get informed. Because they're not available to be there at the meeting, they can still get a recap and hear from you and hear the highlights. What was discussed in our local town hall meetings. It's a great way to communicate the message beyond a transcript because you know, who's got time for that? Put out a podcast. People can listen to it, people can engage with it, it travels well and it gives us more knowledge to the behind the scenes of what's happening. In plain language, forget all the government jargon, all the talking points, just break it down. So increased transparency, great result of putting your official community news into a podcast. What about building trust? Regular audio updates humanizes our officials, right? When we see these people and hear about them, we want to connect with them. We want to hear their voices. We want them to speak to us directly, not past us. Listeners can hear the tone, the emotion and, and the sincerity of our leaders and how they present themselves and what's happening in our community. It's amazing. It can also help us to encourage participation in our communities. When citizens feel informed and included in what's happening in their local town, they are more likely to attend events, respond to initiatives, and even volunteer. What a great way to promote all the local events, all the local businesses. Think of your downtown businesses. Think of a new store opening, a new restaurant, all of the new things, the sporting events that are local, we could hear all of these different things. You could, you could recreate a radio station, a newspaper and a television station all through a podcast. Yeah, you could. And you could have it run by your students from your local high school, could create and edit the content. You could have your video class from the high school or college come in and do all the video and create TV versions of it as well. You could have unlimited amount of involvement in your community, sharing stories of the local community. I think we're missing out here, people. Just because everybody else has left, all the newspapers, the big radio stations and tv, they walked away from us. We don't need to wallow in that. We can just create our own. I'd love to help you figure that out if that's what you want to do. The last part here is we can also help. Podcasts can help us to create an archive of our community. Each episode that we create, all of the content we make is a piece of local history. Voices from residents who have been there since the town was created. Sharing their stories about this street and this house and this happened, and sharing historical facts about, about our community and capturing them before we lose these amazing people that created our town. Capture the voices, get them into your podcast, record them, get the stories. Because once those stories are gone, they're gone. So I think podcasting, especially in a local context for our local communities, can replace what we've lost. Traditional local media used to tell the community story. They used to highlight local businesses. They used to show up and set up their, their banners and do a live remote for a store opening, report on upcoming events and celebrate the small town heroes. Those jobs are largely vanished as large networks focus on national news and national headlines and global headlines. And a podcast can bring all that storytelling back home again. We've lost it. It doesn't mean we can't get it back. Imagine a monthly or bi weekly show featuring local voices, local students, teachers, entrepreneurs, artists, first responders, nonprofits. A mayor could sit down with these people and talk about their new initiatives, the new openings, the new school superintendent could share updates on their programs. And new teachers added to the team. Listeners could submit questions, making it a two way conversation. You could use Speak Pipe as a way to do that and build a conversation again. And build the back and forth between the community and the leaders through a podcast. Some real community community benefits about podcasting, Here's a few for you. A community podcast for your community could become the hub of collaboration between city hall Local schools, businesses and charities. It could become the center of all of the things you're trying to accomplish in your community. It could become a training ground for students who want to be journalists or communication students who are eager to learn about podcasting and social media and YouTube and all of that. All of these resources are at our fingers. And many, many, many of these tools are free. So the overhead, the upkeep and the startup costs basically zero. All you need is people who are interested. And I think the other real community benefit is just. It's a morale booster for the community. It celebrates what's right in the community instead of what's just wrong. Because news is always focused on the wrong. We need some positive upliving, uplifting voices through podcasting in a local context that can bring that positivity back home. I think podcasting allows our leaders to highlight the why behind the decisions, which actually can help reduce a lot of frustration and confusion, speculation. When people understand the reasoning behind a decision that's been made by our senior leaders, they're probably more likely to stay engaged and supportive. We get these politicians who come to our house during an election cycle, knock on our doors, shake our hands, make big promises, and then we never see them again. Imagine a podcast that brings those same people into our home, into our ears, into our cars, into our tractors, into our trucks, and we can then connect with them on the go on a regular basis. It's more than a one time visit to your house, every four years. It's a regular check in with the people who lead our communities. And those local voices, we need them back. We need to hear from the people that we brush shoulders with every single day. So how do we get started? Leaders? You don't need a big studio, you don't need a big budget. A simple setup and a consistent schedule and a genuine willingness to listen are basically the main tools that are required to start a podcast from a local perspective. The key is to keep it authentic and conversational, not scripted press release statements. We're done with that. That's why. That's why all these big things left our community. We're just done with it. We want real talk about real issues from real people and from people who actually live where we live, not some big city miles from here and they've never been to our town. We want people from our town, our voices. People that we know, people that we will know at the store downtown and at the local high school. We want to hear from the people that live where we live. Episodes could be formatted like a Q and A session, community spotlights, behind the scenes insights or even like listener submitted questions where we can ask the mayor anything and the mayor will respond to us and not give us pat answers that have been scripted by some department that's a media team is going to give you the talking points. No, we want to listen. We want access to the mayor. The person that we put in place. We want access to the mayor directly with no screens, nobody there to make sure that what they say is correct and no sound bites. We want, we want interaction without having to raise our hand in a public forum. We want more than seven seconds of talk time from our leaders. And that's what a podcast can do. Pair that with our own local music. Come on. A local band who's going to be playing at the the Happy Go Lucky bar this weekend. How about we have them into and talk about their music and share their music and what they do. They're a local band, they've been here forever and they're playing live this weekend. A podcast could be tied to that event. And we had talked to the bar owner and promote the bar. There's a lot of different things here. Everybody that we can do that traditional newspapers, television and radio have walked away from, they have left the door wide open and they've given us this golden opportunity to connect with our audience. We don't have to fight with the big guys, the big stations, the big noise to do this. We can just do it ourselves. And they left the door wide open for us. We can do announcements, interviews, and suddenly the podcast becomes the heartbeat of the local conversation. It becomes our town square. We've lost our town square. We don't talk to each other anymore. We need to bring podcasting home and our community back together. And I think a podcast is the best option for you as a leader in your community. Don't just talk to us once every four years. Don't just give us seven seconds of your time on a newscast. No, we want you. We want to know that our community is healthy and we want to know how we as community members can make it stronger. So the more we have touch points with you as leadership, the more we feel like we're part of something bigger. So it's time to get us together. It's time, I think, to put podcasts in a local context, to bring our community together again and to give us our home back. We need our local voices. I think podcasting is more than just another communication channel. It's more than just a replacement for TV it's more than a replacement for newspapers. It's more than a replacement than radio. It's much, much more. It's a community tool. I think it turns passive listeners into active citizens and lets leaders replace buzzwords with real voices. When a city or town invests in genuine communication, I truly believe that everyone wins. Everybody. So if you're a mayor of a town or a city, a community leader, or part of a local organization, I really want you to consider this. Your town story deserves to be told by the people who love it and the people who live there. Podcasting can do exactly that, clearly, honestly, and consistently so to the leaders of our communities, big and small. I grew up in a town. When I was in high school, we had 500 people in town. 500. And many of them lived out on farms outside of the town. So not everybody lived in town. It was tiny, and we. Everybody knew each other, but at the same time, we only knew who we knew. And there was other people in town. We would walk by, drive by, pass by their house, and we'd never talk to them. A podcast is not the golden answer for everything, but in a local context, again, where we don't hear local voices, we hear the voices from the big cities around us, but we don't hear about our community from people in our community. I truly believe that podcast has untapped potential to make your community stronger. So if you're looking for feedback, you're looking for ideas, you're a community leader, and you're like, dave, I would just love to sit down and chat about this a little bit more. My calendar's on my website, howtapodcast, ca. And even if we just get together and chat and that's the extent of our time together, I would love to do that. So as a community leader listening to this, somebody put this in your email. Somebody put this episode in front of you and said, hey, honorable Mayor, I think we need to talk about this. I think this might be the. The answer to bringing our community back together again. It could be a podcast, and it's easier than you think. Reach out to me anytime. Love to help you. Take care. Hey, thanks for being part of the podcast. Thanks for listening to our podcasting for professionals little mini series that we're doing. Love doing this. Love spending time with you. Again, if you need any help at all and you're thinking, I just want have questions. I don't even know for sure if I want to start a podcast, but I just have questions. Let me know if you're also if you're a guest, you want to be a guest on podcasts and you like, I don't know how to. How to do this. I don't have a PR agent. I don't have anybody helping me. I'm a. I'm an author. I'm a professional. I have. I have a team, but they don't know either. How do I get on shows? If you just want to have a conversation, love to help you. It's always there. HowToPodcast CA is my calendar invite. It lives there all the time. You have access to it anytime you want, whatever's available. When you open that calendar, when, in whatever time zone, I'm ready for you. So let's get together and chat. I'll give you some direction, give you some ideas, some tools, some websites, some places to consider. Happy to help you. Always willing to serve and love helping new guests find podcasts as well. So I've got some great options for you. I have some great friends in podcasting as well. They can get you started, and really from there, you can build wherever you want to go. So whether you want to be a podcaster yourself, as we're talking about in this little mini series for professionals, podcasting, starting your own show, even if it's just short few episodes. Right? We're talking about that here. We're also talking about guesting. So if you need help with that and you want somebody to walk with you on the guesting journey, you don't have a PR agent. Even if you do have a PR agent, you're still like, I don't know what I'm doing. Reach out to me. HowtoPodcast CA. I'd love to help you and point you in the right direction again, here to serve. Love to see you grow and build community around whatever you're doing. And I believe podcasting could be the answer for you. Firmly believe it. And I have proof. So reach out to me soon. Thank you for being here. Thanks for listening. Take care. Of. You're still here. Great. Okay, this is a little bonus stuff that I do at the end of the episode. This is for people who are the. The super fans. And I totally love each and every one of you because you stay to the end of the episode. Many people, by the time they start hearing the music for closing of the episode, they're gone, they're out of here. And I want people to listen longer to the episode. So I'm doing this on purpose. Steal this idea, please, for your show, because the longer people listen to your podcast, the better. All of the apps love it because people stay longer. They're not here for one minute of a 44 minute episode. They stay to the end. So do things at the end to benefit and give bonus to the people who are really super fans. So thank you. If you're a super fan of this show, awesome. Or you just didn't get to the button to hit stop yet, stick around because I do these bonus things after episode 500. Going forward, you'll hear I'm doing these extra pieces. So the question was to me, from a podcaster, are there many people who are doing podcasting just for fun, like just for the fun of it? Does it have to be a business? And I would say that the majority of people who create a podcast are doing so out of the sheer love of the topic. They went to a podcast app. Nobody's talking about the thing that they want to talk about or they listen to other shows and they're like, they get that all wrong. It should be this way. And they get frustrated. They're like, okay, well, if nobody else is going to do this, then I'm going to do this. And think about this. You're at a family function, going around the table, you start talking about whatever it is, stamps, sports, music, books, whatever. And all of the people around the table just look at you, give you that look like, are you really going to talk about this again? That's the signal of a podcast. That's what you should be talking about, the thing that people go, you're known for this and we have no idea what you're talking about. So there's where you start. There's a starting point. Make a list of all the things that people roll their eyes about when you start talking. And there's your list. You can start with that. A lot of people just start podcasts because they want to just get on the mic. I know people who podcast who just want to talk to their distant relative or their brother and sister or sister that lives on the other side of the world or the other side of the country. And a podcast just gives them a chance to do something on a regular basis where they can record something and put it out in the world. So that's fun to be able to do that and create content together. So if that's the only reason you're going to do a podcast, you are not a second class podcaster because you don't make money. You're not a second class podcaster because you're not a business, you're not a Second class podcaster because nobody's giving you cash. No, you can create a podcast and not even worry about if people listen to the show. That sounds strange, I know, but people do that. So when you think that and you go to these big podcasting conferences and all they do is push making money, that show, having a hundred thousand downloads in the first hour, having a big community, having a newsletter, having all the social platforms and you're like, this is, this is impossible. There's no way I can do what they're telling me to do at this conference or through this book, or through this course. I can't do all this. I have a life. This is just meant to be something I do for fun. That's. The majority of podcasters are people who come here. They'll never make a sweet penny from their podcast. And that's not what makes fuels them to do it. They just want to create content and put it in the world. So if that's you and that's all you want to do is create content, have a great time. This is a hobby. Every hobby doesn't have to become a business. Hobbies should be hobbies for the sake of being a hobby. Fun. You might invest some money in it, great. But, but it should be something that takes you away from your daily stresses and all of that. And your hobby shouldn't become your job. If you want to turn your podcast into a business, that's a different conversation, but that's. The small, small minority of podcasts make life changing money with their show where they can quit their day job and it pays for their mortgage, pays for their car payments, puts their kids to through school and gives them a retirement package. That's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of podcasts. And those are usually the big shows who already are famous, who already have a team and they're not like you and me. So keep your perspective. There's ways to make money with your show. But if you want to be a hobby podcaster, you're not a second class podcast creator. Keep that in mind. Have any questions, reach out. Love to help. Take care. Bye.