Ep.1 – We’ve Decided to Create a Podcast!

 [00:00:00] Hi everybody. I’m Chris. I’m the CEO of Social INK. And welcome to one of the very first episodes of our brand new podcast.

 [00:00:08] What’s interesting about it is I can’t actually give you the name right now but don’t worry about that, we’ll explain everything.

 [00:00:13] I’m joined today by our Head of Content, Gareth Alvarez from Social INK, “hello” and also “how are you?” Very good. “Glad to hear it”, Anna Simmonds, our Head of Social.

 [00:00:25] “Hey ya”

 [00:00:28] So the idea of all of this and just to explain a little bit about who we are, Social INK is a digital marketing agency we specialize in content marketing social media marketing and digital strategy overall for small to midsize businesses. As part of this year, what we’ve decided to do is to challenge ourselves as an agency. We wanted to give people a little bit of insight into what can be done and how it can be done and what sort of results you could get.

 [00:00:54] So since the beginning of the year we’ve done several different things including joining in the One Minute Briefs community on a daily basis since March and this has been fantastic. One minute, sixty seconds to come up with an advertising idea for a particular brief of the day. We’ve been doing that solidly and I think we’ve now managed to rack up a few wins and I’m not sure exactly how many but including one that some of you guys might have seen already on our social media which was for KFC for the #ILoveYouBaconBurger. So we’re very proud of that.

 [00:01:27] In May we decided to do #30DaysOfLive. This was another crazy idea that the team had, but we all came together to try and realize which was every day for the whole month of May, we went live on one of our social media platforms. This gave us a great opportunity to get out a ton of content but more importantly we could showcase the results of what that content actually did and how it performed for us to help inspire other businesses small to mid-sized businesses to understand the power of what you can do with live and on social media, to get that content out there.

 [00:02:01] Last month, June, saw us create the June 100 Challenge which was another bit of insanity by the team, although I think I might be responsible for that but the June 100 challenge was we wanted to launch 100 blogs within this month of June with a view to see what we could do and impact how we can impact our website by creating content.

 [00:02:21] So you guys could find all the results of all of these kind of crazy challenges but this why am I telling you all of this. It’s to bring us to the point that. July. Our plan is to launch a podcast from zero to launch everything in between. We are doing everything during the month of July. So here we are today we’re actually recording this on the 8th of July, and this is our first ever episode and what we’re going to do today is we’re just gonna have a quick chat about the challenge about what we’re trying to do for the podcast. And with my team here, we’re going to come up with the ideas that hopefully you’ll see you go through. So for today we don’t have a name yet on our podcast. You never know we might find one as we go through the day ” here’s hoping” but for today. Absolutely. So for today the idea is really more than anything else to figure out what it is that we need to do and what it is that we need to do next. So in our true fashion the same way as we blog about blogging today we’re recording our podcast about podcasting.

 [00:03:16] Yeah we’d like to sort of practice what we preach and so kind of show you the way that we’ve adopted with certain things just so you can either emulate yourselves or just laugh at us.

 [00:03:29] You know in our hardships or our pitfalls or just celebrate in our moments of absolute joy.

 [00:03:37] Absolutely I was.

 [00:03:39] I was actually really touching Gareth. Thank you.

 [00:03:42] Oh well you’re very welcome I’m feeling rather inspired It is Monday morning after all. I’m not tired.

 [00:03:50] So the idea being guys obviously we’ve come together we want to do this. We know roughly what we’re doing. But also we’re doing a lot of research. We’re trying to figure out everything that goes into making a podcast and funnily enough actually I think the easiest part is doing this bit which is just kind of talking and recording that conversation. And Anna can you tell us a little bit about sort of the from the back end side of things the tech side of things what sort of things that we’re going to go through. What sort of tasks we have to do to try and get us ready for the launch.

 [00:04:20] Well there’s it’s a bit like a blog. You have to have it hosted somewhere. So we’re going to have to do that and build a feed essentially. And that’s you know it’s actually not going to be that difficult. We just have to pick where we want to have it hosted because if if if we go viral like all the businesses want to do then we don’t want it to crash our Web site. So we have to pick that hosting get that feed set up and then we need to start submitting it to directories like. We want to get it on. I think the big three that we want to get it villain are Apple podcasts Google podcasts and Spotify to start with. And so they all have their own sort of I mean on Spotify it’s not even called podcasts it’s called the show. But it’s really a podcast. So it’s just submitting it in time for us to actually have something live before the end of the month. So it looks like we have to get quite a bit done in advance so that we can submit you know five or more episodes at once something like Apple. It could take 10 days for it to actually get approved and go live.

 [00:05:27] So by my calculations it’s the 8th of July now. July has 31 days. That means that we need to at the very latest push some stuff to the twenty first which means we’ve got thirteen days folks to record five/six episodes and get everything sorted hosting.

 [00:05:44] No pressure. That’s way too low.

 [00:05:49]  Remove the weekends, weekends, what weekends? Yeah who needs weekends. We work in marketing. But the thing is right. So we’re going to have that time to record.

 [00:06:05] And like we’re saying the talking part we can always felt fill out fill the time it’s about then once we’ve submitted everything it’ll be about reaching out to people building stuff like we want to build a landing page for this we want to look at ways to market it and reach out to people. So even though we have two weeks until we’re going to submit to Apple at the latest it’s not like we’re going to be like oh OK that’s July then we’re gonna have we’re gonna be working on this all month.

 [00:06:35] OK cool. And I think one of the main things that we’re going to have to really really drill down on is going to be what the episodes are actually about. So today’s obviously pretty much just about podcasting in general what we’re trying to do and I think as well what we will try to do is to bring in the same sort of topics that we did for our social media live challenge. So what we can talk about Gareth, you did some great stuff about the FOREST. .

 [00:07:02] For anyone who doesn’t know what that actually is it’s all about persuasive writing techniques which is again massively important for content marketing we got to do some stuff about social media, about strategy especially at the moment we’re really pushing hard to try and help every business have a strategy in place. And then we’ll make sure that we keep bringing in some interesting people that we can talk to as well. So over the course of the next whatever however many days Gareth said to us, 13 days that we have left. We’ll be doing as much as we can on this podcast to make sure that by the end of the month you’ll be listening to this and hopefully a lot of other episodes and it’s gonna be something that we’re gonna carry on doing afterwards as well as our blogs as well as our lives on social media as well as keeping our Facebook group all about digital marketing live as well. So we’re doing everything we can to give you guys as much content as possible and hopefully giving you as much value as possible when it comes to your digital marketing, content, social media etc..

 [00:07:59] I mean the idea really is that you know different people consume content and consume information in many different ways on many different platforms. So it’s all about just making sure that we’re catering to those to those needs and making sure that you know if you’re keen on on podcasts I recently I got a puppy which means that I now have to walk said puppy several times a day. So that’s a great time to just plug into a podcast and just sort of catch up, some people listen to it on the train or on their commute or wherever. So that’s the way that you consume  your content of whatever you’re learning then then this is great if you prefer to read than there’s the blog if you prefer to watch then there’s the video so it’s all about just thinking what different people like and providing it in that medium.

 [00:08:55] Yeah and I think one thing as well that a lot of businesses that we work with will talk about is they’ll have all these ideas for these different types of content but then they’ll get completely and utterly overwhelmed with actually getting it done. And one thing that we’ve seen with these challenges is that. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is just to build that habit or in the case of a podcast. You have all that sort of finicky stuff that you need to do to get the first few episodes out there. But once you have a regular podcast going then you can concentrate on just creating really good content and you know marketing it. Whereas. It’s just once you have it there then it’s not as much work. So once you have you know if you dedicate a month or something to launching something new. So if you dedicate a month to launching your blog and dedicate a month to a podcast dedicate a month to going live like we did you’ll suddenly realize that all those pieces are in place to keep that going. And you’ll actually want to keep it going. You’ll see the results as well. But. We can talk more about that in other episodes about the sort of results that we saw from these challenges. And it’s just yeah like it’s just it’s it’s fun. We’re making we’re making it a challenge. It’s fun but it also gives us a deadline. And it’s something that we encourage you to do. Like if you are listening to this thinking yeah I wanted to start a podcast then maybe the first value that you can get. It’s like yeah you can do it in a month.

 [00:10:27] Absolutely and it’s something I wrote about recently as well it was like when’s the best time to stop anything. Well the best time to start is now. Don’t put it off. There’s no there’s no need to be afraid of whether it will tank or whether it will succeed or what will happen what people will think about it just get it done just do it and you know don’t don’t seek perfection just actually by virtue of actually getting things done you’ll learn and you’ll evaluate in you’ll iterate and you will you’ll change things as it goes along. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to get started. And once you got started then it becomes that habit. And it was talking about and it’s much easier to manage but you have to get over that sort of first step. And I think we’ve we’ve we’ve done that first step today haven’t we really by actually just starting it off and let’s see where it goes from here.

 [00:11:18] Awesome guys. Well I think that wraps up nicely the first podcast about the podcast.

 [00:11:24] How meta is that?

 [00:11:25] Yeah absolutely. We love a bit of meta. So everyone thank you very much. Make sure you subscribe. There’s gonna be a ton of content that we’re gonna be pushing out here on our podcasts. We’re going to hopefully give you guys as much insight as possible into what you can be doing differently with your digital marketing. And again keep in touch with with our team on Facebook on LinkedIn or Twitter. You’ll find us pretty active on all of our platforms it’s what we do and we believe in practicing what we preach so let us know what you think of the podcast as we go through it and any feedback is always welcome.

 [00:11:56] Thank you very much.

 [00:11:58] Thanks everyone. Have a good one. Bye.