After covering viral videos and blog posts, we reached another new medium of communication this week in social media class: podcasts. A specialized, small snippet of audio, podcasts offer an alternative to radio. As covered in both our social media class and David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing & PR, podcasts have a lot of benefits: they are cheap, portable, and simple to obtain. With a laundry list of benefits, podcasts should be the next big social media craze, right?
This girl is not convinced yet. I am skeptical for a two main reasons:
1. Podcasts are supposed to be the new form of radio. However, how popular is radio as a communication dissemination tool? I certainly do not want to knock the radio industry, but figures show that radio is taking a hard hit. The 2011 State of the Media Report by the Pew Research Center showed that radio usage as a source of news for Americans fell by 6 percent. While podcasts are different than radio, they share the same qualities. Qualities that Americans seem to be turning away from in 2011.
2. While podcasts may provide more topic specialization and ease of mobility than radio, they still require what I find to be a huge downfall of radio: time. I don not know about you, but I am on the social media boat because I can get my news quickly. Instead of sitting down and listening to a 30 minute news or radio program, I can check Twitter 3 times a day during the 10 minute break between my classes. Even with the ease, I may not have time for podcasts.
Take my opinion with large grains of salt. As a social media guru, I am certainly not naïve. Podcasts offer lots of the typical positive qualities of successful social media tools. However, I think a few of the downfalls of podcasts may prevent them from catching on as quickly as some of the other popular tools.
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