A podcast dedicated to human communication and the profession dedicated to it. Public Relations and Marketing

I was lucky to spend 15 years in broadcasting as a journalist doing interviews every day. The next 21 years we’re spent in public relations and marketing. These two careers are perfect recipe for this podcast. Stories and Strategies is dedicated to examining the way we communicate with one another as human beings. The profession that is dedicated to this is public relations and marketing. We look at the neuroscience of communications, studies into how executives are using social media to influence, and examinations of how artificial intelligence is also playing an influencer role. We also look at gender and racial influences on communication.
 

The goal of the podcast is really pretty simple but subtly complex. We want public relations and marketing professionals to get a better understanding of their own craft and to take pride in it. We want senior executive leaders, who hire, or should be hiring these professionals, to understand the deep challenges of the profession. The very human elements of it. And lastly we want people in general to understand that while this profession is increasingly more and more scientific, it does deal with human behavior, the nature of which cannot be perfectly predictable. It didn’t take long to produce the first episode but it took about six months to get really comfortable in the style. We keep episodes close to 20 or 25 minutes, respecting the listeners time. And we use a grabber technique off the top of each episode to tell a story that exemplifies the narrative of the interview to come. Those grabbers can sometimes take several weeks to produce and are only a minute or two in length
 

The key is to always be a month or more ahead of the publishing schedule. That gives us time to think through the episodes we want to do as well as those grabbers which we take a lot of pride in.
 

We’ve been approached by several sponsors but have not taken them up on their offers yet. I want to grow the podcast to higher level before we entertain those ideas. What has happened though is Stories in Strategies is now a full podcast production company producing podcasts for clients. Our podcast itself is just our namesake podcast for the company
 

We use the Shure SMB7 microphone, Riverside FM to record guests, Audition for editing, headliner for promotions, and proudly use Buzzsprout for hosting. Listen notes is a new tool for us but already it’s proving to be extremely exciting.

Preparation free episode is extremely important. We’re typically planning a month or even two months in advance and cherry picking the best ideas and approaching the best possible guests. We develop scripts with questions willing advance and send them to guests so they are prepared but the recording is still just a conversation.
 

This feels like the great frontier in podcasting right now. We create quite a few materials and promote on social media, really encourage guests to promote to their own networks, harness search engine optimization for episode titles, and are just beginning to dabble in the concept of promo swaps. we also think our host, Doug Downs, would make an excellent guest on Podcasts to cover similar topics. His expertise includes strategic communications, marketing, media relations, and neuroscience as it applies to human behaviour and communication
 

If you’re feeling at all intimidated by the technology, just start recording and get about five episodes done before you think about publishing.

If you’re feeling extremely confident in your skills, record about 10 episodes before publishing and make an honest evaluation of whether you really should be so confident.

Honestly think about hiring professional help, if not in the recording, then in the planning and later the promotion and marketing. These are real skills that take years to learn
 

We are re-developing our website but once it’s up it will be at the equivalent of www.storiesandstrategies.ca. Look for us on LinkedIn right now under Stories and Strategies