Susan Bratton, author of Talk Show Tips, host of the Dishymix podcast and CEO of a publishing company called Personal Life Media that produces 40 different podcasts, is sharing some of her expertise in podcasting with the Digital Podcast fans.

In the Susan’s first guest post, we talked about various show formats that are possible with a podcast. In this installment, we’ll dive more deeply into Show Format, giving you an actual structure you can customize for your needs. This include some good language for intros and outros and commercial breaks.

Your Show Format
Once you know how long you think your show should be for your audience and your style, you need to plan for the intro, breaks (if any) and the outro. I recommend starting your show off exactly the same way every time, and ending the same too.

Every episode of DishyMix starts this way:

Welcome to DishyMix, This is your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you are going to meet Clark Kokich, global president and CEO of Razorfish…

Sometimes I do a little “tag cloud” of subjects we’re going to cover. Sometimes I top line a person’s bio (if I think my audience would benefit) and sometimes I just jump right in to bringing them on the show if they are well known. “Welcome to the show, Clark!”

What I think is most important for my audience is for me to GET TO IT! I don’t dilly dally talking about the weather, we get right to our dialog. I respect them as busy people.

Dialogue versus Question and Answer Format
Speaking of dialog, one of the mp3 files you get with “72 Secret Master Talk Show Host Techniques,” is an audio lesson with Duncan Campbell, host of Living Dialogues, called “The Art of Dialogue.” Duncan has a very unique interview style he calls a “dialogue.” Where most talk show hosts ask questions, driving the discussion and expecting the guest to answer and be the expert, dialogues are a more integrated discussion between two parties.

You can hear this difference if you listen to an episode of DishyMix and then listen to an episode of Living Dialogues.

Living Dialogues Stream/RSS/Download
Living Dialogues in iTunes

Creating Your Unique Style
I like to take a few moves from Duncan’s playbook but still keep mostly to the question/answer format. Duncan’s approach gave me the courage to dialogue with my guests. Your audience consumes your content because of YOU, not the guests you have on. You are the central character in the lives of your fans. It’s your filtering, your curating, your questioning and what you get out of your guests they they come for. It’s ok to engage in a little “parry and thrust” with your guest. It’s actually predictably boring to settle too routinely into simple Q&A. I encourage you to mix it up. Get in there and get dirty. More about what happens inside the container of an interview is covered in Talk Show Tips.

Show Flow
Here’s an example of a typical single Host, single Guest Format, thirty minute show. You should create your own personalized version of your show flow using this as a guide and customizing it for your own preferences.

Start the Show with Your Personalized Opener
Welcome Guest Name
(hi, great to be here)

Give a quick overview of who your guest is.
Guest is known for:
Attribute 1
Attribute 2
Attribute 3

Establish the theme of the show.
I’m pleased to have you with us today – I think our listeners really care about xxx and want to know more about xxx.

Tell your listeners the “game plan” for the show today – format and theme.
Today I want to talk to you about:
Subject 1
Subject 2
Subject 3
Get right into the meat by starting the discussion.

Let’s start with a few questions about xxx.

Ask 12 minutes of questions here (see Do’s & Don’ts on questions, bridges and transitions in the main eBook)

Make sure you unfold a story and delve deeply into their particular expertise. What do they know that nobody else in the world knows? Unfold this revelation…

Go to Break if you want a mid-roll ad slot
We’re going to take a short break to support our sponsors. I’d like you to listen to these ads. These are ads created by my sponsors for my show and they help me bring my work to you. If you can support them, I’d really appreciate it.

This is Host Name and I’m with Guest Name and we’ll be right back to talk about “something intriguing.”

NOTE: To keep your listeners or viewers from abandoning your show at the break, tempt them just before the break with the most juicy content you are saving for the end of the show so they’ll be compelled to stay with you!

5 second bumper with show identity (I use only a music bed here)

Break (silence for the count of 5)

5 second intro bumper (again, a music bed)

Bring Yourselves Back Into the Show
We’re back and I’m your Host Name and we are talking to Guest Name about xxx.

House Keeping
This is where I let listeners know about the DishyMix Fan Club and any other actions, like listener surveys or requesting iTunes reviews.

Before the break we were talking about xxx. I want to ask you about xxx.

Another Cluster of Dialogue if your show is longer than 30 minutes.
Questions for 12 minutes
(Follow same format for break and return if you want more ad slots.)

Engage Your Audience
Ask listeners to send you email or call to leave you a message. (I recommend K7.net for a free voice mail box.)

Wrap Up
We are almost out of time but I would like to ask you one final question – ask something that is a benefit to the listener and leaves them with an inspirational thought or feeling. Or however you want to end your show each time.

Thank you Guest Name for joining us and sharing your wisdom/insight/etc.
(You are welcome.)

Sign Off
Address listeners: join us next week on Show Name when we talk to Guest Name or we’ll be covering theme.

That brings us the end of the show, thank you for listening. For text and transcripts of this show, and other shows on the Personal Life Media Network, please visit our website at www.personallifemedia.com.
This is your host, Host Name
Your signature close here

Show ID – Closer
Personal Life Media Bumper

You can reformat this show flow to work for your show. It’s a great help when you’re first getting started. I always follow the same format so my guests can just listen, rather than wondering what is going to happen with format.

Now you know about the myriad options for formatting a show and how to move through your show flow with ease. If you haven’t listened to my interview with Susan about Commercial Podcasting, click here now.

Don’t forget to sign up for Susan’s free Mini-Course called “Easy Question Generators” where she gives you ten tips for coming up with killer questions for every interview. And, if you’re impressed with this bit of detail excerpted from her training system, maybe you should just go ahead and treat yourself to Talk Show Tips right now.

Happy podcasting!

I have just had the privilege of getting a copy of Talk Show Tips which provides 72 Secrets to being a great talk show host. The author is Susan Bratton, host of the #1 social media podcast Dishymix and CEO of Personal Life Media. Susan produces 40 different podcasts from TheDivaCast to Buddhist Geeks to Inside Out Weight Loss, so she knows a lot about hosting talk shows.

Susan has launched Talk Show Tips: 72 Secret ‘Master Host’ Techniques as a training system for anyone who hosts a podcast, vidcast, radio or talk show or for experts who create information products that include interviews as material.

In her new system, Talk Show Tips, she focuses on training you on everything you need to know to empower your audience (fans) to promote your show for you. She shows you how to consistently develop well-produced interviews so that your audience keeps on growing and increasing your chances for attracting excellent sponsors (if that is you want).

Even without focusing on getting sponsors, growing an engaged audience is the reward for the effort you put into producing your content. Susan’s Talk Show Tips provides a roadmap to make that happen quickly.

Susan has put together her best advice for establishing a show format and managing the flow of your show. Even expert radio show hosts and podcasters have complimented her on this thorough approach to shoring up their productions and making them more professional.
Talk Show Tips as a learning system, is chock-full of techniques that make perfect sense, the minute you hear them. Susan has a way of explaining things simply but with a lot of insight and detail. With her system, you can immediately integrate powerful new strategies into your show that include:

• Solidifying Your Show Format, Personas, Intros/Outros/Breaks
• Booking the Big Name Guest and Prepping Them for a Stellar Show
• Developing Great Questions No One Else Asks
• How To Do In-Show Bridges, Segues, Reframes, Power Pauses, Opens, Affirmations and Graceful Interruptions
• Managing Show Notes, Transcriptions, Editing, Contests, Google Mojo, Cross Promos, RSS and Free Widgets
• Using Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TweetLater Pro and Trackur to Promote Your Show
  Getting Featured in iTunes, SEO and Five-Star Reviews

Susan is even making ten of her best tricks and techniques available to everyone for free. Just go and sign up at TalkShowTips.com and she will send you the ten free tips.

As a bonus, Susan has written to posts for me sharing some of her expertise with show format and show flow. I hope you enjoy them.

And as a special bonus from me, Susan and I have created a special bonus audio download for you where she’s interviewing me about how to set a strategy and get started in commercial podcasting and new media publishing.

Check out the interview and go sign up for Talk Show Tips.

 

 Susan Bratton Interviews Alex Nesbitt [22:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Over at Friendfeed, in the Start Up Success Room, I came across a post by Zee that pointed out a really interesting blog post entitled “Learn How This Blogger Averages 100+ Comments Per Post And Did It In Under a Year“. Now this seemed quite interesting. Comments are a true sign of user engagement and inspiring comments is a true art.

The post is an interview with MizFit Online who’s a fitness blogger. Reading the post however did not get me too far, other than MizFit’s avid blog reading and commenting herself and a key phrase “commentversation” which tried to capture her approach. Even MizFit seems unsure of what drives the comments saying “If only I knew. It varies wildly.”

I wanted to know more and decided to do some real analysis on MizFit’s blog. It seems like a great blog. True to her personality. Quite personal. And it seems she’s got a strong following. She also has a theme/category of the day: Monday Faceday, Tuesday Trends, View Mail Food, Glorious Food and Link Love.

I started by looking at every post she made in November. I looked at the title of the post, the theme, the length of the post, text vs. video, the number of outbound links in the post and the number of links to other pages on the blog.

The only thing that seemed to matter was whether the blog post was part of a theme. Uncategorized posts did very poorly incomparison. Post length, other than extremely short posts, had no impact. Number of links had no impact either. Video performed as well as text.

I decided to dig in further. I took the last 10 posts for each theme and for uncategorized posts (note: I screened out the uncategorized posts that were very short announcements).

Here are the results of the analysis of the last 10 posts by theme/catagory:

The results are facinating, at least to me.  If you factor out contests, four of the themes average about 100 comments per post.  Food Glorious Food does a little less well averaging 89.6 comments per post, which may be due to a heavier reliance on guest posts in this theme.

The pattern I saw with the uncategorized posts held true.  These types of posts only averaged 48.4 comments per post.

Contests also play a big role in making the numbers fluctuate.  They seem to add about 45 extra comments to a post on average.  More when the contest was enticing and less when it was not so enticing.

I dug further into the best performing and worst performing non-contest posts to see if I could find some other qualitative reasons for the variances. Indeed there seemed to be more going on qualitatitively.

When I looked deeper at the strongest performing posts based upon comments, I saw that these posts tended to stand out for one or more of the following reasons: Challenges, very personal stories, strenuous exercise video, or lots of questions (3-5) to audience at the end of the post.

In contrast the poorest performing posts were missing these elements.  The poorest performing posts where guest posts without questions to the readers. These posts dropped to 66-79 comments.  Guest posts with questions did a little better running in the mid 80s.  MizFit’s poorest performers in themed posts tended not to have as much passion and had no questions for the audience.

My take aways if you want to generate comments:

• Be personal
• Be passionate
• Post questions not answers
• Set up themes by day and be consistent
• Make sure guest posters have lots of questions for readers
• Use small contests to motivate your commentors

So what do you think?  What kind of posts get people to comment?  Is it this list or some other factors?  Who else gets lots of comments and what do they do?

Comment away:)

Update with ideas from comments about what drives comments:

• commentversation
• taking the time to personally respond to comments

We joined Forrester Research for its 2008 Marketing Forum. This article is the third in our series from the forum focused on customer engagement in a digital media world.

In part 3 of Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement we take on the issue of how to design for engagement. Two presenters at the conference provided us with a couple of frameworks for how to design for engagement.

In the first session, Aaron Oppenheimer, from Continuum, introduced the concept of “resonance testing”. They figured out that clients were too often measuring the wrong thing at the wrong time. Aaron argues that the product that tells the story best wins. He says that what he calls resonance design defers the design decisions until we know what works. In a word, wait. Wait until you know what’s going to work.

He suggests the following process:

Find the story

• Figure out what the consumer needs to hear to make a connection

Try the story

• Model the system in different ways because the context is a large part of the emotional design

Test the story

• Find out what works

Tell the story

• Build the product

Aaron provided an example of resonance testing that was used for designing and marketing garbage disposer units. The question is why should someone spend more on the most expensive versus the cheapest one? Horsepower means nothing to consumers and warranties don’t work as customers think all the units will last for ever.

They identified two needs segments:

• quick, unobtrusive clean up;
• eats everything

They then gave potential customers pictures of designs and let them place the designs along a spectrum, where the spectrum was defined by cartoon images of people and the use case. The potential customers then placed the pictures closest to where they thought the product fit relative to the following statements: does a good job for the person who wants quick clean up, does better for the person that wants it to eat everything, does both.

They then identify what about the design signals meaning to customers? Specific attributes were identified and linked to what they mean. Size, texture, look etc all have meaning that can be used to tell different stories.

Once they understood the language of garbage disposal design attributes, they could then design products that would convey the story in the retail environment.

The same principles can be applied to just about any design process. Setting clear objectives up front, finding stories that work to convey those messages, testing the story before designing, finding the specific design elements that convey the story and then translating that into final design is a process we all can learn from.

In the second session, Ron Rogowski, a principal analyst at Forrester, spoke about how to create engaging online experiences. His focus was on how to make your site more engaging. He tells the story of his wife getting an ultrasound, they found a cyst, called a CCAM (congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation), in the babies lung during the ultrasound. The doctors gave them some information, but he quickly went to Google and searched for the term and found a special treatment center at UCSF.

The treatment center has a website with videos of doctors talking about the disease and the treatment procedures. Ron played one of the videos where the doctors speaking about fetal intervention. He says he got more out of 8 minutes on the site than he had from hours of research elsewhere.

Ron found the videos to be very engaging. The site had the three key elements of engagement built. The videos were useful, usable and desirable.

The online engagement imperative is based upon the expanded ability to do new things with your customers and differentiate from others.

Engagement is hard to define and measure. It can be very subjective. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was engaging about an experience. The means of engagement depend on the company and the audience.

With an engaging design, the focus is on what’s there, not on how to make sense of what’s there. There is an incentive to explore and there is a visual and operational appeal.

Functional elements of the site can be combined with branding efforts to create engaging experiences. Ron points to engaging examples that include Mini USA’s car configuration tool, Google Maps, Zillow.com. He points to Blue Nile’s build your own ring application which mimics what customers were doing with data to select rings as an engaging site. Nike is another site that’s engaging. The site allows you to set individual goals and make challenges to others.

Ron highlights Panasonic’s site that allows you check out how a TV will look in your own room by uploading pictures of your living room and then dragging a picture of different TVs onto the picture.

Discovery Channel’s EarthLive is another site with an engaging experience. They use a movable globe as a navigation tool for users to find content.

Humana One’s Plan Pointer application to help guide people to health plans based upon only questions. The application is useful, easy to use and provides a rich UI for the user.

The New York Times pop-art quiz as creating engaging experiences around their stories.

NetShop’s built an application Shop Together. It allows two people to shop together. One person can see what the other person is looking at. They can look at the same page and chat about the page.

Jeep has lots of content about off road driving and a Jeep community.

History.com has an interactive universe application that explains the planets.

How to create and measure these engaging experiences?

Ron’s framework of useful, usable and desirable is the guide for making engaging experiences.

Tools of engagement

• Useful: Design personas to uncover latent user needs through ethnographic research.
• Usable: Embrace a user centered design process that follows known usability practices and test for flaws.
• Desirable: Brand personas to allow your brand to shine through.

Ron’s Recommendations

• Uncover latent needs through ethnographic research
• Define interaction paradigms consistent with brand
• Engage agencies early in the process
• Conduct user and brand reviews before (and after) going live

Links to the rest of this series:

• Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement, Part 1
• Popping the Question: Getting to Engagement, Part 2

See more about the Forrester Marketing event at Digital Podcast and at Jeremiah Owyang’s blog.

[tags]design, engagement, marketing, Forrester[/tags]