CommTogether

DETAILED SUMMARY

In this episode, the speaker shares their fascination with radio and their experience in Talkback radio, which ultimately led them to start their own podcast. They discuss the value of storytelling and authenticity in podcasting, as well as the opportunity to engage with guests and their networks. The podcast has even led to a new branch of their business focused on helping others publish their own podcasts.

The speaker emphasises the importance of podcasting as a tool for businesses to establish credibility and differentiate themselves. They express gratitude to past guests for sharing their stories and promoting the podcast, and they extend an invitation to business leaders with stories to become future guests.

Throughout the episode, the speaker highlights the value of stories and authenticity in podcasting. They explain that AI cannot replicate the nuances and genuine experiences that come with storytelling, and that podcasting allows for a direct connection with the listener, making a positive impact on their perspective.

The speaker also discusses the holiday experience and how it provides clarity on why podcasting works. They explain that people on holidays are pre-engaged and ready to buy, making them receptive to podcast advertising. Podcasting allows people to get to know the host or brand before making a purchase decision.

Engaging local shop owners and creating a buying atmosphere is another topic explored in this episode. The speaker explains that local shop owners have compelling stories that capture the interest of tourists and lead to purchases. Podcasting can create a similar buying atmosphere by sharing stories and engaging with listeners, especially in challenging B2B situations.

The goal of podcasting, according to the speaker, is to provide something that listeners already want. They emphasise that the intention is not to convince listeners to start a podcast if it’s not right for their business, but rather to encourage further discussion if podcasting is on the listener’s radar.

The importance of podcasting for businesses is also discussed. The speaker explains that podcasting is a valuable tool for businesses to achieve their objectives and establish credibility. Stories are powerful and can influence purchasing decisions, and podcasting allows businesses to stand out with their distinctive voice and stories.

The speaker concludes the episode by expressing their appreciation for past guests and inviting business leaders with stories to become future guests. They reiterate the purpose of the podcast, which is to add value to guests and their clients by providing a platform to share stories and explore what drives business leaders. Listeners are encouraged to continue listening to future episodes, seek help with publishing their own podcasts if interested, and share the podcast episodes with their networks.

Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast!

FULL UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT

Well, hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of Biz Bites.

Now normally at this point what we would do is introduce a special guest for you and the topic that we’re going to discuss for the episode instead of having a special guest.

And just for this time alone, after a lot of people asking me about this question, I thought why not record a special episode with just me?

So forgive me for not having another voice alongside of this episode, but I hope you’ll find it interesting because it has been a topic of much interest And the topic is how did I get this started this podcast and how do you actually continue to make it a success for your business?

Well, let me tell you, it has been a long time in the making and whilst I don’t want to reflect on the full story because you did hear that in a previous episode, the reason I found myself in the podcasting space has a lot to do with where my career began.

Early on in the piece I had a very deep fascination with radio and worked in Talkback radio for some time.

Was lucky enough to work with some really big names at a time when the particular station was the number one station in not just in Sydney, but really in numbers terms around Australia.

And that was what was known as Radio 2 UEA Talkback station in those days.

Those things have changed dramatically in recent times, but it was the heyday of radio for in the last, I would say the last 30 years.

Maybe that’s I’m a little bit biased because it’s when I was there, but certainly some very big names that were working in and around me at the time.

Everyone from John Laws to Alan Jones, Stan Zemanek, Ray Hadley, you know at the time Mike Carlton was also there, and a number of other voices that you’d be familiar with.

I was lucky enough to work with John Kerr for many, many years and loved every minute of it.

And he is one of the all time radio greats and if you’re not familiar with John Kerr, you should definitely look him up.

But I really learnt a lot about building very large audiences at that time and I’ve carried that forward and have wanted for so long to start a podcast.

And really it was on reflecting back on previous years, what I’ve been doing in business to that found my justification for doing it.

I found that like many business leaders spending a lot of time networking with people, and sometimes those conversations lead to something wonderful.

You become a client of theirs, they become a client of yours, they refer you to someone else, you might form a partnership, you might join other networking with them.

There are any number of possibilities that happen with that.

But often those conversations are also sitting on the shelf for some time and are not don’t really go anywhere much.

And in truth, if you have a lot of those conversations throughout a year, you can many times think, now, who was it that I was actually talking to?

What was their story?

And I thought, why don’t I turn that into a podcast?

What it enables me to do is to listen to their stories, help them craft their stories and pull the stories out.

Because I think that’s one of the great things that I love doing and one of the techniques that I learnt over the years, particularly working in radio.

So that has been the reason why I’ve ended up here.

But I really wanted to fill you in in this episode.

Not just how it came to be, but really make you understand the value of what it is that we’re trying to achieve with the podcast series and what indeed it is to achieve with podcast series in general.

Because such has been the interest in the show and from the guests that I’ve had on the programme that it’s led me to now, I guess embarking on a new branch for the come together business, which is focusing on helping other people publish their podcasts.

And I believe we have a slightly different model to what most others do out there.

Because from what I’ve seen out in the space is there’s a lot of programmes teaching you how to do it yourself.

But of course doing it yourself because you can doesn’t mean you should.

And I think those of us that have been in business a long time know that.

You know, we all start off trying to do everything, but then we realise very quickly that there are people that we should be paying who cost us a lot less than what our own salary would be and do things much more efficiently and often better if we pay them to do it.

And this is no different.

The reason for doing a podcast is, well, there’s a multiple of reasons for doing a podcast, not the least of which it’s an opportunity to relay your experiences and your expertise to a grander audience.

But it is also an opportunity for you to engage in listening and in talking to into their networks.

That is the guest that you have on the program.

It’s an opportunity to really make people understand who you are authentically.

And authenticity is a word that we’ve been using for some time.

It’s one that’s become, I guess, a little bit more overused, if I should say that, in recent times.

But I think we use it in the right way because authenticity means it’s actually you.

And in an age where AI is dominating and things are crafted for you by copywriters, by AI starting things, or any number of other different ways that they’re achieved, it often isn’t the end person.

And that can even happen when the person is writing it themselves, because we’ve all done this where we’ve written an article, and does the article actually sound like the way we will talk and actually deliver something?

More often than not, it’s not the case.

And the more we edit it, the more likely it is that to drift away from the real person.

So here we are, freestyling and talking and that allows the podcast to really give you that genuine authenticity that your audience seeks.

Because at the end of the day, the reason why someone chooses to go to you is because of you.

And that may be an extension into your team, but at the end of the day it is just that.

It is what separates you from one another, from one business to the next is your genuine set of experiences and expertise.

And the stories that we tell are the reason why people want to engage with you over the next person.

So in our particular model that’s most in demand, it’s not the exclusive offer that we have, but the most in demand offer that we’ve found is, is that we’re hosting or I particularly am hosting the podcast for people an we’re creating a series out of that where we interview them.

They can bring guests along to the program if they want or in some cases we just interview guests on their behalf and they don’t even appear on the program.

O There’s lots of different options that happen, but I’m not here to talk to you specifically today about why you should have your own podcast.

I’m not here to deconstruct or reconstruct what that may or may not look like if you were to do that.

Rather, I wanted to talk to you about the journey that is engagement that’s happened as a result of all of the things that I’ve been doing.

It really got does come down to that whole idea of storytelling.

Now that is one of the things that AI is increasingly not able to do and makes you stand out.

See, the thing about AI is, is it can only utilise the information that is out there and unless you feed it your particular stories, which have to be nuanced.

Let’s face it, you tell the same story maybe 100 times, but you tell it probably 60 or 70 different ways depending on who the audience is.

And AI is not really equipped to a take in all of your story and B adjust to the nuances of the particular audience that you’re speaking to, and C, it can’t deliver it in an audio fashion that’s genuinely your voice.

At least we can’t do these things yet.

And I really hope that the authentic, authentic approach that is this kind of conversation will continue.

And I think that’s the other interesting part when we talk about audiences is that it’s really about one-on-one.

I’m talking to you right now.

You’re the person listening to this program.

I’m just talking to you.

And that is a big factor.

I’ve talked about in business for the longest time that what we want to do it as a business, our purpose really has to do with the desire to change the world.

And we believe that the best way to do that is one person at a time.

And it goes way back to my radio career when I remember that I would talk to all the listeners before they came on the program.

And if you had an opportunity to change someone’s perspective or approach to how they might go on air and what the conversation might look like, if you’ve made some kind of small impact in that way, then you know you’ve had a positive influence on the world.

And that’s the way we look at what podcasting is really about.

It’s about speaking to you.

And if there’s another, a new idea that you’ve learnt or a reason why you might want to engage with someone who’s either the host or the guest on a program or investigate what they’re doing a little bit further than the opportunity for you to learn to change your way of thinking is huge.

And those little impacts make the big difference that ultimately spin the world into a positive way.

So it is the value of stories though, that people remember.

Let’s face it, me sitting here and telling you how to do something is going to go in one ear and out the other.

It’s not about that.

It’s about sharing stories.

So that’s what I want to do in the light of continuing this conversation about why this all came about and why it continues was really, I guess came even clearer to me during a recent holiday.

And those that have followed me, particularly on Facebook, will know that I took a six week holiday.

And that in itself was a massive thing to do.

As anyone who’s been in business knows many years in the planning to be able to do it and lucky enough for my family to go away for six weeks and journey to different parts of the world.

And I’m not going to take you on a blow by blow account of the holiday itself.

Rather I wanted to tell you what the holiday experience gave me.

It was clarity about why this works.

You see, when you go on holidays, one of the things that you do is you go and visit local shops and invariably you get yourself into a conversation in some of those shops.

Now, you could be listening in on a conversation or you could be a part of the conversation, but it happens, right?

We’ve all been on holidays and seen that happen.

The other thing too that happens is when you go on holidays, you know you’re going to spend some money, right?

You know you’re going to go into a shop and you just know that the chances that you’re going to walk away buying something.

And for those of you who might be like me, you know, shopping with three women alongside of you, then the chances of buying something are reasonably large.

And it’s a really important thing to understand is that people are coming to you pre engaged, ready to buy again.

That’s what podcasts give you is people have had a chance to get to know you, they’re approaching you, and in their mind they’re already ready to buy.

The question is what?

And the big example of how that happens on a on a much more global corporate scale of, of course, is Apple.

They have an extraordinary ability where people walk into their stores knowing that they’re going to buy something and there is some extraordinary statistics and I don’t want to get them wrong, so I won’t pretend to deliver them all to you.

But I know that the incredible amount of sales that goes on through their Singapore store is a good example where there’s 10s of thousands of dollars made every day by each staff member because people walk into an Apple store like that and they want to buy.

Now how do you do that on a localised level?

Well, we don’t have an Apple size budget, most of us, let’s face it.

So we have to do it in different ways.

And podcasting is a perfect Ave.

to do that because it’s an opportunity for people to get to know you just by listening in, when they choose to, when they’re ready to, and about subjects that may interest them.

And I think that engagement is huge.

Hopefully by listening to my podcast you’ve got a sense of the stories that I tell along the way and continuing the the holiday theme.

You know, I did post about this a couple of times.

So those of you that have followed me on LinkedIn will know that I’ve posted a few times about some stories and some things that happened while I was on holidays.

And particularly was the stories that that I did hear from local shop owners.

Everything from 3rd, 4th generation shop owners to people who had, you know, opened a shop in an area because they just wanted to live in that area and found a reason why they wanted to do that and created this cottage industry, old fashioned cottage industry in some cases.

And you walk in there and you start seeing and hearing their story.

And of course they’re noted on on tourist guides and as places to go.

You can’t help but going in and you can’t help but buying when you’re there.

It captures that moment.

Now we don’t all have the luxury of working, not just in the tourist space, but in a space where people are like tourists walking in the door every day ready to buy something.

They’ve got their pockets full and if you have the right things on display and touch them with the right stories then they’re going to buy.

Now to create that particularly in AB to B situation for example is a lot tougher.

Again, this is where the podcast comes to its come to its fore in what we’re doing.

And I think the other thing, too, is that that’s a big thing for people to understand in the art of podcasting is you’re not trying to sell, you know, forgive me, in this episode, perhaps we’ve crossed that border a little bit, but certainly not the intention.

What I’m trying to do is provide you with something that you already want.

And I’m not trying to convince you to do a podcast, for example.

If you if it’s not on your list of things that you think are right for your business and it’s not something you want to do, then that’s perfectly fine.

But if, on the other hand, a podcast is on your radar, then let’s talk, because I can provide a service that’s going to make that happen for you.

I’m not trying to sell you the idea of doing a podcast.

I’m trying to provide a service that helps you achieve an objective that you’ve got and something you already want.

In other words, you’re coming in ready to buy again because you’ve had the opportunity to sit and listen to whether it’s this series of biz bites or whether it’s other podcasts that I’ve been involved with over the last number of years.

To understand a little bit more about me and whether I am the kind of person that you would like to deal with and make this happen, it establishes that credibility.

And as I said, it establishes the story and the expertise.

Stories are just so incredibly powerful.

We all think back to our holidays.

How many stories can we tell about holidays?

And how many stories ultimately also involve around us buying something, whether it’s, you know, food and drink, or whether it’s products or services for that matter.

Along the way we have these experiences and these stories, and often we’re buying because of the stories that we’ve heard before.

Let’s face it, you go on holidays and you might do a bit of research beforehand to work out what are the places that you should go.

Well, it’s because of the stories that people are telling that makes you want to go there.

And it’s more than just a testimonial.

Testimonials are great and they have their place, but it’s not the same as engaging with someone in a conversation.

And and again, that’s what happens.

We, we often go to places because we’ve heard other people telling stories about what’s happened and made us or enticed us into wanting to go there to wanting to purchase.

And I think that’s what this is all about.

So without wanting to make this a super long episode and I appreciate your staying with me and the company that we’ve kept in this, I just wanted to say that podcasting is a huge thing for your business.

There are millions and millions and millions of websites.

There are so many profiles on LinkedIn, but the number of podcasts is considerably smaller.

Growing, yes, but smaller.

So the ability to stand out and stand out with your distinctive voice and your stories is huge.

So it’s a journey I would thoroughly recommend you going on.

And Speaking of that, before we go, I just wanted to say a big thank you to the vast amount of guests that we’ve had on the program to date and the many that we’ve got planned coming up.

And I encourage you if you’re listening in and you’d like to be a guest on the program and you think you meet the criteria because if you’ve got a story to tell and you’re a business leader, we’d love to speak to you.

So do message me directly and let’s see whether we can get you on the program and have you as a guest in a future episode.

But a special shout out to all of the amazing guests that I’ve had so far.

I I want to thank you for your generosity in sharing your stories, but I also want to thank you and your generosity in sharing with your networks as well, because that’s what we’ve tried to do, is to create something that adds value to you and your clients as a guest.

We want you to be able to have something you’re proud of that will share with your audiences.

Be there your existing audience or future clients that you’re trying to get into because they get to hear a little bit about the story behind your story.

We hope to continue to take these episodes in different directions each time to allow you to hear a little bit about what makes some of these people tick.

What is it that really has driven these people to where they are?

I find the why and purpose of people in business just something that will never cease to fascinate me.

We are a product of those experiences and that’s make what makes us stand out and I love being able to share that with you.

And I hope that you’ll continue to stay with me and listen to more episodes of Biz Bites as we March through and take more guests on board.

And I hope that you’ll also be one to reach out if you want some help publishing your own podcasts.

In the meantime, I want to thank you so much for tuning into this special episode of Bizbytes as we get close to that fifty episode.

Mark, thank you again for listening in.

I hope you’ll keep listening and that you’ll share the link of these episodes with your networks as well.

We really appreciate your company.

Stay tuned soon for the next episode of Bizbytes.