Smart Podcast Marketing

Wired News: Women Warm the Podcast Bench: . . . "What she found at the conference was a world overwhelmed by male voices and male exhibitors. Malley said she didn't experience any other incidents she perceived as sexist, but she was nonetheless struck by the dearth of female faces. Just 15 percent of the 2,000 attendees were women, show organizer Tim Bourquin said."

Well, yuh. It comes as a surprise to the author that women weren't in tremendously high attendance at this thing? Of course the attendees were mostly male. Not having been there (too much other things to do in my life, probably like so many other women who are podcasting), I can't be certain, but I'm guessing a lot of the guys attending (as podcasters, rather than vendors) were in the age/lifestyle range that doesn't have a terrible amount of domestic responsibility (be they married/coupled/whatever) and have pretty disposable incomes. Podcasting is, for the time being, a fad, and until it proves itself on the open market, women are not that likely to jump on board.

And why is that? you might ask. Simple: Time, Money and ROI.

First: Women have less disposable income than men on average. Chalk this up to the fact that women earn something like 76 cents on every dollar men earn. We frankly don't have the money to spend on the latest new thing, unless there's a payoff that really truly adds value to our lives. Even if we did have the money, chances are we'd be spending it on things that civilize our lives, like items for home or health that contribute to our lives in tangible ways, versus things that make us go "zoom".

Second: When it comes to domestic responsibilities, women are often the ones who pick up the slack, taking care of kids and households. This means our attention is absorbed in taking care of things that need taking care of... outside ourselves... rather than exploring the latest and greatest way to express what's inside ourselves. And the idea of having hours of uninterrupted time to record and produce and publish podcasts, is a luxury for most women I know.

Third: It's gotta grow corn. Getting back to point 1, there has to be some payoff, some Return On Investment for the time and effort (and money) we put into podcasting, for it to be worthwhile. Right now, the dominant paradigm is "ego-casting", or audioblogging the details of your life to the world. Doing this offers little to no tangible result for most women, unless they're exhibitionists, and even the ones who aren't exhibitionists sometimes find themselves "stalked" by listeners (or think they might be). Let's face it, women who "put themselves out there" still face a lot of hurdles... not that that's going to stop me -- or that it should stop any other women from podcasting. Far from it! But it is something to keep in mind. But stalking aside, the simple fact is that podcasting doesn't yet offer really tangible results, the way it's being presented to the world. More on the evolving paradigm in a later post...

Anyway, back to the article...

Maybe only 15% of the attendees at the Portable Media Expo were women, but how many other women are podcasting/building podcasting platforms like Podtopia.net who just didn't have the time to truck out to Ontario for the weekend? I got a personal invite from Tim Bourquin, back in September, but I just had so much to do and I didn't have the money, so I had to take a pass. I'm not the kind of person who has a lot of money to spare on new things that haven't been proven, so when it comes to women holding back from the bleeding edge, well, I fit the bill pretty well.

I have to say, all financial and time constraints aside, that podcasting seems one of the most "woman friendly" media to come along in a long time. Of all media, podcasting seems the most likely to "segue" well with women and women's lives. It gives us unparallelled ability to select the audio we want to listen to, when we want to listen to it, and given that women's lives are (stereotypically, perhaps) a lot more varied and fragmented than men's lives (stereotypically, perhaps) are, in the course of the day, that flexibility can make podcasting extremely attractive to female listeners... and ultimately for female podcasters, as well.

There were some good points in the article in Wired, and it was interesting to hear about the expo from that point of view, but if we could go a little lighter on the battle-of-the-sexes rhetoric, that would be a plus. A lot of guys don't even realize what they're doing, or how it affects people, and calling them out for it, just makes everyone more reluctant to deal with each other.