As the new media age immerses us across a multi-media online experience, marketing has almost completely re-emerged, evolving successfully through the virtual tools at its disposal. None has been more effective in marketing success than the art of podcasting to promote and brand your name in an ever-growing marketplace.
The future direction of podcasting was summed up in a recent interview I did with Scott Paton, a podcaster at Internet Marketing Unleashed for my upcoming product New New Media World where he talked about a divorce between PC’s and the Internet – meaning we now longer need a PC to access the net with our mp3 players, iphones and other PDA devices.
While it is important to integrate new technology to keep your business ahead of the competition, it is necessary to understand how your business will be affected by technology such as the podcasting phenomenon and equally important to ensure that your business is ready to join the podcasting marketing revolution.
Podcasting 
is an extremely powerful business solution enabling businesses to harness the new technologies now coming to the fore – interfaces such as TiVo and DVR. Today’s society is ripe for immediate information at exactly the time they want to access it and mobile devices such as the new generations of cell phones, ipods, MP3 players and the portable games’ players which disseminate an unending supply of global information and which businesses have been very quick to take advantage of.
Marketers are benefiting greatly from providing this emerging market with instant communication and information data, with big name companies such as the Disney Corporation, American Airlines, McDonald’s already onboard, amongst a rapidly growing influx within the business sectors.
Popular though podcasting undoubtedly is – what exactly is a podcast? Without making it seem more complicated than necessary, it is basically an audio programme which can be downloaded from the internet and listened to at a person’s leisure, that is, when they have time to listen – a discipline now known as time-shifting. A podcast can be listened to on many hand-held devices such as an MP3 player, or many of the newer generation cell phones. The website from which a podcast can be downloaded is known generically as an RSS reader, or an aggregator.
These websites are enabled to capture a diversity of media types. There are many aggregators around, most notably Newsgator, Bloglines, and Google Reader. Software can now be embedded into webpages which make it easier for you to access podcasts – all you have to do is visit the relevant page, and click on the icon which represents the music. This software, known as an audio helper application, enables you to play the audio podcast straight from the webpage. One of the webpages where this can be seen in action is WordPress.
New New Media World launches Feb 17th and gives you the complete guide to podcasting, video, social media, micro media marketing.
