Seven weeks already and I still haven’t finalised my podcast approach. I’ve got more ideas, but these need fleshing out. Fortunately, I can justify spending some time during work time for one of these, as I was recently given it as an objective for 2022, not the podcast, but the content that I can easily turn into a podcast. And no sooner have I written this, and another idea has materialised. Does everyone have these problems trying to pin down what their podcast is going to be about?

Apart from My Podcasting Journey I published one other post to the P2 community this week; My First Zoom Calls https://thediaryofadigitalnobody.wordpress.com/2022/02/14/my-first-zoom-calls/ . This was the first time I had listened to myself, perhaps it has happened previously on a training course, but that would have been a long time ago. It was a set of Zoom calls, one per day, all of which were unprepared, thereby giving me an insight to my natural voice. It is a good exercise for anyone to go through. The perception I have of myself in my speaking voice I know is not always how others perceive me, and I will need to listen to myself frequently to dispel the negative thoughts. 

Analysing your own voice will allow you to pick-up items to eliminate, or reduce in frequency in future recordings, not just the obvious umms and errs but mysterious thumps and squeaks, which I think is vibration from the keyboard through to the mic and leaning too far back in my chair. Preparation is the key to reducing editing time and this week I aim to secure a recording worth spending time editing, I do need to start the learning process on Descript and Audacity, the features, and the tricks.

This week we had Richard’s session “How to make a trailer for your podcast”, a great job Richard, and I hope it was recorded because your improvisation of my potential trailer, was, just incredible. A trailer is a must and can be used to get the various podcasting platforms to recognise you, particularly with iTunes and Apple. You might have a trailer for the podcast or a series, but one trailer for each episode seems unnecessary, an overhead that you can easily avoid. Music which is in tune with the theme behind your podcast, and does not obscure the narration, seems the right way to go, I think it will sound a lot more professional. The length of the trailer might be anything up to 4 minutes although 1.5 to 2 minutes seems optimal.

There are a set of questions you need to answer in the trailer, my answers are given beneath each question:

• What will the audience gain from spending their time listening?
  • They will learn something about Maximo they did not know.
• What are you trying to sell, what’s in it for me?
  • I am using the podcasts to attract listeners through to the related articles which provide the details they should learn.
• What is the podcast name and what does it mean?
  • Maximo Bite Size – Something to learn about Maximo in 10- or 15-minute pieces
• Who is the podcast aimed at?
  • Not the beginners, but implementers with 3-4 years’ experience, who ought to know about the functionality of Maximo before they customise it unnecessarily.
• Who would not listen to the podcast?
  • Anyone who would not have heard the terms Maximo, CMMS or EAM.
• What does your avatar look like?
  • A 30- to 60-year-old male growing increasingly fat on hotel-room burgers and curries. The ratio between male and female in my world is 80/20, it may be worse than this.

One of the things that Richard mentioned is to ask yourself how you can justify someone listening to you over anyone else who may be having a podcast in your subject area. One of the new ideas for my podcast is a series of episodes focused on one of the IBM certifications for Maximo. I was involved in the recent one released last November, I probably wrote about 50% of the questions in the end. I can probably reference that I was involved, and I can show the badges awarded, one being for IBM Certification Exam Developer. I’ve never bothered downloading these and adding them to my LinkedIn profile, I think I ought to do that.

But I have some news, a second justification on why someone should listen to me. I received an email this week from IBM to say that I will be an IBM Champion for 2022. “The IBM Champions program recognizes individuals who make extraordinary contributions to our IBM communities by advocating IBM solutions, offerings, and programs; sharing their knowledge and expertise; and helping nurture and grow the community.” As Maximo Secrets has grown, I’ve received more nominations and this year I was successful. This needs some perspective, in 2021 there were 751 IBM Champions worldwide, 35 in the area in which Maximo resides, which probably means around 8 who are involved in Maximo. 

And, as I am writing this, on Maximo Secrets, My Best Views Ever statistic of 1,375 on 22nd April 2020, nearly 2 years ago, has just been broken, and I have 3 hours to go before the high-water mark is reset. PS. New high to beat is now 1,460 and 6,231 for the weekly views high.

At the end of the week, I was now certain (again) about what my podcast would be about. Two podcasts in fact, ambitious perhaps, but both feel right and relatively short 8-10 minutes each. Both feel as if I will get something out of them, and both seem as if they will be fun to do, well the non-work one does at least, the work one is there to attract people to the Maximo Secrets site.

‘Maximo Bite Size’ will be episodes taking a user through the areas of Maximo that they need to understand to pass the IBM functional certification. I’ve listed the topics and it looks like 90-100 episodes. This will not be difficult to write, and I have detailed content for about 50% and can justify some work time creating the detail on the rest of it. I’ve written 75% of the first episode and it took about 1.5 hours, so a couple of hours per episode, perhaps 5-6 hours to do the recording, editing and publishing. I’ll also get faster at this, and if I can prepare the detail during work time, I might get it down to 4 hours per episode.

The fun one I’m thinking of calling ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’, it is a take on the George and Weedon Grossmith book called ‘The Diary of a Nobody’. Anyway, this is me indulging myself and writing a weekly diary so that at the end of the year I have a lot more that I can remember than I can recall currently. This will dovetail into my other blog which quickly ran out of steam last year that was going to be my digital scrapbook. I’ve written four of the seven weeks so far and I should be able to catch-up by the end of next week. I subjected my wife to listening to Week 6, the content she enjoyed, but I’ve work on the narration techniques, it was a few seconds under 8 minutes. Maintaining the script writing should be relatively easy, I’ll add a piece each evening as I am currently doing for My Podcasting Journey.

As I don’t expect anyone to listen to ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ I can use it to learn the skills of creating a podcast so that when I publish ‘Maximo Bite Size’ I know that I’ll be able to maintain it and I should be writing and broadcasting it efficiently. I feel, then, I have made great progress this week, the niggles and fog have now dispersed. The only disappointment was not getting a worthwhile recording from Zoom, the system I am using is being temperamental and it would just take too much editing.

So, what are the objectives for next week (week 8)?

• Complete the documentation for ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’ weeks 1 through 8 and answer, are they roughly all the same length?
• Do a trial record of Episode 1 for ‘The Diary of a Digital Nobody’.
• Complete the documentation of the first two episodes of ‘Maximo Bite Size’. 
• Capture a Zoom call worth editing, and use Descript for this.
• Revisit the objectives I set in week 4, now considering both podcasts.

A good week, I’m making progress at last.