Audience
I’ve been thinking a lot about audience – Who are they going to be? What are they going to want out of The Green Tunnel podcast? What kinds of expectations are they going to have? What kind of storytelling can we use to engage them? How can we sustain their attention? Mills and Abby created four personas to capture the diverse community of hikers on the Appalachian Trail. These personas vary from younger hikers looking for adventure or trying to find themselves, to older hikers looking for small doses of adventure, to casual hikers looking for a one-day adventure.
My episode is all about ruins and ghost towns along the trail, so I’m thinking/hoping that the content will interest a wide audience because it’s very human-centered. My goal is to provide vignettes of real people with real lives on the trail before it became the commercialized Appalachian Trail that we know today.
Storytelling
Unlike a digital exhibit, a podcast doesn’t necessarily have visual aids to help tell a story, but rather good old fashioned storytelling with words that bring you in and don’t let go until the end. While we may not be able to show a listener a photograph, we can still describe it and bring it to life in a podcast (think of old radio shows – those hosts knew how to tell a good story!).
I mentioned in my last post that we’ve talked a lot about music, which, in a podcast, can almost become its own character, helping shape the listener’s experience. I’ve been listening to a variety of history podcasts to get a feel for how different hosts handle music in their episodes. Because my episode has a supernatural component – for example, there are hikers who’ve seen Ottie Cline Powell, a 4-year-old who froze to death after wandering off too far from his classmates in 1890 – I want to have ethereal music playing under some of the stories, kind of like this.
So music is definitely a part of bringing a story to life, but then there’s the actual people you’re interviewing. Not all interviewees are the same, and not everyone knows how to tell a story. That doesn’t mean that you should only talk to people who are good storytellers, but rather find the right person that brings both knowledge and audio presence to your episode. Right now, I have a list of about a dozen people that I’m hoping to contact for interviews – it’s a good mix of writers/bloggers, hikers, and historians.
Social Media
Creating a podcast is one thing. Marketing a podcast is another, which is where social media comes into play. AT hikers primarily use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, so we’re going to focus our social media strategies on these three platforms.
Blogging can be kind of hit or miss nowadays, but in the AT community, WhiteBlaze.net is still a very popular discussion platform for hikers, so we’re planning to post to threads on these discussion boards, too.
