I walk. A lot. I have two dogs who wouldn’t have it any other way.
The hours spent on the end of a leash give me ample time to check out a variety of audio content via my mp3 player. Sometimes it’s radio, sometimes it’s music of my own choosing, and more often than not, it’s a podcast.
In my ears tonight was a recording from the 2008 Blogworld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas. The speaker was Joel Witt from the Maryland Zoo. He and a few other zoo employees roam the grounds of the zoo each week and find interesting stories for a video podcast series called Maryland Zoo TV. It’s another great example of an organization whose primary product is not media taking a DIY approach to the creation of compelling content.
While the zoo doesn’t see a profit from the podcasts directly, they have seen a spike in attendance despite an overall reduction in marketing spending. You can call it guerilla (or gorilla in this case) marketing, education, entertainment, or even hyper-local community journalism, but what Maryland Zoo TV is doing could be applied to many diverse organizations who want to share their stories without needing a huge ad budget.
As I walked in the 8-degree-below-zero temps of northwest Minnesota tonight, bundled like Ralphie in The Christmas Story, Joel’s zoo stories got me thinking about my previous job as a reporter/producer/show host for a TV station based in a central Florida retirement community almost a decade ago.
WVLG Radio The Villages, FL
At the Villages News Network in 2000, we were doing the kind of hyper-local, hyper-focused content creation that would make for a fantastic video podcast. Problem was, no one had ever heard of the word podcast in 2000. Our work was created for a cable TV channel. If you weren’t already a cable subscriber in The Villages or the surrounding counties, you couldn’t see Around The Villages. But the stories we told (in Faux TV-news style) would have been a great sales tool for homes in the retirement community if there would have been an easy, free way to distribute them worldwide as there is today through iTunes and other podcast aggregators.
Our staff of mostly rookie reporters covered every aspect of retirement life in the The Villages. It’s incredible how creative story telling can bring even seemingly mundane community events (Mahjong tournaments come to mind. Never covered one. Still don’t know what it is. Still think it’s funny.) to life.
We covered the opening of every new store and restaurant. We did feature stories on World War II heroes. We interviewed singers and other performers who came to town (I got to sit in Whisperin’ Bill Anderson’s bus and hang out with Melanie of “Brand New Key” fame). We did features on singing grocery baggers. We covered big events like the visit of Vice President Cheney.
Those of us telling the stories came from diverse backgrounds. Some of us were in our first TV jobs after graduating with journalism or mass comm degrees. We helped the others who didn’t have previous experience in video storytelling: retirees, high school students, and moms who unexpectedly found new careers at The Villages News Network.
Our employer’s main product was newly-constructed homes, not media. Nonetheless, we told the community’s stories for 30 minutes each day.
How will you tell yours?
Cameras are cheap.
Everyone has a story to tell.
There’s someone out there googling your small business, non-profit, college, town, product or service right now.
Give them a story.
NCTC New Media Blog 