As I discussed back in The Café POV, your listeners are your greatest asset, so you should always look for ways to get their voice on your podcast. People love discovering a new platform for their opinions. As a fancaster, you’re positioned to offer a platform to diverse voices from all over the world. Giving your listeners a voice elevates your podcast in ways you won’t expect. If you provide them with ample opportunities, their talent, insight, and sense of humor will surprise and delight you.
Your listeners offer a fresh perspective on your topic. Sometimes, they just look at things in a different way than you do. Oftentimes, you’ll have subject matter experts in your audience for all kinds of topics. I had astrophysicists, fast food workers, psychologists, robotics scientists, librarians, and a bevy of other knowledgeable people in my audience who taught me about topics I’d never researched before. You’ll also prove to the rest of your listeners that participating in the community is the best way to get on the podcast. Many of our listeners became fan-favorites, like Bobby Hawke.
“Bobby’s Always Here”
Bobby Hawke called in with a Once Upon A Time theory as “Robert From Bradenton” a few months after we started the show in 2013. We loved Bobby’s voicemails so much we gave him “pride of place” in our Feedback section. For the majority of the 500+ podcast episodes we produced, Bobby’s voicemail was the first voicemail we played.
Bobby quickly became one of our most prolific contributors, there in the chat room for every live stream, sending in a voicemail ten minutes before we went live, and creating unique content we never asked for and always loved.
Bobby Hawke joins us for our panel at Tampa Bay Comicon in August 2016.
We got along with Bobby so well, we eventually handed him the reins to our first podcast, Greetings From Storybrooke, after we stepped away for reasons I’ll discuss later. He even appeared with us at a live Legends of Gotham panel in Tampa Bay, near Bradenton. Bobby was always there with support and encouragement. His presence made our podcasts better. When we’d set up to go live, we’d invariably open the chat room and have this exchange:
Bill: Well, Bobby’s here.
Anne Marie: Bobby’s always here.
Bobby chatting during a “Greetings From Storybrooke” live stream.
Bobby’s always here, and I hope he always will be. I don’t get to talk to Bobby as often as I’d like these days, but we’re still tight. Our kids have met. I know that, whenever I’m hatching my next creative project, I can always depend on Bobby to participate, or at least cheer me on. I can count on Bobby Hawke.
“There’s no end to the different ways it’s fun to connect with people on the internet. All you gotta do is put in the effort, and there is this great reward.” Justin Robert Young, Host – Who’s The Boss?
We had a lot of “Bobbys”: Hope Mullinax and Wynn Mercere and Dawn Owar and Other Annemarie and Debbie Deb Deb Deb and Dave from Michigan and Michael Lucero and Angel and Tony and Monica and Amy P. and Bud Vanderkay and Josh Phelps and Liz and Woo and Nicole and Niko and Lady Jae and Peter Price and so many others whose names escape me at the moment. These people felt like friends because these people are my friends. By having them appear on our podcasts, we started a two-way conversation that’s still ongoing, long after we quit fancasting.
“Magic Juice” by Nicole Troyer, mailed to us to celebrate the 100th episode of Greetings From Storybrooke.
Sure, monetizing your podcast is important. You should want good numbers, as you define them. Using your podcast to refine your craft is great too. But my greatest accomplishment in podcasting was the community we built, the “Bobbys” who all banded together to cheer us on as we stumbled and fumbled our way through getting good. I’m glad we were able to give these people’s whacked-out theories and brilliant insights a platform. We also had the privilege of introducing these people to each other. Some of our community members have teamed up on their own projects, or meet up at conventions, or chat back and forth on Twitter about whatever they’re obsessed with now. Whenever I see these echos of our community as I mindlessly scroll on my phone, it makes all the time and energy we put into these podcasts feel like it was worth it.
I hope your podcast finds a Bobby.
Using Listeners As Guests
Finding Your Bobbys
It isn’t hard to find your Bobbys. You might have listeners whose names you know, the ones who banter with you in the chat during your stream or call in with a voicemail every week. Start by reaching out to these people, if you have them. Do it on a personal basis, either through e-mail or a direct message, so your other listeners don’t accuse you of playing favorites.
You kind of are, though.
“In my experience with large and small audiences, 80% will never tell you anything. That doesn’t mean they don’t love you! It’s just podcast feedback is not on their to-do list. I stumble across listeners that are like ‘Oh, Kevin. Love the show. Never call in, never send an e-mail, but keep doing it.’” Kevin Bachelder, Host – Tuning Into SciFi TV
If you don’t know any Bobbys, don’t get discouraged. Consider how many pieces of content you consume in a year, podcasts included. Let’s say it’s 300 pieces of content. How many of those creators did you interact with online? 1? 10? 25? Whatever your number, it’s a tiny percentage, and you loved a lot of the other content just as much, if not more, than the content you interacted with online. You have a lot of listeners in the shadows, drinking up your content. Why not shine a flashlight and see who’s out there?
“Try to find the easiest way that your audience can communicate with you. Pay attention to where anybody is interacting with you, go there, and ask direct questions.” Justin Robert Young, Host – Who’s The Boss?
Book guests by asking for volunteers on your podcast at the top of your Listener Feedback segment, since the same people who enjoy sending in feedback would love to give you their feedback live. Offer a link to a form they can fill in. Ask for their availability and audio set-up. Sites like Google Forms put the responses into a spreadsheet you can work from when you need to schedule a guest. When we did a spin-off podcast about Once Upon A Time In Wonderland, we decided to have a new listener join us every week. We asked for volunteers to fill out the form at the end of episodes of Greetings From Storybrooke, then I’d work from the spreadsheet to schedule guests for Greetings From Wonderland, striking out names as we had people on.
Our first live stream, a “Once Upon A Time In Wonderland” wrap-up discussion.
Put out the call on social media, but be warned that some of the people responding might not even listen to your podcast. A lot of fans follow anything, including fancasts, related to a property they love as a matter of course, and might not pay attention to your actual podcast. If one of these people responds, you can still invite them on as a guest. Worst case scenario, you’ll keep the ball in the air through an awkward interview. In the best case scenario, you’ll convert your guest into a regular listener. You’ll also hear a fresh perspective from somebody outside your community.
Managing Guests
When you have a listener on as a guest, all my points about radical agreement with your co-host still apply. In fact, it’s even more important to have a “yes, and” attitude with a guest, particularly one who is already a big fan of your podcast. Remember, your guest is a stand-in for every listener, since every listener will imagine what they would do if they were on your podcast. If you don’t get along, your listeners might take it personally, and they’ll stop contributing to your podcast. After all, if you could hang up on “Bobby,” you might hang up on them.
On the technical side, always do a test call with your guest to make sure their set up will work for your show. At the bare minimum, you need to be able to hear them without a ton of background noise. If you can, record the listener’s audio on a separate track from your audio, so you can clean it up in the editing process. You should also consider making a backup recording, which we’ll cover more in the chapter on Engaging The Cast And Crew.
Sometimes, due to no fault of their own, a beloved community member will be a dud of a guest. Sometimes they’ll even get confrontational. Apply the Café POV philosophy, and the skills I taught you about keeping the ball in the air, to make sure you come out the other side with a podcast that still entertains your listeners.
Remember, this is your show, and sometimes you might have to make a hard decision to save it. We never had an invited guest cause a scene, but we’ve had issues opening up Skype to take calls on the live stream. We’ve had trolls threaten other people in the chat, use derogatory terms, and personally insult the hosts.
I believe most trolls are fans who haven’t realized that they’re fans yet, and you’ll learn ways to convert them into your most devoted listeners in the next chapter. On occasion, you’ll have to make a hard choice and pull the plug on a guest. When you do, apologize to your listeners, then explain why you did it in plain terms, even if the reason seems obvious. The few times I’ve booted a caller, I felt just awful about it, but there’s degrees between providing a platform for listeners and letting them burn it to the ground. If you’re transparent when explaining your side to your listeners, they’ll understand and support you. Try to sweep it under the rug, and you risk fracturing the community you’ve spent so much time building.
Inventing New Ways To Get Listeners Involved
You can involve listeners in your show without having them as a guest on a normal episode. Season-based episodic television in particular gives you plenty of breaks in your schedule to publish experimental content and get your listeners involved. The opportunities available to you rely on your podcast’s format, but I have a few ideas that helped us keep the community (and the podcast) going in the off-season.
Season Break Hangouts
We got in the habit of inviting listeners, as well as other podcasters in our niche, on before and after every season. We’d also do it during a show’s winter break to discuss the half-season. We used Google Hangouts on Air via YouTube to stream these Hangouts live to our YouTube channel, which has a lot of great features for streaming podcasts like automatic audio normalizing and scene switching. Hangouts are easy for most people to set up, and your guests can join via their phone or computer. The quality is “just okay,” but it’s consistently “just okay.” You might notice some drops and buffering while you’re recording, but you usually won’t see them in the final video.
“Teaming up with other podcasts is a great way to fill that ‘dead space’ and build the community around your show.” Darrell Darnell, Co-Founder – Golden Spiral Media
Our second Podcaster Roundtable for Legends of Gotham, streamed the week before Gotham came back after winter break.
“We’ve always been friends with other (Firefly podcasts). We’re all just one big community. Some will be more content-based, some will be more news-based. But we all get along.” Les Howard, Host – The Signal
Limit your guest list to no more than four people other than you and your co-hosts. The more people on your live stream, the less likely you’ll be able to keep everybody focused on the topic at hand. It’s easy for the conversation to go off on wild tangents that will make everybody feel lost. To guard against this, prep your guests ahead of time with a simple system to keep everybody on-task and organized. Be the ringleader. For the most part, your guests will sit back and let you run the show, calling on them and leading the conversation. Most teleconferencing tools have a private chat feature. Suggest your guests “raise their hand” in the chat so you know to call on them.
For the actual discussion, we’d break the Show Doc out into categories like Favorite Moment, Favorite Character, and Biggest Unanswered Question. We’d also discuss key moments in the season (or the season so far). Since you’ll have more voices, you don’t need to do as much prep work for panel discussions. People have been listening to what you and your co-hosts think about the show all season. Just sit back, make sure the chaos remains somewhat organized, and let your guests shine.
“My co-host, Morgan, is quick on her feet and hilariously witty, so when her comments on the bizarre fashion choices Lena Luthor made us laugh, we turned that into a segment called ‘Lena Luthor: Boardroom or Ballroom,’ where we lovingly analyze the outfits that Lena Luthor has worn. I recognize that this aspect of the podcast is Morgan’s idea and that listeners have embraced it because of Morgan’s sense of humor, so I don’t mind taking a backseat. Listeners love it so much that they request it before we even have a chance to record!” Rebecca Johnson, Host – Supergirl Radio
Hypothetical Fan Fiction
One year, Once Upon A Time had a particularly long winter break. We’d just started live streaming our podcasts a few months earlier, and were worried about taking a couple months off and losing people. Hope Mullinax, one of our most engaged listeners, suggested a fun idea: What if we did a series of specials where we examined key moments in Once’s mythology, and considered how the show would have gone if those moments had played out differently?
Our first Once If…? special, inspired by Hope’s suggestion.
We called the series Once If…?, and it produced some of the most fun, electric, and creative interactions we ever had on the show. This format let everybody show off their strengths, including their encyclopedic knowledge of Once and their hot takes on where the show had gone wrong. Discussions often got heated, with many firmly-held opinions butting up against one another, but since everybody knew each other from the chat room, and it was all hypothetical anyway, we all walked away laughing.
Rally The Troops
When inspiration strikes, make a specific request for feedback from your listeners. The first time we did this, we started a ‘shipping war’ on Greetings From Storybrooke.
During the course of one podcast, it came out that I loved the relationship between Emma Swan and Captain Hook, while Anne Marie preferred Emma’s relationship with Rumpelstiltskin’s son Baelfire. I knew, from browsing online forums and social media, that this was a key disagreement between fans of Once. We leaned into it, asking listeners to weigh in on social media using the hashtags #TeamBill and #TeamAnneMarie.
One of many tweets in support of #TeamAnneMarie.
Our listeners responded in kind, allowing us to devote a big part of our next Feedback episode to the brewing “controversy.” It was a safe way for our viewers to vent their ‘shipping frustrations, and became a running joke our listeners brought back often through the years. Near the end, we’d still get e-mails signed #TeamAnneMarie. Never #TeamBill.
Related Media Reviews
Rebecca Johnson and @HolyBatPastor join us to discuss Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Include listeners when you discuss media tangentially related to the content you cover. When we reviewed Batman v Superman on Legends of Gotham, for example, I knew we had to get Supergirl Radio host Rebecca Johnson and Batman bat fan Holy Bat Pastor from our chat room to join in on the proceedings. We all liked the film, but don’t hold that against us too much, or else we’ll say your mom’s name at just the right moment and blow your Bat-mind.
If you find people you work well with, consider bringing them back on a semi-regular basis. If you find yourself without a co-host, you’ll have somebody ready to jump in and help you out.
Expert Interviews
As you get to know your listeners, you’ll learn more about their particular passions. Sometimes, you’ll discover synergy between their expertise and the content you’re covering. If the creators announce their upcoming season will be inspired by the classic story Beowolf, bring that English Lit professor who wrote you a few months back on to discuss the original story, and how it might fit into the upcoming season. Maybe you have a Mr. Robot podcast, and somebody in your chat room specializes in dissociative identity disorder, hacking, or black hoodies. Have them on to talk about the show from an insider’s perspective.
“A listener wrote in with a comment on Kara Zor-El’s status as a refugee, something the Supergirl show itself asserts in its opening narration. (We) put it out to the listeners that if any of them had thoughts on whether it was the correct use of the term ‘refugee.’ A few days later, we received two different emails from listeners who had 20 and 30 years in law, respectively, some of which involved constitutional law and working in Washington, D.C. Because their feedback was so scholarly and amazing, we invited both of these loyal listeners/legal experts onto the podcast for a special episode on Kara Zor-El’s refugee status. And now, anytime we have a legal question brought up by a storytelling choice, we get our ‘Supergirl Radio Legal Consultants’ on the case.” Rebecca Johnson, Host – Supergirl Radio
If none of these ideas fit your podcast, come up with some that do, or let your listeners do it for you. Like I said, the Once If…? idea wasn’t ours. Hope came up with it, then we made it happen for her. If your community isn’t volunteering suggestions, ask them. I guarantee you there are listeners out there just waiting for you to give them a voice on your podcast.