In early January of this year, the tech giant Apple launched a catalog of over 25 audiobooks completely narrated by artificial intelligence. If you’ve written a book or have a podcast, this is some industry shaking news. AI is predicted to play huge roles in audio industries this year, and it shows no signs of slowing down. What does this mean for thought leaders? Is a robot coming to replace you?
Well, no. If anything, this is an opportunity to further use your authentic voice as an essential part of your brand.
First, let’s get one thing straight: the need for a human voice is not going away. AI audio is a great cheap option, but humans crave more depth than what it has to offer. AI cannot accurately add breathing into audio at this time, which is key for how humans listen and interpret the credibility of a narrator, as well as the emotional content. Inflection, modulation, sarcasm, and much more are all beyond the current technology’s capability.
Even more, AI audio runs the risk of dipping into the “uncanny valley,” a psychological phenomenon where people feel uneasy around things that appear similar to, but not quite human.
Our voices are invaluable resources, and the data shows this. Podcasts and audiobooks continue to grow at unprecedented rates. Take a look at the growth:
The podcasts and audiobooks that an ever growing audience are seeking out feature authentic human voices. Our unique speaking styles as thought leaders are something that AI can never replace. In fact, doubling down on our uniqueness by utilizing our voices as an essential part of our brands is a smart growth and marketing strategy that we can explore further in conversation together.
However, this isn’t to say that all AI is bad, or that it has no place in the audio industry. In fact, the judicious use of AI saves us on our precious resources of focus and time. Thought leaders and content creators can use up and coming technology to further their message. Take a look at some software you should keep your eye on this year:
As mentioned above, there’s no stopping artificial intelligence. And while the world is safe from a robot audiobook narrator apocalypse (for now), you can rest easy knowing that your authentic voice is your biggest asset. AI can only help you save time and broaden your reach this year.
Inspired to turn your Voice into influence and become a Thought Leader worth listening to?
No one wants to work for an organization that doesn’t invest in their employees. We’re seeing proof of this with “The Great Resignation” that’s been happening throughout the US. According to Gartner, a Global corporate research company, lack of career development is a leading cause of employee attrition, with 40 percent of workers stating it as a key factor in their decision to leave.
Richard Branson said, “Train people well enough so that they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”Training like this is challenging when your staff is handling multiple priorities and craving innovative, tech-savvy options. However, it’s worth it because organizations that offer better training solutions see improvement in employee innovation, productivity, and retention.
So, if companies know they’ll get better results, why do so many organizations struggle with having quality training programs? The truth is that it can be difficult to convey the wealth of knowledge your senior leadership has obtained over their years of experience. Another harsh reality companies face is how to access the information their employees consume when they’re sent to workshops and seminars. Having an efficient way to disseminate the information they learned may be hard to deliver all at once. And, what about the times employees don’t seem to retain the information or a way to easily reference back to it?
You’re in good company if you can relate to these issues. Training programs can be costly and time-consuming to deliver company-wide, but they don’t have to be. The fastest-growing segment in Human Resource spending is employee learning systems and the adoption of new tools and technology. Businesses across the globe are learning new ways to improve their employee’s continuous learning, including the use of internal podcasting for onboarding and training.
Why Internal Podcasting?
Benefits to using internal podcasts to improve your learning management system (LMS) include:
Podcasting democratizes mentorship.
Senior leadership can bring their experience and wisdom to the entire organization or individual departments (customized topics) so their time and energy are maximized while reducing the perception of favoritism.
According to a CNBC study, workers at practically every level are significantly less likely to quit if they have a mentor, and 90 percent of employees reported being happy in their job when they are being mentored.
Studies also show that when a company uses a mentorship program, they experience a 50 percent higher retention rate and 93 percent of employees believe their mentoring relationship was helpful.
68 percent of millennials who stay at their organization for 5 or more years have a mentor, compared to just 32 percent of those without a mentor.
Using podcasts for senior leaders to mentor “one to many” will eliminate most of the typical challenges mentor programs entail, including any perceptions of favoritism, coordinating and managing the process, identifying and developing qualified mentors, matching mentor to mentee, time constraints, and high costs.
Podcasting repurposes long workshops into bite-sized evergreen content.
Training programs that your company has invested in, such as workshops, can be turned into podcast episodes. This repurposes content into evergreen learning that is bite-sized and highly accessible via their LMS and/or secure podcasting apps.
Hiring trainers and consultants is an investment that can be fleeting. There is a lost opportunity to make the most of training that you’ve invested in by having these recorded and then transformed into accessible modules and podcast episodes to help with implementation and understanding of the material.
Finding extra time for employees to complete training can be challenging. Listeners stay engaged with short yet entertaining podcasts anywhere, anytime. Bite-sized information is more likely to be retained, so what better way for your employees to learn and develop than through podcasts.
Employees can go back and listen to podcasts as many times as they need for the information to sink in. Repetition is key to memorizing or understanding information and modifying or changing behavior.
3. Highly accessible
Internal podcasts are easy to consume and as accessible as music. Audio is available when team members can’t watch or read content, allowing learning to happen anywhere.
87% of people who listen to podcasts enjoy them because they can listen while doing other things. The top activities for listeners are exercising, driving/commuting, and doing housework.
4. Accommodates kinesthetic learning and reduces screen fatigue.
The average adult spends 11 hours per day of screen time, whether that is a computer, phone, tablet, TV, or other electronic device. “While this problem is more pervasive in office-based jobs, it does involve those who don’t work on computers as well, since many go home and spend hours on their phones and TVs after work,” says Vivian Tran, MD, internal medicine physician at Scripps Clinic Mission Valley.Excessive screen time causes a variety ofnegative health impacts, while podcasting gives your eyes a break.
Not only employees with an auditory learning style benefit from podcasts. Kinesthetic and visual-kinesthetic learners benefit as well. These types of learners tend to be less accommodated in many companies, given the sedentary nature of office environments and the long-held belief that most people are visual learners. However, more recent studies find that multimodal learning is more common in today’s workforce. Employees can listen on a lunch break workout, walking to another wing of the building, during their commute, or better yet while performing the task they’re listening about so they can learn while doing.
5. Provides a more personal approach than eLearning courses.
When employees are given the opportunity to learn more about their leadership team, more relatability and respect can be fostered. These connections help companies retain their employees, making your investment in them so much more rewarding.
Internal podcasts provide a more personal approach and increase retention of training materials when delivered with a storytelling style. The content can provide relatable stories, interactions, personal advice, and Q&As to enhance training.
6. Podcasts are perfect for employee onboarding.
Podcasts for onboarding introduce new employees to the mission, vision, values, and goals of the company. They also help communicate culture and DEI, get to know who’s who on a more personal level, and create a sense of belonging. “Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%” (The True Cost of a Bad Hire, Glassdoor).
Podcasts give new employees information that will help them be successful, including what is expected of them in their particular role. New employees and employees switching roles will feel more confident about their performance. It will also be easier for those transferring departments to develop new skills, learn new strategies or understand new SOPs.
For example, VMware, a virtualization company, implemented an innovative approach to overcome the challenges of training busy people. They implemented single sign on (SSO) and assigned training credits for each employee as they listened to each training podcast.
The quality of your employee training and ongoing learning opportunities are crucial to the lifeblood of your business in today’s competitive talent market. Your company can utilize internal podcasting to create training and development solutions that will solve its training and development woes and improve employee engagement. To learn more and book a time to explore how internal podcasting can foster more productivity, loyalty, and innovation on your teams, please Contact Us today.
Employee engagement can feel like a never-ending uphill battle. Companies never accomplish great things if their talent just shows up to collect a paycheck, but how do you ensure your employees feel connected to your organization, stay long term, and encourage others to do the same?
Internal podcasting is a powerful tool to cultivate a culture of employee engagement. Internal podcasts are usually produced with the help of a production company to privately reach their internal audience of employees and stakeholders.
It's no secret why using internal podcasting to improve employee engagement is catching on. Compared to other forms of media, podcasts are easy and inexpensive to produce — and their popularity speaks for itself. A whopping one-third of Americans listen to podcasts regularly, according to Buzzsprout.
Podcast listeners crave new and edifying content to listen to. In fact, the second most popular podcast topic is news according to Edison research. Why shouldn’t it be content that serves your company’s mission and builds your company’s culture? Your employees are used to listening to their favorite news and educational podcasts, so they will trust your corporate podcast as a relevant source of information for training and development. Internal podcasting reaches employees in ways that traditional meetings and corporate culture training cannot.
Done correctly, podcasts are a powerful tool to motivate and develop employees, ultimately leading to better team cohesion and talent retention.
So, how do you do it right? Here are five ways to use internal podcasting to engage, develop, and retain employees …
1. Highlight Top Performers and Rising Leaders
We’ve all heard that one of the best ways to improve moral and employee engagement is to recognize achievement. However, the big question is “How?”. You can only have so many pizza parties, and the “Employee of the Month” plaque is getting a little tired.
A better solution — feature a top performer or rising leader on the company’s internal podcast. This is a chance to shower good work with positive attention in a very public way. The podcast producer could:
Share a big win and highlight the team members responsible.
Feature promotions and rising leaders within the organization.
Recognize outstanding performers by name and describe their success.
Highlight top performers and leaders as subject matter experts where they can share a story or host a Q & A as part of a training exercise.
Employee recognition encourages excellence and creates a sense of shared purpose. It also improves engagement. Employees love to listen along and celebrate the success of their teammates and aspire to be featured on the company podcast as a reward for their contributions as well.
Business and tech consulting company Slalom puts this practice into practice with a segment of their Slalom On Air podcast called “Wins to Know,” highlighting big wins within the organization to its audience of over 8,000 employees.
2. Reinforce What’s Working in the Company
One of the advantages of podcasting is the opportunity to communicate a message to many people at a time. What better venue than a podcast to disseminate best practices, and training, so everyone in the organization can reinforce what’s already working and keep everyone on the same page?
Employee engagement, development, and retention starts with proper onboarding and training. Many savvy organizations are turning to internal podcasts for training, development, and onboarding procedures. For example:
Virtualization leaders VM Ware includes podcasts as mandatory training for new onboards, even using their back-end monitoring tools to verify completion of the training requirement.
3. Highlight Positive Culture Developments
Highlighting positive developments within the company doesn’t have to be limited to individual performance or business practices. The company podcast can also highlight examples of great company culture – teams or groups that took initiative to solve a problem or improve morale.
For many companies, an internal podcast became a cornerstone of company culture during the COVID-19 pandemic, when unplanned remote work led to the risk of a breakdown in company culture. As work from home and hybrid jobs remain popular, podcasts are an important tool to reach both on-site and remote employees.
Reinforcing corporate culture encourages other employees to do the same. They might not have even realized what goes into a healthy company culture or how they can actively contribute. Demonstrating it to them through the podcast is an efficient way to raise the bar for the entire organization.. Here are a few things to keep in mind when using podcasts to reinforce company culture:
Highlight your organization’s values and be sure your script aligns with your corporate culture
Invite employees to company events
Weave in personal stories, hobbies, or humor to improve engagement and inspire deeper connections among employees
Provide updates on company goals and vision
4. Unify the Team Behind a Story or Mission
One of the best ways to get an employee to regard a job as more than just a paycheck is to cast their role as service to a broader mission. Employees who buy into the mission don’t just have a job — they have a purpose. A team united around a mission is unstoppable.
How do you make a mission resonate? By telling a story. Storytelling is the oldest tool in human history for captivating an audience and uniting them around a theme. Use part or all of your podcast to tell the company’s story.
You may have heard of the importance of storytelling in business to grab your customers’ attention. Storytelling is also an excellent way to create connections between leaders and employees. Rather than only being told information, workers feel empathy and connection to their supervisors. Crank up the drama and don’t be afraid to make it personal. Employees respect their bosses more when they are vulnerable, have flaws and a compelling story that shares their leadership journey.
When healthcare administration company Signature Performance brought on two new C-level executives, the company used its internal podcast to introduce the new leaders, let them tell their story in their own words, and articulate their vision for their role and contribution within the organization. It was an opportunity to use the power of hearing someone’s voice to build connection and trust.
An internal podcast is easy to start, cost effective to produce, and simple to distribute. Best of all, it’s one of the best ways you can effectively reach and communicate with your company’s most important asset — its talent. Don’t waste the opportunity. Use your internal podcast to build team cohesion, foster positive company culture, and decrease turnover expenses by earning your employees’ commitment and loyalty for the long haul.
Do you have further questions about how internal podcasting can help improve your employee engagement? Contact us today.
Employee engagement can feel like a never-ending uphill battle. Companies never accomplish great things if their talent just shows up to collect a paycheck, but how do you ensure your employees feel connected to your organization, stay long term, and encourage others to do the same?
Internal podcasting is a powerful tool to cultivate a culture of employee engagement. Internal podcasts are usually produced with the help of a production company to privately reach their internal audience of employees and stakeholders.
It's no secret why using internal podcasting to improve employee engagement is catching on. Compared to other forms of media, podcasts are easy and inexpensive to produce — and their popularity speaks for itself. A whopping one-third of Americans listen to podcasts regularly, according to Buzzsprout.
Podcast listeners crave new and edifying content to listen to. In fact, the second most popular podcast topic is news according to Edison research. Why shouldn’t it be content that serves your company’s mission and builds your company’s culture? Your employees are used to listening to their favorite news and educational podcasts, so they will trust your corporate podcast as a relevant source of information for training and development. Internal podcasting reaches employees in ways that traditional meetings and corporate culture training cannot.
Done correctly, podcasts are a powerful tool to motivate and develop employees, ultimately leading to better team cohesion and talent retention.
So, how do you do it right? Here are five ways to use internal podcasting to engage, develop, and retain employees …
1. Highlight Top Performers and Rising Leaders
We’ve all heard that one of the best ways to improve moral and employee engagement is to recognize achievement. However, the big question is “How?”. You can only have so many pizza parties, and the “Employee of the Month” plaque is getting a little tired.
A better solution — feature a top performer or rising leader on the company’s internal podcast. This is a chance to shower good work with positive attention in a very public way. The podcast producer could:
Share a big win and highlight the team members responsible.
Feature promotions and rising leaders within the organization.
Recognize outstanding performers by name and describe their success.
Highlight top performers and leaders as subject matter experts where they can share a story or host a Q & A as part of a training exercise.
Employee recognition encourages excellence and creates a sense of shared purpose. It also improves engagement. Employees love to listen along and celebrate the success of their teammates and aspire to be featured on the company podcast as a reward for their contributions as well.
Business and tech consulting company Slalom puts this practice into practice with a segment of their Slalom On Air podcast called “Wins to Know,” highlighting big wins within the organization to its audience of over 8,000 employees.
2. Reinforce What’s Working in the Company
One of the advantages of podcasting is the opportunity to communicate a message to many people at a time. What better venue than a podcast to disseminate best practices, and training, so everyone in the organization can reinforce what’s already working and keep everyone on the same page?
Employee engagement, development, and retention starts with proper onboarding and training. Many savvy organizations are turning to internal podcasts for training, development, and onboarding procedures. For example:
Virtualization leaders VM Ware includes podcasts as mandatory training for new onboards, even using their back-end monitoring tools to verify completion of the training requirement.
3. Highlight Positive Culture Developments
Highlighting positive developments within the company doesn’t have to be limited to individual performance or business practices. The company podcast can also highlight examples of great company culture – teams or groups that took initiative to solve a problem or improve morale.
For many companies, an internal podcast became a cornerstone of company culture during the COVID-19 pandemic, when unplanned remote work led to the risk of a breakdown in company culture. As work from home and hybrid jobs remain popular, podcasts are an important tool to reach both on-site and remote employees.
Reinforcing corporate culture encourages other employees to do the same. They might not have even realized what goes into a healthy company culture or how they can actively contribute. Demonstrating it to them through the podcast is an efficient way to raise the bar for the entire organization.. Here are a few things to keep in mind when using podcasts to reinforce company culture:
Highlight your organization’s values and be sure your script aligns with your corporate culture
Invite employees to company events
Weave in personal stories, hobbies, or humor to improve engagement and inspire deeper connections among employees
Provide updates on company goals and vision
4. Unify the Team Behind a Story or Mission
One of the best ways to get an employee to regard a job as more than just a paycheck is to cast their role as service to a broader mission. Employees who buy into the mission don’t just have a job — they have a purpose. A team united around a mission is unstoppable.
How do you make a mission resonate? By telling a story. Storytelling is the oldest tool in human history for captivating an audience and uniting them around a theme. Use part or all of your podcast to tell the company’s story.
You may have heard of the importance of storytelling in business to grab your customers’ attention. Storytelling is also an excellent way to create connections between leaders and employees. Rather than only being told information, workers feel empathy and connection to their supervisors. Crank up the drama and don’t be afraid to make it personal. Employees respect their bosses more when they are vulnerable, have flaws and a compelling story that shares their leadership journey.
When healthcare administration company Signature Performance brought on two new C-level executives, the company used its internal podcast to introduce the new leaders, let them tell their story in their own words, and articulate their vision for their role and contribution within the organization. It was an opportunity to use the power of hearing someone’s voice to build connection and trust.
An internal podcast is easy to start, cost effective to produce, and simple to distribute. Best of all, it’s one of the best ways you can effectively reach and communicate with your company’s most important asset — its talent. Don’t waste the opportunity. Use your internal podcast to build team cohesion, foster positive company culture, and decrease turnover expenses by earning your employees’ commitment and loyalty for the long haul.
Do you have further questions about how internal podcasting can help improve your employee engagement? Contact us today.
Learn four ways podcasts can help solve common pain points of content creation and expand your reach.
By Tina Dietz, CEO Twin Flames Studios
When you’re trying to grow your business, you’ve got a huge amount of information you’d like to share with your audience. But taking everything you and your company are passionate about and distilling it into digestible content often feels like trying to capture a genie in a bottle. Despite your best efforts and highest motivation, it’s all too easy to wind up with content that’s inconsistent, doesn’t connect with your audience, or burns out your marketing team.
Not to mention that in the growing media landscape, it’s harder than ever to capture an audience’s attention. Their eyeballs are constantly pulled between social media, streaming services, hundreds of cable television channels, and millions of websites. But what if instead of eyeballs, you focused on ears?
According to Edison Research’s Infinite Dial 2021 Report released in March, about 80 million Americans (28% of the U.S. 12+ population) listen to podcasts weekly. 116 million people listen to podcasts monthly, a growth of 61.5% since 2018.
As a podcast producer and vocal leadership expert, I’ve seen firsthand how sharp companies increasingly turn to podcasts to solve their content conundrums. Let me take you through some of the most common pain points of content creation, and how you too can use podcasting to overcome them.
Single-use content
Tell me if any of these scenarios sound familiar:
You write a blog post that gets a lot of traction, but a week later no one remembers it
Your team designs a graphic for your website, but only uses it there
You create a social media post that works perfectly on one platform, but falls flat on three others
This is probably the biggest problem content creators and marketing teams run into. No matter how good these pieces of content are, they’re only ever going to be useful once—you can’t just repost them on a different platform. This leads to a never-ending cycle of constantly having to create immense amounts of new content, either for up-to-date engagement, multiple different platforms, or both.
Luckily, podcasts don’t have this limitation. You can take the content from a podcast and reuse it on a number of different platforms, simply by changing its form to adapt to different mediums. And each time you record a new podcast, all those platforms get up-to-date content.
The following six examples are ways you can repurpose podcasts:
Website embeds
Easily embed podcasts into your website so that the latest episode is always available to play with just a click on the front page. Visitors can listen while they navigate through your site or even continue as they switch to another tab.
Quote cards
Take the most memorable insights from your podcast hosts or guests and post them on social media as a one-look visual that your audience can quickly absorb while they scroll through their feed.
Video clips
Many podcast recording methods include video, so you can easily get another secondary piece of content from your podcast. Upload a full, optimized video to your YouTube channel or short, impactful clips to Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok.
Audiograms
An audiogram is a short media clip that layers an audio soundtrack over a background image and texts or subtitles, sometimes with other effects showing up as well. Think of it like a cross between a PowerPoint slide and an Instagram reel or YouTube short.
You can easily grab audio clips from your podcast and layer them over branded images and transcribed texts to create multiple audiograms from the same podcast. Then post them to social media, link to them in your email marketing campaigns, or feature them on your website to attract new listeners.
Transcripts
Some people still prefer the written word. Publishing transcripts of your podcast allows audience members to quickly scan for key phrases and ideas and jump to the point in the conversation that most interests them.
Google scans your webpages for keywords, and it’s easy for the algorithms to recognize them from a transcript. This helps your website’s search-engine optimization (SEO), leading to higher search rankings on Google.
Articles
Repurposing podcast content into blogs or articles are another way to create timely and thought-provoking content for the community or profession you serve. This could be on your own website as blogs or case studies as well as used for contributing blogs or trade publications.
The Paychex Business Series, a thought leadership-branded podcast from the global HR and payroll services business Paychex, is a great example of this multi-platform approach.
On the podcast’s main webpage, you’ll see weekly episodes with links to video of each episode on YouTube and audio on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. The Paychex Business Series page also includes a few sentences summarizing each conversation, the timestamps of the topics covered, and a link to a PDF of the transcript for easy downloading and forwarding.
The podcast is promoted on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. One recent tweet from Paychex includes a link to the latest podcast, a short description of its focus on workplace mental health, and a 19-second video with stills of the podcast guest and one of her most impactful quotes from the conversation. The variety of content creates awareness of their message and promotes the podcast to multiple social media audiences.
Another example is Randy Crabtree, the host of The Unique CPA and his team at Tri-Merit Tax Solutions. They are now in their 3rd season of podcasting and went from building an audience from scratch to being in the top 5% of all podcasts, according to podcast data aggregator.
But, the real magic was how the podcast helped Randy Crabtree, the host, reach his goals. As a partner in the company, Randy is excellent in creating relationships and helping companies, but he didn’t consider himself a thought leader or influencer. Hosting the podcast allowed Randy to use his strengths as a relationship builder and generate content that he and his team were then able to turn into articles. They have become regular contributors to industry publications like Accounting Today due to their podcasting content, as they regularly turn their transcripts into thought provoking and timely articles for the accounting profession.
Because of his podcast, Randy also received a coveted mention in the Top 100 in public accounting because of his “excellent podcast.”
As you can see, each podcast can be turned into many pieces of content. Multi-channel marketing is an important process to maintain brand consistency and company growth.
Three other pain points of content creation podcasts can overcome are:
Inconsistent content
Let’s face it: it’s difficult to keep most marketing content consistent across platforms. In written blog posts, you have to follow grammar and style rules and keep the tone the same across multiple writers. Visual media must also remain consistent with brand color schemes and formatting. It’s easy to miss small (or even not-so-small) inconsistencies, especially when producing large amounts of content over time.
Podcasting solves this problem by holding all the consistency in its conversational format. As long as the length and topic(s) of your podcast stay the same theme, everything else can be flexible. The host and guests have room for a free-flowing conversation, without having to worry about going through a ton of edits or making everything look and sound perfect. Audiences already expect that every conversation is going to be a little different, so there’s no requirement to formalize a podcast besides a consistent introduction. After that, the space is all yours to share organic-sounding content that resonates with your listeners.
Trouble connecting with audience
We often struggle with the fact that the more overt our content is as an advertisement, the less likely potential customers are to want to come back to it. Gene Marks, host of the Paychex Business Series, is the first to admit that “nobody wants to have commercials or products jammed down their throats.”
Podcasting allows you to place your brand in the context of topics your audience already cares about. Tomorrow Comes Today, the branded podcast of UK wealth management giant St. James’s Place, features conversations with economists, journalists, and more on everything from success psychology to the role of investors in combating climate change. Content strategist Lauren Smith told podcasting company Podbean that the podcast has solidified St. James’s Place as a thought leader in the wealth management space.
Podcasts are edifying and enjoyable for both content creators and listeners. That’s the reason 80% of podcast listeners stick around for all or most of an episode. Podcasts offer a peek into a real conversation with real people, and provide real solutions to your content difficulties. You, too, can connect with potential customers more organically through podcasting.
Content producer burnout
If you or your company’s content producers report feeling burnt out today, they’re not alone. A recent study by content agency Vibely found that 90% feel the same way. Too many content producers are asked to spend too much time on mediums that don’t maximize engagement.
Mark Bussel, National Director of Learning and Development for the memorabilia ring company Jostens, used to spend much of his time creating an all-for-one newsletter. He recently turned to podcasts and told Podbean he was shocked at how easy they were to create and publish.
“We’ll take maybe 15 minutes to create an episode by putting a bumper on the front and back and adding a little bit of music,” Bussel said. “I am by no means a technical expert, but I’ve learned in a really short period that we can make it look pretty doggone good.”
As you can see, the magic of podcasts is that they are enjoyable for both marketers and target audiences alike.
For more information about how podcasts can work for your business, click here.
Audiobook sales are the most rapidly growing segment of the publishing industry. Registering double-digit revenue growth for the past few years, it is having a renaissance that can no longer be ignored. How can authors capitalize on this massive opportunity? Robin Colucci brings an expert on to the podcast to help us understand this booming industry. Tina Dietz is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed speaker, audiobook publisher, corporate podcast producer, and vocal leadership expert. Her company, Twin Flames Studios, helps authors and experts amplify their voices through audiobooks, podcasting, and other means. Listen to her discussion with Robin and learn why you should be looking into audiobooks as the new golden goose in publishing.
The Renaissance of Audiobooks and How to Capitalize on It with Tina Dietz
Our topic is audiobooks. Audiobooks sales and consumption have been booming. This is the most rapidly growing segment of the publishing industry. It’s been on a growth surge for the last few years of double-digit revenue growth in the field of audiobooks. In 2019, we had another epic year of audiobook sales with 16% growth. The total sales in audiobooks were $1.2 billion. This is a phenomenal thing that’s occurring. I wanted to bring on an expert who could help us understand a little bit more about audiobooks, how authors should be thinking about audiobooks, and what we might be able to do as authors to capitalize on this massive opportunity. With that in mind, I have brought on Tina Dietz.
Tina is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed speaker, audiobook publisher, corporate podcast producer, and vocal leadership expert who has been featured in media outlets including ABC, Inc., The Huffington Post, and Forbes. Tina’s first podcast, the The Start Something Show was named by Inc. Magazine as one of the Top 35 Podcasts For Entrepreneurs. Tina’s company, Twin Flames Studios, amplifies the messages of experts globally to their target markets via audiobooks, podcasting, and leadership. Tina divides her time between the US and Costa Rica where she’s part of a leadership team building a conscious community called Vista Mundo. Without further ado, let’s welcome Tina.
It’s my absolute pleasure, Robin. Thanks for having me.
I’m excited to speak with you because even though I’ve been in the publishing world for many years and long before there was such a thing as audiobooks, it’s an area that I don’t know a whole lot about. I’m as excited for myself to learn as I am for our readers.
It’s an interesting world and industry. I’m happy to share.
Book marketing is an evergreen thing. A little bit every day is better than a big push once.
We all know what an audiobook is. A lot of us listen and have them. Audible is the most famous platform for an audiobook. Something I learned or at least got a taste of in our previous conversations is there are other platforms. I want to know a little bit about that because as I said, this is where you have “newbie Robin.”
Audible is the 500-pound gorilla in the room. They’d been around for a long time. Audiobooks have been around in one format or another. Since 1929 was the first audiobook, which was on an album. Audiobooks were on albums and then they were on tapes. A lot of us remember Books on Tape for years then moved to CDs and then, of course, it moved digitally. It was in the digital transition that happened that audiobooks have received a huge resurgence and a huge renaissance.
Prior to that, one of the first audiobooks I listened to as a young adult was Deepak Chopra’s Magical Mind, Magical Body. It was 12 or 16 tapes. I could not keep track of those damn tapes. I was always like, “What tape is next? I don’t remember which one I was listening to.” When digital audiobooks came about, it changed the game and much like the iPod Nano and the iPod in general changed music. Audiobooks changed in the same medium. Audiobooks, music, podcast, all of this audio content has had a tremendous rise in the last few years.
Audiobook Renaissance: Audiobooks are not as popular outside of the English-speaking world. However, they’re having a tremendous rise in countries like China and India.(Image via The Author's Corner)
It’s such a drastic thing that in my mind, there weren’t audiobooks available. Luckily, I haven’t been in the publishing industry since 1929, so that’s a relief. It’s interesting because you’re right. As soon as you started saying it, I’m like, “the tapes!” It was clumsy. It was difficult to manage. You had to keep track of where you were. You could lose one and lose a whole chunk of the book, and you had to be home. You had to be somewhere where you could also use the equipment.
If you didn’t have a car and Walkmans, things like that, that’s where things got more popular in that era. Prior to that, with albums, you couldn’t do that. I remember being a little kid sitting in front of my record player, having the book, and record from Disney. When Tinkerbell rings her little bell, it’s time to turn the page. I loved those when I was growing up. Those were fun. It was part of learning how to read. Audiobooks have this lovely, rich tradition, but because we live in such a different era now with the internet, digital, Bluetooth, and all the technology we have, as you said, the dots don’t necessarily get connected between the two.
Audible, in that pivot, does hold more than 60% of the market share in audiobooks worldwide. Audiobooks are not as popular in other places of the world outside of the English-speaking Western cultures. However, they’re having a tremendous rise in countries like China and India as the markets have opened up. I’m waiting with a bowl of popcorn. I’m excited to see what’s going to happen there. Going back to your original question, there are a lot more outlets than that.
There are more than 40 other audiobook outlets. This goes everywhere from your libraries. Most people get audiobooks out of their libraries. Those are usually using apps like OverDrive and Libby and sometimes Hoopla. Those are the three big ones for libraries. Those are the apps that they go through. There’s also Audiobooks.com, Downpour, Scribd. Blackstone has their own thing. You can purchase audiobooks through NOOK and other places as well. There’s a large distribution world for audiobooks out there.
I’m curious when a library purchases an audiobook, do they purchase a license or do they purchase a single audiobook like they put a book on the shelf?
The world of libraries does work differently than the retail world and it’s not an area that I have a tremendous depth of expertise. I’ll be transparent about that. To get on the radar of libraries is a lot more challenging. It depends on the types of titles that they’re looking for and their yearly budget mandate. Every community is different. As you can imagine, the number of libraries across the US alone is huge. It’s in the tens of thousands.
Getting into libraries can be an entire strategy in and of itself. The way to get on the radar of libraries is a little opaque because you can’t campaign libraries. You could but it’s a little different. The licensing works different for libraries. They have to purchase more than one license in order to be able to pass it around, so to speak. There are some people in the industry who specialize in selling books to libraries. The audiobook and the book process for purchasing to libraries is, from what I understand, quite similar.
Make a note to get me that contact. That could be also an interest.
It’s a great niche.
I did a little research for a client. They were writing a book that was more for school-age kids. There are over 46,000 school libraries, nevermind other libraries. In K-12, there were over 46,000 libraries in the US at that time. There are all these different platforms but Audible has the lion’s share. I’m curious when you’re working with a client on an audiobook, since we jumped in distribution, what is your goal when someone comes to you for help with an audiobook? Do you focus on Audible or do you try to get them any? How do you look at all these platforms that are available as part of your strategy?
We have to look at the overall goals of the author. We work with non-fiction authors. Fiction goals and non-fiction goals are very different worlds. Generally, the goals with the fiction author is to sell copies. That’s the only name of the game. Whereas a nonfiction author has their book. It’s being used in service of building their platform. Selling copies is important but if you’re selling bulk copies of your book, you’re more likely to sell them in bulk when you’re speaking or to be handed out as a promotional item as a loss leader, or various other things.
Getting speaking gigs, attracting clients, getting press, media attention, all of those things. The goals are different so the strategies are different. What binds the two together is, first of all, distribution platforms. Secondly, everybody does want to sell copies and wants visibility. The third thing is that book marketing, it’s you and I could agree, is an evergreen thing. A little bit every day is better than a big push once. That’s where authors get tired. We could have a whole conversation about that.
As you said, with the non-fiction authors especially, I always tell my clients, “Look at what activities you already are doing to grow your business or you know you should be doing and do those to promote your book because it will pay you off way bigger.” It keeps the book in the conversation that way too.
Going back to your question about what we focus on: We have to look at the goals and the overall strategy of the company or the individual first. What do you want your audiobook to do for you? What do you already have in place? Do you have a marketing team? Do you already have strategies for your book? How is this going to dovetail with all of that? Usually, in terms of distribution, what we end up recommending for the most part, particularly for a newer book. If you have a book coming out as a launch and the audiobook is coming out right around the same time as your book is launching or say within six months afterwards, then what ends up happening is they’ll be distributed exclusively through Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books for the first year, which takes advantage of a couple of things. One is a higher royalty rate. Royalty rates for exclusive distribution of 40% versus 25% for non-exclusive distribution. The other thing it takes advantage of is being able to focus on pushing your marketing, your customers, and your audience at one platform.
Amazon, Audible and Apple Books, that’s one?
Technically, that’s considered exclusive distribution because Audible and Amazon are the same company and Apple Books has an agreement with Audible for distribution. It’s an automatic also-run thing.
I’m going to guess Apple Books is the second biggest platform. Would that be accurate?
No, because Apple only holds 10% of the cell phone market. It seems like it’s everywhere but on a worldwide basis, Android is a much bigger player in terms of the cell phone markets. Apple is amazing in their marketing and they’re amazing at creating evangelists for their brand.
Audiobook Renaissance: The most important factor in someone deciding to purchase an audiobook is the quality of the narration. (Image via The Author's Corner)
This exclusive distribution, you said for the first year.
Yes. You then can evaluate after the first year and decide if you want to continue on or if you want to go with non-exclusive and then get the audiobook out to a bunch of more platforms.
What would be a good reason to be on? I’m wondering, if you’re getting 40% royalty and then it goes down to 25% royalty, does it ever add up like getting that extra market share offsets the decrease in the royalties?
It comes down again to marketing and the goals. If you don’t market, it’s not going to make any difference either way what it comes down to. It’s a marketing opportunity to change your distribution. Once you have your book on other platforms, you can make announcements about it like, “The audiobook is now available here. Did you know that this existed?” Much of marketing in our digital age, particularly on the 24-hour news cycle that is social media is coming up with interesting little, “Did you know,” pieces of information. It’s much like being nominated for a book award, getting a book award, having your book in a new place, or having a speaking opportunity. These are all little snippets of information to offer to your audience to stay top of mind. Additional distribution creates an additional opportunity for content to market your book.
What I’m getting out of this is that you’re adding these other distribution platforms, piecemeal, not all at once.
You submit it all at once but they tend to come in onesie-twosie in their approval process because you’re using a portal. The portals that we use and these are a self-serve portal. Not just for publishers but for people who want to self-publish as well. ACX.com is the common self-publishing backend for audiobooks for Audible. FindawayVoices.com can be also used for Audible but it will also help to get your book up to 40 additional platforms. Not everybody is going to take your book but a lot of them will.
What should I have asked you about the distribution that I didn’t?
That’s a lot of the broad strokes of that particular thing. The only thing about distribution that people need to know is that at least in the beginning, it’s something you want to stay on top of and go in. Read your monthly reports, get familiar with the notations that are made because that’s market research for you. What channels are working for you? What is not working for you? What are your best places to define readers? Certain distribution channels also, individually, if you look into them, may have more opportunities for you to promote your book in different ways.
Some paid opportunities usually come up. For example, Findaway and there’s this program called CHIRP, it sends out a daily email for audiobook deals. You can submit your audiobook to CHIRP once it’s been accepted through these other channels. Your book gets pushed out on a daily email to over 100,000 people. Now, you’re going to give them a deep discount on the audiobook as a result. If you’re talking about nonfiction and building an audience, building notoriety, all of that, that can be to your advantage.
I want to talk a little bit about audiobook production because one thing that we see is there seems to be two tracks. We either have the author themselves read the book or there’s a voiceover artist.
That is correct. Occasionally, that’s a hybrid of the two. That’s our third option.
Talk to me a little bit about what are the things like if an author comes to you and they’re like, “I’m not sure if I should read it myself or if I should hire a voiceover artist.” What are some of the things that an author should be thinking about when you’re looking for it?
One of the things the author should be thinking about, again, comes back to the purpose of the book. First of all, most authors who write non-fiction who are building a platform will come to me and say, “I have to narrate my book. Nobody can do it like me.” That is the first assumption that we question because that may be true. However, the most important factor in someone deciding to purchase an audiobook is the quality of the narration. Even if the author can read the book out loud in a way that they feel characterizes the book correctly, whether that translates or not to a listener receiving it the way it’s intended is an entirely different matter. They may feel like, “This is how I need it to be read,” but their listener may be going, “That is not what you’re portraying.” That is one of the things we have to take a look at and evaluate.
A lot of the folks we work with, our speakers narrating an audiobook is different than public speaking. It’s a tool. It’s a different animal. When you’re up on a stage, public speaking, you’re speaking one to many whereas on a podcast or a narration, you’re speaking one-to-one. You can’t get out there and be like, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to be doing all of this and talk about audiobooks.” It blows your face off. You also can’t be boring but you have to slow down with an audiobook because audiobooks are at a slower pace than most other kinds of speaking. There’s a balance there. The breathing is different.
Recording an audiobook takes time and that’s if you hire a professional. If you want to go DIY, double that time and add a bottle of vodka.
Even the duration of time that you have to spend recording an audiobook—it’s not just a matter of reading the book. It’s reading the book in such a way that it sounds like you’re not reading it. There are all of these factors that go into it. In the early days of developing the company and the services and all of that, we did experiment with a number of different ways of working with authors who wanted to narrate their own books because it is an important thing. About 1/3 of our authors self-narrate and about 2/3 work with a professional narrator. That’s the way it shakes out. Some because they don’t have a great voice for narration.
They’re great for a keynote, but if you had to listen to them for 6 or 7 hours, no. Again, a different animal. There may be some physical issues. One of my favorite authors, brilliant book, brilliant man, and a rare form of head-neck cancer. He couldn’t narrate his entire book. There was no way. We did what I like to call the Tony Robbins Sandwich with his book. Tony Robbins narrates the first chapters and the last chapter of his book and has a professional narrator do the middle. That’s what we did with that particular client. It worked out well. Those are some of the factors.
Audiobook Renaissance: There need to be more opportunities for a diversity of narrators. One of the reasons people didn’t listen to audiobooks more is because they were boring.(Image via The Author's Corner)
There’s something in here because when you were talking about a speaker on stage being one-to-many, an audiobook is a one-on-one. I want to point out an idea that goes along with that. It’s something that I speak about fairly regularly is this idea of how a book is the best way when you’re thinking about a marketing avenue to create intimacy to your prospective client or with your reader when we’re talking non-fiction. It’s often your prospective clients or somebody who’s going to be influenced by you in some way. What you’re saying about audiobooks and even the tone of the voice, the pace of the speech, volume, and everything else, I never thought of it before but you’re right. It is a one-on-one conversation, just like the writing is but it’s important to get that across. It’s even different if you’re standing at a book signing in front of the room and reading an excerpt.
You have more bodies there and different energy.
That is one-to-many, but an audiobook is a one-on-one conversation. One of the things is vocal quality. Even the amount of time the author is willing or able to—
The time is a big factor. I’ll give you simple math, 10,000 words of a book are about one hour of audio. You’ve got 40,000-word book, you’ve got about a four-hour audiobook. That four hours of the audiobook is going to take about 10 to 12 hours of recording time. This is working with a professional organization like us. This is not DIY. For DIY, double that and add a bottle of vodka. It’s not just me saying this and do a shot for every hour of audiobook you do, it’s a drinking game. Split up into 2 to 3-hour chunks because that’s about as far as you can go with our vocal fatigue and energy issues and all of that.
What we do to work with the author and take the technology out of their hands and also to give them the objective feedback and a person to play off of, is we do the full direction of our audiobooks, but we do it remotely. We have software we’re able to remote in to wherever the author is anywhere in the world, help them make sure that their sound is tuned correctly, we’ll suggest a microphone, make sure they’re in the right place in their home or office to record. We then fully direct and record the audiobook for them to the entire process. That creates a wonderful product. It also takes a lot of the stress and pressure off of the author. All they have to do is focus on delivering their message and being natural about it and that helps a lot.
You’re able to give them feedback.
Yes, so it makes it a lot easier to catch issues. A lot of our authors have charts, graphs, and exercises in their books. There are industry standards on how to narrate those. We’re able to live coach people through all that process as well.
Let’s talk a little bit about the other side of hiring vocal artists to record your audiobook. What are some of the things that you advise authors to consider when they’re trying to make that decision? Let’s say they’ve decided, “I’d like to use the voiceover artists.” What are some of the things that they should be thinking about as they’re deciding? What’s that going to look like?
I have done professional narration. My background's as a therapist. As an entrepreneur of multiple businesses, did business coaching for years, but the voice acting was a paid hobby for me because I love a stage and a microphone. The masterclasses I took on audiobook narration had me have this epiphany about all my colleagues and clients who are doing bestseller campaigns, why aren’t they doing audiobooks? That was the rabbit hole I went down. That’s how I got there.
Between the podcasting and the audiobooks, microphones are a big part of my day one way or another. Narration and voiceover work in its industry. It has its own language and standards. Coming into that world as an author or as a business owner, there are some things you need to know about that industry. When we send out auditions, there are key pieces of information you need to provide to an author in terms of, what are you paying? What section of the book do you choose for an audition and how long it is? Where do you choose from the book?
Other key pieces of information that the narrator is going to need. If you want somebody to emulate your energy and have similar qualities to your voice being able to articulate, what are those qualities that are most important? What are the key pieces that somebody needs to know if the book is going to, first of all, resonate with them and what they need to deliver to you in terms of an audition? A lot of mistakes that authors make doing this on their own are putting an audition piece out that’s way too long and then being offended when somebody only sends back one minute of an audition. Auditions need to be short. Another thing that happens a lot is getting into the production of the audiobook and not having been clear upfront about the number of characters or the type of characters, even in non-fiction.
A lot of the pronunciation issues can come in regionalisms. We had an issue a while back. We keep a running list of these and this one we hadn’t run into yet. We had 38 replacements. You can’t go back when in audio like you can in text and do a find and replace. This narrator had to go back and we worked with the other because normally, we wouldn’t even allow that change at the end. That’s something that needs to be discussed upfront. Fortunately, the narrator was game and it all worked out but she would have had to replace entire paragraphs or entire sentences depending on the situation in the book. These are the things we get ahead of and get on top of. Occasionally, things happen as I mentioned. We get ahead of it 99% more than working through it on your own. Those are a few things.
What is the question that an author asks themselves even going into that? How do they know to tell somebody that they want that? It made me think of The Chicago Manual of Style which we both know is the publishing industry bible for punctuation and everything. It’s a perfect book except you have to know there might be a mistake to look for the correct way. How do you help authors figure out what to ask for in even a situation like that?
We have a whole onboarding process where we go through things like that. We have protocols, guidelines, and all of these things that we walk people and authors through to help prevent things like this. Everything from names to medical terminology and other types of regionalisms even down to looking at, “Are there any characters in your book, even if it’s nonfiction, who are they? What do they sound like?” One of my favorite books we ever did so far is called Tiger Bravo’s War. It is a ten-hour audiobook about the Vietnam War that I would put up against Ken Burns any day of the week.
Our narrator who works with us in the company now on our podcasting divisions. He’s a wonderful guy named David White. He did an incredible job of nuancing about 15 or 20 different soldiers’ voices inside of this documentary-style memoir. Getting those characters out front, getting a sense of who they are, and having the narrator demonstrate that before you get too deep into the production, that’s important.
I want to bring up something because you cleared a memory for me of an audiobook that I was listening to and I was enjoying. I believe the author Red Moskoff. They did a character and they brought in a different voice. By the way, this was traditionally published—New York Times. Not only was it a terrible Middle Eastern accent, it was so bad that it sounded racist to me. It’s offensively bad.
They went full Apu from the Simpsons.
That’s a perfect analogy. I was going to say it was like a Breakfast at Tiffany’s nightmare. I still enjoyed the book but every time that would happen, unfortunately, it was more than once in the manuscript. I would cringe and it nearly ruined the experience for me. What about characterization, especially when it’s clearly across cultural narrations? This seems to me to be a real potential minefield. If you could you say a little bit about that.
There is always something to get better at.
It can be. We produced a book that was author narrated and it was an emotional book. As I’m talking with potential clients and scanning through their books, a lot of them are highly emotional. I was crying in the first two pages of this guy’s book. He was writing it and he was an angry, abusive man. It was about his healing journey and what he wanted men to know. He had traveled to many countries as a professional Rugby player. He had voices of these people from different countries and cultures. He had a lot of facility in doing this.
He was able to slip into their skins—which most authors don’t have that ability to do. One of the things that the director did is he went and listened to other authentic accents to see how far off or how far on the author was and to make sure it didn’t come off as mocking or disrespectful in any way. There are ways to handle it in the direction process. Professional narrators are sensitive to this because they want things to be represented accurately. That comes down to the audition process and vetting people.
I didn’t feel like we needed the accent in that book I’m telling you.
A lot of times it’s not necessary or there’s a shade. You don’t have to hit it hard.
Why is this even happening?
It happens a lot with male narrators doing female voices as well. Some are brilliant at it. Some of them will characterize female voices as whiny, shrewish, or childish. That’s an issue in the industry that gets brought up regularly and on both sides. Women doing male voices, men doing women’s voices because it’s one narrator. Full cast recordings are still quite rare in the industry because of the cost of production. Some of them are great, like The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, but particularly in non-fiction full-cast recording.
I’m glad we got a chance to talk about that. It left quite an impression on me.
If we have culturally diverse authors and one of our authors is from China. We opted not to have him do the narration. His articulation isn’t quite up to speed. It might be hard for the listener. He’s a brilliant speaker from the stage—he’s fantastic. But 8 to 10 hours on an audiobook will be harder. One of our biggest challenges has been finding somebody who is Chinese-American or Chinese immigrated to the US, a professional narrator who can do this voice authentically.
Have a hint of the authentic accent without being thick.
It needs to be real.
That’s another aspect of this. If the author is an immigrant or something in the US.
We have several books in the pipeline that we know our narrator searches expanded because there need to be more opportunities for a diversity of narrators. For years, it was, “This is Audible. I’m an Audible guy.” That’s one of the reasons people didn’t listen to audiobooks because they were boring.
“I’m a suburban white man Audible.”
“Can you see my blue suit just from the tone of my voice? I bet you can.”
“On weekends, I wear khakis.”
“I play golf.” I’m a professional instigator, I should warn you.
What I wanted to say is this sounds like a heck of an opportunity. Let’s talk a little bit about investment-wise. What’s the difference when we hire an artist to record our audiobook for us versus doing it ourselves?
There are a couple of levels. We try to keep the cost of author narration and the cost of professional narration very similar. The business model we’ve created has allowed for that because counterintuitively to a lot of people, it used to be in our company that author narration was way more expensive. I run into that all the time but think about it. We had to train the author on a whole new skillset. We had to research studios. We had to pay studio time, which is hourly, and studio time, depending on where you are in the world, is anywhere from $50 to $250 an hour. The editing was a lot more intensive because we weren’t doing what’s called Punch and Roll recording. We weren’t doing live direction. Studios will give you a sound engineer who’ll tell you if you’re screwing up but they just record the whole session. We stop, back up, and record again to get rid of a lot of those errors.
The comfort level of the author was tense because even with training them ahead of time, it was crazy. All of those factors make for a much more expensive prospect. We’ve got things down and we have a negotiated rate with our narrators that we’ve got a sweet spot. However, we do also have a premium level for narrators. These are folks who are in the Actor’s Union, SAG-AFTRA. The minimum required hourly rate to work with those folks is $225 an hour. That’s what’s called a per finished hour rate. That can include multiple things. That’s not studio hours. I go back to that 40,000-word book is four hours long. It would be $225 for four hours. That’s the math we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about 15, 20 hours in a studio at $225 an hour.
Audiobook Renaissance: It’s always better to experiment, beta test, and interest focus group things out before making a big launch. (Image via The Author's Corner)
That’s a lot more reasonable than I would have been imagining.
The average audiobook that we produce is somewhere in the $2,800 to $5,000 range.
I’ve heard of people charging 2 to 4 times.
It can get high depending on how much margin they’re adding. If you’re working out of New York or LA, your price automatically goes up because the cost of production is much higher in those cities.
If you’re hiring the talent or as you said, you were able to do it remotely, that’s not as expensive.
All the companies I’ve ever owned, except for my first one, was in completely remote. For years, we’ve been 100%t remote and my team is across North America and Europe.
A lot of businesses like mine are similar. We were already working remotely. The pandemic added my social life to the remote category.
I lost all my coffee offices for a while. I know that talk about first world problems, but nonetheless.
This has been informative. We talked about production, distribution, costs, and talent. The thing that’s occurring to me now is, you don’t have to reveal any names or anything. Do you have any stories of audiobooks either gone extremely well or horribly wrong? I always love a good story.
One of the reasons we changed the way we were doing things and I looked for solutions around author narration is because of both the amount of time that it took to work with authors that way and then having to go to the studio and the cost involved. Like with many things in business, a lot of what has to be handled upfront is expectation management. For people who don’t understand what it takes to edit audio and rerecord audio versus text, we call it a repeated education process and 90% of people get it. We occasionally do end up with someone who resists the training and coaching, and then after recording wants to go back and rerecord the whole thing because “now they have a handle on it” and think that’s included.
That is not the way that works. You can’t go back and do another ten hours of recording because you feel like it. You haven’t taken the coaching and been willing to do the work that needs to be done. Similarly, managing expectations on the professionally narrated side of things, it’s important upfront to get all of the expectations, voices, cadence, timing, pacing, and all these things are done. We do all that in what’s called the first fifteen of the book. We take about the first 15, 20 minutes, produce it, and make sure that it’s what the author wants before we produce the rest of the book.
We have an audiobook that created a tremendous amount of havoc in the author’s life because they realized in listening back to their own work, that they hated their work and wanted to shutter their company. It was intense. In hearing a third party deliver their work back to them, they had a breakdown. I’m a therapist by training but they were also in a different country, difficult to reach, and a long time difference. It ended up being an abandoned project with them not paying their bill because they decided to not move forward with their company. That resulted in some policy changes on our side of things.
Once you’ve been in business for a while, there are always a few items in the contract that were created in response to a specific situation.
That’s why contracts end up being so long.
They’re like, “We can’t let that happen again. Let’s set this.”
Making people’s initials in certain paragraphs is something we do because it’s easy like the terms and condition page to scroll to the bottom and check, “I have read it.” It is important to read. I don’t read all the terms and conditions either, but in contracts, I definitely read every word because there could be some questions there.
I’m thinking about that. They should have paid you but it could have been a great thing that happened for them.
That’s the thing and I don’t disagree. It was a case of somebody who was extremely well-meaning, had gone out, and they were putting themselves forward as an expert in an area that they had no experience in. It was all academic knowledge. It was all from synthesizing reading and going to workshops. They had never had a single client ever. They, unfortunately, spent over six figures in trying to launch this company. This is a lesson in entrepreneurship. I know there’s somebody out there who needs to know this. I’ve never told this story or alluded to this story anywhere in the media before. I built many businesses and companies my time and helped many other people do the same. It’s much better to experiment, beta test, and interest focus group things out before you do a big website, a book launch, or anything like that.
I want to add to that because this has shown up many times in my business that somebody will come to me in that situation. They’re like, “I want help writing a book.” I’ll be like, “Cool but I’m not going to be the one helping you.” You have no business writing a book about your expertise until you’ve developed some expertise. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who will tell people, “You need a book so you can have a business.” It isn’t true. It’s such a dramatic illustration of a big problem but this is investing over six figures to launch a brand with nothing behind it. By the time he came to you, most of that money was spent.
It doesn’t matter what religion you are. When it comes to sales, you have to become a Buddhist at that moment.
This is an aftereffect of it.
I will let people write a booklet. Quick turnaround, test, and we do help people with that. That’s why I came up with that idea, by the way, was because I turned away thousands of people over the last years who came to me wanting to write a book in exactly that situation and said, “Go become an expert and then come back.”
Come back when you have some chops in what you’re doing. That happens more on the podcasting side of our company. I will pivot people from, “I need to start a podcast.” “No, you don’t need to start a podcast. You need to build some clientele, sell some stuff, and be in business.” I’ll pivot them from having their own podcast to podcast guesting. That’s a great way both to network, to generate content, to build authority, all of those things that you want to do without the massive commitment that it is to have a quality podcast.
I know we’re a little off-topic, but I agree with you. There are people reading this who need to know this. When people start a podcast, what they need to do is get clients. When they decide to write a book, what they need to do is get clients or do an audiobook. The problem is if it feels productive. They can get up in the morning and say, “I’m growing my business,” “I’m recording a podcast,” or “I’m working on my book.” What they’re not seeing is what they’re avoiding. If people don’t have clients yet and everything’s theoretical, it’s because they don’t feel comfortable with doing sales.
A lot of what shows up looking like productivity is an expensive, very long avoidance strategy that could eat up somebody’s entire savings and set them back in terms of their ability to generate momentum in their business because they’re trying to avoid sales subconsciously. What’s they’re saying is, “This is what I do. This is how much it costs, Mastercard, American Express, or Visa.” That’s what innate and they can tell themselves they’re being productive. That’s why it’s so destructive when people tell people that. It’s a double whammy. When they figure it out, their resources are drained.
I bootstrapped my businesses in the beginning for years working other jobs, whatnot is exploring, and all of that. Sometimes you get sold the dream. I grew up in a situation, my parents owned a business, and I was surrounded by sales. Even I wasn’t comfortable with sales until I was in my late 20s, early 30s, it’s always something to learn. There’s always something to master or get better at. It never has anything to do with making the sale, it has everything to do with your internal conversation, your personal growth, and your ability to create relationships. The sales has nothing to do with sales.
We can do a whole episode on sales. I look at it that the sales conversation is a quest for clarity and to help the person that I’m on the phone will come to a place of clarity. If the clarity dictates that we work together, we work together. If the clarity dictates that we don’t work together, we don’t work together. That takes all of the pressure off everybody. I don’t feel pressure to make the sale and they don’t feel pressured too or people like they’re being sold because that’s not what the conversation is about.
This was a mentor of mine that created a lot of clarity for me around sales. Robin, how do you feel about cookies?
I love cookies.
If I were to bake a plate of cookies, I would say, “Robin, would you like a cookie?” Assuming we were together and not social distancing, you would say yes, right?
Yes.
If I were in a room, I walked around, and I offered 100 people a cookie, some people are going to say yes and some people are going to say no. The people who say no, is there anything wrong with my cookie?
Nothing is wrong with your cookie.
The people who say yes, is there anything magical about that cookie special or does it mean anything?
No.
There are all reasons they could have said no. They could be diabetic, not like that particular cookie, allergic to one of the ingredients, not hungry, or on a diet. The cookie has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with my worth or even with my ability as a baker. People say yes or no. Ultimately, you go out into the world and you think about “selling something.” You’re offering them your cookie, and there’s nothing wrong with your cookie.
That’s a great analogy. That was the hardest thing for me to get over because I went from a place of being afraid of sales to I’m almost addicted to sales. I love selling. It’s fun. The big thing that I had to get over was taking it personally either I was lacking or what’s wrong with me. That’s how I did. I was having a lot of conversations in a short period of time to the point where I didn’t care.
That happens a lot with people learning how to like their own voices. They have to listen to themselves over and over again. I say all the time, “It doesn’t matter what religion you are. When it comes to sales, you have to become a Buddhist at that moment. You just have to practice non-attachment.” Temporary conversion. You can convert back afterward.
You can pick up all your baggage. Tina, this has been wonderful and informative. Thank you for sharing your insight, wisdom, and great stories with us.
Thanks, Robin. This has been awesome. I appreciate it.
Tina Dietz is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed speaker, audiobook publisher, podcast producer, and influence marketing expert who has been featured on media outlets including ABC, Inc.com, Huffington Post and Forbes. Tina’s first podcast, The StartSomething Show, was named by INC magazine as one of the top 35 podcasts for entrepreneurs.
In 2016, Tina was the recipient of the Evolutionary Business Council MORE award and in 2017 she received the award for Outstanding Audio Company from The Winner’s Circle. She is also a member of the EBC leadership body and a founding member of the Forbes Coaches Council. Tina was also the lead interviewer in the podcasting documentary “The Messengers” and featured in the film.Tina splits her time between the US and Costa Rica where she’s part of the leadership team building a community of conscious leaders called Vista Mundo.
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Yes, thank you for joining us.So please tell us a story of how Twin Flames Studios came to be.
Well, Twin Flames Studios is a high ROI Influence and Marketing company where we use audio to amplify the voices and messages of trusted leaders and companies all over the world. It's really our mission to help these people help these organizations get their word out to a larger audience in the very intimate form of audio, whether that is nonfiction audiobook publishing, or that is podcasting strategically for your business.
And it's important that we note that in these times of great change, these powerful voices are needed now more than ever.
My background, and my story, is a little bit more like the twisty journey of a lot of entrepreneurs.I grew up as an entrepreneur—my parents’ business—the super sexy world of wood burning stoves and fireplaces.
Wow.
Yeah, very exciting. But I never wanted to have my own business because I didn't want to be tied down to a brick and mortar like my parents were. And I'm an only child, so that business was my annoying younger sibling when I was growing up.
Right, the baby.
The baby, yeah.
So, I became a therapist, and I tried to be conventional. And that didn't work out so well for me—
Okay—
As many entrepreneurs—
The entrepreneurial spirit was still—
That’s right, within the blood.
Yes.
So, after working in higher education, starting a nonprofit, and also building a family—another family business with my father, the Nayada Institute of Massage—I stepped off into a full-time business coaching practice. And through the jigs and the reels over the years grew that practice.
It was wonderful, had young children at the time, we lived a mobile lifestyle, we sold our stuff moved to Costa Rica. And at one point because I was… had my own, like personal expression—I grew up a little bit of a theater kid—drama kid—and was looking for some outlets, creative outlets—I became a voice actor as a paid hobby. And through that process, and learning the audiobook industry as a narrator—I was exploring that—I had this epiphany “Well, wait a minute, I'm coaching all these people from all over the world who owned businesses—20 different industries, eight different countries—why aren't these folks who are publishing their own books doing bestseller campaigns? Why aren't they doing audiobooks?”
And it was that curiosity that led me down the rabbit hole first for audiobooks—I already had my own podcast at the time—had fallen in love with that world. And that is what led to developing this niche in podcasting and audiobooks for business owners, thought leaders and companies.
And so what would you say the difference is versus something that's on paper, versus really hearing a tone? What does that do for an audience to really hear a voice?
Well, you know, a couple of years ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of being the lead interviewer on a documentary about podcasting called The Messengers, you can find it I think it's on Amazon Prime. And that was developed by Chris Krimitsos and his team at the Podfest Multimedia Expo. And that was, that organization was younger at the time and wanted to really explore what is this industry of podcasting from an independent podcaster’s point of view, rather than monopoly, or NPR or the, you know, the big professional gigs.
So, I interviewed about 40, different podcasters from all different walks of life, different countries, different places, most of them didn't know each other. And the word that came up in every single interview independently was the word intimacy. Podcasting being this intimate format, you know, directly into your ears—becoming a voice in somebody's head, it's such a privilege. And that and then also the ability to do active storytelling when we're so wired to tell stories as human beings. So that's, you know, the audio format has a lot of advantages in that way. And it's also the most accessible form of media, you know, you can listen—as I'm assuming some people are right now listening to this podcast—when you can't read, you can listen when you can't watch. So, you can take it anywhere.
And as a coaching also involved in telling… teaching people how to speak as well as I'm sure some people aren't necessarily natural storytellers. Is that something you sometimes have to teach certain clients as well?
Yeah, actually, the body of work that I've been developing over time and will continue to do so is around what I call Vocal Leadership. And that's really about the instrument that your external voice is and learning how to tune that and play it beautifully to another level. And also, the internal voices that we have, which is really… if the external voice is the instrument, then the internal voice is the music, the sheet music that we're playing.
So those two things really need to be congruent in order to have a presence, and in order to move people the way we want to move them through stories. And then, of course, there's also the actual storytelling, and microphone techniques, and all of that good stuff as well.
The little details.
Yeah, exactly.So, our hosts… One of the things we do as a company as we get our podcast hosts together into a mastermind about quarterly, to connect them with each other, and also to provide additional support and training.
Okay
And that's, in addition to meeting with them one-on-one to help them with the strategy, you know, as their podcast is, you know, being aired.
Okay, and so that kind of goes to my next question—you mentioned Voice Leadership, and then how you can kind of take an extra step to really connect with the audience. So then, what does being a conscious business leader mean to you?
I think that the word conscious has… has not become overplayed, but it's important to take a step back and look at “Well, what does that really mean?” I'm so glad you asked the question.
And being conscious in your business means taking not just your business into account, it's taking the impact that you're making, or that you can make into account. And that has to do not just with the people that you serve, but it also has to do with how your business is set up. How the impact… How it impacts the people that work inside the company? Is it a win for them? Is it a good culture? Is it healthy? Is it helping people develop their dreams and goals? And is it good also for the people who are, you know, the founders? So, sometimes it's really easy as a C suite or business owner to get on this hamster wheel where you will—you burn out, right?
So, you really need to bring a conscious view… You know, taking these things into consideration. What are the deeper values that you have? And how do those infuse everything that you're doing, everything that you're saying, and the practices that you have? You know, unfortunately, being in the entrepreneur world, speaking world, as long as I have, sometimes you run into people who preach these incredible positive messages from the stage, but then don't treat people well behind the curtain. And being conscious means that you're congruent.
And that also comes back around to the—you know—the vocal leadership, or embodied leadership that we all strive to develop. When you are conscious to make sure that, you know, you're reflecting and having the… your internal conversations match what's coming out of your face.
Wow, that's the first time I've heard that sort of response as far as how it can be one way for the show, but behind the scenes things aren't matching, and how it needs to.So, would you say then, in order for things to be congruent, it has to start with the internal of the founder, of the person who's kind of setting the culture from the beginning?
Yeah, I would completely agree with that. You set the tone. The buck stops here, as the old saying goes.
And I think one of the important things about being a leader is being open enough to seek the coaching on that or to seek the feedback on that, not just from other experts, but also from your team, also from the people around you, from your, from your clients. And it can really take something to hear feedback about that. I remember years ago—I'll go in all the way back to my 20s—I used to get this piece of feedback all the time, because I'm a pretty intense person, you know, I—
I understand, yes.
There's this intensity, and there's this fervor, and there's this passion. And it's… they would say, “Well, could you tone it down a little bit?” Or “Could you soften your edges?” And—oh, my god—that was so offensive, that pissed me off 18 different ways. Because I thought, I just thought they meant that they wanted it, “You go be quiet, put in a box, and smile and do what you're told.” And sometimes that was the case. But what I came to understand later, is that it wasn't really about me, it was about them being intimidated by me. But where I can be kind, and I can be compassionate is learning how to read the room.
Right
And learning how to not, you know, quell or shut off my integrity or my passion, but to manage it in order to express it in a way that people can really receive. Because that's what's important to me, can you receive the message that I'm giving?
Right, right. I guess that’s one of the hardest lessons to learn—different people receive things in different ways.
Right.
I’m just passionate, I just want you to do great, I want us to do great. And just certain ways… it doesn't sit with people like that. And it's learning how to do that extra communication.
Yeah, I remember one of the most important conversations I ever had was in a leadership course really kind of intense one year-long course. And one of my fellow, very successful executive woman, she said—I was getting all ramped up about something—she said, “Why is this so important to you?” I said, “Well, the question is, why isn't it important to you?” And we had a really fascinating discussion about how different people have different capacities to feel. And certain ones of us are very highly sensitive and other people are not. And just, it really opened my eyes, because I really kind of just thought that everybody was like me, and turns out, nope—
No—
Not so much.
I had to make those adjustments. And so, where do you see your business going then in the next three to five years? And I'm sure… We're seeing that people are doing more audio both receiving and giving, than actual reading, and literature, and everything. So where do you see your business going?
Well, it's been a… we've doubled the company four years in a row, time on time. And I don't expect that that will happen forever, certainly—
But it's nice.
It's great so far. And so, we're in a big scaling phase right now. And also, in a position, you know, earlier, in 2020, when the pandemic really was affecting a lot of our colleagues, our clients, our customers, former clients—things like that—I was grateful that we were in a position because we've always been a fully mobile company. And of course, audio is much easier to do remote—that we offered, you know, a lot of—a complement just for free. We went out and said, “What… how can we help?” and offered teleclasses, and consultations, and things like that, to help different companies make use of this online space, make use of audio, both for internal communications, and external communications and marketing. And so, we've had… 2020 was really a banner year for us.
And going into 2021 and beyond we're just looking to really serve more companies to have more intimate relationships with their current clients, with their future clients, with their colleagues, and even for their internal culture, because podcasting in particular, can help with all of that. And then on the author side of things, of course, a lot of people with time that they had, are finishing their books and getting things out on audio—and you know, audiobooks, outsell eBooks three to one across genres. So, it's… It's a beautiful thing to be able to help people get their voice out like that.
Yeah, absolutely, so you're kind of in a nice little sweet spot where it's like you get to of course, help people build their businesses and kind of make some pivots, but of course, it helps your business as well having more clients.
Exactly. You know, it's weird to say it felt like being in the right place at the right time after 20 years. So, worth the wait, worth the wait.
Absolutely. So, you have a few services offered through your website, such as links to your podcast and audiobooks. Tell us about any other services that you might offer, your business offers?
Well, you know, the done-for-you audiobook side of things, one of our… the key things that we're able to do with folks, to the best of my knowledge, we're the only audiobook house—and we do specialize in nonfiction exclusively—who is able to remote into wherever an author is in the world and record their audio book with them, live, full direction, from their home studio or office without them having to go into a studio.
And we can coach them on very easily getting good sound having a high-quality audiobook, and it keeps the cost down. And it's also very comforting to be in your own space while you're do that. So… And we also can do really fun things like insert music, and even other audio clips, and things like that. We're producing a memoir for a family right now on the Holocaust. And there are some fascinating video clips that we're converting to audio that we're going to be inserting in the narrative to help tell the story. So, there's some really cool stuff we do on that side.
Same thing with podcasting. Podcasting is so creative and such a beautiful format to get your message out there. So, whether it is internal podcasting—like we do with enterprise level companies—, external podcasting—that we do with companies and organizations to help get the word out about who they are, what they do and develop their influence—, or the vocal leadership—that I do one-on-one, to help people become more effective in the messages that they have. We're just happy to do all of it—
Yeah, sounds like, yeah, cover a lot of different things that a lot of different people could use especially right now with how things have changed. And so, for anyone who's interested in using any of those services or just even wants to connect with you, where are the best places, and platforms to go to?
You can definitely find me on any social media platform. We have a social media following about 280,000 so we're out there and so you can find me, Tina Dietz. You can also look up Twin Flames Studios, although my name is probably going to get you a better result there on LinkedIn, certainly Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And you can also just come over to us at TwinFlamesStudios—it's a lot of ss—.com, and come and hang out with us find out some more information, and grab a cup of coffee.
Love it. I love coffee, and I'm sure others do too and would love to share with you.
Me too.
Perfect.
Tina Dietz, thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure learning about you and your company today.
Well, it's been a pleasure being here. Thanks so much, Gabby.
Learn more about the intimacy and power of our voice,
In this quick video, I share with you some mysteries behind microphones and give you some recording tips to improve your podcast sound quality
Tina Dietz
Hi guys, it's Tina Dietz from Twin Flames Studios, and I wanted to do a really quick video for you on microphone technique, because I hear microphone issues constantly—particularly on new podcasts—but even on longstanding podcasts.
And there's a few things that are very small that you need to be sure that you're doing with your microphone.So, first of all, this is a Yeti. Yeti is one of the most popular microphones on the market. A lot of people have one. I've been using one for years. Even though I've got other ones floating around, I do come back to the Yeti because it's familiar and lovely.One of the biggest issues with the Yeti people don't know is that it is a side presentation microphone—you don't speak into the top of the Yeti, you talk into the side of it. The other thing that happens a lot with the Yeti, as well as many other microphones, is you may have what's called the gain adjusted wrong. Gain is sometimes a button or dial on the microphone; sometimes it's in the software. The gain has to do with how much volume, or how much that your microphone is taking in. And you want to have that generally set about halfway. Not too low, not too high. Sometimes you have to experiment with it.On a microphone like the Yeti there's also different settings on the back—read the directions. Usually, for podcasting, you use the cardioid, which is the little heart symbol on the back. There's different settings on the Yeti because it is an omnidirectional microphone—you can have a bunch of people sitting around it to get sound.This is in contrast to a top presentation microphone, which—if you have a microphone that looks anything like this—and most microphones are a top presentation microphone. So, a microphone like this—this is a Samson—you would speak into the top of it, not the side of it. So, one of the biggest issues of Yeti—the sound isn't here; it's here. So, make sure you're doing it right.The other thing is, are you close enough to the mic? When we're on video like this, I'm sitting back kind of far from the microphone, and you know, you might be getting a sound. If I'm recording a podcast, I don't want to be that far away. I'm going to take a hang loose sign; I am going to put my pinky finger on the microphone; I'm going to put my thumb on my lip. And that is as far away as I should be from the microphone.If you want to create an even more intimate sound as long as you don't get too loud—because it'll pop your sound waves—you can even get in a little bit closer. And you can probably hear in the sound quality that there is a difference here when you get right up on the mic.
If you have a lot of popping and sibilance—you'll hear that right there—on your microphone, you want to make sure you do have a guard on it like this—a foam one or a screen one. They will help with the sibilance; we can also do some in post-production.And I'm also speaking in a room that is quite big—high ceiling, all of that. I'm going to get a lot of room noise. I'm going to get a lot of reverb. So, when you are recording, think about recording either in a smaller space with soft cloth or, you know, acoustic tiles on your walls. Record in your walk-in-closet—it's a great space to do recording. Just don't use video.And for God's sake, stop using Zoom for your podcasts. Even as a producer, I can tell you we have used Zoom for our podcasts in the past. We have stopped doing it. Because all of the changes in the software of the platform, they are over-compressing the sound quality. We're not getting good quality out of Zoom anymore. So consider using a podcast platform like Squadcast.fm—that's the one we use for our clients, Squadcast.fm. That is not a paid plug. It's a really easy to use format. There are a bunch of other ones out there as well, that are going to be better than Zoom.Audio and video—very different. We'll talk about that in another video. But I wanted to talk with you—since I'm seeing so many podcasts launching here in 2021—about some quick microphone techniques. These are very, very basic. There's a lot more we can go into, but if that's helpful to you—I really hope it is and hopefully that'll improve a little bit of your sound quality on your new podcast.Talk to you soon.
I invite you to join Julia Steele and me at the VID19 Conference and learn how to strengthen your voice of leadership in uncertain times
Hi, everyone, and welcome to day eight of the VID19 Conference. My name is Julia Steele, I'm the creator and host. I cannot believe we are on day eight already, but days are flying by and the feedback has been absolutely brilliant. So, thank you so much for everyone that has reached out to me and the other contributors. It's great to see you all getting so much value from this conference.
It's traditional in Australia to acknowledge the land that we stand on at the start of every conference. So, given we are on a new day, I am just going to acknowledge that I am standing on the land of the Wurundjeri people, of the Kulin Nation. I extend… Sorry, I, I'll start again. I want to acknowledge the land, the land that I stand on, and the people of the Wurundjeri in the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders: past, present and emerging. I also extend that to all First Nations people that may be joining from around Australia, and overseas as well.
We are joined by the wonderful Tina Dietz. She joins us all the way from Florida. I just love that this is getting more international by the minute.
So, Tina, thank you so much for joining us. And you're gonna help us sort of explore and strengthen our voice, you know, while we lead through these uncertain times. So I can't wait to, to see where you take us with this. And thanks, again, for joining from Florida.
Oh, it's my pleasure. Anytime we can reach out to each other across the globe, it's always a privilege. So I really appreciate that.
Okay, so leading in uncertain times.
I know, Julia, you speak a lot on this as well. So, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. Just to share a little bit about myself.
I've been an entrepreneur for many, many years, many decades, I grew up as one. And I also found myself trained as a therapist. I have been in business for a couple of decades building businesses around the world, more than 20 different industries, and about eight or nine different countries now and counting.
And my company, Twin Flames Studios, works with leaders, executives, trusted brands, and entrepreneurs to help amplify your voice and your message not just to your audience, but also to your team, to new people who are looking to find you. And we do that through audiobooks. We do that through podcasting. And we also do that through what we're going to talk about today, which is vocal leadership. And a lot of people haven't heard about vocal leadership. So, I'll explain more about what that means in just a couple of minutes.
But you know, with everything going on, I'm just, it's funny, I think this is about my—I've always used Zoom a lot, my company has always been mobile so I feel very fortunate. And this time to already be in a place to help other people work with online formats, work with audio formats, because this is what I've been doing now for more than a decade. And it's… But sometimes I am on Zoom so much I question that I actually have a lower half to my body. And it gets a little weird after a while. It's like, “Do I exist from the waist down? I'm not entirely sure.” And I'm also pretty sure that the unofficial tagline of Zoom is “Zoom: Pants optional.” So I don't know if you're wearing pants joining us here today. You don't have to because you're not on camera. Actually, I don't have to either. But I am, I assure you.
But what we're gonna be talking about today, just to—And I'm super curious if you want to put into the chat, anything about what brought you here today? Where you're from? I'm monitoring the chat. So, I will definitely be taking questions as we go along—If there's something that comes up. My preference is to be highly, highly interactive in everything that we're doing here, because the best way that I can serve you is by covering those areas and covering those topics that are going to be most relevant to you. So, as we're going along, if something pops up for you, please do put it in the chat, ask questions again, feel free to introduce yourself, so we kind of know who's out there. We had a really lovely turnout for this today. And I'm excited to get to know you as well.
So how to strengthen your voice of leadership in uncertain times, and what exactly is vocal leadership, and what makes it important?
So vocal leadership encompasses a wide range of topics. And this includes
Your personal vocal mechanics—which we'll talk some about today.
The dynamics of communication
Team communication
It's present in meetings and presentations—when you're live and in person, and you can actually, you know, touch elbows, things like that. It's present when you're in online presentations like this. It is also present in your speaking peer to peer and networking. Anytime that you're using your voice, vocal leadership is present.
The two areas that we don't think about our voices being present, but they are very much present are
The voice of your message or your brand
And how you know who you are and what you stand for—and your values come through that particular modality of your voice.
And the very most important part of vocal leadership, which is your inner voice, and what that tells you, how that informs you because that inner voice that you have—or maybe it's lots of voices, as I can attest to myself. That is one of the things we're also going to discuss today is that inner voice as well as the outer voice—so meetings, presentations, sales conversations, conventions, conflict resolution, performance review, team collaboration, vocal leadership encompasses all of these areas and has a significant impact on your performance on the culture, on everything that happens.
And the two areas we're going to focus on today to help you be the calm in the storm, are:
The mechanics of some vocal leadership technique to help you lead during meetings and conversations. And these are going to be useful to you in any situation where you're the “leader”—I'm putting that in air quotes, because some of these situations, we don't think of ourselves as leaders. Certainly working with our teams or working with clients, working with freelancers, any of those areas, sure. But you may also be having a leadership role in parenting, taking on being a leader or holding a space of calm in your other relationships with friends or in the community.
And we're also going to be covering ways that you can manage your own inside voice, your internal conversations and habits about what happens, you know, inside of you as you're looking to communicate with other people.
And the key to vocal leadership is aligning these inside and outside voices, being congruent. And that's truly where authenticity lives. And if we're looking to truly be leaders, then authenticity is where we must stand as much as possible at all times.
So, when we start with the vocal leadership mechanics, there are four factors we're going to focus on today—there are far more than that. But the four factors we're going to focus on today that have been shown in research to significantly impact how you're perceived as a leader and your credibility, are:
Articulation
Tempo
Flow
Sonority
I'll say that again, articulation, tempo flow and sonority.
Articulationis how clearly you speak, how understandable your words are. And the more articulate you are—not over articulate, because when we're over articulate, we start to sound like a snob, and nobody likes that. Under articulation, of course, kills your credibility because you start to slur your words, you're not understandable, and then people wonder if you really know what you're talking about. But articulation is important. And particularly since we're talking about online meetings, and non-visual meetings, in many cases, articulation is extra important because people need to be able to understand you. And they need to be able to be very clear on what your words are and how you're speaking.
The second area is tempo. And tempo is arguably the most important factor to focus on. Tempo is your natural speaking speed. Now, I live in Florida, but I'm originally from New York. Not New York City, but Buffalo, New York, on the opposite end of the state. But nonetheless, being from, you know, that area, the Northeast, we tend to speak pretty quickly. That's a natural tone for me, I'm never going to be somebody with a lower, slower, more laid-back tone of voice—like you might find from people from the southern US or from other countries where the cadence is much, much slower. So, it's natural for me to have this slightly faster tempo. Your correct tempo is whatever is right for you. And it is, in research, in all the research studies, probably the top factor in what makes you most credible as a leader and what makes you sound most trustworthy.
This is because it has a lot to do with your breathing. Everything comes from the breath. And when we are breathing to shallowly and our voices start to speed up that's an indication on a very biological level that you're nervous, that maybe you're lying, or that you're angry, depending on how you're presenting to people.
On the opposite side of things, if you're halting and your tempo starts to slow down, then you lose people's attention. And they start to fade off. And they're not really focused on what you're saying. And that's a credibility killer as well. So, the most important thing we can do on the mechanic side of things, first of all, number one, is to focus on our breathing. Practicing your breathing—and this can be do through yogic breathing, it can be through something as simple as what I call “The 4-4-4 Breath” and this is where you inhale on a count of four, you hold for a count of four, and you exhale on a count of four. And this helps normalize your breathing, which helps settle your parasympathetic nervous system, and creates more calm throughout your body, which translates—of course—to your brain, and how you're connecting with your audience, or the person you're sitting in front of, or your child, or whoever it is that you're communicating with. And we hear about breathing a lot. But we don't necessarily always take that advice. If we take a few moments, it can make a tremendous difference in how we're perceived by other people.
The fourth factor is flow. And this is how smoothly your words come out of your mouth. This also is indicative of the dreaded “uhms” and “ahhs”. When you're a public speaker or you give a lot of meetings and presentations always tell you, “Oh, you got to watch how many times you say ‘Um,’ and ‘ah.’” The problem with that is that the more you think about “uhms” and “ahhs,” the more you tend to save them. It's like don't think about pink elephants, and there's the elephant, right? So, if you give yourself some room to let go of being concerned about the “uhms” and “ahhs,” the best thing that you can do is focus on the other person instead of what you're saying. Not on their reaction, but in being present to them, even in an audio-only situation. And we'll talk some more a little bit later about how our audio-only—when we're listening—and how audio-only actually can heighten our senses, and how we interact with that, and how we can trust ourselves and our listening when it's audio-only. When we're in a situation where we are listening to other people, focus on them, be present to them, and many times that will get rid of the “uhms” and “ahhs” because those “uhms” and “ahhs” are indicative of our own brain interrupting us trying to get us to say things a certain way, or questioning ourselves in our internal conversation if we're saying the right thing or not. We get worried about “Oh, what do I have to say next?” And that interruption of train of thought can really damage your flow.
So again, coming back to your breath, keeping yourself calmer will help your flow and help get rid of those “uhms” and “ahhs,” and increase your rate of flow for that extra boost of credibility and leadership.
And the last factor we're focused on today is called sonority. Sonority is the pleasantness of your voice. And in truth, most people, the more they practice these other factors—articulation, tempo, flow—the more you take care of your voice, the more your sonority will rise. Not everybody has a naturally super pleasant voice, but you have to work with the voice that you have. That's the only choice that we have—is to work with the voice that we have. And it's a funny thing, when I speak to groups of people—and I'd be curious as to what happens here with this audience—when I ask the question, “How many of you here like the sound of your own voice?” How many people do you think raise their hand? Yeah, pretty much nobody. About 80% of the room will tell me—on any given room—that they do not like the sound of their own voice. And this goes even for podcasters and professional speakers. Even in rooms like that, I'll get 50 to 60% of the room saying “Ehh, I don't like the sound of my own voice. I like my content, I might be able to own my identity as an expert, but the sound of my voice?” Right?
So, it takes something to get used to the sound of your own voice. And truly the only way out in that situation is through, as the old saying goes. You have to listen to yourself back and learn how to appreciate sometimes you just have to get used to it like a habit over and over again—listening to yourself doing interviews on podcasts, listening to yourself just doing recordings are around your house with your own musings, and things like that. And find ways that you can appreciate the voice that you have. Even if you are, you know, find yourself concerned about things like an accent, I'm going to ask you to let that go. Because what makes you unique is your voice.
And if you have any concerns about how understandable you are, then we go back to practicing the things like articulation, and tempo, because all of those things are going to help make your voice more understandable, depending on the audience that you're trying to reach.
So, the other factors around sonority that I wanted to touch on are two credibility killers. And these are far more prevalent in North America than they are in any other part of the world. So, I'm very curious for our audience in Australia if you see this as well. And those two credibility killers are what we call Up Talk and Vocal Fry.
So up talk is where you make every statement sound like a question. And that really makes you sound not credible. Because you make you sound like you don't know what you're doing. And that's an example of what up talk sounds like. Most people will up talk the end of their sentences when they're not entirely sure how their message is going to be received. If you're doing a live networking event, for example, and you have to give a 30-seconds “Hi, my name is so and so. And my business is such and such,” you'll hear a lot of up talk in people sentences, because they're kind of questioning how they're going to be received in the room. This is another good area to ask somebody else, rather than try to figure it out yourself, if this is a habit that you have—it's actually kind of difficult to hear if you do it in the moment, and you can practice will be called downstrokes. So up talk would sound like this: “Hi, my name is Tina Dietz, and my company is Twin Flames Studios. And we help amplify the voices of leaders and authors and companies around the world.” Sounds a little off, right? Speaking that with downstrokes with sounds like this: “Hi, my name is Tina Dietz. And I'm the owner of Twin Flames Studios, where we amplify the voices of leaders and companies and authors all over the world.” Sounds a little different when you get to hear the contrast between the two. So, you can see why that's a bit of a credibility killer.
The other one I mentioned is vocal fry. Now I have a hard time even doing vocal fry because my voice doesn't like to do it. I've trained myself out of it. But if you're familiar with the American celebrities—the Kardashians—these guys are a good example of listening to vocal fry, it makes you sent voice sound like it's a little bit bored or dismissive, because you drop the ends of your sentences down into your throat. And it's kind of a vocal fry kind of sound. You'll also hear this on American radio, on National Public Radio a lot, particularly with the male hosts on shows if you listen to podcasts, you'll hear this quite often in a lot of professional level shows. But the thing is, the reason it's a credibility killer is—and it's not with those guys who are professional hosts or even with the Kardashians—is we're not looking to take advice necessarily from the Kardashians, or from a radio show host who's doing a game show, we're looking to be entertained by them. So, the vocal fry doesn't matter for their credibility because we're not looking for credibility.
But when you take that same vocal fry, and you put it into a situation where somebody's doing a job interview, we find in the research that across the board—regardless of gender, regardless of age, regardless of race or any other demographic situation—if somebody is giving their answers in a job interview with vocal fry, they are across the board seen as less trustworthy, less credible, and less hirable. So, it is a habit that we do take try to with our leaders try to coach you out of because it can be damaging, particularly if it's done a lot. Here or there you are having a bad voice day, fine. But habitually? Not so good. So those are the two credibility killers with sonority.
Now when we're in a meeting, and you're running something with a team or you're running a program, you can keep these factors in mind. But what's more important is that you practice them ahead of time. So, articulation practicing with things like tongue twisters, and facial exercises are really important.
Tempo, as I mentioned before, the best thing you can do to work with tempo is to work with your breathing. And that tempo piece will flow over—no pun intended—over into the flow and sonority areas as well.
Listening back to yourself as the other best thing you can do for your vocal mechanic so that you can start to identify—And this is not a situation of beating yourself up. This is listening to yourself to say, “Okay, what can I add?” Or “What can I enhance?” Or “How can I create my next level?” That's the conversation that we're in. This is only a conversation between better and best, I never want to hear you beating yourself up for the voice that you have.
And by the way, we have put together a Vocal Leadership Workout for everybody that you can download. And it's got tons of exercises in it, and it also has links to some articles that I wrote for Forbes magazine, and some other places on different aspects of vocal leadership. You can download that we'll put the link in the in the chat as well at TwinFlamesStudios.com/vid19. And that's… I really, really love this vocal workout, I have all my clients do it to get them going. Because we don't think about our voice as the machine that it is, as the muscle that it is. And the neck muscles and the throat muscles around the voice are very complicated. There's a lot of people… You think about it, you have basically a popsicle stick holding up a bowling ball. That's the musculature of your neck. And it's all these crisscrossing tiny little muscles. And if you go to massage your neck or your throat, you can start to feel it like “Holy crap! That's like piano wire in there! That is really, really tight.”
So, allowing yourself… give yourself some throat massage is really, really helpful. We'll talk about that, along with some other techniques a little bit later when we get to talking about managing your inside voice, which we're about to switch to right now.
So, all of that being said about the mechanics of your voice. You know what’s really important? The inside part. Yes, it's important to have all these factors and to practice to manage the articulation. There's lots and lots of different things when we work with podcast hosts, or we work with authors who want to narrate their own audiobooks, there are a lot of mechanics that we go through for phrasing, and asking certain questions, and speeding up, and slowing down, and different listening techniques. All of that is wonderful and valuable. But if I gave you nothing else today, it would be to talk with you about who you are being when you are being a leader, and it coming through your voice that way. So this is all about your inside voice.
It's who you are, and who you are being far more than what you're saying that's going to make the biggest impact on who you're communicating with. We are wired as human beings for empathy. 100%. All the time. We are herd animals, we are social animals, so to speak. And we have these wonderful things called mirror neurons. Mirror neurons allow us to kind of see and understand or feel and understand what somebody else might be feeling. And mirror neurons and empathy kind of cuts both ways. Those mirror neurons that make us able to identify and feel so strongly when we're watching a movie, and the dog dies, or your favorite character falls in love. We feel those feelings even though those events aren't real. That's how powerful those neurons are. And that same biology is what people are reacting to when you're communicating with them, even with non-visual communication. So, for example, have you ever been on the phone, and all of a sudden your stomach drops, because you sense that something has changed without the other person saying anything. Or if you're a parent, your kids are playing in the next room, and suddenly the sound changes, and without even knowing why you find yourself going into check on. And then there's music. Our emotional state can change in an instant, just for those first couple of bars of our favorite songs. So, here's the thing.
You have that same impact on everyone around you. Every single day, we impact those around us whether we're conscious of it or not. And the opportunity for each and every one of us is—Do you want to make a conscious impact or an unconscious impact simply through how you're being? So, have you ever thought to yourself who are you being when you're being the best version of yourself? Who you being when you're being the best version of yourself think about that for a moment. And I'd even invite you now to close your eyes and see where you can feel—see what I said, “See where you can feel?” it's kind of a dichotomy there. But think about it just close your eyes go inside. Where do you feel those emotions in your body when you think about when you feel the best? Think about a scenario about when you have felt the best, maybe a peak experience is, or working with your clients, or, you know, you had a really great experience speaking, or running a meeting, or you had another accomplishment. Where do you feel those emotions in your body? And how would you identify them? A couple of places you can think maybe to check in are your chest, your throat, maybe you have this level of calm alertness. I hear that a lot from clients of level of calm alertness, like you're ready, but your calm. It's a really cool way to be.
You see, we're never taught to practice our emotional states, like we're taught to read, or throw baseball, or create a presentation. But it is a skill, like any other. Intentionally bringing up an emotional state and putting it on—like putting on a new jacket—is something that we as human beings have the absolute ability to do. And it's something that is a very worthwhile practice, because it's not so much like you have to control your emotions, but it's a conscious shifting and a conscious choosing of who we are going to be. And as a leader, this is incredibly important as an internal skill. So, let me break this down into a more practical state.
One of the ways that we train authors who want to narrate their own audiobooks, and our podcast hosts, and our vocal leadership clients to practice these different emotional states, one way we do that is to take a passage from a book—or if we're working with an author to passage from their own book—and read it in different emotional states. You know, and I'm going to give you an example right now. I've got some classic quotes queued up in front of me here. So, this is the first line from The Great Gatsby. So, I'm going to read it normally. And then we're going to try on some different attitudes or different emotional states with it. And you can try this on your own with—open a book and just try doing it in different ways. And the trick is to say, “Okay, as I'm reading it in these different attitudes, how does that feel in my body? Where do I notice it?”so you can bring it up really consciously?
So, here's the first line read straight. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.” Okay, let's pick a let's pick an emotional state—let's do sad and regretful. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.” Or if we can try angry. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.” Right? Maybe we can try excited. So I'm really excited to share, okay. “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.”
Okay? So those are some different emotional attitudes. And when you're practicing this, I invite you to practice it in a big way, in an overplayed way, in an over dramatic way, so you can really emphasize. And then every time you do a different emotion and try on a different emotion, close your eyes after you do it and see where you can feel it in your body, see where it raises or lowers your energy. And just start to get a little practice doing this. Because your emotional states are something that you many, many times can choose. And this is also very helpful when you are managing people because as leaders, we tend to be “emotional Velcro”—things stick to us, and we can help it because we're empathic and we care. So, you might start out your day feeling really great, and then help people through a whole series of problems, and then by noon, as you're taking a break, you make time to take a pause and go “Okay, is anything sticking to me that might be somebody else's?” Taking a few deep breaths and blowing it out. So, when you kind of clear yourself, there's some different ways that you can kind of clear yourself throughout the day. And clearing yourself throughout the day is super important because of this “emotional Velcro” state that we go into. And because we can shift emotional states, as quickly as we want to. We tend to be—if particularly if you're a coach, if you're speaker, if you are a conscious leader, and you're out there working with people, you've probably been on a ride with people through this empathic state that you have every day. And so, it's important in between times, to take care of your vocal leadership. To pause and see what your internal voice is telling you—has something anybody said to you kicked up an old belief maybe of something that, you know, kind of mirrored off of a client or a colleague, that you need to take a moment to shift? Or maybe someone had something really dreadful happened to them, and even though you didn't totally take it on, there's a little bit of something you need to process.
There's a couple of different vocal techniques you can do to release some of that stress physically, that then translates again to your nervous system and help you bring back that balance or that homeostasis, that internal / external voice congruency that we're looking for. And one of those is something that I mentioned a little while ago, which is throat massage. The throat is a very vulnerable area for most of us. It's not something we allow people to have access to, you know, you touch people on the shoulder, you touch people on the arm, you might even touch people on the knee, give them a hug, but somebody touches your throat? This is a very vulnerable space. So, giving yourself a few minutes to give yourself a little bit of a rub, or slide your fingers particularly up in this area on the bottom of the jaw. Thumb presses—thumb presses down the side. There's a massive muscle that goes from the bottom of your ear all the way down to the throat called the Sternocleidomastoid—say that five times fast. That's a big muscle that also is related to TMJ. So, if you have any jaw issues, sometimes massaging and giving some attention to that big muscle will be a relief for you. So that's one thing you can do to relieve some stress in that area. The second one, I also alluded to, and that is blowing it out. But I also like to refer to it in honor of my grandmother as “The Italian Grandmother Sigh.” And so, this is again, something that helps activate the relaxation part of our nervous system, and it's simply taking some large deep breaths and allowing a sound to come out on the end. So just “Aaaaaaahhhh.”
And I remember my great grandmother sitting in crocheting in the afternoon, and every so often, she would just let out this deep sigh. And I realized years later that that was her way of just releasing tension. She wasn't trying to get attention, she wasn't being dramatic, anything like that it was her body just even unconsciously, just releasing some of the tension that she was going through. So that's another very simple, very, very easy technique that I would recommend.
So, in particular, before you go into meetings, check in with yourself and see what you might need. It's very, very easy for us to get caught up in the doing. But it's the being that allows us to stay on track and go with the flow and be the biggest help of those other people that we interact with and that we lead.
One of the questions I get asked by leaders a lot, is “How much should I share personally with my team, how open or vulnerable is good to be?” Now this question came up long before we were dealing with the global situation we're dealing with now.
So, let's go back to our example of being in an online meeting or a conference call. And so, let's say you've been conscious of your way of being and you're bringing a good version of yourself to your phone call. You are ready to listen to people, your empathy is turned on high, you feel good, you’re breathing, your tempo and articulation are natural and flowing for you, and you're kind of embodying this calm in the storm for your team.
Now as you start your meeting, what many leaders are reluctant to do, but is extremely important to do particularly in times of uncertainty and difficulty is—it's important to acknowledge any elephants in the room. These concerns or issues that your team might be dealing with, but maybe they're reluctant to bring up. So, you as a leader holding a space for what we call clearing is going to help your team be fully present and deal with the task at hand and focused. So, regardless of the way you have this clearing—and there are several ways to approach clearing, I think there are going to be a little outside what we have time for today. But the point is that your role is to model what we would refer to in storytelling as telling the story from the scar, not the wound. Telling the story from the scar, not the wound. So, here's how that looks or sounds. This is where you acknowledge what you may be feeling or going through that's impacting you. But keeping in the clear state of being that you're holding from the team.
So, for example, you might share at a time like this “No, overall, we're doing pretty well, I have to admit, something that's on my mind is my elderly parents live far away, and my mom has some issues with her lungs. So, I have to admit this is causing some stress. And I'm grateful to be able to be in contact with them. And I know they're taken care of, but it's something on my mind. So, I'm just saying in this clearing that even though that's on my mind, I'm going to set that aside, so I can be fully present with all of you.”So that's telling the story from the scar.
If you were to tell the story from the wound, and you've probably heard this in meetings, it might sound something like, “I'm really worried about my mom, I don't know what I'm going to do. This whole thing has gotten me so stressed out, and Oh God, guys, I'm so sorry. But I, just you know, I'm having trouble focusing. And I know this is really hard for everybody.” That's what telling the story from the wound sounds like and it creates a totally different energetic scenario in a meeting. It's definitely something that's going to impact your team. They're going to immediately feel that, and then they're going to be reacting doubly, because not only are they then worried for you. They are—instead of an area being compassionate, or empathetic with you, which is you would they would hear and react to the first way—now they're going to be worried. And they're going to have their own worries on top of it. And then they're worried that you're going to freak out and then they have to carry the burden. And then it's going to spiral.
So, telling the story from the scar, not the wound is the primary cardinal rule, I want you to remember, when you're thinking about how to deal with being the leader in conversations that are challenging, times of high stress, high uncertainty. You are there holding the space. And that's why it's important, you know, not to go from meeting to meeting as much as possible but to leave a little bit of space in between even if it's two or three minutes. To regroup, check in on your way of breathing and being and get your nervous system in homeostasis before you walk in, with that your voice intact, with your being intact at the same time. So, modeling this leadership behavior is super powerful for any team to keep people focused, clear, and also feeling connected to each other and to you.
So, I am known in the circles that know me as a bit of a fire hose on this topic and whatnot and give a lot of information and a lot of topics. And I do just want to remind you that a bunch of this, and these tips are written down in the Vocal Leadership Workout I mentioned at TwinFlamesStudios.com/vid19.
I want to pause for a minute before I lay on any more, and just see about questions, and opening up the floor for comments, and things like that. So, let's take a look here. Oh, this is very cool. We got Canada, Melbourne, Australia. Oh, good to know Australians very commonly use up talk. I yeah, I have my I have several Australian colleagues and I haven't heard of them. So, I have been curious about that.
It's pretty, pretty common in the media in particular. So, when you're watching the news—
Really?—
We talk, and we talk, and we talk, and when we go up at the end, and everything's great.
Very common in Canada as well, as well as the Midwest of the US. But really, it's a human thing. Yeah, it's very much a human thing. So, I'm very curious in all of the info I just threw at you guys, any kind of questions you might have, or if you'd like me to go deeper or clarify on any particular topics. And while you guys are typing, I'm going to go ahead and put that link into the chat.
If you've got any tips, or if I can check out your website, because I find it takes me a while to get my voice warmed up in the morning.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And is there things on there that I can—even now like I'm talking to you, I'm like “I could do with some more cup of another cup of tea or some honey or—“
Definitely. Yeah, those are those are all good things. Yeah, there's a bunch of things in there.
One of the things we can definitely use gargling with warm salt water is really great for breaking up mucus, particularly, excuse me in the morning. Another thing we always tell folks, if you're going to be doing a lot of speaking, of course, stay away from dairy, citrus, and if you can stand it coffee—I usually ignore that last one. And so those all are things that tighten the voice. Yeah, any kind of really heavy meals. Anything that's going to kick up your stomach acid—if you tend to be sensitive and all of that—may impact the quality of your voice or the stamina of your voice. If you have stomach acid coming up, it's going to erode your—it's going to make things more tired.
Sleep is another big one. You can usually tell if somebody's tired by the quality of their voice. Their energy is going to be a little off, they're going to be a little slower, they may start to “uhm” and “ahh” again. So, sleep as much as possible is really a good thing to take note of. And that throat massage I mentioned before, is important.
I'm a big fan, I drink a lot of tea. So, I'm usually get some sort of tea, yeah, ginger, tea, anything herbal tends to be good for the voice to kind of keep things going. Some people have some issues—and sometimes it's just the day—with mouth smacking noises or that kind of mouth click sounds, which is super annoying. And so, if you know that you are somebody who has a tendency to do that, a trick from the voice acting world is to have a bite of an apple, or particularly a green apple. And there's something about the pectin and the acid in the apple that helps to alleviate that mouth smacking noises. Many times, if you go into a professional recording studio, you'll see a bowl of apples on a table. And most people don't know why that is. But it helps to alleviate that. Chapstick is also helpful to have for that. But sometimes water doesn't do it. It's another thing you got going on. That also does point to dehydration though. If you get a lot of mouth smacking noises, chances are you have some dehydration. Speaking of which…
I think it's such a fascinating area, like you said, your comment around, we've got something quite thin holding up a whole bowling ball. And I never thought about it like that. But if anyone's got any questions really encourage you to put them in the chat. Tina, I think I've become more aware of my voice, the more I speak. And particularly having sat on this conference now for what eight days I can feel my throat—
That’s a big job—
Getting a more of a workout than it would normally do. So, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I've already opened your link that you popped in the chat. So, I'll be downloading some of the cool leadership stuff too. So yeah, it's, it does make a difference. And even just listening to you reading that same sentence with different emotions is actually… Yeah, actually, what do I want to come out?
What do you want? What do you want to come out?
Yeah. So, we're working with authors who want to narrate their own books, we'll practice with them, like “What's the way of being that they want to come across as?” And they're kind of amazed when they listen back to themselves, how their voices, how it lands with the listener. Yeah, and sometimes it's not what you expect, sometimes, a more gentle approach is not the best thing. Really just depends on what you're looking to convey. Sometimes a much… You can go way bigger than you thought you could. And that's good news for people like me with, you've always been trying to like not, you know, overwhelm people with our big personalities and all that.
When you're working with audio, or you're working with a medium when you're not in person, many times you can go bigger than you can when you are adding that physical element to it. Not on a stage—stage, you can go really big as you get a big room and all of that. But, you know, if you, I'm sure you've been in networking events where somebody is just like, “Hi!!!”, you know? And they're just really big, and in your face, and all of that. It's “ahh!” you know, personal space. But online, we have a lot more room for people to get in our face, because they're not really there. There's a bit of separation, kind of an energetic level, and also, in our personal space. We don't have any kind of automatic—necessarily—any automatic reactions to someone coming that close to us physically. And again, that's very cultural. Some cultures have very, very close physical space, some it's way further out. So, the online formats do make it more flexible in that particular sense.
But we're finding a lot of teams—and particularly in corporate—are even doing just audio. And there's a lot of advantages to doing just audio meetings. One is it changes the way that you listen. You don't get triggered by people's facial expressions, you really just have to listen to what they're saying and how they're being. The second thing is, is you're not worried about, like, you and I are on camera right now, and you know, we're a little bit crow-like. Sometimes we're like, you know, checking our stuff. You know, am I in the right position? How’s my chin, you know? All of that kind of stuff. So, it helps to relax the people in the meeting. I was just coaching someone who runs a PR firm for executives on running online meetings, and taking their live meetings on to Zoom and audio format. And one of the things that we talked about extensively was, video / no video, and we decided on no video, and she got a lot of feedback afterwards about how comfortable that made it for people to not have to worry about their background, or if they've done their hair, or if their kids were around or you know, especially in the circumstances we're in right now. And that really allowed them to just be present with the content. And they were, you know, she was interviewing Fortune 100 CEO, you know, and normally you do want to like, look your best and all of that to be in something like that. And they could just like, you know, be in their jammies if they really wanted to, and still have this professional conversation.
So, I really think that audio-only formats for online meetings is highly underrated. I work with the majority of my clients—and always have coaching clients, consulting clients, podcasting, audiobooks, vocal leadership—primarily via audio only, so that you learn and you actually train that listening, because there's so much that you can pick up. And it gets quite fascinating once you practice it for a while and you're not relying on the visual cues anymore, what you can hear, and then start to trust your intuition and ask questions of people—
Yeah—
To get that.
I've been wearing my air pods for every session for the same reason because it blocks out all of the atmospheric noise. We have some pretty chatty parrots in our yard, and cats like to meow, and all of that sort of thing that we don't have in an office either.
So, Tina, thank you so much, sending so much love, and thanks from Melbourne. If you're ever in Australia, please let me know. And next time I'm in the States—
Tina Dietz
I will pick you up on that.
Perfect. Thank you so much—
Thank you so much, Julia. Thanks everyone.
Thank you.
Interested in learning more about how you can strength
Chris KrimitsosI've known Tina for quite some time—she actually was very active in our local group and has helped quite a few of us. And she's gotten into the B2B niche. So, Tina, if you'd like if you want to just share your screen, and then we'll open it up to Q&A.
Tina DietzYeah! Sounds good.
So, the floor is yours.
Why thank you.
Hi, everybody! Thanks for joining us here today. I'm excited to talk with you. And I'm not much of a PowerPoint fan, but I'm gonna do my best here.
What I'm really excited about, though, is just having an opportunity to talk with you all, and have some Q&A afterwards, because this is an area—Executive and Corporate Podcasting—that I got into… Well, I started talking about it about five years ago now because I was in podcasting, and looking at podcasting trends, and where I saw it was going, I knew it was going to take a while for larger organizations to get into podcasting.
But, like with any trend, it was almost inevitable that it was going to happen.
So, let me back up and share a little bit more. It's really about how to give a nameless, faceless corporation human personality. And this is about half my more executive team. And what we do at Twin Flames Studios is we amplify the messages of trusted brands of leaders, sometimes really well-established entrepreneurs. And we do that in three ways:
Through full-service podcasting, getting things going, very high touch, kind of white glove, concierge service, podcasting, and ongoing production
I, one-on-one, work with executives and CEOs on vocal leadership—which I'll touch on a little bit later when we talk about podcast guesting
And we also do nonfiction audiobooks. Full production, publishing and distribution.
So everything audio, to get your voice out to millions of people.
And I've been building businesses for more than 20 years. I started my career as a therapist, but I grew up as an entrepreneur. And I never met a microphone I didn't like, I say all the time. So, eventually what happened is, after building businesses in about 20 different industries in eight different countries over the course of years as a consultant and a coach, I felt this pull towards doing more with podcasting, doing more with audio, that was where my heart was.
And I had this epiphany that if I could work with enough leaders, who are doing enough amazing things in the world with low hanging fruit like podcasting, and audiobook—some of the lowest hanging fruit for people to start to change their lives—then there was a good chance, you know, what was important to me, I can make a bigger impact in the world, leave the world a better place than I found it.
So that's why we do what we do. We have a global team. We've got folks overseas, we get folks here in the US and Canada, Portugal, Scotland, and I adore my team. So, I love to show them off whenever I can.
So Corporate Podcasting trends—how and why are companies using podcasting.
And like I said, most companies are—well, they're familiar with what podcasting is. But getting it into their own systems is a little different. Because how corporations handle their marketing is quite different than how entrepreneurs handle their marketing. And this was actually a learning curve for me, being a very pure entrepreneur. With all the businesses I've owned, I actually don't come from a corporate background at all. It was my ability to be flexible, and for my company to be flexible, that has really made this work in the corporate and in the B2B space.
So, what we found is that companies are using podcasting for a number different reasons. We're going to break it down, but they're primarily using it in three different ways and wanting to use it in three different ways.
So External Podcasting, which is the type of podcasting, of course, we're all the most familiar with, out into the universe available to everybody. Internal Podcasting, which we'll go into a little bit more, that is when a podcast is only available to the people inside of a company. And Podcast Guesting.
Let's break down these three—and I'm going to move through these slides as quickly as possible so we can get to the juicy meat of the matter talking about what you're most interested in and how it can serve you best.
External Podcasting, of course, they're generating brand awareness. If you look at the research on sticky branding or sticky advertising—it means when it's not directly an ad necessarily, or maybe it's something more narrative of a mention or it's a brand that gets featured in a podcast—that really is the stickiness that sticks to people. And so, they find that with podcast advertising or podcast branding, people who listen to podcasts are about 70% more likely to do business with a brand mentioned on a podcast or a brand offering a podcast. So, very important.
Attracting new clients and customers is what most of us are trying to do in podcast and podcasting on the business side of things. So, in this case, we're not talking about narrative podcasting, we're not talking about NPR style, business podcasting. That is a trend and I think what some of the people who do it best are “Pacific Content” out in Vancouver—they run Charles Schwab's external podcast, they run Facebook's external podcast; I had the pleasure of interviewing one of their executives recently, and I have tremendous respect for what they do. But every one of those episodes is tens of thousands of dollars in production, because it is a full-time, massive deal.
So, most of the podcasting we're seeing externally, with corporate, with B2B, is not quite in that range. We can—we do see that sometimes in enterprise level companies, like Facebook, like Charles Schwab, some other large, large corporations. But companies that are in, say, the three to $35 million range—some of them maybe even considered, you know, small to mid-sized business, rather than super large corporations—they're really looking to expand their presence in a way that allows them to keep their humanity. You know, remember a lot of these are well established businesses, they're used to doing their marketing and their networking, face-to-face or as we say, belly-to-belly. And so podcasting is very appealing to these companies, particularly at this time as they're having to pivot and still wanting to keep the relationships, in their marketing, in their networking, and particularly creating relationships with industry influencers to widen their professional network.
Very rarely do we ever find that if you reach out to somebody and ask them to be on your show, or any of our companies, they reach out to an influencer in their industry—lots in finance, in particular that we work with—that somebody turns them down. It's basically “Hey, would you come and have a really friendly conversation with me for half an hour about things you're most interested in and passionate about?” Not a hard sell. So, our clients get really thrilled at having this media platform to share, that allows it to open doors for them.
And of course, that leads to creating collaboration. My favorite, favorite value out of B2B and Corporate Podcasting is what happens after the interview. Yes, there are audience members; yes, you have downloads; yes, we have, you know, growth. And we're generally not looking at podcasts that are necessarily in the thousands of downloads per episode, because we're looking at very niche podcasts. And we are also looking at the collaboration and the relationships that happen with the guests—between the guests and the host between, the guests and the company—as these podcasts come along. It does improve SEO to the websites. SEO is one of those things that seems like more magic than anything else these days. A lot of the things we all knew to do years ago with meta tags, and keywords, and all this other stuff… It's really kind of gone away and really gone the way of organic.
So, corporations are using the podcast to generate long form content that can then be repurposed into transcript-based articles on their website—which are fantastic for SEO, particularly paired with a few other important pieces. So that's External Podcasting—the main reasons and why—we're seeing for External Podcasting.
Internal Podcasting is another animal, and this is a rising area. It's just starting to come forward and flourish a little bit, particularly in enterprise-sized companies. So, this has more to do with development and reinforcement of company culture. Culture development is key to things, like you know, making sure that things actually get done. Efficiency, particularly now that everybody is working from home, or so many people are working from home; it's how we can create a little bit more glue, and have people not feel quite as alone or lonely.
And it also really helps to prevent things like screen fatigue: if you can listen with your earbuds while you're doing the dishes, or taking your dog for a walk, you don't have to be staring at a screen like you are all day for regular work. And screen fatigue is a real thing—it has shown to decrease productivity, it increases a certain number of health risks in a big population. And corporations are always looking at corporate wellness inside of their corporate company culture. So, this is actually more to it than meets the eye when we think about culture.
It's also great, of course, for dissemination of important information. We're moving fast. There's a lot of town hall meetings that happen inside of companies, or they're rolling out new products, or particularly with some of the companies we work with in the pharmaceutical/healthcare side of things, everything's changing right now with Coronavirus, and people need to be kept in the know. Podcasting internally is a way to disseminate that information in a more intimate way than a newsletter. And also in a more human way, than they’re used to, you know, providing this, you know, very kind of cold, documented information. We're still seeing people doing everything written, but adding on the voice, adding on the relationship, and the warmth.
Also, to educate and inform teams, particularly sales teams as they're rolling out new products, features of those products, how to sell them, who to sell them to—issues that might be coming up talking about your sales numbers. A lot more interesting to celebrate your wins, by meeting your sales goals over a podcast and to hear somebody announcing your name—it's like “Hey, a big shout out to John Smith! And, you know, Amelia, for you know, blowing away the sales numbers this month, you know, make sure when you see them in the hallway today, you know, give them a shout out, send them an email.” It's great to hear that. That celebration, acknowledgement of achievements is a really, really big one—who doesn't love to hear their name being mentioned by leadership, right, or being interviewed?
And the sharing of stories and inspiration, particularly Leadership Development. Leadership Development is the biggest area we're seeing for internal podcasting, and in internal employee resource groups. And I'll talk about a specific example in a minute about that.
So, I wanted to dive in and talk about a couple of specific instances where we can see how Corporate Podcasting is being used, you know, directly. And so, we have been working with the folks at Tri-Merit. They're a corporation outside of Chicago, and they have a very, very niche business. They had no marketing team up until about a year ago, and their marketing team actually contacted us to help with the podcast. They find R&D tax credits for technology companies. Can you hear the crickets, thinking about how you would create podcast content about this?
But what they do mostly, is they have relationships with CPA firms. That's where they generate most of their business. And they are passionate about the world of public accounting. Again, not something I would ever find myself naturally drawn to be passionate about, but these guys are thrilled, and finding the stories in the public accounting world that are unique, that are interesting—they're getting them out there. And they're using this as a beautiful networking tool. You have never seen a more excited group of folks talking about public accounting than these guys. And they do fantastic work in the world. So, this podcast for them has been the hub of their content marketing, allowing them to then create social media, allowing them to then follow up with their guests afterwards, and generate collaborative opportunities, generate other guest speaking opportunities. All kinds of networking happens when the host or their team follows up with these guests after the fact.
Now let's talk a little bit about Internal Podcasting. I have to talk about the Podcast Inc. conference, which is going to be online this fall. And I don't know if any of you know Jennifer Crawford. Jennifer Crawford is the founder of DC PodFest. And you know, Jennifer and I have known Chris for years, and know the folks from She Podcasts for years. And there's this wonderful collaboration and cross promotion that happens in the background with all of these podcasts’ conferences, which I love. And Jennifer saw a need in the industry to have a one-day conference specifically in this area, because it really wasn't being addressed a whole lot of places. It's very, very niche.
And so, what we did when we moved the conference from May to November, is—I went out and I said, “Jennifer, why don't we do a limited series podcast on Internal Corporate Podcasting and use this as a lead up?” So, this just came out about two weeks ago. And we're just ramping up the promotion of the conference. But if you want to look up PodcastInc.co/podcast, you can find this and listen to these episodes from different aspects of the Corporate Podcasting world specifically talking about Internal Podcasting, but also Corporate External Podcasting sneaks in there as well.
So then we talk about things like security and the use of a podcast intranet. One of the biggest issues for Corporate Podcasting is security. And so, platforms like PodBean, Blubrry, and Libsyn all have internal podcasting capability, and you have to find out what works for you. What we're finding is that these corporations want to use their already existing intranet to disseminate podcast information. And that's actually what we're doing with the folks at Novo Nordisk right now developing an internal podcast with them, for their women in leadership employee resource group. And what's cool about that is, as we're getting further into the process, the folks from the women in leadership resource group are reaching out to the other employee resource groups to see about developing a collaboration so that the podcast can live over time.
It's a very different development art—for those of you who work with podcast show development—then an external podcast. It's a much slower process, for the most part, and also there's a lot of little baby steps. So, what we've learned in this process, in the back end, is just to let things play out and have some patience. But people are really, really coachable, really, really interested in learning, and very excited about making their workplace better. So it's very, very cool.
One of the ways we're using podcasts a lot in corporate, both Internal and I'll also reference back to External, is Limited Series like this podcasting. Podcasting doesn't have to go on forever: For companies that feel like it's a high risk to commit to a full year or an ongoing podcast, we work with them on a limited series. A to 10 to 12 episodes to start, and we say “You know what? If this doesn't work out for you, if you don't feel like you want to keep going, then you've got a really great marketing asset and a series that you can use.” So, we always bring up seasons, we always bring up limited series podcast, and we find that most of the time when they get into the groove, they do want to keep going.
We also see in Internal Podcasting, the use of External Podcasts for internal purposes. So, you can repurpose the material you're sending out to folks, and make sure that your team, you know, is actually getting that information. And we're starting to develop databases of podcast information for say a group of financial advisors to then be able to keyword-in and then send out articles, and podcast episodes, specifically to their clients and really use the podcast as a resource.
Podcast Guesting—we're just going to check on this real quick. This is some of the companies that I've worked with, some of their executives, in one capacity or another around their vocal leadership and/or Podcast Guesting. And so, Podcast Guesting, we're finding a lot of usage for executives who are looking to set themselves apart, to have third party credibility, to develop their personal brand, and to do personal leadership PR, which is different than company PR. I work with a wonderful company out of Manhattan, and they help leaders get their leadership profile amplified. And we do a lot of work with their folks around getting them prepared to be on a podcast knowing that they can have this laid-back intimate, conversational relationship. They're not teaching, they're not reporting. They're in a relationship with the host. And we work with them heavily on their storytelling, so that they're not boring guests. And they come across as the people they really are, which is warm and professional, and really out to make a difference in the world. And that conversational interview style and format makes this possible. So, Podcast Guesting we're seeing a lot of rise in the director and above level of executives in corporations.
Okay! 20 minutes.
So all right, and I wanted to leave 10 minutes for Q&A, and seeing if there's any other examples we want to talk about if we want. You guys can go to TwinFlamesStudios.com/PodFest—I've got a bunch of materials for you there. I'm not a funnel girl. Don't sell things via email. But I do have our Vocal Leadership Workout, our package on How To Be a Guest and more podcasts, and some additional articles on Corporate Podcasting that we will just send you in an email if you go to that particular link.
That's it.
Awesome, Tina. So I’ll put it back to speaker view, if you could just unshare for a second there.
You’ve got it.
Alright, so we have a couple questions. When it comes to Internal Podcasting within a corporate culture, how do you know what to charge? Is it per minute, or? Because you're dealing with very big companies—like how do you figure out what to charge?
Yeah, so with these large companies, we're generally not dealing with the umbrella of the company; we're dealing with a small section of a company. So, these Employee Resource Groups have their own budget. So, the first thing is to find out what are their budgets to work with. They don't have tremendously large budgets, and if you can work with them—I usually work with them on a consulting basis and then go from there. Because many times they have internal resources even to do the editing and things like that. They need to know how to get things going.
So, an internal podcast, is that open on an Apple feed? Or is it, you know what I mean, so it's internally?
Yeah, so these are being—
How do you set them up? I'm just curious.
Well, it's actually, again, because these are larger companies, they want to handle the tech themselves. So, it's really a matter of teaching them, showing them how to create the content, how to manage the workflow. These are a lot of things we do, you know? Conceptually, how do you internally market a podcast? And then it requires interfacing with multiple departments to actually find, you know, work with them to get the show loaded up onto their intranet. Like I said, there are the—
That’s right, they all have Internet and MI Departments, computer guys, you know, people.
Yeah, yeah. So, it's a different animal, you're not going up on a hosting platform, unless they do want to use Blubrry or PodBean, or Libsyn—are the big three right now that have Internal Corporate Podcasting platforms. We're gonna see that happen more in mid-sized companies that don't quite have intranets, but still want to have control and security.
So then you're seeing that… I found it interesting you're seeing a lot of C-Level executives wanting to grow their brand by going out on other podcasts—you're seeing that?
Yeah, there's an interesting point in an executive’s career—you're rising up in these in these large industries, you know, they've distinguished themselves and they've kind of hit a certain level and to go from say, what we call a Director Level executive, into a C-Level executive really requires distinguishing oneself with Thought Leadership in some way.
And so, Podcast Guesting is a way to distinguish oneself on Thought Leadership, that is outside the company. You know, there's an old saying that says, you know, “it's hard to become a hero in your own hometown.” So, if people know you really well, they think they know you. Well, if you're out there, and all of a sudden, you're on a podcast or a bunch of podcasts as a guest, that gives you a third-party credibility in your leadership and your development of your Thought Leadership. This is usually paired with a whole package of executive PR, of articles, or press releases, or other types of materials, that kind of all go together to help develop somebody's leadership. Getting on Boards of Directors is another really big thing. And when boards go out and research potential candidates, one of the things they look for is have they done media, and most of these folks haven't done any media because most of the media that's taught at a corporate level is high pressure crisis media.
You’re right, “how to protect yourself when everything hits the fan.” That's true. There's no… This is a… I have to tell you… This is… The more you talk, it's like the beginning of a new era, because you're right, the C-Level executives are only trained, “Don't talk to media, unless you talk to your PR department before you go out there.” Now, they're being proactive, and they're interfacing with podcasts. And I guess they also have to build their personal brand, because who knows how long they'll be an executive with that company till the next one. And, you know, there's—
Yeah, there's a fair amount of mobility and talent even, in these times, you know, top talent is something that companies are always looking to retain. It's a big issue. And we find that podcasting is a way to really bring out their voice not so much in a technical way. Working with the executives on their storytelling is one of my absolute favorite things, to have them go from this kind of teaching reporting style, that they're used to doing in meetings and things like that, and kind of teasing out the humanity. And the really cool thing is that once they learn that, now they're bringing it back to their teams and having different conversations with their teams. And that's what we go deeper into Vocal Leadership training.
So, this is really a cutting edge field of consulting, if I hear you correctly, like a media training, which they always have, but on the podcasting side, and you're at the forefront of it.
Yeah, I'd like to think so.
No, you are I mean, it's only going to grow as we move forward. What trends are you seeing with corporations and B2B type stuff? So, there's Internal Podcasting going on, you're doing external facing… Any other trends that you see? Obviously, they're trying to build their PR cred by going on other podcasts shows—
Yeah, what we're seeing a lot is that the internal marketing teams in these companies really, really want to do podcasting. I spoke at a conference a little over a year ago in Scottsdale, big B2B conference, had a packed room of 100 people speaking at a panel, and two thirds of the people in the room raised their hand when they said, “Are you trying to start a podcast in your company?” And they were running into issues with time, they were running issues with knowledge, they were running issues with budget.So coming in and being able to stay the course—these are, of course, much longer relationship building sales cycles than, most entrepreneurs, generally care to go with. I have people ask me all the time, “So can you introduce me to your people at GE so I can be a corporate, you know, trainer there?” And I'm like, “That's not how this works.” It's not the warm introduction cycle that we're used to as entrepreneurs to build our network. So, there's a lot, there's a fair amount more to it than that. It's a fascinating world, but it's definitely growing.
Yeah, a few years ago, I had, I was approached by a big $800 million, like trust, and I just remember, for them to make a decision was like 10 different committee meetings, and they still hadn't decided and they said, “Oh, this is too cutting edge.” I'm like, “This is actually not”—this was just a couple years ago—and I’m like, “It's not cutting edge. And you guys have money by the time you implement it,” you know, but it's just amazing to see how they make decisions. And you’re right. It's not the entrepreneurial world.
No, they’re much more risk-averse.
So yeah, when you do get the contract, because there's a huge lead cycle in this kind of field. So, I'm excited for what you're doing.
Thank you.
Tina, your numbers—we started at like, 50, we ballooned to 70. We have 60-something people here is amazing. I just want to give a shout out to Ross Brand, Al Mega, Dr. Ellen, Rachel Hernandez, commenting, chatting.Anything that you see for artificial voice in corporate or is that going to take time? Like the [Alexa] skills, are you seeing anything there?
Any artificial voice—any truly artificial voice that it's not a human voice—we find a lot of resistance to and I also have a tremendous amount of resistance to it. Because to me, that is the polar opposite of what podcast gets used for. You know, when you and I worked together and I did a bunch of the interviews for The Messengers movie—if you haven't watched it, watch it—you know the thing that came up across all those interviews that we did was the word intimacy and podcast and creating intimacy. And so, an AI voice is the opposite of intimacy. And I don't think we're going to see mechanized or automated voices, takeover things anytime soon. Will we see things go into voice activation? Will we see more happening with Alexa? Yeah, I do think we'll see that. But there's a lot of privacy concerns, particularly in corporations. So that's the last place we're gonna see that; we're gonna see that in the consumer market way way sooner.
Oh, well, Tina, people can reach out to you through the app, connect with you. Thank you for taking the time out. Just tell us your website one last time.
Awesome. Tina, thank you so much. You always knock it out of the park. You're a pro.
Thanks everyone for joining us.
I know you got a lot on your agenda. So, thank you for being part of this and supporting what we do. And also thank you for—I forgot but you did… Tina did the initial interviews, probably half of the movie. The Messengers came out with interviews Tina did while we were running the second ever Pod Fest. And if you haven't seen The Messengers: A Podcast Documentary—I'm gonna have Andrew upload it to the conference so people could see it. But thank you for mentioning that, Tina. Thank you for doing that for us.
It’s a great project. One of my favorite things.
It was awesome. Thank you.
Take care.
Goodbye now.
Interested in learning more about Internal Podcasting, External Podcasting, and Podcast Guesting?
