Audio Social Engagement
One of the persistent thoughts that runs through my head as it pertains to the emerging voice market and all the affiliated hardware, is that the building blocks are coming together for a new type of social media experience, one that is predominately built around audio. Today’s audio content however is pretty static. There’s no real native aspect of engagement, which we know is a fundamental pillar of today’s social media. Twitter, for better or worse, would not be Twitter if not for replies, retweets and liking tweets. The same goes for Instagram. So, to me, in order to see this idea of an audio-based social medium take hold, the content needs to become dynamic and engage-able by the audience.
Anchor is at the forefront of changing the way we interact with audio. As a podcasting platform, which was recently acquired by Spotify, Anchor presents a platform that is designed from the ground up to help podcasters create and disseminate their content out. Now, it would appear that engagement is becoming a focus for the company as it makes the (rather hidden) voice messaging feature much more broadly accessible.
Listeners can send an audio message, no matter the device or browser, which can then be implemented by the podcaster into future episodes. I believe this is only the start in terms of what can be done with engagement. Here are some examples of how we could see engagement being built out for an audio-based social medium:
- Leave a review via your voice – Giving fellow listeners a chance to hear a review would be pretty cool. Maybe it then gets transcribed into a text review as well.
- “Let’s take some callers” – blending some of the best aspects of radio with podcasting. Each week, designating a portion of your show to “calls” (voice messages) from your listeners. Maybe you pose a question to the listeners and ask for them to send in their responses, and each week you read off the answers from the previous episode’s question. I think this alone might berth a whole new set of podcasting formats.
- The next-level step here would be to say “Alexa/Google …let’s send in a voice message…record it, send it, and then resume playing the episode.
- Audio snippets – I believe this exists to an extent today for the podcaster to share snippets of their episodes, but I would hope that feature gets opened up to to the listeners too. Being able to grab your favorite clip of a podcast and share it out very quickly on the various legacy social channels would be awesome. It would be cool for the podcaster to know what portions are resonating most with people too.
These are just a few ideas and I’m super curious to know what others think about this concept of audio-engagement and other directions we can go with this. Tweet at me and let me know what type of audio-engagement features you’d like to see built out!
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave