That's Not A Podcasting Mistake - It's A Feature!

To err is human. To really screw things up, it takes a podcaster. With or without a computer. Oopsies happen. Sometimes, leaning into our errors can uncover hidden intentions and creative growth.

September 10, 2020

Article

We are imperfect beings. It's not an overstatement to say that we would not be the species we are today were it not for mistakes. Mistakes are, quite literally, baked into our DNA.

When a creative person - like a podcaster - makes a mistake, it’s not quite as life-and-death as genetics. Though they might lead to an existential crisis! I know some of the boo-boos I've made as a creative have been really hard on my soul.

But not all mistakes made in the process of making a podcast are bad things. Sometimes, these inadvertent errors can be a gift. To help illustrate that, I’ve chosen 10 completely random examples of probable mistakes that might happen to you as you podcast, along with ways to embrace them as a hidden intention. While I’m reticent to take a “hey, I meant to do that” approach, that’s not a bad mindset to adopt. If you can pull it off.

Publishing Your Podcast Episode On The Wrong Day Or Wrong Time Of Day

This assumes that you have (and you should have) a set schedule of exactly what day and time you publish your episodes. Repetition breeds familiarity, and your core audience quickly begins to expect exactly when they can get your content.

But you can screw that up. I’ve screwed that up. Especially if you're (smartly) working in batch and scheduling episodes far in advance. It’s easy to click the wrong date or time in the publishing system, causing both you and your audience to be surprised to see an episode drop on a random Wednesday afternoon instead of Friday at 2:00p. Oops!

If that happens, it happened. There’s no reliable mechanism to unpublish an episode of a podcast and publish the exact same file again later. So instead of freaking out and beating yourself up over your error, use it an opportunity to learn.

Did the number of accesses to that audio file change compared to other episodes? Did you get more or less feedback from listeners? Did it “feel better” to you to encounter the episode at that unusual time? If the data supports it, you may have stumbled on a better day and time to publish.

Skipping A Plugin In The Mastering Chain

If you're like me, you've a set chain of plugins and filters you apply almost every time you make an episode of your podcast. Even though those are applied much like muscle-memory, you can skip one. Maybe you forgot to add in noise reduction, by way of common example, and didn’t notice until after you published the episode.

As before, examine the results. Sure, it sounds different (worse?) to you. But did it sound different to your audience? Did someone say, again by way of common example, being able to fully hear the background traffic sounds bleeding in from your window was a nice human touch? Their opinion just might change yours.

Adding/Removing Too Much Space Between Segments

Space, silence, music, and effects have a huge impact on your show. If you’re a careful audio engineer, you spend a lot of time getting each transition just right.

But sometimes, you’re in a hurry. Or you accidentally click and drag a segment out of place, and now the bed music plays for ten full seconds before the VO part announces the next segment. Or maybe you normally have super-long roll-off between segments, but now you have one transition that is super-tight.

Clearly, that change in timing was unintentional, and the episode probably sounds weird, with that one bit sounding quite different than the rest of the program. But ignoring the fact that the edit is different, does it sound good? Did the extended bed music give listeners more time to consider the words spoken before the transition? Did the tighter edit make it flow better and feel “snappier”? And is that change of feeling something you’d never considered, but now that you’ve heard it, it’s worth exploring?

Promoting With A Full-Length Audiogram Instead Of A Clip

Ignoring my skepticism on the demonstrable effectiveness of audiograms for podcasts, many podcasters rely on them as a staple of their promotional process. The tools that make it easy to make an audiogram also make it pretty easy to accidentally make an audiogram out of your entire episode instead of the short clip you had highlighted. And if the social destination you’re publishing on will allow it, your audience might see a 30-minute long audiogram from your show in their timeline.

Check the stats of that post! Did it get more or less engagement? Did you stumble across a new publishing platform that at least some of your audience prefer? Or do you have new content you can upload to longer-form video platforms that helps your show stand apart?

Your Podcast Guest Isn’t A Good Fit For Your Show

Getting the right content out of the right guest is a mix of art, science, and the vagaries of the human brain on any given day. You may very well find yourself with a guest that just doesn’t fit. Maybe they weren’t vetted properly. Maybe they’re just “off” that day. Maybe you’re the one who’s off.

You obviously can’t force them to say the content you were hoping they would say. But are they saying interesting things? Do they have a compelling story far afield of what you wanted to talk to them about? Can you find a way to use the content they are giving you for a different episode, perhaps one you haven’t even conceived of? Unless you’re really struggling with hard drive storage, save the odd conversation and see if you can make something out of it later, maybe as a bonus episode.

Recording Without Your Favorite Microphone

I can’t count the number of times I’ve wished I had my mic with me when I traveled. You remember when we used to travel, right? Or when I have remembered to pack my gear but stupidly forgot batteries for my portable mic. D’oh!

But I do have a microphone that I carry with me pretty much everywhere. You have one too. In fact, you might be reading these words on it right now. Yes, I’m talking about your mobile phone. While no one is going to confuse the depth of sound captured by an SM7B with the built-in microphone on any cell phone, those mics are certainly capable of picking up a decent representation of the sounds around them. What can you capture on your phone in the field that you can use to build a great episode when you get back in your studio?

Losing Access To Your Sound Library

Many serious podcasters subscribe to one or more music licensing services. These typically come with monthly or annual agreements. But if payment fails, you may find yourself without access to your trusted library of music, effects, and loops. Now what?

Maybe this is an opportunity to try one of the newer services. Or if you’re really in a pinch, you now have an excuse to revisit the Freesound project, if only until you have the time to carefully vet new services.

Losing Access To Your DAW

Computers break down. The latest OS may automatically install, but your expensive podcast editing software doesn’t work on it. Or you’re traveling only with your laptop and it just can’t handle the big DAW. None of that matters, because you still have an episode to produce.

I know it’s been a while, but free software like Audacity is still out there, and you still remember how to use it. No, you probably can’t do all the things you normally do or have access to the same plugins and filters you normally do. But it’s still there. And sometimes, doing “less production” is an interesting break for you and your audience.

When “Oh Shit, I’m Recording TODAY?!” Happens

Through a fluke of scheduling, you’ve nothing lined up. No guest. No well-researched topic. Or maybe you’re passing a kidney stone and have only the energy to beg your audience’s forgiveness while you let the waves of pain and opioids wash over you. You know, for instance.

Lean into it. It’s not like you can go back in time and fix those problems. So just go for it. Riff on a topic all on your own. Respond to some listener feedback. Talk about future plans for the show. Don’t try to fake a normal episode. instead, take the opportunity to give your audience something different from you and the show.

You Forgot To Socially Promote An Episode

Normally, you're really good about promoting episodes after you’ve released them. In fact, you've built a near-bullet-proof, cascading process that takes the guesswork out of your episode promotions.

But only if you remember to kick it off. At some point, you’ll forget. So… what happened? Did the number of accesses (downloads) change for that episode compared to others? Do you see more or less engagement overall across your promotional channels? Are you getting positive responses from people thanking you for not flooding your social profiles with promotional messages they just see as noise? What do those data suggest to you about your future promotional plans?

Not All Errors Are Created Equal

I’m a fan of fixing errors before they make it to the public. Some things that are “wrong” are just that: wrong. And you should fix them. Don’t take my words as permission to publish a .wav file “to see what happens”. We know what happens. It’s bad. If your mix has all of the vocal tracks playing at the exact same time so that all voices are incomprehensible, don’t publish it. Or if you did, delete it and republish a corrected version. If you said the wrong date when you were talking about the War of 1812, fix it in post.

But for non-factual errors or glaring mistakes, treat other boo-boos that happen on your podcast as a gift. Maybe they were your hidden intentions all along.

You can help me by telling one person you know about Podcast Pontifications. Assuming they’re a working podcaster, send them a personal note and ask them to listen. Please? Word of mouth is really the only way this show grows.

And if you like what I have to say, go to BuyMeACoffee.com/EvoTerra and toss a few shekels my way. It really helps keep the show going and shows me that you appreciate the 12-15 hours of my work week that I dedicate to the show every single week.

I shall be back on Monday with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

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Podcast Pontifications is written and narrated by Evo Terra. He’s on a mission to make podcasting better. Allie Press proofed the copy, corrected the transcript, and edited the video. Podcast Pontifications is a production of Simpler Media.

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PPS3E32 That's Not A Podcasting Mistake - It's A Feature! - Transcript

To err is human to really screw things up. It takes a podcaster with, or without a computer oopsies happen. Sometimes leaning into our errors can uncover hidden intentions and creative growth.

[00:00:21] Hello, and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me, Evo, Tara. We are imperfect beings. It's not an overstatement to say that we would not be the species as we are today. Were it not for mistakes? Mistakes are quite literally baked into our DNA. How we get here now, mistakes from a creativity stand when you are a creative and you screw up.

[00:00:51] Um, they're not quite as life and death. Maybe not, maybe a little bit less existential questioning, although sometimes it certainly might feel like, and I know some of the boo-boos I've made over time. Creativity have been really, really hard on my soul. I get that. I get that right. We understand those things, but also you can use your creative mistakes or the mistakes in your process of making a podcast to be very specific.

[00:01:16] Can you sometimes these mistakes to work with these errors, these errors can sometimes be a gift. And for this episode today, I thought I would walk you through in no particular order, 10 examples of what I mean by that 10 examples of how something in the podcast in process you might be doing can go wrong.

[00:01:39] And what you can do with that as a way to grow as a way to accept it as a way to embrace it and say, well, this is what I've done. Can I run with it a little bit, maybe towards the, Hey, I meant to do that mentality, but you know, not making an excuse for anything or anything silly. So here we go in no particular order, 10 ways that you can kind of lean into these mistakes, make them so maybe for example, Something that w if you haven't experienced this, you will experience as I promise.

[00:02:11] Eventually, maybe you accidentally publish your episode on the wrong day or at the wrong time. That assumes that you have, which you should have a set publishing schedule at a time and a day. Sometimes you just get it wrong, especially if you're planning things out in advance. Maybe you publish things on the wrong day or at the wrong time as I have done.

[00:02:36] See what happens. I mean, if that happened, you look, you can't go back in time and fix it. There's no way to, to unpublish something and then republish it again. I mean, you can, but it's not going to do anything. Right. So instead of freaking out over and beating yourself up for it, this is an opportunity to learn what happened.

[00:02:54] Did the number of accesses to your file change for that particular episode? Did the comments change it to get more or less feedback? Did anything, did it feel better? Did you, were you able to get stuff done differently? Did it, did it kind of fit that who knows? You've got to look at the data sometimes.

[00:03:15] Maybe it happens in line. Maybe you're in the process of doing things. And there's a, you know, if you're like me, you've got a set chain that you follow and maybe when you're adding in those effects, you forgot. Like, maybe you forgot to add, I don't know, noise reduction, for example, or maybe you didn't put the compression always the same way that you do on the line or you didn't color it.

[00:03:37] I don't know something else in the mastering process that you would normally do every single time you just didn't do well. Just like before, what are the results? Did it sound different to you? Probably so, but did it sound different to your audience? Did in fact, some people comment and say, Hey, I really like it when I had the background sounds of traffic in there.

[00:04:01] Cause they were kind of halfway muted in and out. I don't know. You know, what do you think that, did you now have a different sound? Is it a sound that you and your audience actually likes? Maybe when you're also inside of there, you, maybe you line up your next segments, your, your segments of your show, maybe a, maybe there's a bed music playing underneath the interview.

[00:04:19] And then normally you come right back in with your recap. But maybe you let that drag out for too long. Maybe, you know, who knows why this happened, but there's a three or four, a ten second gap. And the music just plays by itself for awhile. He terrible, or maybe the gap is suddenly, normally normally put five seconds in there.

[00:04:35] And for whatever reason, you only put in, you know, maybe less than a second of that, a gap. How did it sound? Clearly it was unintentional, but is, is it good? Do you like it when that music kind of rides out for the long time, does it give people more time to think about what they were listening to or on the opposite side?

[00:04:54] Does the tighter show make it flow, make it snappier? What'd you? What did your listeners think? What did you think? Looking at this thing that you've already done, maybe when you were promoting things, you publish the entire episode as an audiogram, that'll actually fit, right? Because you can do that.

[00:05:11] Certain tools will allow you to take an entire MP3 file. And make an entire audio grime out of it. And it, maybe you can't publish that to all the platforms, but what if that happened? Did it, does it work? I mean, it maybe even published it, did that audio gram get more engagement? Do people like it more? Do they say, Hey, here's a new way for me to, I can listen to the whole thing right here in my whatever social app that plays 30 long minute piles.

[00:05:35] Hmm. Maybe. So it doesn't have to be in production. It doesn't have to be production. It could be the fact that. You screwed up when you were trying to vet a guest and you've got the absolute wrong person on the program, you're in the middle of asking questions and they have no idea about the topic at hand.

[00:05:53] Okay. But do they have an interesting story? Can you find an angle in there? Maybe it's not what you thought it was going to be, but is there something you can do with that content later? Maybe not for the very next episode, because you already had this plan, but maybe there's some value. In doing a bonus episode, occasionally with some weird thing, maybe you're recording on the road and you brought the wrong microphone with you.

[00:06:19] Or as I have done many times, you didn't bring a microphone at all. Even though I have nine of them sitting over there. Well, you know what? I've got my phone, you've got your phone. There are other opportunities. To try something different, maybe, you know, it's not going to sound like it normally does when you're talking into your big SM seven B microphone.

[00:06:38] So you can't do that, but what can you do different because of this mistake that you made, did you let your musings music licensing subscription, lapse hoops that happens sometimes as professionally? For those of us that have big productions, we, we forget that's happened now. We don't have that. Or maybe we can't get it anymore.

[00:06:57] Well, so what do you do. Are there options to go to the free sounds project or some other places, and maybe it's a time to go experiment and find new stuff. Cause there's a lot of different subscription services app. You're going to have to pay somebody, try something different, again, your publishing you're editing somewhere else and you forgot your computer.

[00:07:17] You didn't bring your studio computer with you and you're just on your laptop and you don't have your big fancy dog with all your plugins. Well, Maybe you do download something like audacity or a free tool. You remember how to use these things you haven't done in awhile, but there's still there. Maybe that raw interesting, you know, less, uh, less produced sometimes can be fun.

[00:07:38] Occasionally. See how that goes. Maybe you didn't even schedule anything properly. Maybe you just didn't have a, someone set up as a guest or you didn't have your topics ready to go. Or something else in the process of the schedule happening to throws everything, a kilter. Okay. Lean into it. What's the worst that can happen.

[00:07:59] Just give it a shot, talk about something and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but you know, lean in and enter and see what happens. Maybe you forgot to socially promote the episode. You're really good about producing episodes on time. And you've got this entire series, a waterfall process of going through and promoting them and you didn't do it well.

[00:08:19] Again, what happened with that episode? Did the access points change? Did you get more or less engagement? Did people suddenly are responding to you more because you're flooding your social less with all of these standard promotional stuff? I don't know. That was quick 10 quick things. And I thought about a dozen more as I was preparing for all of this.

[00:08:41] Now, before we wrap this thing up, look, I'm not talking about. Escaping and ignoring factual errors or glaring mistakes. Don't publish a WAV file instead of an MP3. Don't put out an episode or if you do put out an episode where all of the tracks are ran together, they're in one gobbledygook in comprehensible thing.

[00:09:03] No one wants to listen to that. If you got the wrong date, when you were talking about the war of 18, 12, fixed that kind of stuff in post. Clearly you want to do that, but the other ones treat them actually as a gift. Now you can help me by telling one person, you know, about podcast, pontifications another working podcast or who needs to be listening to this show, send them a personal note, telling them to listen to podcast pontifications and if you like what I have to say, go to buy me a coffee.com/evo, Tara, and toss a few shekels my way.

[00:09:38] Really helps. Keep the show going and shows me that you love what I do. Buy me a coffee.com/evo. Tara, no episodes for me on Friday. Enjoy your weekend. I shall be back on Monday with yet another podcast. Pontifications cheers.

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