March 5, 2020 Product Release Review

Not that long ago, if you would have asked me what the hell is an audiogram. I definitely would have looked at you with a blank face and thought oh gosh. I don't know like maybe video and audio coming together and having an Instagram baby?

I mean the thing is that's actually not that far off. We're excited to talk about them because Casted is actually releasing a streamlined version of audiograms in the platform. We'll get to that in just a second. But what are we doing here In an effort to keep you up-to-date and remain transparent with everything happening at Casted, we've decided to start delivering our product release notes in... you guessed it... podcast form. So let's get to it.

I'm Adam Patarino, Head of Product here at Casted and this is your inside look at the March 5th product release.

So at the top, I posed the question. What is an audiogram? Well technically speaking, an audiogram is a video that is just there to promote a piece of audio. I mean if you think about it, you can't actually share a plain audio file off on social media. So if you're trying to market out your podcasts on social platforms, you don't have that option to do that directly. You actually have to create a video out of your audio in order to post it. And in essence, that's the problem that audiograms solve. In order to make those videos more interesting. They usually include, you know, a small animation, maybe a waveform that's moving to suggest that someone's talking, often times, you know, static images and graphics that go along with the branding, but the best ones they include closed captions or subtitles of what's action being said at that moment in the audio.

This is actually really important because it allows users who don't have their audio enabled, for whatever reason, to understand that there is someone speaking and they can still engage with that content because they can read what's being said. What's cool about how Casted has built audiograms, which will get into some more detail, is that includes all of those things. You've probably even seen these on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter. It's a really great way to capture a user's attention whether the volume is enabled or disabled and hopefully get them to come in and listen to them more of your podcast.

So why did we build this at Casted? We include this feature as part of our activate category. So the idea is about getting more of the podcast that you created. Right now podcasters are asking their listeners to rate them on iTunes, you know, hoping that they'll get into some top chart so that they'll be discovered more and ultimately get more listeners. But the thing is, as marketers we've been doing this forever. I mean, we have social channels, email, you know, newsletters, we've got lots of ways that we connect with the world around us, connect with our prospects. But podcasts just like haven't been playing nice with that at all. I mean if you were really savvy maybe you're using SoundCloud, there are apps out there that may audiograms, headliner wave. I mean, they think really great audiograms, but the thing is that's adding your podcast to just another location.

It's not actually owning your media, right? I mean think about it. If you were making a blog post, would you then copy that blog post over to like four different platforms? Just so you could promote it in a specific way? I mean probably not, that's why podcast have had such a rough time of it. Well, we're here to fix that. So what we thought was you know, what if you could do this all on one platform? You know, the same platform where you're uploading your episode, it's getting automatically transcribed. It's really easy to generate small bite-sized Clips. What if you could just like create that clip and share it as an audiogram with like zero fuss?

That's Casted by the way. I mean, if if that wasn't obvious, that's what we do. So that's the idea. For us, we wanted to make something super simple for marketers to actually promote their audio content to get users on different platforms hooked in and interested and bring them back to your podcast to listen to more. And that's where they can be deeper into your content, see more related resources, and ultimately like spend more time with your brand. So that's why we built it.

So yeah, that's audiograms. We're really excited for everyone to see it. If you've got any feedback at all really excited to hear it.

Next item in the release: private episodes. So whether you're creating an internal podcast or like a gated podcast, this gives you the option to create a show that are only eligible to those who you want to listen. So rather than push every episode to your subscribers across Apple and Spotify view your RSS feed. Lets lets you create an episode or episodes that can be listed privately in addition. They'll actually be hidden from Google. They'll be non-indexed by search engines. This is really great way where you can only share the podcast of those who have the link. So the perfect example of this is this show we're publishing these release notes as a private episode, so that our customers and our stakeholders can hear what we're up to.

In addition to those two larger items, we have a couple smaller ones. For instance, we added a filter so that you can pick which types of Clips you can see in the clip sidebar. We also added a new description type four episodes called episode meta this is what will show up anytime you share your landing page or clip just as a link into social. Things like Twitter and Linkedin will pull in descriptions out of meta tags we'll let you fine-tune and find control exactly what shows up there.

Finally. We added the ability to drag-and-drop resources in our new custom nav and that will actually maintain on the landing page as well. This way users have the control over exactly what order their resources and custom nav items show up on the landing page.

Last and finally not least, Podcat had an awesome time squashing some mice. Sometimes the dev team calls it bugs, I always call the mice. I don't know why they look at me with that face, but I think it's fun.

Cool, and that's it folks. Thanks for listening to our first product release notes. I look forward to sharing more of these updates with you in the future and for this month, we're incredibly excited for everything started without any grams.

And if you have other ideas for things that you like to see in future releases. I might have some pull on that roadmap. So definitely feel free to email me at adam@casted.us. Thanks for listening until next time.