It’s easy to hold on to traditional ways of doing business and measuring success. The music industry is one of the best case studies to demonstrate this. They have been completely unwilling (to be fair they may lack the agility) to identify new business models that are consistent with the digital age. Instead of investing to adapt and advance, they invest heavily into lobbying for legislative support to make a traditionally civil matter a criminal matter. All the while, they continue to hold on to dated cost structures and charting styles.

So, what are some of the ways of measuring penetration and success?

HIT COUNT

While becoming increasingly less dependable, one way of identifying penetration is by looking at how many hits a website has attracted. The home page is a terrible way to confirm that a Podcast has built an audience. By establishing a “buried” page as the measurement tool through some form of call to action within a Podcast, the Podcaster can more reliably identify how many listeners actually listened, and reacted, to the Podcast.

DOWNLOAD COUNT

Technology to measure listens versus downloads is still in its infancy and the tools that are being built and tested are proprietary. Until that is worked out, download count is just that - a count of the number of times a media file has been downloaded.

REFERRER LINKS

Social networks have established a new way of identifying how much penetration a Podcast has achieved… referral links. Referral links are links from other sites to a specific target site. There is a direct correlation between the most popular episodes of a Podcast and the number of referring links to those episodes.

FEEDBACK

Encouraging listeners to submit comments on a Podcast, or a particular subject discussed within a Podcast, makes it possible for the producer to do two things: engage the listener, and measure response. There are two popular types of feedback. Text feedback can be sent via email, typewritten in the comments section of a blog page, and contributed to active forum discussions. Audio feedback is becoming increasingly popular and can be sent as MP3 (or some other format) attachments in email, through voice messaging services that forward digitally encoded versions of the messages to the Podcaster via email, and web-based audio commenting tools.

POSTAGE STAMP TEST

Michael Geoghegan introduced me to the idea of identifying the cost of producing a Podcast and averaging it across the number of downloads, and comparing that to the cost of creating a postal mailing to reach the same number of people. What’s particularly intriguing about this idea is that if a business is going to hold on to dated ways of doing business, why stop at the beginning of the Internet?