149: Make a Business Out of Podcasting with Steve Lubetkin

Steve Lubetkin is a baby boomer who's reinvented himself through blogs, Twitter, podcasting, audio/video recording, and documentary videos. You too can succeed in podcasting if you avoid talking too much "inside baseball", if you use checklists AND if you become a podcast producer instead of focusing solely on your own podcast. The Business of Podcasting: Steve and Donna's book Being the Media Trafalgar Communcations (Donna Papacosta's website) Display TranscriptRobert Plank: Steve Lubetkin is the managing partner of Lubetkin Media Companies, LLC and he is widely recognized as a seasoned technology futurist. The Philadelphia Business Journal has named him as one of their social media stars for his work in podcasting. He's using technology for decades. He has included an email address on his business cards since 1988. We're going to talk about a lot of fun stuff, a lot of cool podcasting stuff, how are things today Steve? Steve Lubetkin: Real good Robert, thanks for having me on the podcast. Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you on, so can you tell us about who you are, what you do and what makes you stand out, what makes you different? Steve Lubetkin: Sure, I like to tell people I am a baby boomer who has reinvented himself. The economic crisis of the last decade are making that necessary for a lot of people and it happened to me about 12 years ago when I exited a 30 year corporate career doing public relations for large companies, and needed to find out what the next chapter was going to be. The likelihood of going back into a corporate job at that point was kind of small, so what I decided to do was to reinvent myself. The initial thought I had was to continue doing what I was doing which was providing public relations advice to senior corporate executives and that was a very, very competitive market so I decided to look for something a little bit less competitive where I would have a unique specialty. Because before I went into corporate PR I was a radio journalist and production engineer, I looked back at my radio roots and this was right about the time in 2004, 2005 when what we now call social media but back then called new media was coming up over the horizon and it was mostly blogs and a little bit of Twitter and podcasting. My wife pointed out podcasting to me because she heard a radio show about it, and I started listening to what people were producing and I realized immediately that producing radio shows for corporate clients could be a really good way for them to tell their story effectively in kind of a radio format. The problem is most of the people who were doing podcasts at the time were doing a pretty amateur job of it, and I recognized immediately that the tool could be used if the skillset of the person producing the podcast was at a more professional level. Because I had the radio background and had worked in news I sort of felt that I had the right tools and just needed to reeducate myself about recording and editing digitally because I grew up in the 1970s and 80s when most of the tools we used were analog. We recorded on magnetic recording tape, we edited by using a razor blade against that magnetic recording tape and you can't do that today, or you can but there's not too many people working that way. It's much more efficient to work digitally. Robert Plank: No more Scotch taped splice all those things together. Steve Lubetkin: No exactly, and that's exactly how it was done. I set myself up to learn how to do that and once I learned how to do that I started putting myself out as a podcast producer and we began to get some clients for that. Over the years the business has morphed several times. We do a lot of audio podcasting but we also have expanded into video.