In 2020, we launched a video podcast series, Shift In Conversation. We now host two series — one for marketers and one for professionals in production — with a third coming soon dedicated to the advertising industry. Each week, we speak with creative professionals about how their work has changed in 2020 and what the future looks like for their industries, to share industry knowledge with our customers in Media & Entertainment, Marketing and Advertising.
Our host, filmmaker and Shift Media Marketing Manager Grace Amodeo, was inspired to start the podcast when COVID hit. “We needed to think about how to continue creating content that would reach our audiences. All of our customer events were cancelled, and much of the content we’d been working on had to be reimagined,” Grace said.
“The reach of video is enormous, and gives us the flexibility to share to so many new audiences beyond just our own customers.”
As a video-based platform, it made sense for us to create new video content for our audience. Grace noted, “The reach of video is enormous, and gives us the flexibility to share to so many new audiences beyond just our own customers. We quickly realized that our video interviews could also easily be re-published on audio podcasting platforms, to allow viewers to consume content however they liked.”
And thus our video podcast was born.
The Challenge: Project Management and Media Storage
The podcast is produced 100% virtually, with all interviews on Zoom. Unlike a traditional audio-only podcast, with a video podcast we needed to manage video, audio, and design files all at once.
As the podcast grew with more guests over time, the amount of files we were juggling quickly became overwhelming.
As the podcast grew with more guests over time, the amount of files we were juggling quickly became overwhelming. Grace remembers, “At first it was just the video file and a simple thumbnail, but we soon expanded into audio, written blog content, and a variety of social media deliverables. Each platform needed its own specific type of deliverable, multiplied by 20+ episodes (and counting). It’s a lot to keep track of.”
We needed a robust system that could handle project management, production and promotion, along with a way to securely store and organize content.
The Solution Part 1: Airtable for Project Planning
After trying out a few different tools, our team landed on Airtable to organize interviews, distribution, design, and marketing. We created a public Video Podcast Planner template that you can clone and use for free in Airtable. We created tables for all of the following work areas:
- Steps for booking a guest
- A production checklist for virtual interviews
- Post production deliverables
- A branding checklist
- Social media deliverables for sharing your content
We love the ability to visualize our spreadsheets with color-coded statuses and categories for each type of episode. You can even add emojis to quickly identify your tags!
Airtable’s Views feature allows us to quickly transform one sheet into multiple views, where we could visualize each episode with the guest thumbnail:
The calendar view is also handy, where we can easily transform due dates on a spreadsheet into a color-coded calendar view:
get your free template
Ready to start organizing your own podcast project? Clone our free Video Podcast Planner on Airtable to hit the ground running.
The Solution Part 2: MediaSilo for Media Management
Because the MediaSilo platform is designed to securely store and organize large amounts of media files, it’s the perfect solution for all of our podcast assets. In addition to our logo and promotional graphics for each channel, we have set design deliverables to promote each episode. These included a video thumbnail, article graphics, and social media graphics for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
We decided to create dedicated folders for each speaker, so that as we are promoting a new episode each week, the marketing team knows exactly which folder to look for.
Because MediaSilo is optimized for video file storage, the app automatically captures all the file’s metadata, which you can surface in the metadata tab. This powerful feature is useful when checking the video settings for online publishing, where certain sizes and file types are often required.
Conclusion
Thanks to both MediaSilo and Airtable, we now have fine-tuned our process which enables us to produce several episodes each month. And the end result? Be sure to check out and subscribe to our video podcasts Marketing In Conversation and Production In Conversation. If you work in Advertising, stay tuned for our third channel dedicated to all things advertising coming in early 2021.
Want to try out MediaSilo and Airtable for your own video project? Sign up for an Airtable account here, and request a free 14-day trial of MediaSilo.
