Podcast Management, Content Curation, & Event Planning
Listen In, Michigan
Michigan Today is an alumni publication that address all alumni regardless of their school or association affiliation. It speaks to the entire alumni community, in hopes to connect readers across all disciplines. The Michigan Today Podcast, “Listen In, Michigan”, is geared toward keeping alumni connected with Michigan in an entertaining way.
Deborah Holdship, editor of Michigan Today and podcast host, was looking to reach more alumni with her podcast content. This podcast was hosted on SoundCloud, and the RSS feed was linked to Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, and GooglePlay.
However, Deborah was looking for a new podcast hosting site that could solve a few of her key issues. She hosts, edits, produces, and uploads her podcast herself and needs a software that will revamp her system without complicating her process. Here are some of the requirements she was looking for:
- Allow podcast to be submitted to all the places her podcast is currently on, plus Spotify
- Has embeddable audio player for michigantoday.umich.edu
- Intuitive design that is simple for non-tech savvy users
- Wide range of statistics based on listens and downloads
- Pricing bracket with unlimited bandwidth
After researching different podcast hosting sites, here are some of the factors I considered for two sites that would fit best for Michigan Today:
Libsyn: Very popular and considered a podcast “veteran” with a great reputation in the podcasting world. Basic pricing package would be around $15 for 250MB per month, however, analytics cost extra. The limit on storage could cause complications when trying to upload all backlogged episodes. Libsyn does publish to Spotify.
Simplecast: Less established podcasting site compared to Libsyn, but prides itself on strong analytics, an easy to use interface, and unique sharing tools all for just $15 a month. This hosting site also allows users to publish to Spotify and provides a customizable embeddable player.
After discussing with Deborah and the rest of the team, “Listen In, Michigan” was moved to Simplecast. This digital aggregator allowed Michigan Today to streamline its podcast and give the content a complete revamp. The implementation phase included transferring all existing podcasts onto Simplecast. While doing this, I updated the episode art, show notes, and summary for each episode.
To enhance accessibility, we also transcribed all existing episodes and embedded the transcript within the episode’s page on the Michigan Today site. This revamp included creating new logos for the podcast, which were designed by a fellow student (Kaitlyn Beukema). These designs needed to be compliant with the University of Michigan style guide.
Lastly, to increase the visibility of the podcast on the Michigan Today page, Podcast link was added to the top navigation bar for quicker access.
News Roundup
Michigan News’ mission is to promotes research, major events, expertise and programs to enhance the university’s reputation around the world. The office uses multiple methods and platforms for storytelling including news release distribution, social media engagement and multimedia production.
As part of social media engagement, our team had a goal of collecting U-M news content across platforms that surround a specific topic. This project is based off of a “focus topics” page on the news site, that previously collected Michigan News stories surrounding topics like Obesity, Personal Finance, and Tech Trends. This format limited the round-up to only stories on the Michigan News site.
We wanted to expand our focus topic curation to popular press articles, social media posts, and multimedia formats. Wakelet is a visual content platform that helps curate online information so it is easier to find and share. Information is put into what Wakelet calls “collections” and can accept images, text, tweets, links and facebook posts. The first Wakelet collection I curated was Breast Cancer Awareness at U-M.
To start this process, I searched through the U-M News Site for stories surrounding Breast Cancer. After collecting these stories, I looked for popular press articles relating to U-M Breast Cancer Research by utilizing filter tools on search engines. After discussing the main stories we wished to highlight, we decided to break this content into three categories: Diagnosis & Treatment, Patient Stories, and Research.
There were three essential tasks to complete these collections:
- Content that has a healthy balance between stories, quotes, social media posts, and images/videos.
- Collection Description and social media copy.
- Header and social graphics for the Wakelet collections.
The finished Wakelet collections are now linked under the Focus Topics page here. I also repeated this process for different research topics including Childhood Challenges. This project aligns well with the mission of Michigan News and used a unique platform which has affordances that allow the News office to create quick and polished deliverables for social media.
Reddit AMA
In celebration of Privacy Day at Michigan, the Michigan News office got together with Privacy Expert Florian Schaub at the School of Information to run a Reddit Ask Me Anything. In collaboration with other Michigan News team members, we planned, promoted, and ran this AMA. After the AMA, I created a timeline Infographic explaining our process to help guide the Michigan News team through planning and executing AMA’s in the future.
Savannah Redlinger 