I typed my own brand, Podknows Podcasting, into Google, spelled wrong completely on
purpose because transcription services keep hearing Podknows and delivering
Podnose, as in the thing on your face.
So I thought, right, let's go and see what's living at that address.
And yeah, sure enough, something is living at that address.
A whole podcast network, 14 or so odd shows, says it's been
going since 2013, and my first thought was, well, no you haven't.
This is Podmastery: Podcasting Insights.
I'm Neal Veglio, 25 years in radio and audio, and about a decade now
helping independent podcasters like you to figure out why the thing
that they're building may not be reaching the people it's building for.
All right, so some more context here.
When I started Podknows Podcasting, I came up with the idea by
a swimming pool in Mexico.
I checked the name was available.
Obviously, I checked the name was available because you
check a name's available.
I searched it.
I looked for anyone trading as anything close to it.
I made sure I wasn't about to spend the next several years
accidentally being someone else's tribute act, and there was nothing.
It was completely clear.
So off I went. When I'm now later sat there looking at a network claiming
a 2013 heritage and I've never heard of them, and I definitely checked,
you can see where my head went.
Somebody's noticed the transcript error.
Somebody's now parked on that transcript error.
Somebody's backdating their own founding to look established thanks to finding an
opportunity based on that transcript error.
And believe me, I was already in the mood for writing the
LinkedIn post ranting about this.
I even had the first line written down, and then I did the thing I
keep telling other people to do, which is check before you hit.
They're real.
They're properly real.
There's a show on there that's been running since about 2015, hosted by a
writer called Tim Worthington, where he gets guests on to talk about things they
remember that nobody else remembers.
There's a film show called Cinema Limbo that's been going for years as well,
and there's one with 270-odd episodes.
There's a network that runs on donations, an actual fundraiser
to keep those shows free.
That is not the behaviour of a man cashing in on my brand equity.
That's a bloke who's liked podcasts and in 2013 called his thing Podnose because pod
and nose is, I guess, quite funny, and he spent 12 years just getting on with it.
He's probably never even heard of me.
He probably has no idea that I exist.
And for a good few minutes back there, I was the villain in this story.
Yeah, I said it, and that's the really useful part in all of this.
Here's what I got wrong, and it isn't the accusation.
The accusation was just ego pain resulting from a search.
What I got wrong was much earlier and frankly a bit more boring, and
I suspect a lot of people within the sound of my voice have made exactly the
same mistake without ever finding out.
I checked my name.
I did not check my sound. Because your brand actually has two names.
There's the one you spell, the one that's on the artwork, on the website,
on any correspondence you send, and then there's the one the machines hear.
Descript hears it.
Riverside hears it.
Castmagic hears it.
YouTube's auto captions hears it.
Apple's built-in transcription hears it.
Siri hears it.
Your listener's Alexa when they shout your show's name at it
from across the kitchen hears it,
and that second name is a real address.
Somebody may already be there.
Now, if it's just a transcription wobble in your own show description, well, fine.
Who cares?
But follow it a bit further because this is where it stops being trivial.
Think about how people actually get told about podcasts, not how we imagine
that, not somebody carefully clicking a tracked link from a beautifully designed
Instagram carousel or a LinkedIn post.
Think about how it really happens.
Somebody's in the car.
Their mate says, "You'd like this show. It's called…"
And then they say your name, your podcast's show title out loud once at
sixty miles an hour with the fan on.
Or they hear you get name-checked on somebody else's episode.
Or maybe they catch it in a voice note or from a bloke at a barbecue in
Fareham who's had two ciders and is very keen that you know about this podcast.
They don't see your name.
They hear it.
And then at some point later that evening, they type in what they thought they heard.
And if what they heard belongs to somebody else, well, that's it.
That's the end of that road.
They land somewhere quite plausible.
It's got podcasts on it.
It looks fine.
And they think, "Oh, this must be Podknows."
And then they just get on with their lives, all the while thinking that
other potentially crap podcast is yours.
And they're never gonna have the heart to tell you that they listened for three
seconds, and they never listened again because they think it was your podcast,
and they don't want to offend you.
They don't want to upset you.
Why would they?
Nobody sits there thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if this is a homophone situation."
They found a podcast.
It looked exactly how they would imagine your podcast to look and sound.
Job done.
And you will never know that happened.
There's no line on your dashboard for the person who tried to find
you but ended up somewhere else.
Captivate can't measure that.
Spotify can't measure that.
There's no graph anywhere in podcasting that shows your near misses, the people
who heard about you, went looking for you, and arrived somewhere else.
That number could be zero.
It could be 400.
You have precisely no way of finding out, and the only reason I found mine
is that I happened to be annoyed about a spellcheck, which means for however
long this has been the case, and it may well have been for years, I've been
lovingly publishing what I'd like to think is quality content and doing all
the sensible things, tightening up the audio, sharpening my titles, and all
the while, there's been a perfectly nice comedy podcast network secretly absorbing
anybody who, when they heard Podknows, heard Podnose instead of reading it. Not
stealing, just being there, existing.
Which, do you know what?
Is somehow worse because there's nobody to be angry with.
Right, so now that we've established that, what do you actually do about it?
Well, the first thing, and it's completely free, find out what your sound is.
I'll come back to that in a minute because it's the one thing I
want you to actually go and do as soon as you finish this episode.
Secondly, once you know, say the spelling out loud in your episodes.
Not every 10 seconds like a personal branding expert with Tourette's.
Once in the outro.
So for example, I always say, "That's Podknows, P-O-D-K-N-O-W-S." It takes
me two seconds, and it converts every single person who's only ever heard me.
Thirdly, if the phonetic version is going spare, the domain, the
handle, whatever it is, take it.
It's usually about a tenner, and it's the cheapest insurance
in this entire industry.
And fourth, since it'd be dumb not to mention it, yes, you can trademark.
And if your brand is carrying real money right now, maybe clients, a product, a
business that would genuinely be hurt if someone parked next to it, then
get proper advice and do it properly.
But be clear-eyed about what it buys you.
It is a few hundred quid.
It takes months to come through.
And in my case, it would have protected me from a crime that nobody committed.
A trademark stops bad actors.
It does absolutely nothing about the accidental ones.
And the accidental ones are the ones probably costing most of you listeners.
After this short break, I'd love to play you a podcast trailer from one
of our Podmastery Community Members.
We're gonna be opening the doors to the public soon.
If you'd like to join the founding members list, go to podmastery.co/waitlist.
Well, there you go.
That's the sort of show that deserves to be found by the
people looking for it, doesn't it?
Which brings me neatly to the one thing I want you to go and do right now.
Open the voice recorder on your phone or in your notes
app with a little microphone, whatever dictates on your phone.
Say the name of your show out loud in a normal voice the way you'd
say it to a mate, and then look up what it typed and Google that.
It'll take you about 90 seconds, and at the end of it, you either find nothing
and get on with your day, or you find out you've got a phonetic twin and you've just
discovered something about your own show's discoverability that no analytics data
on Earth would ever be able to tell you.
I'd never have known any of this if I hadn't typed my brand's name
in wrong on a Thursday evening.
Go and type yours in wrong.
See who's there.
I'm Neal Veglio.
That's Podmastery: Podcasting Insights.
Everything's at podmastery.co, and good luck with your continuing
journey towards podmastery.