Show AND Tell

Not everything belongs in a podcast, medical or otherwise.

I’m finding that out the hard way (or perhaps it’s ultimately the easier way) as I do show prep for the next few episodes. Using FreeMind to generate ideas and link them coherently, I quickly got in way over my head.

The show topic — show series, really — deals with one of THE hottest topics in the podosphere since podcasting began, namely, generating significant income from your podcasts. As the ideas branched in a spider diagram to greater and greater detail, as they often do with FreeMind, I recalled again what I’d forgotten early on: you can do an entire show on just one or two branches, if there’s a nugget of insight connecting them. And enhancing income in a medical practice, when mind mapped, as FreeMind calls it, had a lot more branches than that. It’s elephants all the way down, man.

I’m a big fan of insightful nuggets, when it comes to conveying info and experience. And podcasts are ideally suited to this kind of sharing: you can riff on single nugget for an entire show, using your voice and the nature of the medium — intimate talking into a listener’s ear — to convey your enthusiasm for an idea’s novelty, your passion for a cause, your interest and humor over an insight. Podcasts excel at planting bright little seeds, that grow as your listeners mull over what you’ve told them.

They work less well conveying long branching chains of detail. I won’t say it’s impossible to do artfully and well, but it’s tedious following an Idea to its branches, and those ideas to theirs, then backing up the trunk two levels to get the next Idea, by listening. I’ve broken up Income Enhancement into Active Income, Passive Income, Reducing Expenses, and Other; take just the first, Active Income, click on it, and (in my MindMap anyway) the branch EXPLODES into Attracting More and Desirable Patients, Educating Existing Patients on Available Services, and Reducing Patient Attrition. And each of these explodes into further detail and examples.

Which, though reading is done s-e-r-i-a-l-l-y like listening, can be pretty easily grokked graphically with a few sweeping glances over the paragraphs or MindMap. Links, branches, hypertext, icons, and all.

A medical practice, and a financial model for enhancing it, is a complicated organic entity, like real life. Sometimes you need to go deep, sometimes you need to pull back and re-establish some perspective. To truly leverage the strength of the podcasting medium, you need to blog from a website as well, i.e. visually show information that’s better seen and not heard. Plant some seeds with your mesmerizing voice, then let folks read the complex details. The right tool for the right job, tip o’ the hat to Home Depot.