Podcast | Social Signal

With this episode, we flip the mic (metaphorically) and talk with someone who's a lot more used to writing speeches than delivering them. That's not to say Ian Griffin isn't at home behind a lectern; he's an accomplished speaker and a skilled communicator.

If you're in the tech industry, you've probably heard his words; Ian has worked in executive communications at Cisco, Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems. He's also incredibly generous with his time and expertise, as many Silicon Valley communicators who've attended one of his presentations can tell you.

The social web has gone a long way toward changing what it means to be in the audience at a speech – making an audience member less a passive spectator listening to a monologue, and more an active participant in a conversation among peers.

If you're involved in public speaking – as someone who delivers speeches and presentations, or as an executive communications practitioner, or as an event organizer – then this is for you.

Over the next several weeks, I'm going to share conversations I'm having with some of the smartest people I know about public speaking and social media: how connected audiences are transforming the world of presentations, and how some forward-thinking speakers are making the most of it.

Podcasting, as any social media guru worth her or his robes knows, is dead. Like so many social technologies, it failed to jump the adoption gap, break the hype cycle or clear the Great Hurdle of At-First-Raving-and-then-Dismissive Punditry.

Except that the common wisdom - that podcasts are the 3-1/2" floppy disk of the 2000s - has been lost on one group of people: listeners.

According to a BBC story from the summer,

[P]odcasting has continued to grow and grow.