Had the pleasure of attending the first ever PodcampSLC today, it was a blast! The event occured last Saturday the 15th of March. I met some really great people and had some fairly in depth discussions on podcasting. Everything from how to do a proper phone interview to the deeper stuff like monetization and marketing in this Web 2.0/Social media world. First off I’d like to thank Thom Allen of CouchCast and Brad Baldwin of Rocky Mountain Voices for putting on an awesome event! For the first one ever it went pretty smooth, except for that not being able to leave the building after 2 o’clock else you would get locked out part… That was a bit of a downer. So I’ll go ahead and recap some of the discussion that we had right here.

First off, it seems that doing a phone interview should require a landline for the person that you are interviewing. Evidently this is not only to avoid the risk of the call dropping but also to increase call quality and/or prevent interviewee from calling you while going southbound on the I-15 in a convertible. While I agree with this suggestion in principle there will most definitely come a time where the landline will not be an option. Nowadays its entirely plausible to encounter a handful of people in a day that just do not have one. I encounter that person fairly early when I look in the mirror. So, all in all a good rule of thumb but sometimes it just isn’t going to cut it. My preference would be Skype, but thats because most who I would interview would have this medium available to them.

The other thing that I wanted to bring up in regards to PodcampSLC was the last session that I attended which discussed in it what seemed to be the business aspect of podcasting, it hit this note quite hard and it was very interesting and we even had someone from Podango to speak on this. This session, while interesting and comprehensive could have lent itself much more to promoting a podcast and building your podcast rather than seeking out new monetization methods. Although this probably is due to my focus in communities at the moment. I think that we didn’t get the chance to hit this topic due to time constraints (and it was a long day as it was) but fortunately I came across (via Scoble & Calacanis’ twitters) a video by Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV which explained everything that would have needed to have been covered. Here’s a link. Watch it, learn it, live it.

Check out the photo’s I took at the PodcampSLC on Flickr!