Sheree Martin - Time to Shine

Birmingham Shines

When I was three a lawnmower turned over on me and crushed my left temple, I have a noticeable but faded scar in the shape of a cross. I can actually remember bits and pieces of the moments before, during, and after the accident. My head on my mother's chest, covered in blood, as we raced to the nearest hospital 10 miles away.

Today, I call it my Harry Potter scar. The girl who lived.

I'm Sheree Martin, host and producer of Birmingham Shines, and I want to say thank you for listening to the podcast and for sharing it with your friends. I've been blessed to have met so many awesome individuals through Birmingham Shines, both guests, fans of the show, and others who simply love Birmingham or love podcasts.

It's hard to believe that it's been a year since I started scheduling interviews for the first episodes and now we're just a few weeks away from the anniversary of the first episode release.

This week's show is a bit different. I decided to make myself the guest, to tell you a little bit about my own story, why I started Birmingham Shines, what I'm trying to do here and some other things I'm working on. Some bits and pieces of this have been woven into my conversations with guests, but a lot of what you're going to hear in this episode is new and I'm going to try to do it more in a storytelling format.

Some of you know that I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, who's both an inspirational force for the adapting to the new economic realities we live in, and someone's who helped to change the face of marketing in the digital arena, through his book, Permission Marketing, and later on, through his messages of empowerment. As Seth recognized years ago, the internet enables everyone—from brands to individuals in basements and bedrooms—to bypass the traditional media gatekeepers and to find and speak directly to their tribe of fans, followers and kindred spirits.

When I began making plans to leave my faculty job at Samford a few years ago, I decided I wanted to stay in Birmingham, if possible, and that meant I would be leaving academia because there are only a few teaching jobs within driving distance for someone whose focus is social media marketing, digital content strategy and media law. Within academia, the traditional approach to PR and advertising doesn't accommodate the perspective that I bring to the table. And marketing departments in business schools typically don't consider faculty with a Ph.D. in Mass Communication, those programs want a Ph.D. in marketing or, perhaps, psychology of consumer behavior. It's all very siloed and that's not a topic I care to get into in this podcast.

My point in bringing this up BEFORE I get into the official part of the episode is to say that when I left Samford my plan was to demonstrate how on-demand audio, especially audio content with a longer shelf life, can be a key part of business marketing strategy.

That's a message I've been talking about behind-the-scenes for quite some time. More recently, I've ramped up my own marketing efforts to explain this approach to CEOs and business marketing and corporate communications managers to sell my own on-demand audio content strategy and production services.

My target clients are B2B companies, and professional service providers, like lawyers and accountants, and other certain business sectors like real estate, construction, and banking/finance, healthcare and veterinary medicine.

If you're a business owner, a marketing manager or someone who handles PR and corporation communications in house or with an agency:

Perhaps the best way to think of it is this: Podcasts are like having your own business radio station and you are the DJ. You can decide whether to have short news features, product-specific episodes, answer the FAQs of your customers and clients

You get to explain what you do in a way that lets you speak directly to each unique customer.

Not only do you get a “radio station” section for your website, with audio file that you can distribute across the digital spectrum through iTunes, SoundCloud and other channels, but you can also use the script or notes from each episode as the basis for a text story on your website to get more SEO juice from the content in the audio file.

You can also use pull-quotes from the audio to create graphics that you share across social-media channels.

The Birmingham metro area as over 400,000 daily commuters who spend around 50 minutes of each work day driving alone to and from their jobs.

Many of these are your customers and many of those customers will gladly choose to listen to you answer their questions and solve their problems through your business radio podcast.

Another cool thing is this: Even if your target customer doesn't immediately listen to the episode, the podcast is always available to answer their question when the time is right. Content creation becomes an investment, not an expense.

And the distribution of the episode across social media channels gives you brand impressions in ways that ads do not, unless they are internet display ads or promoted posts on social media. So even if the episode doesn't immediately generate listens or downloads, you can still get brand impressions for unique content.

The great thing about on-demand audio, is that's very affordable, multipurpose and you--the business owner, the PR specialist, the marketing manager--get to control the distribution schedule.

On-demand audio is targeted to your unique customer profiles. Each episode can speak to one segment of your client base on one unique topic or question or concern.

That means you aren't throwing money out the window on relatively expensive and ephemeral radio and TV ads that evaporate into the ether as soon as they're broadcast to an audience that's both distracted AND much broader than your ideal customer base.

Unless you're a fast food restaurant, a car dealership, or a big-box retailer these radio and TV ads probably don't give you much bang for your buck. Print ads also have a relatively short life and are very hard to target. You're usually paying for reach you don't need. And with print ads, your message is competing with a million other distractions.

With on-demand audio, you can create one piece of content that speaks directly to many ideal customers, one individual at a time. When someone is listening to your voice through an earbud, you can establish a relationship with the customer that grows over time. And that content is easily repurposed for use in a multi-channel digital distribution world.

I'm here to help you develop a business radio strategy and launch your own podcast. It's really not difficult. I can handle the episode production, as well as the scheduling and distribution, if that's not something you want to do in house.

So how to connect with me? I've put together landing pages at birminghamshines.com and shereemartin.com that explains what I offer and I'm happy to give you ballpark estimates on costs, both for strategy development and production. If you don't have time to visit the landing page, you can email me: sheree at shereemartin.com and ask me about podcasting for your business.

Now, back to this week's episode:

Remember that lawn mower accident? A week or so after I was released from the hospital, I spent a few minutes facedown in a muddy, freshly plowed field while a tornado passed overhead. My dad was trying to run with me to a neighbor's storm cellar when we got tripped up in the muck.

Fortunately, the tornado was just to the north of us and not quite on the ground, so we weren't harmed. My bandages were a muddy mess. I can see the scene unfolding like it was yesterday.

On the way home from the doctor's office to have my bandages changed, my parents had stopped to speak with my maternal grandparents, and we were all standing in the yard when Earline, a neighbor, up the road began running in our direction screaming, “Tornado, it's about to get me....”

The house between us had a storm cellar. My grandfather, Paps, sprinted off in the direction of the cellar, but opted to go under small bridge. My dad took the shorter route, which is how we ended up in the field. He'd taken a short cut that didn't quite work out. My mom and mema were left standing in the yard. They didn't run.

A couple of years after the lawnmower accident, on a sweltering hot June day in 1968 when I was 5, my beloved grandfather, Paps, was my pier-side babysitter while my parents spent several hours waterskiing on the Tennessee River.

It was a very hot day and my dad was a tool and die maker who worked the 4-12 shift at Ford Motor Company in Sheffield. He had to go to work so we left the river in mid-afternoon to return home.

On the way home, it was clear my grandfather was in distress. He was sweating profusely and complaining of nausea. Everyone thought it was the heat.

We dropped my dad off at home so he could leave for work and then drove on to my grandparents' house. Mom and I drove on my grandparents house, a quarter-mile away. It had been decided that I could spend the night with my grandparents, which I did regularly. My uncle William stopped by with some medicine for my grandfather, who was lying on the couch, obviously in a great deal of distress. He left and Mom left to return home to get clothes for me to spend the night.

A bath was running for me, when I heard my grandmother scream to call my mother. I ran into the den to see my grandfather having a heart attack.