Turn Listener Messages Into An Engagement Loop

A small moment on Podnews Weekly Review sparked a chain reaction: episode shout-outs, listener fan mail jumping in, and a wholesome engagement loop that social media rarely delivers.

We also share that Buzzsprout’s annual year-in-review is back with a new name and it’s coming in January (so it includes 100% of your year). Download the Buzzsprout mobile app so you don’t miss it!

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• Send us a text message
• Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods

Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Transcript

Kevin: 0:00

Okay. Jordan, I see you got a little bit of an outline here for today's quick cast.

Jordan: 0:04

Yep.

Kevin: 0:04

Do you mind if I do an episode takeover?

Jordan: 0:07

Yes. No. Yes, I want you to. No, I don't mind.

Kevin: 0:11

Okay. Because there's there's something happening in the podcasting space, and we have to talk about it.

Jordan: 0:16

Oh, okay.

Kevin: 0:17

This is exciting. It sounds a lot more dramatic than it is.

Jordan: 0:20

I know. I feel like we're getting some like underground information or something.

Kevin: 0:23

I'm kind of excited about this little exchange that happened. And hopefully this will come out in the next 10 minutes or so.

Jordan: 0:29

Okay.

Kevin: 0:29

But you know, all these uh Spotify Wrapped and well, year-end review recaps are coming out. You're probably getting them from a million places. We can dig into all the fun little places if we have time that are doing these things. But I was listening to Pod News Weekly Review last week. Uh-huh. And James and Sam were talking about Spotify Wrapped, specifically, again, also talking about all the other services that also do raps. And I heard something that I'm like, what? What's going on? I have a clip. Can I play the clip from their show? It's like 45 seconds.

Jordan: 1:01

I'm sure they won't mind.

Alban: 1:02

Before you play this, can I just say this is a very uncomfortable spot to be in? Jordan, I have no idea where you're going with this. And now I know what it's like to be you in podcast episodes with no practice.

Jordan: 1:12

I feel like I'm like strapped into a roller coaster. I'm like, all right, let's go.

Kevin: 1:15

You'll be fine. You'll be fine. You're ready. Okay, so this clip, I'm I I cut it up so it's shorter. It's about 45 seconds. But it is Sam and James talking about Spotify wrapped. And then they have the idea that well, I don't want to give away the lead, but take a listen.

James: 1:31

I personally, I think that all podcast hosts should be doing this. And you know, I mean, our sponsor Buzz Bratt talked about start podcasting, keep podcasting. I think for any podcast host, the best way to keep people podcasting and to lower the amount of churn going on is to give encouraging detail like that.

Sam: 1:52

I agree with that. I think this is really good. And I agree that have that data.

James: 1:57

Hosts have got downloads, hosts have got countries, hosts have got various other things as well. And they can produce a lot of the data that Spotify had. I'm you know quite surprised that we don't see hosts doing that. To me, that that is an obvious way of keeping your podcast clients uh going.

Kevin: 2:18

Uh okay, so wait a second. You all have the same look on your face that I had when I was listening to that. I am also surprised that James has not opened his emails from us for five years. Oh no. Exactly. I was like, not only is this someone who uh I know they listen to Buzzcast. I know that uh they're hosting on Buzz Sprout. I know we've sent them a year in review for the past, I don't know how many years they've been doing Pun News uh weekly review. Probably four years, five years. So they've gotten one every year because this is our sixth year doing it.

Jordan: 2:49

From us.

Alban: 2:50

This feels like an impromptu review right now, Kevin, where I'm like, I don't know where I went wrong, but I've definitely gone wrong somewhere that we haven't uh highlighted these even more. I mean, mostly we'll update like the smallest little thing on some website, and James will be like, hey, do you want to comment about this? I saw you made this update. Right. These are emails I'm trying to send to get people's attention, and they're apparently flying right into the spam filter.

Kevin: 3:14

Completely missed the last five years of the year in review as a podcaster that we send out. And and it has all the exact data that he's talking about, like the downloads and the countries and the like listening apps and all that stuff. It's all the stuff that we highlight in these things.

Jordan: 3:29

We have this.

Kevin: 3:29

Yes. Okay. So I'm glad we're all on the same page so far.

Jordan: 3:33

Yeah.

Kevin: 3:33

And I also felt like it was appropriate because here we are on we're recording on December 12th. It gets uh quick cast, so it'll go out today. But everyone might be wondering like when is Buzz sprout going to do. Well, the few people that evidently opened their email might be wondering when is Buzz sprout going to send out their year in review. We're gonna send it out in January. And when we first did it, we send them out in January. The last couple of years we moved it up because all these other services were sending them out early. So we're getting more and more emails about when's it coming, when's it coming, when's it coming. So instead of answering hundreds of emails, we're just like, we'll send ours earlier. But the drawback to that has been that you don't get a full year's data. Yeah. Like your podcasting year goes all the way through the end of December. And so it's better if we can send it in January, which feels like we're a little bit behind, like everyone else sends theirs out in December, but they're wrong. Like at the end of the day, we're gonna stand on we're like, this is a hill that we're gonna fight on, right? Like you can't give a year in review until the year's over.

Alban: 4:23

Yeah. You know what it's like, Kevin? It's when like the new cars come out in August, and it's the 2026 car is being sold in August of 2025. Yes. And so you see, like, oh, you have a 95 Mustang. Well, that came out in 1994. I don't know why that's always bothered me. I'm like, the year is for the current year. That's correct.

Jordan: 4:41

You know what's really funny is Spotify actually posted a QA about the wrapped, and one of the questions was like, Why does the data only go through November? And they were like, Well, we have to make sure that we get all of it out before the end of the year. And so that's why they were like, if we were to wait until December 31st to gather the data, you wouldn't get your wrapped until Easter. And I was like, that doesn't math. Like you do it through November to get it like a couple weeks later. But if you wait till December 31st, we'd have to wait four months. Like, that doesn't make sense. I'm sorry.

Alban: 5:11

Yeah. That's like Orthodox Easter or something.

Jordan: 5:13

There's some different date.

Kevin: 5:16

Yeah. Well, we figured it out. We've figured that if we build all the tech and we have all the formulas and database queries and everything ready to run on December 31st, we can run them on December 31st. They do take it does take a while to put all that data together. Yeah. And of course, the designs and the emails and everything that has to go along with that, that can all be done ahead of time. And then we can just hold it until January, and then we can send it out in early January and it has all the data. So that's what we're going to do this year. But that's not the topic of today's quick cast. The topic of today's quick cast is this beautiful interaction that can happen in podcasting when you give your listeners the ability to interact with you as a podcast host. So the Pod News Weekly Review is hosted on Buzzsprout. So of course they have the fan mail link enabled.

Jordan: 5:57

Uh-huh.

Kevin: 5:57

And so I'm hearing this and I'm like, what?

Jordan: 5:59

What?

Kevin: 6:00

How do you not know we do it? We do this year in review. We've been doing it for a long time. I have to tell you this.

Jordan: 6:04

Your thumbs just can't type fast enough.

Kevin: 6:06

That's right. And so I tap the text the show link, furiously texting them and sending them a message. And then their episode comes out this week. And guess who gets a spot on their show? I do.

James: 6:18

We were talking about a Spotify recap, weren't we, last week? And I think I blew my mouth off and said, why don't podcast hosts do any of this stuff? If podcast hosts should really be doing it, it would be a really good idea. Blah, blah, blah. Something to that effect. Something to that effect. And Kevin from Buzzspraut, our sponsor, said.

Sam: 6:44

Oh my word. The last two years we've called it backtracked, and this year we're calling it playback. We'll send it out in early January so you get all of your 2025 data. Yes, we did. Excellent.

James: 6:57

Well, thank you, Kevin. Sorry, Kevin.

Kevin: 7:03

So I did get to interact with the show. They did read me out in their next episode, which was really fun and nice. I love having that two-way communication. Yeah. And then another amazing surprise happens. After that, they're continuing to read their fan mail that comes in. And it wasn't just me that remembered that we send this out and wrote in. One of their listeners and one of the uh fans of our show, Claire Wait Brown, also writes in.

Jordan: 7:25

Yeah, Claire.

Kevin: 7:26

Yeah. And here's her message.

James: 7:29

Claire Wait Brown, what a good idea for hosting companies to give podcasters a year-in-review style roundup. So good, in fact, that Buzz Spratt already do it. Yes, all right. Anyway, if you want to get in touch.

Jordan: 7:42

Claire coming in clutch. I love it.

Kevin: 7:44

Isn't that fun when you can interact, when your audience can interact with your show and your show can interact with the audience and we can all talk to each other? I love it. I love that fan mail was a big part of that story. I love that I was able to, like they were talking about us that, and now we're able, like the circle keeps going because now we're clipping their show back into our show.

Jordan: 8:00

Yeah.

Kevin: 8:00

I don't know. I just love this whole world of podcasting, and I love that Buzzsprout makes it easy for listeners to interact with the show and the shows to highlight people who are listening and connect in a way that you don't get in other social media stuff.

Jordan: 8:12

Yes.

Kevin: 8:13

Like you don't see this type of stuff very much like in a YouTube or in an Instagram reel or a TikTok thing. Like none of that happens.

Alban: 8:19

In YouTube, it would be a mean comment, like, this is the worst show. But instead, here you get to write them and they get to laugh at it. They go, Oh, yeah. Well, actually, it was a good idea. Yeah.

Kevin: 8:30

They actually on the Pod News Weekly Review, if if you go back and listen to this week's episode, they actually have a clip of us talking about our sponsorship deal with them and how we view that. And they were saying how great it is to work with Buzzsprout to sponsor their show. And here's us talking about them. And they played a clip from that too.

Jordan: 8:43

Yeah. It feels so much more conversational. I know that these podcasts go out to like thousands of people and stuff, but it just feels like a small world. It feels like a really tight-knit community when you're actually like engaging with each other that way. Yeah. I love it.

Alban: 8:56

You know what it reminds me of is there have you ever heard the dead internet theory? I don't know that I have.

Jordan: 9:02

Yes, I have.

Alban: 9:03

Of course, Jordan has. Well, there's a conspiracy angle to it, which I'm sure Jordan's keyed into. But the non-conspiracy version is just pretty much since 2016, over half of internet traffic is not human. It's a bot, it's a scraper, it's something. And more and more comments and more and more web hits and more of everything are generated not by a person but by a program or by some AI agent or whatever. And the idea is like the internet eventually is just gonna be bots talking to each other, and there's a conspiracy side to it. But there's this other idea that's like the opposition called the alive internet theory. And the idea is like at some point you have to remember like some of these people are real, and there are ways people can interact with you that show their humanity and that they're a real person. And I think all the bot traffic and stuff, even makes the download numbers, even the strongest filters we put on there, we still look at it with a little bit of skepticism, no matter what the platform is. But then when you get a person you know in real life talk about your product and they say something, and then you clip it and they re-clip it, and then they share something, and a friend of the show writes in via text, all of that happens, you're like, oh yeah. This is just a way to communicate with friends and people you like and people that share similar interests in podcasting. And I think that's why this feels so wholesome is because it reminds us of the way the internet used to be when it was verifiably human and these are real people and just feels nice. For sure.

Kevin: 10:39

I just listened to uh the Joe Rogan podcast where he had Jensen Huang. He's the CEO of NVIDIA. They were talking about AI a lot, and Joe was making this point of like how much of the internet is going to become just AI, talking to AI and all this kind of stuff. And Jensen was making the point, like, to some degree, it doesn't matter. Like, does it matter if AI wrote a piece of compelling content that I like or a human wrote it? And he's like, because so much of what we enjoy today is was written by humans that I've never met or never interacted with, a lot of it from hundreds and years ago, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And all the thoughts and theories and stuff that we have today is usually based on past human writings. Anyway, I don't need to go into all that. But what he was saying was is as long as it's a part of that, that's totally fine. And I love the fact that podcasting is like the counter to that. Podcasting, like that stuff, I mean, it's probably gonna come into podcasting too. There are a lot of just completely AI podcasts, but this interaction, I don't, well, now I'm rethinking all of it. Will AI interact with itself? Will will AI leave itself uh fan mail and then answer its own fan mail? Maybe. I don't know. But at the end of the day, if you're listening to the show, if it just sounds fun, if it sounds authentic, maybe, maybe we'll be okay with it.

Jordan: 11:54

Yeah.

Kevin: 11:55

Who knows?

Alban: 11:56

One of my favorite books, I probably read this first in high school, is Snow Crash, which is from the early 90s, like 92. And one of the things that happens in this book is that the internet gets like bombarded by all of this garbage fake data to the point that the internet becomes useless, and people start building these like private internets that are verifiable, and people are verifying all the data. And I remember reading it probably, I don't know, 2000, and thought, ah, this is funny. Like, obviously, not ever gonna happen. And now I'm like, yeah, this is pretty much like it's probably it's reality. It's actually funny enough, the book that also I think is the coined the term metaverse.

Jordan: 12:39

Really?

Alban: 12:40

Yeah, there's so many Neil Stevenson books that I feel like I want to write a list of things that I encountered in books and then ended up being real like 20 years later.

Jordan: 12:49

He's like the modern day Nostradamus.

Alban: 12:51

Uh another um cryptonomicon is pretty much the idea of Bitcoin in the late 90s, years before Bitcoin was ever made. Anyway, it's just funny to think of this idea of the internet being so polluted with junk data that eventually people just opt out and they're like, I can't trust any of this. I'm just gonna go and create a private internet.

Jordan: 13:11

Yeah.

Kevin: 13:12

Well, just to bring us back to Lay on the Plane on this quick cast, two things to take away. One, fan mail is awesome. I love interacting with other shows. I love when people who are listening to the shows can interact with the shows and then the shows read them back. So that was a fun to be a part of that experience this last week. Thank you to the Pod News Weekly Review. If you don't listen to that show, please go search it up in whatever podcast app you like and subscribe. We sponsor the show, they do great stuff. And uh the other thing is your playback is coming. So our year in review thing that we do every year has a new name this year. We're calling it playback. Your podcast, playback 25, is coming. It's coming in January, and this year promises to be I promise that it's better than ever. We're doing some really cool stuff, and the best way to experience it is going to be through your mobile apps, the Buzzsprout mobile app. So if you don't have Buzzsprout for iOS or Buzzsprout for Android, download that now so that you get your playback right away because we'll send push notifications, turn on push notifications. We're gonna send a push notification as soon as they're ready, and then you'll be able to see your playback in January. So it includes all of your data.

Alban: 14:10

100% of your year will be encapsulated in this playback. 100%.

Jordan: 14:15

I'm so excited. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening and keep podcasting.