Since podcasting springs from the DIY heritage of the internet, we tend to think of it like home-brewed beer: We hope the content outshines the creation process. But dig a little deeper into the etymological heritage of podcasting and you come up with something much more elegant and ambitious: Radio.

If you know the people behind BI Radio, the series of thematic podcasts from Cognos, the maker of business intelligence and performance management software, the name should come as no surprise. Two of the three producers have radio backgrounds.

But there is a lot more behind the metaphor than that. BI Radio is a series of “programs,” each with a theme, that contain three segments offering different views on the overall theme. For example, a program about leadership contained a segment with a leadership book author, another with a leadership consultant, and a case study segment about supply chain leadership.

The programs also try to bring fun and informality to the usual business topics. “Love and Other Killer Apps,” offered a podcast with a “personal growth” author and a segment about how IT and Finance can develop shared passions for performance.

All of the programs have one thing in common, however: High production values. There is a professional announcer, smooth mixing of sound elements like music and quick-cut voice clips—even commercials. The slick production serves everyone’s needs. Listeners get consistency and a certain sense of comfort that the podcasts will meet the kinds of basic expectations that they have had for decades from radio and television productions. For Cognos, it is a way to further the company’s quality brand image and do a little targeted marketing through the commercials.

I interviewed the three producers of BI Radio recently: Delaney Turner, Manager, Product and Solutions Communications; Kelsey Howarth, Manager of Content and Multimedia; and Derek Schraner, Senior Specialist, Marketing Multimedia. They talked about how to raise the production level of podcasting to that of broadcasting—and why they won’t touch video with a ten-foot telephoto.

Chris Koch: You guys have invested in production values for your podcast. You have images, music, and professional announcers. Based on your experience, what are the minimum production values necessary for a successful podcast?

Delaney: Compelling content. That’s it.

Chris Koch: So you are saying you could have bad sound quality, but as long as you’ve got a scintillating interview, it’s going to be alright?

Delaney: If you recorded Kelsey doing an interview through a phone and didn’t edit it and didn’t give her a theme song, I think it would be just as compelling in a lot of ways. I think we can take something great and make it better, but I still think a raw interview could make a good podcast.

Derek: I think the production values that we add to our programs give them a kind of heft and signal to the listener that it’s not one single, one-off podcast, but it’s an actual coordinated program. It’s bigger than the one show that you are listening to—it’s a fully realized, fully conceptualized show that surrounds and contains the great content.

Chris Koch: How do podcasts fit into your broader marketing strategy?

Delaney: In a certain sense the company viewed this project as low-hanging fruit because the writing team was already out there doing interviews and writing up the stories for other marketing purposes.

Derek: In our broader team we are big believers in the reuse of content. So we offer up the podcast as a loss leader through iTunes and on the web, but we also repurpose the podcast elsewhere. We post the show transcripts on Cognos.com to drive our search engine optimization efforts. We will spin the interviews into newsletter articles, we’ll combine content, so we get a lot of mileage around all of those things. You have to figure out how this initiative is going to integrate itself into the broader communication strategy that you have. Again, that’s a lot of upfront thinking.

Chris Koch: You have integrated advertisements for Cognos into your podcasts. What has been the listener reaction?

Delaney: We haven’t heard anything form listeners about it. But we did change the placement of the ads over time. We decided we needed to move the ads after the segments as opposed to selling upfront.

Derek: My thing was just not losing anybody from the outset. So we always put very strong material right up front. We don’t put an ad in front of it. We don’t put a lead form in front of it.

Kelsey: I think it’s because it is a slick show, it’s very professional, there is great value, so I don’t think people hesitate when we throw in 30 seconds of that Cognos message.

Chris Koch: Do you think that a podcasts are a sort of first step on the way to offering video content ultimately, or is that a different path?

Derek: My background is in audio and that’s a personal bias, but there are dozens of reasons I could give why audio is just better than video. It may be that when you measure it, they do not stand up in the final analysis—people just may prefer to watch something, no matter what.

But if you were to take one of our podcasts and turn it into video, it would be talking heads, which to me isn’t interesting.

Then there’s the complexity issue. The file size is much bigger, the download time is much longer, and it isn’t portable—you can’t just listen to it anywhere or anytime like you can with a podcast.

Chris Koch: What trends do you see in the ways your audience consumes the podcasts?

Delaney: We provide individual feeds for the packaged show and for the individual segments which lets people pick and choose which ones they want to hear, but we have been watching the numbers for a year and people overwhelmingly favor downloading the whole show.

Derek: It’s hard to tell why people do that. It may be the convenience of making one download and then getting everything in one go. Or they may prefer that the package is tied together with a theme and there’s a host and more music. But that packaged format has definitely been much more popular.

Chris Koch: Can you describe your process for determining what subjects to cover in a podcast and how you set up your editorial schedule?

Kelsey: I think sometimes there are some themes that we are thinking about, and some of them just percolate up from the things we have going on in the organization. For example, we have Cognos Forum coming up, which is a very large event of ours. Don Tapscott is a keynote speaker. So we have interviewed him about his latest book, Wikinomics, and he will be on the next show. We will do a show that fits with the theme of the conference. But sometimes we pursue things that we are just generally interested in, that we think our listeners would really see value in.

Delaney: We have a mandate to support our core product marketing themes and the overall Cognos story, so that provides a good context. We also have our big wall of ideas where we put all our ideas and then we move them around based on the theme or the date. Sometimes we’ll come in with a theme and develop around it and other times we sort of move stuff around and say that could be a theme. That’s what I enjoy most. Suddenly we spot a thought line to connect three disparate things and suddenly we realize, hey, this is all about mobility, or hey, this is all about conservation and green, or whatever.

Chris Koch: Why do you think it is so important to have a theme and group podcasts together under the theme? What should marketers take from that?

Delaney: I think it just makes for better storytelling. There are so many ways to explore the Cognos story. We can take a theme and then have multiple angles on it. And as the one who writes the script, it’s a lot easier and more fun to write when I know what the show is about. It’s also easier to present a package on iTunes. It pulls everything together and gives it a unity that again is served by the production values.

Chris Koch: Do you think there is a right or wrong length for a podcast and how should marketers think about that?

Derek: I think that it should be shorter rather than longer. Early on, I said to anyone who wanted to do a segment: Make it a pop song. If it’s not a pop song, then we are going to lose people. More recently, I softened my stance and now we try to keep it to eight-and-a-half minutes per segment.

Chris Koch: So, make it a ‘Hey Jude’ pop song?

Derek: Yeah, absolutely. The other issue is that I think pacing is very, very important. When I look at the audiowave forms in my audio editing software, if I do not see peaks every-once-in-a-while, or too much of a certain tone or style, I start cutting, because I have this real thing about variety. I really want the listener to keep hearing something different, fairly frequently. Whether it’s mixing up male and female voices, music versus voice, or bringing in different speakers, I really feel there’s kind of innate need to keep things changing.

Listeners may not have these expectations in their conscious mind, but they know instinctively when something is wrong or not working. For example, when speakers hear their own voice they can become self conscious and they want it cleaned up and made perfect—every extra breath taken out. I very strongly try to discourage that, because if you pull everything out of it—every breath, every little break or flaw in their voice—it becomes too perfect and it’s uncomfortable to listen to. When I was in school they would say, “If you have no breathing in your voice, people will lose their breath as they listen.”