Podcasting is cool, no doubt about it. And a lot of nature protection and pollution control organizations are giving it a try. In July, the National Park Service put out a press release, boasting:

Many parks offer interpretive podcasts about wildlife, history, and topical issues like climate change and fire management… The Inside Yellowstone series has more than 50 episodes, which are one to two minutes in length. More episodes are on the way.

And the good folks over at ThankYouOcean.org also a produce a podcast series of the same name, the Thank You Oceans Report, which they describe as:

…interesting and exciting California ocean topics such as marine mammals, the latest news on ocean health, timely ocean issues and fascinating ocean facts.

So… should you jump on this bandwagon? The answer depends on your appetite for experimentation and how quickly you need a communications venture to pay off for you.

One of the trade publications I respect, eMarketer, recently did a roundup on the state of podcasting and concluded that despite rapid growth over the past couple of years:

…podcast downloading is still a niche activity.

eMarketer reported that only about one in five Internet users has ever downloaded a podcast, and only one in five of them does so regularly. That means that only somewhere in the neighborhood of 4% of Internet users are regularly listening to or watching podcasts.

The conclusion I draw from this article is that although podcasting will continue to grow for the forseeable future — it will be several years before it’s a truly useful mainstream channel for people like us.

So for those orgs that have some resources to throw at an experiment, I say go to town (and share what you learn with the rest of us). But if your organization doesn’t have a technically-inclined person on staff to produce your podcasts for free, don’t get caught up in the hype and get distracted from basics like good websites and email programs that consistently use the words that work.

Click here for the full eMarketer article on the state of podcasting today.

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