On January 3, 2005, Neville Hobson and I uploaded the first episode of For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report. The 43-minute podcast was one of a few hundred available at the time. It was one of the few with co-hosts (most were individuals) as well as one of the first focused on business (most were either personal observations, music-focused, or all about tech).

If I’m not mistaken, it was also one of the first to feature co-hosts in two locations, Neville in Amsterdam and me here in Concord, California. Thank heaven for Skype.

It was also, definitely, the first podcast to address PR, marketing, communications, and advertising, though many would follow (including Inside PR, whose co-hosts, Terry Fallis and David Jones, credited FIR as the inspiration for their own podcast. (Inside PR is now co-hosted by Terry’s business partner Joe Thornley, along with Martin Waxman and Gini Dietrich—and it’s part of the FIR Podcast Network. More on the network later.)

In that initial episode, we explained our hopes for the show and talked about podcasting a bit, then delivered our first report, about the role blogs played in the wake of the tsunami tragedy in Asia.

On Monday, we’ll record and upload episode 798, representing the beginning of our 11th year of podcasting.

A little background

Though we had never met in person, Neville and I had known each other for some time through the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). In fact, in the 1990s, Neville and I teamed up (virtually) to add an online component to the IABC international conference in Boston. A number of members participated in the IABC Hyperspace forum, part of Compuserve’s PR & Marketing Forum. Those who were at the conference uploaded reports of the sessions they attended. We even had someone doing live updates during a session, with members submitting questions to the speaker. Consider it an experiment in live-blogging before there were blogs.

When I first heard of podcasting in 2004—in a post on Steve Rubel‘s blog—I decided I needed to try it if I was going to be able to talk intelligently to my clients about it. I listened to a number of the early shows: Todd Cochane’s Geek News Central, Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, Dawn and Drew, and some others, and came up with the kernel of the idea for FIR. I emailed Neville, who was working for a tech company in The Netherlands, and asked if he was interested in co-hosting. It turned out he had been thinking along the same lines, so we started planning.

Recording both ends of a Skype conversation wasn’t as easy then as it is now, and the double-ender wasn’t practical yet, given how long it would take to transmit a WAV file as an email attachment. We jumped through some hoops figuring out how to pull it off. It involved two instances of Skype running at the same time and the use of some some free software out of Russia called Virtual Audio Cables. (Thanks to Stewart Henshall for that tip.)

The name of the show was derived from that first line of just about every press release ever written: For Immediate Release.

Random recollections

Over 10 years, you would expect the show to evolve and change. For instance, we initially did interviews as part of The Hobson and Holtz Report; our first was with Paul Woodhouse, who wrote the Tinbasher Blog, an example of a blog that helped grow a business. We would conference our guests into the call and they would sit quietly waiting to be brought into the conversation. With Woodhouse, that occurred at 18:18. I know this because, in those early days, we also included time codes for each episode in the blog posts. Listening to each episode and figuring out when we started each new topic was Neville’s job, while I handled audio production.

(The task of figuring out time codes got too onerous, so we started posting episode notes to The New PR Wiki where listeners could volunteer to add show notes. Among those who did: Chip Griffin, who later became a sponsor. I’ll get to Chip in a bit.)

Files and bandwidth

We hosted the show at Midphase, where the blog continues to reside today. Midphase metered bandwidth, but we figured we’d be fine. How many people would download a PR-focused show, after all?  After just a couple months, though, the site went down. I contacted Midphase to ask, “What the hell?” I was told we had exceeded our bandwidth and we would incur a per-gigabyte charge for more. We started looking around and found LibSyn.com, an audio hosting service set up specifically for podcasts which charged based on storage; there was no metering bandwidth. We moved our recordings to LibSyn, where we still host them today.

The superstar roster of interview guests

The length of the show got longer and longer, so we ditched interviews, creating a new feed for interviews separate from the show. Our first separate interview was with Jeremy Wright, currently Senior VP of Marketing at SoCast SRM. At the time, he was a high-profile blogger working on a new venture, Inside Blogging. (Later he established B5 Media, one of the early blogging networks.)

Removing interviews from the body of the weekly report didn’t keep the length from expanding. At one point, we tried doing two shows a week, something we kept up for a few years, but each of those shows expanded to well over an hour. Neville—who had left his Amsterdam job and returned to his native England and taken up the sole-practitioner life—eventually took a full-time job, so we went back to a weekly show, perfectly happy with a 90-or-so-minute run-time.

The roster of interview guests has been impressive. Among our repeat guests have been Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, and Pete Blackshaw. We’ve also interviewed Seth Godin, Loic Lemeur, Chris Heuer, Lionel Mechaca, Christopher Barger, Gary Vaynerchuk, Scott Monty, Jon Iwata, Rick Murray, Aaron Strout, Peter Shankman, Craig Silverman, Bob Pearson, Lee Aase, Jack O’Dwyer, Shashi Bellamkonda, Josh Bernoff, Richard Binhammer, Andrea Weckerle, Amber MacArthur, Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, Jeanne Meister, Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel, Ekaterina Walter, and way more than I can list here.

Listener feedback and new correspondents

We were encouraged about the length by feedback from the listener survey we conduct about every other year. While there were a few complaints, the vast majority of listeners reminded us that this was a podcast; they could start it when they left the house, stop it when they arrived at work, and re-start it when they left work to drive home. As long as the content was good, they said, they were fine with the length. (I also dismissed worries about length based ont he success of Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech, one of the most-downloaded independent podcasts, which routinely runs over two hours.

On episode 15, on March 14, we got our first comment from a listener, a Canada-based American technologist named Dan York. Two weeks later, we had another comment from an Australian communicator named Lee Hopkins. After a while, Dan suggested doing a weekly tech report on the show, which we readily embraced. As for Lee, he commented virtually ever week. At one point, I said something like, “I swear, if we get one more comment from this guy, we’re just going to make him a correspondent.” And thus Lee became our first Asia correspondent.

(Michael Netzley, a communications professor in Singapore, is our current Asia correspondent. When Lee retired from the job, I poached Michael from Mitch Joel’s podcast, Six Pixels of Separation, where Michael was a regular commenter. I poached him with Mitch’s consent, of course.)

Lee was also the first person to reduce For Immediate Release” to the initialism FIR. In one of his audio comments, he said, “F-I-R is F-A-B.” It stuck.

We’ve been blessed with a core group of listeners who interact with us and each other in our online community on Google+, and by commenting. Clarence Jones, who works in retail in Mississippi, gave us our first clue that we were reaching non-communicators who just enjoyed the show. Harry Hawk is one of our newer listeners who stays in touch with commentary and ideas. There have been hundreds in between.

Travel rig, circa 2011The technology we used to record also evolved. Through a podcasters community on Podcast Alley (the community no longer exists), I learned how to configure a mix-minus using a mixer and a digital recorder. I eventually bought two rigs, one for the office and a smaller, lighter setup for the road. (I continue to use that setup, even though now Neville records his own side of the show and uploads his 1-plus-gigabyte WAV file to a DropBox folder.)

We also got a hand from Effective Edge, an Ontario, Canada-based design firm that volunteered to create our look and feel. The guys at Effective Edge continue to crank out album art for new shows, and will be helping us with the design of a new website (which I’ll explain later in this post).

Sponsors join FIR

We also took on some sponsors. In November 2006, we announced that media monitoring service CustomScoop would become a sponsor. (In a subsequent listener survey, we learned people didn’t like the CustomScoop promo; it was too much like a commercial and disrupted the flow of the show. CustomScoop CEO Chip Griffin took that as a challenge and created the Media Monitoring Minute, a 60-second report that fit nicely into FIR and wrapped up with the offer of a free trial.) For several years, Jen Phillips was the voice of the Media Monitoring Minute; today, Chip records the segments.

In July 2007, Lawrence Ragan Communication became our primary sponsor, covering interviews and other content in addition to The Hobson and Holtz Report. That included FIR Live, the hour-long specials we started producing on a random basis, where we could go in-depth on a single topic with a panel of experts. (FIR Live now is produced as a Google+ Hangout on Air, whenever we manage to pull one together.)

We’ve had other sponsors over the years (Igloo Software currently is our third sponsor), but Ragan and CustomScoop have stuck with us from the time they first signed on.

Meeting with listeners

One of the first times Neville and I got together in the real world, we had joined forces with Joe Jaffe to do presentations at a conference at Columbia University in New York. We promoted a “geek dinner” while we were there. Bryan Person—who was working for Monster.com in Boston at the time—took the train to come to the dinner, knowing he’d have to take a bus home because the trains didn’t run that late.

We’ve had several FIR dinners since then, including the one shown at left, in London. Whenever Neville makes it to the U.S. for the IABC conference, we have dinners there, too.

Our hosts and correspondents have also connected with listeners and each other all over the world, including a recent get-together between Asia correspondent Michael Netzley (at right in photo at right) and Bryan Person (center), who met in Singapore along with podcaster/communicator Jon Hoel.

The number of times I’ve run into people who listen to the show is crazy. I remember talking to someone from Pandora in the company’s earliest days—they had a booth at the Naked Conversations launch party at Michael Arrington’s house. When I introduced myself to the guy manning the booth, he said, “Oh, in Concord, California, right? I listen to your show!” Any number of times, I hear people tell me I sound in real life just like I do through their ear buds.

FIR face-to-face

During our decade of podcasting, we have recorded live, in-person, face-to-face a few times. The first was when Neville came to the U.S. to attend a New Communications Forum (we are both founding fellows of the Society for New Communications Research, having attended the first NewComm Forum in Napa and been in on the discussions with Jen McClure and Elizabeth Albrycht that led to the creation of the Society.) (The image at left is at the second NewComm Forum in Palo Alto.) We have also recorded live at an IABC conference from the trade show floor, in my office, in Neville’s kitchen, and in hotel rooms in London and Atlanta, Georgia.

There are themes that have resonated throughout the 10 years of FIR. Ethics in communication is at the top of the list, a topic that has never fallen out of the runlist for very long. Of course, we are always focused on social and digital media; the theme of the show has never changed from “public relations and technology.” But there are also themes that rise and fall. For a year or so, we talked a lot about Second Life. Oreo (with its Super Bowl tweet) was also a long-running subject. (I think it was Scott Monty who suggested an FIR drinking game: down a shot every time we mention Oreo during an episode.

The future of FIR

In addition to interviews and FIR Live, we added several other feeds over the years. Whenever Neville or I are able to record a talk at a conference or meeting—our own or somebody else’s—we post it to our Speakers and Speeches feed. If we’ve read a book we feel like reviewing, it goes into our Reviews feed. (We even had a book review editor for a while, but there hasn’t been a review in a while, sadly.) For a while, when the social media news release was a hot issue, I would get together with Chris Heuer, Brian Solis, and Tom Foremski for the NMR Cast (that’s for New Media Release), which lasted from July 2006 to June 2009.

But we wanted more.

For years, we’ve pondered how FIR can become a bigger network of shows, the home for great audio content for anybody working in any of the communications fields. We have also harbored a secret desire to figure out how to make FIR a full-time gig. Jeremiah Owyang is among those who insists we could pull off an FIR conference; he reminds us frequently that he’d promote it and attend it.

The conference may become a reality now that FIR is more than just Neville, me, and our correspondents and sponsors. In late 2013, listener Andrea Vascellari suggested adding a new show to the mix that he would host: FIR on Strategy. It was the first of a batch of shows with various hosts that has evolved into the FIR Podcast Network (FPN). Original shows now part of FPN include All Things IC with Rachel Miller, FIR B2B with Paul Gillin, Higher Education with Kevin Anselmo, Linked Conversations with Chuck Hester, FIR on Technology with Dan York, and TV @ Work with Ron Shewchuk. We also host shows that were already established elsewhere, including Young PR Pros, Inside PR, Media Bullseye Roundtable, Chats with Chip, Thought Leader Life, and AMP Up Your Social Media.

More shows are in the works and will be introduced after we launch a website configured for a network of programs. We anticipate a show about communications use of YouTube, about gamification, about social media basics, and a few others. We’re also keen on identifying topics and hosts for new shows on communication segments (like one that focuses on media relations and another on community relations) and verticals (healthcare communications, for example, or communications in the financial services industry).

With a full-blown network of shows, we anticipate moving from our casual sponsorships into the kind of advertising you find on other networks (like TWiT and Revision 3); we figure the companies that advertise in PRWeek, AdAge, and other trades will find a desirable audience in our network.

2015 is the year all this will take shape. Neville and I hammered out some of the key details while we were together in London in October (the evidence is in the photo below).

Ready for a new decade

After 10 years of podcasting, I’m anything but burned out. In 10 years, we’ve neverm issed an episode (except when recording day fell on a Christmas Day, but we have recorded on New Year’s Day.) Neville records solo when I’m not available. I either record solo or bring on a guest co-host when Neville can’t make it. (My guest co-hosts have included Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis, Kami Huyse, Olivier Blanchard, Kristin Brandt, Steve Crescenzo, and Mitch Joel, to name a few.)

Podcasting is resurgent, propelled in large part by the success of Serial, the phenomenon from the producers of public radio’s This American Life, which has attracted millions of listeners (and even been parodied on Saturday Night Live).

Serial may have created more awareness of podcasting, but it was already part of the popular culture. Comedians, for example, figured out years ago that producing a successful podcast can be a road to bigger success on TV.

Whatever the reason, Neville and I are both excited by podcasting’s growing profile and by what the future holds for FIR and the FIR Podcast Network.

If you’re not already a listener, I hope you’ll join us for the second decade of the ride.

(There are so many people to thank and recognize who have contributed to fir over the years. Some who weren’t noted in the body of this post include Donna Papacosta, Sallie Goetsch, Krishna De, Glenn Gaudet (who comps us our GaggleAmp account), and LibSyn’s Rob Walch…and we wouldn’t be anywhere without the love and support of our wives, Michele Holtz and Laura Hobson)

If you’d like to be part of our first episode of 2015—and the first of our 11th year of podcasting—send us an audio comment or email, or leave a comment on the FIR blog. We’ll share listeners’ thoughts throughout the episode.