Hey everyone, Rachael here, welcome to week two of my Partner blog!
Highlights Of The Week (In no particular order)
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Podcast outreach- Working with Akhila
The podcast outreach has been going well! The strategy of personalised messaging seems to be working, but I am having difficulty (in particular with instagram) getting responses.
I have four people lined up so far,naturally I need more, so Deepak recommended I delegate the further research process to another partner by letting them know my process and criteria.
Enter: Akhila, new partner and absolute machine who legit did so much research in one day I am questioning if she is real or a bot. She’s really lovely and super hardworking. It was a relief not to have to undergo the whole research process again.
As it’s getting harder to get instagram influencers on board, I have decided to alter my strategy from using it as my major platform. Instead we will target smaller vegan influencers on platforms like blogs (with an email) and facebook.
I have told Akila about this and she is totally on board and has started her research. Once she is done I will send out my second wave of responses.
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Getting podcast equipment (sexiest mic imaginable, time to set up my ASMR channel)
Got the equipment for my podcast. It’s incredibly high quality, especially the mic. Now I’m considering setting up an ASMR channel.
Getting to grips with everything- like setting the lighting, moving my whole set up to another room has been great. I have the ponciest green screen imaginable- a green towel I have somehow made work.
I can’t wait for my trial runs later this week.
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Haro Outreach
Another highlight- learning about HARO (help a reporter out) with Heather and Paula. We had a meeting to discuss our strategy that went very well.
Me and Paula will be focusing on PlantSumo related HARO outreach.
I have emailed back with answers for several articles on vegan food/ being vegan during coronavirus and have specifically acted as Salim in emailing a specific podcast who was searching for guests.
4. Podcast trial: The Heather Edition
Podcast trial with Heather, another partner who came through the entire process with me went fantastically well!
Everything flowed really smoothly and had the relaxed conversational feel I wanted.
We just kind of went In and I created some dialogue based off her quora answers on education, business, travel ect.
Became super political very fast though, which I loved.
Things I learnt
- Heather is wildly intelligent and has really interesting perspectives on things, I honestly would just listen to a podcast of her talking about whatever
- I need to stop using filler words (um, you know, like)
- I don’t need to feel afraid to move the conversation forwards onto another topic. If the other participant reacts in a natural way (9/10 they will) it continues smoothly.
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I semi-chaired a meeting! Also Podcast trial: The Noah Edition
So I semi-chaired a meeting! Deepak told me five minutes before that I was doing it, I’m convinced now the trial by fire only ends after the first month. It’s ok though! as I only had the task of Iceberg’s- to which I asked everyone to give their “top piece of life advice”. Noah handled the rest of it.
I had connectivity issues in my previous meeting so I was pretty nervous. Went as red as a cherry tomato, which the video lighting I was raving about earlier didn’t help. But it actually was pretty successful.
The podcast with Noah was the best so far.
Had the kind of natural flow I want my actual podcasts to have. I interviewed him about his relationship with plant-based food and athleticism for the first half, then he interviewed me about what Plant Sumo is (had some great promo moments I have to replicate on my actual podcast)
I think I struggle sometimes with a dichotomy between being relaxed, funny and therefore- less articulate in how I word things, and then super-articulate but too formal and serious. He balances both incredibly well, and speaking to someone with a sense of humour made me feel a lot more confident and relaxed.
Things I learnt
- Humour is your best friend- make people laugh and everything becomes so much easier.
- I need to get more sleep (said some things I find questionable)
- We both need better webcam recording quality.
Got some feedback from Deepak about it- will fix the issues before my first podcast next Wednesday! Ahhh!