Ben Franklin's World: 1 Year Anniversary

Happy Birthday Ben Franklin's World! Today marks the 1-year anniversary of Ben Franklin's World: A Podcast About Early American History.

I thought it would be fun to discuss the current status of the show, how it has evolved over the last year, and how I intend to experiment with, and add to, this digital history project over the course of the next year.

By the Numbers

Statistics as of October 7, 2015, 7:59am

Number of Episodes: 55 published; 61 recorded

Total Downloads: 333,374 (this includes the Spreaker & iHeartRadio stats, which I always forget to consult)

E-mail Subscribers: 824

Listener Community Members: 227

Monthly Download Total October 2014: 288

Monthly Download Total September 2015: 43,829

Evolution of the Podcast

I started Ben Franklin's World to see if a podcast could create wide public awareness about the work of professional historians. Over the last year, the show has positively answered this question. It has also proven that people are interested in professional historians' scholarship and that our work enriches their lives.

However, Ben Franklin's World has also become more than a platform to generate interest in historical scholarship.

Educational tool: High school teachers and college professors incorporate episodes into their classroom teaching.

High school and college students listen to the show to study for their exams and papers. One high school student told me that she passed her history exam in part because she listens to the podcast.

Graduate students use episodes to study for their comprehensive exams.

Professional development and service tool: Potential guests note Ben Franklin's World as part of their marketing strategy in book proposals. Guests use show and episode download numbers in their tenure and promotion packets. Many professional historians listen to the show to keep up to date with early American historiography.

Networking tool: Not only have I had 30-60 minute conversations with many great historians, but historians have connected with each other as a result of hearing about each other's work.

Community building tool: Over 200 listeners have joined "Poor Richard's Club," a community for Ben Franklin's World listeners on Facebook. Members of the community share articles, discuss history, and interact with each other based on their shared interest in early American history.

Ben Franklin's World serves all of these functions and yet I did not create the podcast to serve these purposes. Like many digital history projects it has taken on a life of its own. It will be fun and exciting to see how the show continues to evolve beyond its original purpose.

Experiments & Goals for 2015-2016

Three big projects will dominate my attention over the next year: Monetization, community development, and time management.

Monetization

Can Ben Franklin's World become a self-supporting project? Over the next year, I intend to investigate ways to make Ben Franklin's World pay for itself. Experimentation begins later this month when I will launch my first crowdfunding campaign.

Community Development

I have been surprised by how many listeners want to interact with me via Twitter, Facebook, or e-mail and by how many listeners want to spend time hanging out with other listeners in Poor Richard's Club. The community-building aspect of Ben Franklin's World requires more attention. This unintended aspect of the show could further historians' efforts to engage with the public and, in turn, the public could help us with how we write about, talk about, and interpret history.

Presently, I am halfway through an online course on how to build and develop online communities on Facebook.*

Time Management

I love working on Ben Franklin's World, but this work has come at the expense of my scholarship. As much fun as the podcast has been, and continues to be, I miss researching and writing about history.

I started Ben Franklin's World as an historian with a podcast. A year later I am a podcaster who happens to be an historian. I do not regret the quick success of the show or the challenges it has created for me, but I am also not intellectually satisfied by working on the podcast alone. Over the next few months, I need to find a way that I can continue to produce a high-quality show and work on my book projects.

Share Your Story

Do you listen to the show? What has your favorite episode been?

Do you have tried and true strategies I could use to better manage my time?

Listener Testimonials

"I am not an historian, but subscribe to many history-related podcasts. Liz's is one of my favorites. It is fun and provides historical views and perspectives that I trust."--krrat

“If my teachers had been half this engaging I would not have slept through most of history class.”—Sheryse Lang

“If you remember a really great university history class— not the one where you fell asleep in the back row, but the one where you got their early to get the good seats in the front row—that’s Ben Franklin’s world.”—Friscodog

"I LOVE Ben Franklin's World podcasts.  Liz Covart's enthusiasm for history is contagious!  I have always enjoyed learning about American History, but I can't emphasize enough how much I look forward to each new episode."--Pat Kerper

*I am taking the "Facebook Groups Rock!" course by Katie Krimitsos. Her course is closed at the moment, but this special link works in case you want to take the course too. This is not an affiliate link.

New Article, New Project: The Articles of Confederation

The editors of the Journal of Early American History have published my article "Trade, Diplomacy, and American Independence: Cuyler, Gansevoort & Co. and the Business of Trade During the Confederation Era" in their latest edition. I came across the papers of Cuyler, Gansevoort & Co. during my volunteer work at the Albany Institute of History and Art. In exchange for building a finding aid for the Ten Eyck/Gansevoort Papers (MG2), I had the opportunity to be the first scholar to look at the collection. I had hoped that the papers would contain information for my book project AMERICA'S FIRST GATEWAY: ALBANY, NEW YORK AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA, 1614-1830. Instead, the collection led me to my second book project: The Articles of Confederation.

The Ten Eyck/Gansevoort collection contains many of the papers from Cuyler, Gansevoort & Co., an import-export firm that conducted business during the Confederation Era. The correspondence between Jacob Cuyler, Leonard Gansevoort, and their trading partners reveal the hope and perils of conducting domestic and foreign trade during the first years of American independence.

The idea for my second book project came as I wrote the historiography section, which I opted to place toward the end of the article as not to breakup the story of Cuyler, Gansevoort & Co. Few books discuss the Articles of Confederation on its own terms. Merrill Jensen wrote two books on the subject between 1940 and 1950. Since Jensen's work, scholars who discuss or investigate the Articles look upon the government as a stepping stone to the Constitution of 1787.

My future book will not claim the Articles of Confederation as a successful government. My article below uses a case study to discuss the diplomatic and economic weaknesses of the government. Instead, my book on the Articles will investigate the government and its making within the context of the American Revolution. I am sure it will take great interest in the regional debates surrounding the formation of the government because I am fascinated by the diversity of American culture and how the United States functions despite Americans' cultural differences.

Enjoy!

How to Find and Subscribe to a Podcast

September 30, is International Podcast Day. Long before I became a podcaster, podcasts had enriched my life. I love how podcasts allow me to learn something new while doing ordinary tasks like cooking, walking my dogs, or driving.

In this post, you will discover how you can make podcasts a part of your life by exploring the different ways you can find and subscribe to podcasts. I will also help you get started by sharing a list of some of my favorite shows.

A Brief History of Podcasts

Podcasts emerged ten years ago. Early producers created audio files and uploaded them onto the internet to provide listeners with on-demand, radio-like content.

At first, only the most tech-savvy people listened podcasts. Hardly anyone but those fascinated by tech knew that podcasts existed. There were no central directories. Files had to be downloaded and either played through your computer or uploaded onto one of the earliest iPods. None of this could be done wirelessly.

A lot has changed in the last ten years. Apple has created iTunes, which contains a comprehensive directory for podcasts. The production quality of podcasts has improved as professional-grade equipment has become affordable and audio editing software has improved. Additionally, smartphones have made it easy for anyone to download and listen to a podcast. According to Libsyn, one of the largest podcast hosting services, listeners download 69.94 percent of podcast episodes to a smartphone.

With that said, podcasts still have a ways to go before they become a mainstream media like television or radio. Although Apple took an early interest in podcasts, Android smartphone developers have not. 82 percent of podcast listeners listen on an iPhone. The Apple podcasts app accounts for more than 50 percent of all podcast downloads. In contrast, the iOS and Android-based app Stitcher Radio accounts for 2.5 percent of podcast downloads. For podcasters, the association of podcasts with Apple iOS devices presents a problem: Android smartphones outnumber iPhones 79 percent to 14.2 percent worldwide and 52.4 percent to 42.6 percent in the United States.

How to Find Podcasts

There are several ways to find good podcasts:

1. iTunes & Apple Podcasts App: You can search iTunes or the Apple podcasts app. Both apps will show you what shows are “New & Noteworthy,” which have the most downloads in its top charts, and you can search for new shows via categories. Love history? Try looking at the Society & Culture category where you will find a subcategory for history.

2. Word-of-Mouth: Ask your friends and family members about their favorite podcasts. The best way to find podcasts you will like is to ask like-minded people what shows they enjoy.

3. Internet Search: Try searching a topic you are interested in and “podcast” in your favorite search engine. This technique should turn up podcast websites, blog posts, and news articles about popular podcasts and shows people like.

4. Magazine and Newspaper Websites: Many popular publications now produce podcasts. For example, Slate, The New York Times, and The New Yorker have podcasts. 5. NPR or Radio Station Websites: In addition to having nearly 30 non-radio podcasts, NPR releases episodes of its most popular programs via podcast episodes. Local radio stations also release versions of their morning and afternoon programs as podcasts.

6. Podcatcher Apps: Many podcast listening apps offer a search function. I use both PocketCasts and Overcast (iOS-only) to listen to my favorite shows. I also use them to find new shows.

7. Internet Radio Apps: Internet radio apps such as iHeartRadio, TuneIn Radio, Stitcher Radio, and AGOGO (iOS-only) allow users to locate and listen to podcasts. Even Spotify has started to offer podcasts. As of summer 2015, they began offering podcasts to listeners through a beta program.

How to Subscribe to a Podcast

Regardless of what app you use to listen to podcasts, you can subscribe to your favorite shows to ensure you never miss an episode. Subscribing to podcasts also helps your favorite podcasters as the only way we have to measure how we are doing is by download numbers, show ratings and reviews (click here for short video tutorials on how you can rate and review podcasts in iTunes and Stitcher), and listener engagement via e-mail, voicemail, and social media.

iTunes: If you are a Mac user, you can search and subscribe to podcasts in iTunes. To locate the podcast directory, click the "more" icon in the iTunes store.

Click the "subscribe" button underneath the cover art on the show description page.

Apple Podcasts App: Click the "subscribe" button on the show info page.

Overcast App: Click the "subscribe" button on the show description page.

PocketCasts App: Click the "subscribe" button on the show description tile.

Stitcher Radio: Press the + in the top right of the listing for the show you wish to subscribe to.

Show Apps: Some podcasts, like Ben Franklin’s World, have apps for both iOS and Android devices. These apps allow you to listen to episodes, share your favorite episodes via social media, and contact the hosts directly from the apps.

Word-of-Mouth Recommendations

If you are on the lookout for new podcasts to listen to, allow me to share a few of my favorite shows (in no particular order)

History

Ben Franklin’s World (yes, I am partial, but it is also one of my favorite shows) 15 Minute History Backstory with the American History Guys The History Chicks

Social Media

The Social Media Social Hour Social Media Marketing Podcast

Business

The BizChix Podcast Biz Women Rock Podcast Smart Passive Income Rhodes to Success Startup

Podcasting

Podcast Junkies ShePodcasts The Feed The Wolf Den Podcasters’ Roundtable The Podcast Producers

Other

Fish Nerds (Kind of like CarTalk, but about fish) Reply All Serial

Share Your Story

What are your favorite podcasts?

Perfectly Practical Tips for Using Twitter

Jointly authored by Liz Covart and Joseph Adelman Twitter is a deceptively simple tool. With just 140 characters to work with, it can seem at times like it takes barely any work at all to come up with a tweet. There's not much room to say anything, right? But trying to say something meaningful in 140 characters is an art, and takes practice and consideration.

From our conversations, we have realized that most of the guides to using Twitter focus primarily in generating a follower base and otherwise building an audience. That's worthwhile, of course, but it means that there is room for something that discusses how to craft an individual tweet, including how to use links, hashtags, and other tools in tweets.

We hope this guide will prove helpful for individual Twitter novices, but also for classes and other group projects where not everyone knows or understands how to write tweets.

Twitter Anatomy

To begin, here are some of the basic mechanics of how Twitter works:

• Tweets can be no more than 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation as well as any links or images you include.
• If you tweet from Twitter, the service will automatically shorten the URL you wish to share down to 24 characters. All you need to do is cut or copy the URL you want to share from your browser and paste it into your new tweet box in Twitter. [1]
• After you use a shortened link, you will have approximately 118 characters left for your tweet.
• Twitter will automatically embed any image you attach to a tweet; the link Twitter creates takes up 23 characters. Twitter allows users to add up to 4 images to each tweet. After your first image, additional photos do not count against your character limit.
• You also want to leave 10-40 characters free, if possible, as research shows tweets with less than 140 characters receive more engagement.[2]
• You can use a hashtag to link your tweet to others on a similar topic. Hashtags are the words with # in front of them. They let users know that a tweet is part of a larger conversation by defining either the audience or topic the tweet addresses. For example, a tweet with #Twitterstorians is a tweet for historians on Twitter. #AmRev denotes a tweet about the American Revolution. See the History Hashtags list for a comprehensive list of history hashtags.
• You can include other feeds in your tweet by including the handle, which begins with @. However, you should avoid beginning a tweet with the @-symbol, because only people who follow both accounts will be able to see the tweet.
• For more advanced users, you can use a third-party app to schedule tweets. See Liz's post on Twitter strategies for details.
• You can reply to your own tweet to create a chain that Twitter will display to your readers.
• Attribution is important. Anytime you share someone else’s blog post, news article, or video, you want to create a tweet that attributes the content to that user.

How to Create a Tweet

Here's an example of a real tweet that Liz created to share a blog post about a Twitter hashtag.

A few weeks ago, Megan Kate Nelson published “#FollowWomenWednesday” on her blog Historista. The post discusses how social media users share content generated by men more often than they share content authored by women. Megan created the hashtag #FollowWomenWednesday as a way to help call attention to this bias. I found this post intriguing and wanted to share it.

When I create a tweet, I use the headline the author created, craft my own headline, state a reaction to the post, or pose a provocative question about the information contained in the post I want to share.

In the above example, I created the following tweet: “What a Great Idea! #FollowWomenWednesday @megankatenelson #Twitterstorians #Acwri http://histry.us/1Nx6TTS.”

The tweet offers my thoughts on the post, Megan’s headline, her Twitter handle, a link to her post, and hashtags for audiences I think might also be interested in her article, i.e. fellow historians (#Twitterstorians) and academic writers (#acwri).

Whenever possible you want to include the Twitter handle of the source or person who created the content (i.e. @megankatenelson, @thejuntoblog). Perform a quick Google Search of “Name of Blogger or Blog Twitter” If the blogger or source does not list their Twitter handle on their blog.

Tweet Anatomy

My tweet for Megan’s article is 108 characters; 81 characters for my note about the blog post and 23 characters for a shortened link to the article. As tweets with images share more often than text-only tweets, I add an image when possible. In the above example, I dragged and dropped the image Megan included in her post onto my desktop and then clicked the “add photos” icon and selected the image to add it to my tweet. My final tweet contains 128 characters.

We hope this post has given you an idea of how Twitter works at the level of an individual tweet. It's a fun way to interact with other people, whether in a professional or personal setting, and once you're comfortable with the format writing tweets comes much more naturally. ___________________________

[1] If you prefer, you can also sign-up for a URL link shortening service like bit.ly. The advantage to a service like bit.ly is you can track how many times people clicked on the link you shared. Additionally, you can purchase a custom short URL of 8-10 characters and use it as your shortened URL. For example, Liz purchased a custom short URL so all the links she tweets look something like this: http://histry.us/1234abc

[2] Research shows 100 characters to be the ideal length for a tweet. Additionally, some third-party Twitter apps still add  users’ handles and ‘RT’ before your original tweet when they retweet you. Leaving at least 10 characters free should ensure that these third-party apps will tweet you whole message when retweeted.

How I Select Guests for Ben Franklin’s World

Believe it or not (I can’t), Ben Franklin’s World will celebrate its first birthday on October 7, 2015. The podcast started as an experiment to answer questions: Could a podcast help historians restore history to the forefront of the public mind? Were non-historians interested in learning more about high-quality, well-researched history?

The experiment soft launched on October 7, 2014 when I posted the first 4 episodes on benfranklinsworld.com. On December 2, 2014, the show hard launched in iTunes.  By February 2015, listener engagement and statistics for the podcast indicated that the answer to my questions was “yes.”

Today, Ben Franklin's World has released 47 episodes. Listeners have downloaded the show more than 295,000 times.

Over the next several weeks, I intend to share lessons I have learned about podcasting, interviewing, and being a digital historian.

In this post, I will answer a question I get asked a lot: How do I select guest historians for the show?

Guest Historians: The Early Days

The first guest historians on Ben Franklin's World represent historians I either knew and/or who had books I wanted to read or historic sites I wanted to learn more about. I also asked historians who worked on topics that my "podcast avatar" wanted to explore.

A "podcast avatar" assists podcasters like an "ideal reader" helps writers. In both cases, a fictional person stands in for the ideal audience member a podcaster or writer wants to reach.

I created an avatar who is hard to please: Janet Watkins. Janet isn't into history. She's a 22-year-old pre-med student at SUNY-Buffalo. She wants to fill her schedule with math and science courses, but she ended up in a history course that assigns Ben Franklin's World episodes because SUNY requires all students to take several Liberal Arts classes before they graduate. Janet is a good student so she decides to brace herself for the inevitable: another boring history course that discusses dead white men. As an African American woman, she long ago grew tired of how her primary and secondary school history courses always seemed to focus on the lives of elite, white men.

My challenge: How do I reach Janet and change her mind about history? How can I show her that the study of history has as much value as the study of science and math?

Janet is fictional, but I still like to think that if I have done my job right, Janet (or someone like her) will get caught in the student clinic supply closet listening to Ben Franklin’s World when she is at her work-study job.

The Ben Franklin's World Audience

Janet Watkins has been a helpful podcast avatar. She has, and does, serve me well. However, I find I need to use her a bit less these days as Ben Franklin's World has an audience.

Ben Franklin's World listeners reach out several times a week to tell me what they want to know more about. They have given me a lengthy list of subjects, but their most requested topic: Everyday life.

Today, I try to make every decision about whom to invite as a guest or which pitches to accept with the Ben Franklin's World audience in mind. If I am interested in a book or historic site, but can’t get a clear read on how the audience might feel about it, I think about my podcast avatar and whether she would be interested in an episode about the topic.

I also think about geography and period. I take a liberal view of what periods and geographies constitute "Ben Franklin's world." In essence, the podcast covers the first half of a college-level United States History survey course. I start my survey before 1492 and discuss the peoples and nations who inhabited or interacted with the North American continent until about 1865.

Listener engagement increases when Ben Franklin's World investigates the history of a listener's home region. To this end, I plan to include more North American regions in 2016.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the role my own historical interests play in my decision-making process. My interests play a role, but I couldn't tell you how much of a role they play. I am sure they played a greater role during the first few months of the show than they do now. Today, when I find a topic that interests me, I compare it to my listener requests list and to my geographic and period needs. If I am on the fence, I think about my avatar. I try not to let my interests supersede those of the audience.

Conclusion

Listeners, podcast avatar, period and geography, these are the people and aspects I consider when I invite a guests on the show. If you would like more information about being a guest please check out the show's guest information page.