Overview: This crossover episode features Adam Williams, host of We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream, as a guest on Ryan Short’s (co-founder of CivicBrand) Eyes on the Street podcast. (Ryan was a guest on Looking Upstream recently.)
In this episode from Eyes on the Street, Ryan and Adam talk about community storytelling and how it can be a catalyst for change. Adam shares insights about Looking Upstream and the larger We Are Chaffee storytelling initiative of which it’s a part.
They also talk about some of Adam’s creative interests, how he got into podcasting, what he loves about it, and the value of conversations like those that happen on Looking Upstream to community.
SHOW NOTES, LINKS, CREDITS & TRANSCRIPT
The We Are Chaffee: Looking Upstream podcast is a collaboration with Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority, and is supported by the Colorado Public Health & Environment: Office of Health Disparities.
Along with being distributed on podcast listening platforms (e.g. Spotify, Apple), Looking Upstream is broadcast weekly at 2 p.m. on Tuesdays, on KHEN 106.9 community radio FM in Salida, Colo.
Ryan Short
Ryan Short on Looking Upstream: wearechaffeepod.com/ryan-short
CivicBrand: civicbrand.com
Instagram: instagram.com/civicbrand
Adam Williams
Humanitou: humanitou.com
Instagram: instagram.com/humanitou
We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream
Website: wearechaffeepod.com
Instagram: instagram.com/wearechaffeepod
CREDITS
Looking Upstream Host, Producer, Photographer & Website Manager: Adam Williams
Looking Upstream Engineer & Producer: Jon Pray
We Are Chaffee Community Advocacy Coordinator: Lisa Martin
Director of Chaffee County Public Health and Environment: Andrea Carlstrom
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts are produced using a transcription service. Although it is largely accurate, minor errors inevitably exist.
Adam Williams: Hey everybody, welcome to We Are Chaffee’s Looking Upstream. I’m Adam Williams. Today we’ve got a special episode. It’s something different. A while back I got to be a guest on the Eyes on the Street podcast hosted by Ryan Short, who is co-founder of CivicBrand.
You might remember that Ryan appeared on Looking Upstream in recent months, and I hope you got a chance to listen to that one already. If not, of course I’m going to recommend that when you’re done listening to today’s episode, you go learn more about Ryan’s story and the cool work he’s doing in the world from when he was a guest on this show, and I got to be the question asker.
Today, now, for Eyes on the Street, Ryan and I talk about community storytelling and how it can be a catalyst for change. Naturally, that includes my talking about Looking Upstream and the larger we are Chaffee storytelling initiative that it’s part of.
(00:45): We also talk about some of my creative interests, how I got into podcasting, what I love about it, and the value of these kinds of conversations to community. I hope you’ll enjoy this conversation. We’ll learn something more about We Are Chaffee, maybe even a little bit more about me. And again, when you’re done, I hope you’ll go check out when Ryan was on Looking Upstream. He and CivicBrand do some really awesome things in the world. They are creative pioneers at what they do, so go give that a listen.
(01:11): The Looking Upstream podcast is supported by Chaffee County Public Health and the Chaffee Housing Authority. Show notes with photos, links, and the transcript of the conversation are published at wearechaffeepod.com where you also can subscribe to the monthly email newsletter. You can see more photos and connect with the podcast at wearechaffeepod on Instagram.
(01:30): Here we go with me, Ryan Short and his Eyes on the Street podcast.
[Eyes on the Street intro music]
Announcer (01:43): You’re listening to Eyes on the Street, a CivicBrand podcast, conversations on community branding, engagement and marketing.
Ryan Short (01:55): All right, welcome back to another episode of Eyes on the Street. I am Ryan Short with Civic Brand and super excited to be joined by Adam Williams, artist, podcaster and let him dive in a little bit into his story. But I guess Adam, how are you doing?
Adam Williams (02:11): I’m good, I’m good. Thanks for having me, Ryan.
Ryan Short (02:13): Yeah, appreciate it. So I guess, Adam, do you mind giving us a little bit of background on what you do, who you are and some of your art that you do?
Adam Williams (02:21): Yeah, so I am a podcaster, producer and host for the We are Chaffee Looking Up Stream podcast, which is a community storytelling initiative here in Chaffee County, Colorado. But my background with that, even before art and those things, which is in the visual art lane, that’s with photography and painting and things like that. But what is most relevant as far as probably your audience and the podcast in my career trajectory, I started in journalism.
I usually say that my core skills are in writing and photography and I started a little more than 20 years ago in journalism with newspapers and magazines and doing feature stories and profiles on people and all this sort of stuff that over time led me to brand journalism and magazines and then content marketing and content strategy.
(03:06): And ultimately it started as my own project with a very similar podcast of a different name Humanitou which is my website. And that was a personal community. I want to get to know people and let them get to know me and I want to be part of things and engage in the community. And so I started that one and that led to where I am now with We Are Chaffee.
Ryan Short (03:29): Awesome. And I guess I have to ask, anytime I talk to a photographer or somebody comes from a journalist background, I always ask, have you ever read or heard of the book, it’s an Errol Morris book, Believing a Scene. Have you ever heard of that?
Adam Williams (03:43): No. No I haven’t.
Ryan Short (03:44): So definitely check it out, or actually I’ll send you a copy as a thanks for being on here, but it’s one of my absolute favorite books. It can be a bit of a dry read, but I feel like there’s certain people that’ll just geek out on it and really get into it. And the gist of this book is he, Errol Morris is filmmaker, and in this book he dissects a couple of different photos, like famous kind of photojournalism photos that are famous. You’ll have seen several of them. And he really gets into this idea of every photo that you take, you’re essentially editing something, you’re cropping something out just by how you frame the shot.
(04:25): And he kind of gets into the ethics of journalism and if I’m taking a picture out this window, if I intentionally don’t include the power lines, am I being authentic and telling that story of what’s here? And he really goes into some famous things and I think, I don’t know, I just think it’s relevant because it’s something that I think about a lot when we are doing storytelling. We will edit a little bit on this podcast, if we cough or my dog barks. Everything is kind of edited to a degree. So anyways, it’s kind of a bit of a tangent off the start, but it’s a really fascinating book that I think you’d enjoy.
(05:05): Tell me I guess a little bit about, I guess, why did you even choose podcasting? Obviously podcasts are popular now, it’s a good medium, but what kind of ultimately landed you there?
Adam Williams (05:19): It’s funny that I never thought that I would. I said that writing and photography are my core skills. And when I started that community project, Humanitou that was a text-based thing on my website. So I would go and interview people exactly the way I do with a podcast, but I would just put my phone down with the recorder running and then I would go transcribe, spend the hours it would take to type up what might be several thousand words long, all to edit it down to maybe 2,500 word in text, that’s long form, and a number of photos of them. And somebody once said to me just based on what I was doing and my interest in the humanness of that kind of conversation and connection said, “Oh, you’re going to end up doing a podcast.” I said, “I don’t even listen to them.”
(06:06): But somewhere along the way on family road trips, my wife started downloading podcasts, some for the kids, some for us. And I thought this is a pretty amazing medium. And so somewhere a few years in I think to that project, I decided to give it a try and it is not hard. There actually is a fairly low barrier to entry even for an individual who’s not going to spend a whole lot of money on equipment.
(06:35): And I just started doing podcasts with people in person initially. My first few were in an art studio that I started renting in the old Colorado City section of Colorado Springs. But that was February of 2020 and within a few weeks the world is shut down for the pandemic, and I never had anybody else in that studio again. I ended up carrying the studio and the rent on that. It was cheap. It was a cheap old broken down building, for a year. But what I had to do and transition to quickly on that was, well, how do I do this remotely? So now I need to learn those skills.
(07:13): And I did that for a few years until I was burned out during the pandemic and I think guests were. I walked away from it and took a hiatus when there were a good 10, 12, even 15 guests who had said yes to me. But ultimately our communications fell apart. I think everybody was just burned out and on one more thing that really wasn’t necessary.
(07:32): So I ended up having a hiatus of a good year or more until this kind of fell into my lap with We Are Chaffee. So I say that it’s the same podcast of a different name and now I have support and I have a team and there’s funding through a grant from Colorado through our Chaffee County Public Health. So it’s kind of turned out in a great way to be able to forage into this unknown that it’s funny, I never thought I would do.
Ryan Short (08:02): Yeah, I think that low barrier to entry is a super important part, especially when we start talking about, we’ll get to this in a bit, but how communities can and should probably be doing similar to what you’re doing in their community. And when we first started doing this podcast, we bought the mics and the board and the headphones and all that stuff and had a little podcast studio in our office, but then like you said, COVID happened, we stopped doing in-person things and most of ours are just like, we just record a Zoom call and chop it down and it doesn’t sound great, but the conversation is kind of…
(08:33): Your podcasts do sound very well-produced, you’ve also got the good, I think podcaster voice. Sounds the part. But yeah, I think, I don’t know, I feel like some of my favorite episodes that we’ve done, it’s like the audio’s not really even that great, but it was an interesting conversation and you got to know someone and you learn something and we’re all used to, especially coming out of COVID, we would listen to the president via Zoom and the late night hosts broadcasting via Zoom from their house. And so I think we kind of got over that everything has to be perfect production quality pretty quick.
Adam Williams (09:12): Absolutely. And I think that’s a really key thing is that the quality of the content, in this case, conversation, what somebody has to share and has to offer. It does supersede technical perfection for sure.
Ryan Short (09:25): And so did your work, I guess when it was more written form, was there always kind of that human storytelling community aspect to it or what drove you to that specific angle?
Adam Williams (09:40): At the time I started Humanitou, I was 18 months into living in Manitou Springs, my wife, our two sons. She worked remotely. I was working as head of marketing for a company in Denver and for the parent company that was in Germany. I would travel to those places and otherwise I would work remotely. We were not part of the community is what I’m getting at. I created Humanitou as a way for me to explore my own creative interests. I enjoyed the job that I had, but every time I had to leave town and travel, I thought I really just want to be back in this town that’s really amazing and hugged up into the mountains and at the foot of Pikes Peak.
(10:24): I wanted to figure out a way that I could engage and use my skills. And if I’m lucky, maybe there’s even some people who see those skills and they think we’d like to work with you. And now maybe I even create a pathway for me personally, professionally within that town and that community, and I can be all the more engaged. I started interviewing people and it started getting traction throughout the community to the point that I might follow somebody on social media and then I would see them on the street or wherever else in town, and I would introduce myself by my name. And people, they’d have a blank look and then I’d say “I’m Humanitou,” and their eyes would light up.
(11:02): The name was preceding me in the community. And so it grew in that way, and then I could expand to the neighboring city of Colorado Springs and so on. And then like I said, I had to go remote, so then it became a global thing and I could reach guests truly around the world. But it was just a way for me to personally be able to connect and on terms that worked for me. I’m an introvert. I don’t know if people realize this or even would guess it because I do a podcast, but one-on-one conversations are the structure and those are the terms, conversations with depth and meaning, and we get into all that humanness and the real stuff. That’s the way I want to connect and communicate with people and that’s I think the seed of why I started it.
Ryan Short (11:44): Yeah, well you’re talking about from a personal standpoint how that benefited you personally and you enjoyed that, which is amazing and I think true for so many people. But there’s also I think just an immense value to the whole community of this type of work and this type of storytelling. And the reason I think it’s so important is we work with a lot of cities and communities on place branding and the identity of what is the real… And when I say that, we’re not talking about what’s the logo of the city government or the tourism campaign necessarily. Just what’s that real innate, what is the identity of this place?
(12:22): And everywhere we go when we travel all over the US, we meet people. What makes this place special? The answer we get every time is the people, which is both true, and it’s not that it’s not true, but it’s like you have to go deeper. It’s like, well, what about the people? And it is kind of these individual stories that you really have to go deep in the people in a west Texas town versus a Colorado mountain town versus New York City. It probably really is the people, but what about the people in those really human connection stories?
(12:53): And so I think personally that just knowing somebody and knowing the people of a community is one of the most important things that whether you’re in coming at it from an economic development, tourism, real estate, all of those things. At the core of it, what you’re selling when you’re selling a place or talking about a place or communicating a place is it’s a collection of people. And so I think that value of telling the story on a real one-to-one individual basis, there’s not many platforms I think that are much better than “Let me listen to somebody for 20 minutes to an hour and really get to know them. And then now when I see them, there’s shared empathy.”
(13:36): And so tell me a little bit more about We Are Chaffee in particular, and I guess how you got into that and how you start to see the value of that to Chaffee County.
Adam Williams (13:48): We Are Chaffee is a storytelling initiative that started a few years before I was brought in for the podcast portion. So there are different formats for it. There are video workshops where a filmmaker at the local college helps teach people, “This is how you identify a nugget in your life. This is a story within your life.” Because I do think that’s key that a lot of people don’t recognize what their stories are. Or necessarily understand what the value of it is or how or why to share it.
(14:17): And so they do that with, there’s still photos and they distilled these things down to three to four minute videos. Then there’s also the written format. So there are writers who are hired by the initiative to go interview people and be able to put in written form and those get shared around in various ways in the community.
(14:36): I was brought on in the summer of, well, it was last year, so 2022. So we’ve been going form we’re coming up on a year and a half with this podcast and we have, I think I’ve recorded somewhere close to 40 conversations at this point. Some of them have than one person. So 40 something people in the community have had a chance to share their story so far. The difference here is that this is long form. Like you mentioned in our case, we have a media partner that is the community radio station, and that’s a timeboxed hour. Sometimes what I do though is I run longer. I might go to as long as an hour and a half with people and for the radio version kind of send them over to finish on the podcast players because it’s available everywhere.
(15:18): I think there’s really value in getting into that depth. I have had a couple of people say, “Oh, that’s too long for me,” but they actually aren’t podcast people. I don’t think you can boil somebody’s story down to really understand and connect with them if it’s only five minutes. We need a chance to develop that connection, me with them, one-on-one. And I see myself as a facilitator between the guest and who the whole audience is.
(15:47): So the depth of long form conversing with each other. And again, I’m introverted. I’m not into the small talk chit chat. I often take people pretty much right out of the gate, right into depth, and we get into some incredible things, which by the way, I always am amazed at because we are strangers and people are willing to trust and share. And I think a key to that is because I’m willing to ask and I do it with sincerity and curiosity and people are willing to answer and tell about themselves when somebody shows an interest.
Ryan Short (16:19): Yeah, I do think that the length is an interesting thing because, we just went and saw Killers of the Flower Moon. New movie, it’s like three something hours and it’s like, “Oh man, that’s so long.” Yet with Netflix and all these things, we’ll start a new series and it’s like got five seasons and 10 episodes. I think if the content’s there and a podcast is such a format that you don’t necessarily have to listen to the whole thing straight through. You definitely can, and it probably is helpful, but there’s times where I’m like, “if I’m doing a bunch of five-minute car trips, it’s like I’m getting five minutes at a time and kind of chopping it up.
(17:02): And I think, so that’s another thing too. I think just the barrier to entry from a tech standpoint, a production standpoint is the time is, I don’t know. Would you encourage other people that are going to be doing this to worry about that or not worry about that as much?
Adam Williams (17:19): Yeah, don’t worry about it. Yeah, so I look at this wearing my content strategy hat. In a world that is fighting for attention, we’re talking about companies, we’re talking about everybody. We’re talking about individuals on social media. The latest I’ve heard is that if you don’t make your video on Instagram, instantly grabbing within the first three seconds, you’ve lost them. I’d have to admit that my answer across these things is I don’t really care. The way that I mean that is that I am interested in depth and there’s no way that we can cut down…
(17:56): If you’re looking for connection, we need to have a chance for depth. You need to build rapport, you need a chance for that conversation to develop. And we can’t do that in three seconds or three minutes. I look at it. If I also wear the marketing hat, where do people engage and how long do they spend? Well, they’re going to scroll through an Instagram or Facebook feed, and you might get, I don’t even know what the percentage is on this now. Is it 1% of your following might see it through the algorithm?
(18:24): So if you’re using an email newsletter, what if you’re getting 30% open rate or 50? That’s a whole lot more engagement. That’s a strong platform compared to social media. Add that tool. Well, okay, now what about people who want more depth? What about the people who are willing to stay there and go into a conversation on podcast with you? So now I’m giving them 90 minutes of opportunity.
That’s the way I look at it. Or 60 minutes. They might bail at 20, but that’s not on me. That’s the way I look at that. They have things going on in their lives. That might just be what they needed to do, but like you as a listener, I’ll come back to it. If I was into that conversation, I’m going to come back to it. It might be tomorrow, and I get another half hour with it, and then it might be the next day that I finish with the last half hour.
Ryan Short (19:10): And I think you also do a really good job of using the different channels to kind of pull out sound bites and nuggets. And so whether it is on Instagram, maybe there’s a pull quote from the 90-minute interview or a little segment that you can kind of pull out. And I think that’s important. Somebody might see a little catchy little sound bite that draws them in and maybe right at that moment they’re standing in line at the store and so they just have time to look at that sound bite. But then later or next week, they’re going to dive into the full thing later. And so I think that’s important to kind of break it up and share it in those different ways. I guess, what kind of feedback and response have you gotten, and has We Are Chaffee gotten since you guys have been doing this?
Adam Williams (19:53): One of the best compliments I think I get is when I hear from somebody who listened to an episode and they knew the person or they thought they did, or maybe they really did, maybe that’s a best friend from 20 years. Maybe it’s even a family member. And when they say, “I learned something about them” or “I never knew that story,” or “I didn’t know that they had been through that experience,” I love that.
That’s one of my favorite things to get because what that tells me is that while we tend to think of this sort of project and story sharing initiative in a community, we often think of, “Oh, here are two people on opposite sides of town,” or opposite whatever way you want to look at the demographics of a town, I want you two to meet each other. I want you to get to know each other a little bit. Maybe we feel a little closer as a community.
(20:39): But it also works for the people who think they know that person. Oh, that’s my friend. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard all the stories, but if you just listen. I really would bet that it often happens. Oh, I learned something. I had no idea about that perspective because people don’t go around asking the questions that I will reach into with a guest.
Ryan Short (20:59): And I think there’s, whether people can pinpoint it or not, I think is a very, it improves how we behave in a community when you know something about somebody, or even if you just see them regularly and living here in Salida, in a pretty small town, when we have friends, I was just talking to some other dads the other night about this exact same thing, and every one of us had experienced this exact same thing. And so you’re at a restaurant, you’re in kind of your small town restaurant, and you have friends or family in from, maybe they’re in from big city or whatever, and maybe the food’s taking a little bit longer to get there or somethings there’s not right, and somebody’s like, “I’m going to say something, should I say something?”
(21:40): And me, part of this is just my personality, but part of this is I think, “Well, no, don’t say, this is my community. I know this person.” And I really don’t. I don’t know them. I’m not friends with them, but I see them, I know who they are, they say hi, they probably know who my kids are. If they see my kids riding down the street getting into something, they’ll probably tell me. And that to me is what a community is. And it changes the do you complain, do you say something?
(22:09): And I think the more you have that empathy and kind of know somebody, you’re probably less likely to leave a negative review for a small business owner, you’re probably less likely to say something. And I don’t think that should apply to just, it’s hard to know everybody in a huge city. But I do think just having some of those personal connections and just knowing I know a little bit now about what that person went through in their life. And so I do think that probably is going to change my behavior to them even if they cut me off in traffic or something like that. Have you seen any of that or does that resonate with you at all, how we act?
Adam Williams (22:44): It absolutely resonates. I think that is touching on the key point. There’s so much, I think isolation, the pandemic didn’t help with that, and confusion and misunderstanding. And it is almost cliche I think to talk about the divide in our society right now and politically and so on. But it has become really easy. And I think that we’ve all kind of played into the trap that when national media, for example, wants to break us up into us and them, you and me, and create these sorts of pictures that make it very easy, it’s like caricatures of each other. It makes it very easy to dumb it down and say, “Well, I don’t really need to care about you because” whatever the reasons are that I make up and justify my behavior towards you.
(23:34): But what happens if you actually learn that guy who you think might come from a different worldview or be your opposition in some way, what happens if you actually find out that they have a similar childhood experience or a similar pain or challenge or shared dreams? Which I’m actually pretty sure that we all do. All of us, we have families, we want our kids to be safe. We want our kids to be fed, we want our community to be healthy. But we have to take an active role I think in participating in how does that come together?
(24:04): Through having these conversations, through learning just a little bit about each other, that ends up influencing how we maybe treat a neighbor, how we treat somebody else in the community, maybe how we vote in the community. It ends up trickling through because listeners to this are not just the neighborhood, it’s civic leaders, it’s public servants, it’s people who actually have influence in policy and in community decisions that we make with each other. So I absolutely think that the more we get to know and understand, “Oh, that’s a human on that side of the table,” and I can relate to their story and I can see myself in them, it is invaluable.
Ryan Short (24:46): And even the most divided groups or people, at minimum, like you said, you’re both human and you’re both in a community. The one thing you have in common is you’ve chosen this place to live. And most people have made some conscious decision to be in a place or to stay in a place even if they were born there. And so that’s a pretty, I think, substantial starting point of you choose to be here, I choose to be here. We have something in common straight away.
(25:18): And then I think, yeah, I’ve loved listening to the podcast because a lot of the, there’s some people that I have seen around town and I kind of know who they are, and then I listen to their episode and it’s like, “Oh wow, there’s a whole life there.” And I think that’s really cool to see, because we don’t see, when you see somebody for a moment you meet them, you definitely don’t see their whole life. And especially like you said, you’re an introvert and you’re not going to naturally just start talking about your childhood when you meet somebody at the grocery store.
(25:52): I just think that’s so valuable. And again, in the work that we do, I think communities, they’re spending so much time and effort to brand a place, to recruit people, to recruit talent, to retain talent. And I think sometimes they skip over what you’re doing. And that’s almost should be the most fundamental thing. If your community is not doing this and doesn’t have some outlet for people to get to know each other and for outsiders to get a glimpse into that. Before we started recording this, you were kind of speaking a little bit to that of the idea of, man, if you’re thinking about moving to a place or investing in a place, the power of if you could just have a glimpse inside of that, you mind sharing a little bit what you were saying about that before?
Adam Williams (26:41): Yeah, sure. We moved here about three years ago and it was from the Colorado Springs area, so much larger. And so we’re looking for points of connection. And my wife in particular was doing research and she’s trying to find whether it’s in the entrepreneurial community or whatever points of connection we might have and learn from them. And she’s reaching out with emails and all these sorts of things. In the past year plus that I’ve been doing this podcast, she has said, “If this podcast would’ve existed before we moved, what a treasure that is.” And it’s just this trove of personalities and stories and points for connection.
(27:16): And then it was so amazing because I could see what she was saying, and yes, we would’ve loved to have been able to listen to that. But that really hit home. In the last couple of weeks, I got an email from somebody just like that, somebody who reached out in the same way doing research on the community, they’re considering moving their family here. And it was such an incredible email one, it was complimentary of me and I appreciate that. But the most important piece was that it hit the nail on the head of what I’m describing here, that wow. And he could list the different people he’s listened to and they own this business, or they’re doing this cool creative thing in our community and they feel like they’re already part of the community.
(27:52): I think that’s invaluable, I think to real estate agents if you think about that. Wow, what if that’s a way of story sharing you can provide if you have an email newsletter or on your social media and reach out to your perspective clients. What if you’re in a chamber of commerce and you want to have this content that we are creating because we have business owners who are members of your chamber. Promote that if you are in the Tourism Bureau, because yes, we love to live here. We happen to be in an amazing place that draws people from all over who probably wish that they could live here too. And some will. We have community and potential partnerships in a civic initiative like this that as of yet for us are untapped, but definitely on our minds.
Ryan Short (28:37): And kind of back to what I mentioned earlier of when we travel around to communities and we ask people what makes this place special? The answer we get is always the people. But if there’s not a podcast or there’s not a storytelling way to do that, what avenues do people have to learn about your people? You can look at school ratings, you can look at the architecture, I guess you can walk around. What other mechanisms do you have to decide is this a place where people value what I value that I think I’d fit in?
(29:10): So yeah, I do think that whether it’s chambers of commerce, economic development, you mentioned realtors even, small business owners, I think that even gets down to the, it’s the holiday shopping season right now, so it’s a lot of shop local, support local, and I know that’s always a challenge with Amazon and all those things.
And me personally knowing the stories of some of these business owners, that’s extra incentive for me to support their business, because I’m not just buying there and being like, “Oh, good, I feel good. I’ve supported local.” It’s like, no, I know that I’m supporting this person and I’m supporting their family. And I think that makes it a lot easier of an ask to support local and keep your money in the community when you feel like you’re really impacting somebody whose life you have some glimpse into, even if you don’t personally know them.
(30:05): I guess. Have there been any things that have surprised you about We Are Chaffee or just your podcasting experience or that you’ve really learned that maybe you didn’t expect going into it?
Adam Williams (30:16): I have been very pleasantly surprised by the stories and the people that we’re uncovering who live here. It’s an amazing list of people that, from an entrepreneurial side. In our case, we live in the mountains. So from say a mountain sports side, from all these different ways of looking at the community, I think it’s stunning. In a small town, in a small community, we have around 20,000 people in our county between two main towns.
(30:46): These are people that you might expect to live in big populated areas, to be creating or taking their business into LA or Chicago or wherever else it is. I’ve talked with people, I think it’s five or six people who have been on TV shows, on national TV shows, been in documentaries. There’s five or six people who have published books, and that’s just who I’ve gotten to so far. There are people who are doing amazing things. We have a recent guest was noted as the best female rock climber of the millennium. She lives here and she was on this podcast. I have another guy coming up I’m recording with this week that I wish I could tell you about because so can’t wait for this episode to come out in January. I think it’s going to blow some minds that this guy chose to move from Los Angeles to live here, and he’s a musician on a global stage. And it’s stunning, just a collection.
(31:40): And I have to believe that even though we do, I think we both feel like we live in a pretty special place and it draws tourists and visitors and people who want to move to here from all over the country and beyond. I think that this is possible, probably in any town because once you start asking people for their stories, you’ll learn what knowledge they hold. Well, let me cite another example here.
We have a Chaffee County Commissioner, so one of three commissioners who are in leadership, public service in this county. Now he’s a retired naval officer and he’s been a business owner in our community, and he served in various public capacities. Here’s the thing that I think is most gripping, that if people were to pay attention, and I don’t think they knew this, and he doesn’t think they knew this. He worked hand in hand at the Pentagon with General Colin Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff and with General Wesley Clark and other top brass in our military. This guy is bringing this level of leadership to our community of 20,000 people. It’s just extraordinary.
Ryan Short (32:45): And I do think this is a special place that we’re in, but I also know for a fact because we’ve seen some of this work in other communities, there’s these stories everywhere. The towns that you might think are not an interesting town, that don’t have a visitor community, that don’t have that. It is pretty amazing when you dive into the depths of someone’s life and some of the talent and the experiences, and even just the stories. I think I commented the other day, like Brinkley’s story about the horse, his horse story. I was just gripped by even his storytelling and how he told that story, I thought was just very interesting. And he’s a very quiet, unassuming guy that everybody in town knows him and knows his work. But I don’t know, I was just super fascinated to just even hear him tell a story that’s not even a crazy famous thing or it’s just a story about a horse.
(33:46): And I think those things can be just as interesting as the big huge things as well. And those things are everywhere, and everybody has something in them. And I think that’s the other thing too, is a lot of people, they probably assume that they don’t, personally. Like, “Well, my story’s really not that interesting or I don’t really have anything to share.” But then it sometimes does take somebody like yourself that has that skillset of how to ask questions, how to make somebody feel comfortable to pull that out. And so I think, I guess kind of shifting into if a community is wanting to do this in their community, where do they start? We talked a little bit about the production barriers or entry are pretty low. Don’t get caught up on the time, but I guess what advice would you have for them?
Adam Williams (34:35): You just made a good point there that while I’m highlighting the people who have amazed me because they have accomplished such incredible things, my advice is not just to look for those things. I think that it should be a good mix of these are maybe known or who we think are known personalities, maybe because of their public service, maybe because they’re business owners or they have a reputation for whatever involvement in the community. Definitely include those people. And that can strategically, that can be of use because it can draw more awareness to the storytelling that you’re doing.
(35:08): But I think it’s also really important to touch on diversity in every sense that you can think of for that, and that it would include people who are lesser known, people who have never given an interview to a newspaper on radio, anywhere. To hear their stories, for instance, one of the first stories that I did for We Are Chaffee was with a woman who grew up in Arkansas in a family of addiction, drug addiction. And then she, of course, she started as a young teenager with family members also dragging her into the same hard, hard drugs, heroin addiction and whatnot.
She now is someone who can tell this story and happily does because she knows the benefit because she is one who managed to survive it and managed to recover. And she now works in service in the community in a role as a peer counselor for others who struggle with the same disease. That’s a person who was never going to be in the media. She’s not on town council or anything like that. And it’s absolutely at least as valuable to include that kind of story.
Ryan Short (36:12): For sure.
Adam Williams (36:13): Now, you asked me about other things, other points of advice, and I think that being curious is a hugely driving factor in this. And what I have seen happen in communities and even in larger cities with magazines and things that are maybe more formal and well-stayed than an upstart podcast is they tend to work within their own maybe friend or professional networks. And so you end up getting the same voices all the time. I encourage people to reach out into all the corners and people will say, yes, this is what I’ve learned. Again, as an introvert, I’m not going into a party and striking up a conversation and coming out with 20 best friends.
(36:56): But I will happily let my curiosity drive me to reach out to anybody in this community and ask them about being on the podcast. And when you have an excuse like that, that person is not going to start telling me about their childhood trauma on the street corner. But when I asked them if they were willing to talk with me, because I show genuine interest and curiosity, and it’s for a purpose being, in this case a podcast or whatever storytelling format, they say yes. People pretty much just don’t ever say no. They want to be asked. And they’re, I think, honored that people care to hear from them and care to hear their insights and that they want to feel valued.
Ryan Short (37:33): Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. I do think, yeah, we might think that somebody doesn’t want to be bothered or you wouldn’t maybe necessarily walk up to them in person and just start asking them these things, but if you approach it right in this format, more people will probably say yes than no.
(37:49): So I want to ask and get some advice that you would give to listeners on how to, everybody’s going to be a different level of interview, how comfortable they are talking, how you pull things out of them, get to go deep. But before I do that, you talk about that, I do want to read two excerpts from you interviewed your kids on a recent podcast.
And there’s just two little excerpts from that that I just thought were funny. But to me, speak to, you have a journalist background, so you’re a professional at how do I ask questions? How do I get people to open up, talk about important deep meanings, not give me a yes no answer? And so I want to get into that of how do you do that? Not everybody is going to be a journalist background, but I just thought it was funny. These two excerpts just made me laugh this morning when I was looking at them.
(38:42): But so you asked your son, talking about skiing, and you’re like, “The wind’s in your face. What are you feeling inside?” And he said, “Cool.” You said “You feel like you’re cool.” And he said, “No, I feel cold.” And you said, “I need insight, what are you feeling?” And he goes “Inside my coat?” And I just cracked up because that was such a, I don’t know, Arrested Development kind of, just seemed like a scene from that. You’re trying to talk about feelings and emotions. And he’s like, “Well, I’m cold.”
(39:16): And then the other one you said, “How would you describe the feelings in your heart about life and people?” And he goes, “I have no idea what that means.” And then you said, “Fair enough. Let me see if I can ask it in a better way or ask a better question.” And he said, “Ask a better question.” So I loved those of the honesty of “This is how I feel.” “I’m cold.” “No inside, well inside my jacket.” And “Ask a better question.” So I guess on those lines of you’re trying to get somebody to open up, you’re trying to know about what’s feeling inside and not just in their coat. How do you ask better questions? How do you do that?
Adam Williams (39:54): It’s funny to me to hear that because I had forgotten about them. It’s interesting. And what comes to mind is a recent guest who… Now I would have to say that most people, they will answer what you ask. And I do it with care and compassion. I’m not trying to pull anything out of anybody that they don’t want to tell and that it’s also in their hands. They get to decide what they tell.
But I had a guest recently who did say, “Well, I got into trouble as a kid,” and I didn’t want to let that go. I’m like, “Well, wait a second before you move on,” because the way he did it, I’m like, “Well, that’s a nugget. That sounds like there’s a story.” I’m like, “Tell us something about that.” And he’s now an 80-year-old man. So we’re talking about this is the statute of limitations are passed.
(40:45): And he’s like, “No, I can’t talk about that.” And I just sat quietly, I think, and he’d say a little bit more. “But I can’t talk about that.” And then he’d tell me more about it. I wasn’t pushing him to say anything. I think people want to share their story. And so sometimes silence is a good way to give people space to draw it out. And in general, I think maybe sometimes I worry that I do this to a fault is I give context for my questions and I try to set them up and let people know where I’m coming from. That might mean that I’m rambling a little bit.
(41:24): But if I can create a comfortable condition for them to feel like, “Oh, okay, I see where you’re coming from on this. I see why you’re interested in this.” And I guess additionally what I do is I share things of myself. So I look at these as conversations rather than interviews. And that might feel like I’m parsing things that don’t need to be parsed. But in my mind, the difference is the give and take. Now, guests often do not ask me questions. I tell them they have permission to, they don’t ask me questions. I do that for a couple of reasons.
(42:00): Build rapport. If I’m sharing something of myself, and I’ll often do that through the unasked question. They’ll say what they’re saying, and then I will respond with a story in kind or something. It builds rapport. I’m facilitating this rapport between the guest and between an audience. I’m building rapport with that person on a one-on-one basis so that they feel safer sharing with me. Some of the compliments that I have also appreciated getting are people who say, “I thought that I wouldn’t share about this, but you made me feel so comfortable in doing it. I did, and I’m surprised that I did, but I’m glad that I did.” Things like that. I just think creating the safe space for them goes a long way.
Ryan Short (42:40): Have you ever had folks share something and then the next day go email you and be like, “Hey, can you not include that. I shared more than I thought I was going to,” or they’re having second thoughts and you have to kind of talk them off the ledge of retracting it or
Adam Williams (42:55): No, no. And now I’m going to be afraid of that. No, they haven’t. And if anybody has had reservations about what’s shared, I think a lot of times they’re keeping that to themselves. Nobody has ever asked me to say, “Oh, can we take that out?” I have noticed though. So one of the key things I think to success in spreading this idea of a storytelling project is that the guests themselves be willing to share. However, I think that at least half of them do not.
(43:23): And I understand probably for most of them it’s because we go into vulnerable spaces. And what if they said something that maybe their mother or their sister or whoever hears. And we are in a small community, what if I said something that I don’t know if I want everybody to know, but they felt okay. And it’s like the step they could take was to say, “Yes, I will talk with you. Yes, I will say these things because I do want to share them. Oh, but I’m not sure I feel comfortable sharing it directly with all my friends on Facebook for all of them to know.” So I think that goes back to people want to share.
Ryan Short (44:04): I think, like we were talking about before, I love your advice of you need to have a pretty good mix of who, if you’re going to do a podcast like this, you have a pretty good mix of who you’re talking to. It doesn’t need to be all the famous people in town or just elected officials. Mix in some of those for sure. And I just think that in doing that though, you’re naturally going to get people that are coming at it from different levels of how much are they mentally filtering, “What am I comfortable saying?”
(44:34): A politician is probably going to be doing that a little bit more than the average person. But then on the flip side, maybe that average person isn’t as used to being scrutinized and having people hear, so maybe they’re going to be filtering it. And so I do think that that’s, I guess just to be expected if you’re going to do a podcast like this. That people are going to kind of come at it from different levels of comfort, different levels of what they’re willing to share.
(44:58): I guess any other, just if you are getting somebody that just kind of is locking up and they’re just not giving you anything. Have you had that or do you just feel like you’re got the skills to make him comfortable and bring it out of him?
Adam Williams (45:12): I don’t think that I’ve had that. I don’t think anybody has felt like they just couldn’t, if needed, rise to the moment. You mentioned Brinkley Messick, he, I don’t think had ever done anything like this before. But he was willing to say yes, he was willing to go outside of his comfort zone because I asked him and then I think felt pretty decent with the experience, and just giving space for people who maybe they need time to think of their answer. Again, it is creating a safe space for everybody to be able to do it on terms that work for them too. I’m not there to push anybody or pull anything out of them.
(45:52): I do think, one thought, when you had given me kind of a heads up on some of the thoughts I might want to take some time with, and one of them being that advice, I think that it’s easy to get wrapped up in a world of YouTubers have millions and millions of views or Taylor Swift has billions of listens. It’s easy to end up comparing ourselves to the wrong circumstances and think that if you start a podcast, “Well, I didn’t get a thousand or 10,000 listens on the first one. What’s wrong?” And that’s not the way this works. And I think people need to be able to put it into context.
(46:28): Now we are in a smaller community. I said a county of 20,000 people. It would be a real disservice to all of us. I think if what I was comparing to were high-profile podcasters like Joe Rogan who has millions and millions of downloads for every episode, or Brene Brown, who presumably millions of listeners to what she does. I look at it this way. I redefine success for our community based on our community. Of 20,000 people, let’s say 10,000 are kids, they’re not at all going to be listening to a podcast. Let’s say 5,000 more are not podcast oriented people either. We still have 5,000 people in this county who are potential listeners. How many of those do we need to get for a percentage that feels like success?
(47:18): One other thought on that is that podcast, it can be intimidating to think there are 5 million in the world. That’s the last number I heard. For all I know this week it’s 6 million. That is an incredibly daunting thing if you think you’re going to compete against everything. But again, if we bring it back to community, you have a niche audience, you have a niche opportunity.
You don’t have to compare yourself to 6 million or 5 million or whatever podcast. But here’s the other thing that I think a lot of people overlook. 44% of those, bail out within three episodes. Something close to 60% bail out within 10 episodes, but less than 20% of podcasters stick it out to 50 episodes or more. So the message in my mind is keep going and just believe in what you’re doing.
Ryan Short (48:04): And with that, how important is consistency of how regularly it comes out or anything like that?
Adam Williams (48:10): I think consistency in general with content is huge no matter what your format is. And I think that’s a key thing that many people miss probably. Especially with social media. I think that we miss the social aspect. We forget that it’s not just a platform where, hey, it’s all about me, me, let me put this out now everybody love it.
(48:31): I think we need to have social interaction. We need to be going in and engaging with, in this case our community. What are the accounts and the people, whether they’re businesses, individuals, and interact and show them some love too, show some appreciation and that, “Hey, I’m paying attention to what you’re doing too.” And I think that consistency with social media posting with the release of, in this case podcasts or any format is absolutely crucial. Your email newsletter, don’t just send it occasionally once every few months. Maybe it’s three months this time, maybe it’s two weeks next time. Be consistent and reliable so people can actually want to come along with you.
Ryan Short (49:09): And then what about, a lot of podcasts these days, there’s a video component, there’s the YouTube version, you’re seeing them. What about for this format? Do you feel like that’s, I guess my take is, one, that’s just extra production sometimes and the editing gets harder. But I’ve found that I feel like people, while I personally don’t watch any that are a video that I can think of, what are your thoughts on that? I feel like I would be more comfortable knowing I don’t have to worry about how I’m looking or anything like that. I like that it’s an audio project I guess. But what are your thoughts on that?
Adam Williams (49:44): I personally probably favor audio just for the reason you said, I don’t necessarily know that I want to be on camera all the time. However, from a content strategy standpoint, I understand why people do it. And if there are resources and the energy behind it, I would do it.
(49:59): Now, back to the consistency question though. Here’s advice I give people when it comes to content strategy against social media or whatever platform they’re using. Do what you can do and sustain consistently. Okay, so if you’re going to start a YouTube channel and try to do this stuff, which by the way, you can put them out and just audio based for people to listen. YouTube is the second-largest search engine behind Google. So it is a worthy tool if you have the energy and the resources to make use of.
(50:27): So even without setting up cameras and having video production, I’m saying you can create an audio-based video file that goes on YouTube, but if you cannot sustain six social media channels and all of the things and the content creation for social media and all, pair it down to what can you do and do consistently and sustain for the effort because it’s going to take energy. And again, if you can get to a level of what you can maintain, the field of competition, so to speak, gets a lot smaller the longer you keep at it.
Ryan Short (51:02): And I’ve been amazed just with… I definitely am guilty of all the things not to do of inconsistency or worrying about the wrong things or things like that. But what I’ve been surprised by even just with this podcast as niche as our audience is, how many people go back and listen to those old episodes now. They’re not just gone. They’re forever there. So somebody might hear this episode for the first time and then they go back and start at the beginning and start listening back through them.
(51:31): And so I think to your point of not getting overly worried about the metrics and the numbers, I think that’s a good point, especially if it’s kind of somewhat evergreen content that’s like you’re not talking about what happened that week necessarily, that people can go back to those. And so episode one may have had 10 listens the first time, but then over the next two years people are going to go back and hear that one. So I think that’s another thing. Just keep in mind sometimes you feel like, “Man, we did all this work and no one listened to it.”
Adam Williams (52:03): That’s a great point. And you never know what episode is going to draw people into the archive. And I have two examples here. One is from my podcast Humanitou that again, I’ve been on hiatus from that I’m not doing that one because the conversational energy I’m putting into these things is now under We Are Chaffee. But I still get thousands of listens a month on that. And it’s largely, I believe, based on one episode I did with a therapist from Hong Kong. And she must have a global audience and she’ll get a couple thousand a month just for her.
(52:33): Now I have to say that’s actually extraordinary quite a bit for any of the other episodes I did. But she has drawn hundreds of listens to my archive all up and down the line, and I could not have predicted that. Okay, that’s like trying to say “I know what goes viral on social media. Let me just create that.” You can’t do that. You don’t know for sure what’s going to hit that note with people and what’s going to be important. The other thing that I wanted to mention is that people probably, again, we have this mindset of all the big numbers, right? Who’s out there getting millions of listens or reads or page views or what have you, but with podcasting, it really is different and it takes time to build an audience.
(53:13): You might be surprised to learn that if you get somewhere around 30 listens in the first seven days of release of an episode, you’re in the top 50% of all podcasts. I think that’s incredibly worth keeping in mind because it can be very disheartening if you think, I only got 10 on the first episode, I only got 30 on the first episode. But like you also said, over time, you might get more once people start digging back.
Ryan Short (53:41): And I think all of that is so much… And that’s probably why a lot of those start and then stop after a certain number of episodes. I think if somebody is trying to sell this internally in their community and they’re having to pitch it to someone, whether it’s to try to get a grant or to their city council or the chamber or whatever. I do think that’s really smart advice is careful how you pitch it of to where it’s not. We always get asked on projects, “Well, what’s the return on investment? What are the KPIs? What are the metrics we’re going to look at?”
(54:09): And so I do think that’s good advice is maybe try to soft sell or undersell the importance of some of those things and talk a little bit more about the, I guess, other value that it’ll bring. Some of the other things of just creating community, creating empathy, being a platform for people to discover your community. I don’t know. What’s the ROI of one person that listens to a podcast and ultimately decides to invest or move to that community. That one person, we both moved to this community, I don’t have any idea of how to calculate the economic development return of you and I living in this county. But it’s valuable.
(54:50): And so if a podcast played any role in that or played any role in keeping us here or played any role in us meeting, I think that’s valuable and it’s hard to measure. So I do think that’s really good advice for somebody that’s trying to get this going in their own community. Be careful that you don’t oversell. Yeah, we’ll get 10,000 listens in the first week and then you get shut down or defunded because you didn’t.
Adam Williams (55:14): Right. I think it all goes back to the quality thing, like we said, that the quality of the conversations and the connections that are made, and sometimes you can’t put numbers to that, and that supersedes any of the technical perfection that we talked about, or in this case, those metrics of what is ROI on that. I think that could be a challenge if you don’t have people with the heart and understanding to place value on this, I don’t know how you would sell that to civic leaders who think it’s all about the dollars because we’re talking about humans, we’re talking about the humanness of this kind of project. So you have to be able to see that vision and trust.
Ryan Short (55:52): That’s good. Awesome. Well, Adam, I greatly appreciate you coming on and talking to us about this and definitely encourage people to do what you’re doing with We are Chaffee and their community. I guess if people want to learn more about you or contact you or see We Are Chaffee, how do they find you online?
Adam Williams (56:10): Yeah, Ryan, thanks for the opportunity, first of all, because I love to talk about this stuff. I love doing the work that I do, and I do think there’s value and importance in it. WeareChaffee.org is the website, but We Are Chaffee Looking Upstream is the name of the podcast, and you can listen to that on any of the podcast players. Again, if you go to the website though, we do have other formats. So you can watch short form video stories, you can read things, you can get a fuller appreciation of what the We are Chaffee Storytelling Initiative is.
(56:38): And there also is a forthcoming documentary actually that we are Chaffee has been spending the last several months working toward, and that’s going to debut at the Salada Film Festival in May. So another big exciting project that’s underway under the We Are Chaffee umbrella, and I encourage people, my favorite platform for social media is Instagram. There is a podcast specific Instagram account @WeAreChaffeePod, but you can also go to the We Are Chaffee Instagram account or Facebook page.
Ryan Short (57:07): Awesome. Thanks again, Adam. Appreciate it.
Adam Williams (57:09): Thank you.
[Outro music]
