Conducted a mega-long chitty-chat with His Excellency Ian Kath on ye old Skype last night (I’m there at @gtowna). While t’was Ian’s afternoon in Brisbane, Sub-Tropical Oz, was my late late-y.

Covered a ton of issues, we did, though the bulk of our chinwag was centered around online marketing, something I know a wee bit about, methinks.

We yammered on about ways how Ian might possibly gain even more traction for his mighty 65-episode Your Story Podcast collection, a clever, mostly hour-long, talk show series which has been buried beneath deep sedimentary layers of online silica dust. Obscured, sadly, by boobytraps, reams of bloggy horse feffer, and shredded bus tickets. Fooey!

I, myself, was featured on Ian’s cast twice previously (here and here!), once when I was living 2005-2010 in Prague, Czech Republic (forever former Czechoslovakia to me), the second when I’d already moved back to my hometown of Toronto, Canada’s largest burg.

As I lean back listening to that maiden 2008 episode, it astonishes me how wooden I was. I thankfully got much looser by the second, and little does Sir I-Rock know that I intend on becoming a regular fixture on his show…

Over that thirty-three episode lapse, I keenly observed how Ian grew in strength as an interviewer.

How, during those intervening episodes, he honed his interrogative skills, Stasi-like, and how – as he more aptly described it – he learned how to“cast a spell” over his interviewees, getting them to admit things a la Charlie Rose or Gargamel, which these folks never would quite do in polite company. The sorts of contentious issues you want to face in your life, yet which you never quite find the right time or situation to do so.

Your Story is crunchy, fortifying, and nutritious, yet the show doesn’t benefit from the kind of traction it deserves. So how to fix things, matey? A couple of examples, and not the full arsenal of things we covered last night…

(Disclaimer: Ian Kath of Brisbane, Australia is not a PMD-For-Hire client, as much as he wishes to be. As I don’t take money from friends nor mix beers and business, he will have to sate himself with advice from afar). 

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