Sheree Martin - Time to Shine Birmingham Shines

When I was three a lawnmower turned over on me and crushed my left temple, I have a noticeable but faded scar in the shape of a cross. I can actually remember bits and pieces of the moments before, during, and after the accident. My head on my mother's chest, covered in blood, as we raced to the nearest hospital 10 miles away.
Today, I call it my Harry Potter scar. The girl who lived.
I'm Sheree Martin, host and producer of Birmingham Shines, and I want to say thank you for listening to the podcast and for sharing it with your friends. I've been blessed to have met so many awesome individuals through Birmingham Shines, both guests, fans of the show, and others who simply love Birmingham or love podcasts.
It's hard to believe that it's been a year since I started scheduling interviews for the first episodes and now we're just a few weeks away from the anniversary of the first episode release.
This week's show is a bit different. I decided to make myself the guest, to tell you a little bit about my own story, why I started Birmingham Shines, what I'm trying to do here and some other things I'm working on. Some bits and pieces of this have been woven into my conversations with guests, but a lot of what you're going to hear in this episode is new and I'm going to try to do it more in a storytelling format.
Some of you know that I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, who's both an inspirational force for the adapting to the new economic realities we live in, and someone's who helped to change the face of marketing in the digital arena, through his book, Permission Marketing, and later on, through his messages of empowerment. As Seth recognized years ago, the internet enables everyone—from brands to individuals in basements and bedrooms—to bypass the traditional media gatekeepers and to find and speak directly to their tribe of fans, followers and kindred spirits.
When I began making plans to leave my faculty job at Samford a few years ago, I decided I wanted to stay in Birmingham, if possible, and that meant I would be leaving academia because there are only a few teaching jobs within driving distance for someone whose focus is social media marketing, digital content strategy and media law. Within academia, the traditional approach to PR and advertising doesn't accommodate the perspective that I bring to the table. And marketing departments in business schools typically don't consider faculty with a Ph.D. in Mass Communication, those programs want a Ph.D. in marketing or, perhaps, psychology of consumer behavior. It's all very siloed and that's not a topic I care to get into in this podcast.
My point in bringing this up BEFORE I get into the official part of the episode is to say that when I left Samford my plan was to demonstrate how on-demand audio, especially audio content with a longer shelf life, can be a key part of business marketing strategy.
That's a message I've been talking about behind-the-scenes for quite some time. More recently, I've ramped up my own marketing efforts to explain this approach to CEOs and business marketing and corporate communications managers to sell my own on-demand audio content strategy and production services.
My target clients are B2B companies, and professional service providers, like lawyers and accountants, and other certain business sectors like real estate, construction, and banking/finance, healthcare and veterinary medicine.
If you're a business owner, a marketing manager or someone who handles PR and corporation communications in house or with an agency:
Perhaps the best way to think of it is this: Podcasts are like having your own business radio station and you are the DJ. You can decide whether to have short news features, product-specific episodes, answer the FAQs of your customers and clients
You get to explain what you do in a way that lets you speak directly to each unique customer.
Not only do you get a “radio station” section for your website, with audio file that