If you’re anything like me or the other 5M people who have downloaded the podcast since it launched in October, you have a serious Serial addiction. As the fastest podcast to ever hit this milestone on iTunes—in just 9 weeks’ time according to Apple—Serial has quickly developed a cult following. The Telegraph called it the greatest podcast ever made, and each episode receives an average of over 1.5M listeners. Over 171K Redditors have visited the Serial sub-reddit, and the 15 year-old story of Adnan Syed and the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee has truly become a viral sensation across the internet, drawing attention from celebrities and influencers such as Kelly Oxford, Danny Zucker, Patton Oswalt, etc. Further, the podcast’s production team recently announced they raised enough funding to develop a second season of the show.
Clearly, the Serial team is on to something big. As I dug deeper and deeper into the conspiracy theories, memes and forums, I couldn’t help but wonder how the show was able to get consumers SO engaged, SO quickly, and began to think of what this means from a PR standpoint. Below, check out five PR lessons you can learn from Serial’s success:
