Voice of the Valley: How One Arizona Telco Launched a Podcast, With Bob Dahlstrom

Bob Dahlstrom launched and co-hosts the Valley’s Bits, Bytes & Banter podcast for Valley TeleCom. He shared the ups and downs of podcasting with our live StoryConnect audience.

Special: Live at StoryConnect 2025

Creators and Guests

Host

Andy Johns

Vice President of Marketing

What is The StoryConnect Podcast?

StoryConnect features interviews with marketers, communicators, CEOs and other leaders at cooperative and independent broadband companies, electric cooperatives and municipal power providers. The goal of the podcast is to help listeners discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers. It is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources.

Intro:
A production of Pioneer Utility Resources.

StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their
stories and connect with their customers.

Andy Johns:
What does it take to start a podcast? That's what we'll be
talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. My

name is Andy Johns, your host with Pioneer,
and I'm joined on this episode by Bob Dahlstrom of Valley TeleCom

Group in Arizona. Bob, thanks so much for joining me.

Bob Dahlstrom:
Appreciate you having me, Andy. Thanks.

Andy Johns:
Now I'm also joined by a fantastic live audience here at
StoryConnect 2025.

Audience:
(cheers)

Bob Dahlstrom:
Stupendous crowd.

Andy Johns:
Stupendous. Yeah, where Bob has achieved nickname status in only
two years attending StoryConnect.

Bob Dahlstrom:
Let me turn this around.

Andy Johns:
Buttery Bob, if you're listening,
you want to turn the bass up a little bit in your car,

I understand. Bob, you guys have started a podcast.

We're going to do a podcast about a podcast. Y ours is called
Bits,

Bytes and Banter. Tell us a little bit about the show that you
guys are doing.

Bob Dahlstrom:
Yeah, I do it with my partner in crime,
Ralph Score.

And, Gene and Patrick, we had them on earlier.

They're our spirit animals. We are the Gene and Patrick of our
company.

Andy Johns:
There you go.

Bob Dahlstrom:
And it was our idea to get a podcast going,
but we didn't know how to start at the time.

We didn't know, what were we going to talk about?

Because, okay, we can talk about our company.

That's interesting for like three episodes.

And then what do you do after that?

So we came up with a concept that we noticed nobody was doing in
our space.

And that was we noticed, and everybody can probably appreciate
this,

we have a lot of interesting people that live in our communities.

And we know them because we're cooperatives,
right? We live where we work.

We work where we live. And we thought they are the stars of the
podcast.

They're the guests; every week or every other week are the stars.

So we do, we talk a little bit about what Valley TeleCom has
going on and maybe some tech news.

We take a bite out of the tech world a little bit,
and we banter with local people in our community.

So Bits, Bytes and Banter.

Andy Johns:
It's very well put together, and it's a great approach to it.

I will say, this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast is sponsored
by our co-op friends over at Meridian Cooperative,

who use powerful innovations to empower utilities.

Thank you for supporting Meridian. Let's have a round of applause
for Meridian supporting.

Audience:
(applause)

Andy Johns:
All right. So, Bob, we help some folks with with podcast.

We, you know, full disclosure, we don't work with Bob on this.

But I know that as you are, you know,
the idea of doing a podcast is one thing,

but like you said, figuring out what are we going to talk about
is a whole different thing. Tell us a little bit about how you

decided at the very kind of formative stages.

I mean, I've listened the last couple episodes y'all have done.
You had a birder on.

You had an athletic director from a local college. You had a a
Christmas special or holiday special talking about Christmas

movies. Y'all are all over the place a little bit.

Where did you decide t his is what we're going to do.

This is what we're going to talk about. How did you do that?

Bob Dahlstrom:
Well, we got together and started brainstorming . Ralph and I did
and put a concept together,

and we meet regularly to kind of update guest lists who we're
going to talk about.

And we came up with our concept and then brought it to our team
and said,

"This is what we'd like to talk about" because we wanted their
input as well. And they had a little bit of input because they

thought, you guys have a very solid concept here you can go with.

We all started naming people off the top of our heads that we can
think of across our community.

And my partner in crime is always calm on the podcast,
Ralph.

W e lean on him a lot because very technical.

He's a genius at the AV world. He has a very storied career.

I'm going to give Ralph a shout out. He's been a roadie for years
for bands and conferences.

Andy Johns:
Wow.

Bob Dahlstrom:
He knows the ins and outs. He's done TV shows.

He's recorded this and that. So on that technical side,
he really helped take us forward pretty quickly.

In fact, back when we offered TV service,
we hired him to record and produce our local TV channel.

So he had that technical know how,
and I brought the voice.

That was my concept. B ut we started formulating it.

I t took several whacks at it to get really what we thought would
be a good from soup to nuts,

what would be really good and breaking it down.

And we decided that, the big thing we decided is we would produce
it live.

There's no production that takes place. There's no editing. It's
all happening organically as it goes.

Andy Johns:
I want to get into the technical piece of it in a minute.

But I know that you are marketing savvy enough not to just be
doing this for fun.

How does this fit in? I know you've got the kind of commercial
breaks in the middle of the podcast.

How does this fit into the other channels or the other pieces
that you guys are doing when it comes to your marketing

communications efforts?

Bob Dahlstrom:
Yeah, that's a good question. We broke it up into three segments,

and we have commercial breaks built in,
like you said, and they're all our commercials.

I mean, we control it. We own it.

We get to say what we want to say.

Andy Johns:
Sure.

Bob Dahlstrom:
So we do a break that talks maybe about us being a part of the
fiber gaming network.

We talked about the Rural Rumble Esports.

We do a segment that talks about stream now and streaming
products.

We've changed it up from time to time.

We don't try to do it as selling.

We do it as, "Hey, did you know this is also available to you."
As a customer or not a customer,

these are things in our community because the whole thing about
it is community.

The whole reason we're doing it is not – I mean,
yes, we don't want to sound self-serving,

like it's all a big ad, but we do want to make sure people
understand our connection to the community.

Andy Johns:
Perfect. Let's get into the technical piece of it.

What does it take to do a podcast?

What kind of equipment or software,
that kind of stuff, are you guys using to make it happen?

Bob Dahlstrom:
I'm glad you asked that, Andy.

Andy Johns:
Well thank you.

Bob Dahlstrom:
Thank you very much. One of the big pieces of equipment we have
that does it all is we have a RODEcaster that we bought.

It's a RODEcaster Pro. It's a portable unit,
and the beauty of the unit is it hooks up.

You hook up all your microphones into it,
all your headphones into it.

It has hotkeys where you can program your spots,
your radio, your intro,

outro, and you can record on it.

And it's all in one device.

Andy Johns:
Nice.

Bob Dahlstrom:
So that is the big brain of everything.

And we hook all that up into that.

We use some Audio Technica microphones and the arms.

Andy Johns:
Usually three mic setups?

Bob Dahlstrom:
Three mics.

Andy Johns:
Okay.

Bob Dahlstrom:
Occasionally, we'll do four, like we did for the holiday special,

but usually it's three. That's usually our goal is to do three
microphones.

We hook it all up, and the other part of this was we wanted to
make sure we could go anywhere and record.

Andy Johns:
Yeah, I was going to get into that because y'all aren't always
just in a,

you know, sealed, quiet studio.

Bob Dahlstrom:
No, we're not. We do have one. Ralph used it for his production
studio back when we were doing video.

We use it for recording radio spots and things like that.

But that's where, if we're doing it at our office,
that's where we do it. But our community is pretty widespread.

We cover a wide area, so we have to travel,
and we break it down into two cases and a table and a couple

chairs. And we load it all up, and we can go.

We can go anywhere and set up in about less than 30 minutes,
and we're ready to go.

Andy Johns:
I know with the podcast it can be a little bit of a slow build.

How are you measuring success, or what kind of goals are you
shooting for in terms of,

"Hey, this is working. This is worth our this is worth our time
and energy?"

Bob Dahlstrom:
Yeah, we track the downloads. There's not much other ways you can
do that.

One of the ways it can help you get those analytics is where our
podcast is hosted is at Podbean,

podbean.com . Free app or go to podbean.com.

And you go on there and pay for their level of service,
and it's not much at all really.

But they give you all the analytics you need to check downloads
and how many people are liking it and listening to it.

Like I said, downloading it. They also assist in getting it on
all the platforms,

podcast platforms, to get it out there for you and the RSS feeds
for that.

Andy Johns:
Last question for you, Bob. What advice do you have for somebody
who's maybe they listen to podcasts and they've thought about

doing it for their own brand. Maybe they've just started. What
advice do you have now that you guys are, what, 20-25 episodes

in? What have you learned, and what advice would you share with
them?

Bob Dahlstrom:
Get advice, get feedback. Sometimes you hit a wall.

It's like, I have this concept. And I think we talked about this
last year over at StoryConnect last year,

in fact, many of you know Scott Wild ,
NISC .

Andy Johns:
He was the one that gave you the nickname Buttery Bob. We all
remember him.

Bob Dahlstrom:
As a matter of fact, I picked Scott's brain quite a bit as we
were getting it going about what he's seen in his experience as

a podcast. So if you know somebody who does podcast,
pick the brain,

get some ideas from them. And help really kind of formulate your
idea,

but you've got to have a concept.

And it took me two years to really kind of,
for us to get together and have the concept we thought was very

solid and one that would last a dreaded seven.

You know, a lot of podcasts start,
and they may have enough ideas for seven episodes.

Then it's like, now what do we do? And this is one we just will
never run out of people to talk to.

Everybody we've ever asked has said yes,
and we want to make sure they're comfortable on the podcast.

And there's ways we do that to make them feel comfortable.

We have a –

Andy Johns:
Such as?

Bob Dahlstrom:
We have a questionnaire that we have – that we fill out a part of
it,

for our guest. Every every episode,
we do this.

We do a new episode every other Wednesday.

And we release this questionnaire to them.

And "This is what we think we should talk about." And the last
page is blank.

And it's like, "What do you want to talk about?"

Andy Johns:
Nice.

Bob Dahlstrom:
What are some ideas or concepts or something we're not thinking
of. Or maybe something new that you would think would be great.

Give us some more information on your bio.

And we'll do that, and the interesting thing is we don't stick to
that.

We're not scripted. You got to know where you're going to go,
right?

But it's organic. I mean, we may bring that into the podcast and
look at it.

And there's one thing we touch on,
and we go off in a whole different area.

Andy Johns:
Sure.

Bob Dahlstrom:
I mean, you never know where it's going to go,
and that's why I think it works. Like I said, it's very organic.

Andy Johns:
Especially when Die Hard came up in that Christmas movie
discussion you had on that episode.

Bob Dahlstrom:
Oh, yeah. How many of you think Die Hard a Christmas movie?

You're wrong. That was my opinion on the podcast.

But yeah, we had a very spirited discussion about that very topic
on that one.

Andy Johns:
Fantastic. Well, Bob, thanks so much for being on. I looked it
up. You were on episode 93 that we did a while back,

and now this is going to be episode 350 something.

So thanks for coming back and being on StoryConnect:
The Podcast once again.

Bob Dahlstrom:
Thanks for remembering me, Andy.

Andy Johns:
(laughs) He is Bob Dahlstrom. I'm Andy Johns.

This is our wonderful audience here at StoryConnect.

Audience:
(applause)

Outro:
StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility –

Andy Johns:
Thanks for j oining us.

Outro:
Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share
your story.

StoryConnect is engineered by Lucas Smith of Lucky Sound Studio.