All of today's social media – blogging, podcasting, twitter, etc. - are a combination of technology and content. Without both, you can't succeed in telling a story or getting the word out. For a lot of companies, that means getting IT and marketing in the same room talking to each other.

TSP is in a unique position, where we are both technologists and marketing folks – in that we have a business that sells products and services for technology. So when it comes to solving these problems, we frequently try to do everything ourselves (for better of for worse) – it's in our blood.

While this can sometimes come at the detriment of our free time, it does mean that we do get to learn a lot about both sides of the proverbial coin, more so than if we simply outsourced the technology or marketing-speak to someone else.

That process is beginning again, as we tackle podcasting: the posting of audio and video content in a blog-like form. Today, I'd like to give you a little bit of insight into how we're looking at the technical side of becoming podcasters – especially audio.

The first step is to define your problem, then select your tools. For us, podcasting is a natural extension of helping people with technology: it's simply easier to show someone how to do something rather than tell them how to. Video screengrabs combined with instructive audio can really help people to solve technical problems quickly.

We've found a great piece of screen recording software called ScreenFlow from Telestream for $99. That makes recording screen grabs incredibly easy. So the next step was to get the audio right, and that required a bit more research.

One of the key differences between a good podcast and a bad one is the audio quality, and the key to good audio quality is a good microphone. After some online research, I landed on the Samson C01U, a USB-direct microphone for professional quality sound for less than $100.

Plugging it in is easy: it's just plugging it in. Once connected, the C01U becomes available to the "Sound" System Preference as an Input source, which I selected on my Mac. Very simple.

Then, I could grab audio from any Mac recording software, including ScreenFlow and GarageBand.

Want to hear the results? Just listen to the short audio clip from GarageBand, recorded with a tiny bit of reverb and compression using GarageBand's built-in filters. Note that this is an uncompressed AIFF file, so while it's only 10 seconds long, it's 2MB. But that gives you a good idea of the quality of this microphone. It's pretty darn good.

A few tips: With audio, getting the levels not too high but high enough is really critical - and doing so with the C01U means setting the input level in the "Input" tab in the "Sound" System Preference. Also, I used the age-old nylon stocking hack to keep the popping of P's and T's to a minimum.

Oh, and don't mind the "140 characters" bit or the fact that the audio gets cut off. Henry wrote the script and that's what he told me to say. :)

In the next post, I'll show you how I put together the video to make a screencast tutorial.