The ‘Four Ps’ of Content Creation: Plan, Produce, Publish, Promote | Stover Harger III (Cali BBQ Media) | DH051

Stover E. Harger III is telling brand stories — and so should you.

To be successful at anything, you have to know your "Why." For Stover Harger III, content publisher and digital strategist for Cali BBQ Media (and producer of this very podcast Digital Hospitality), his "Why" as a content creator has always been simple: “Any good reporter really just wants to help the world with information."

An industry veteran, category creator, and all-around story-telling multi-hyphenate, Stover got his start in print while studying journalism at college in the 2000s. While Stover was honing his craft as a writer, reporter, and editor, the newspaper business he entered would soon become the one he’d be leaving.

“As I rose in the industry, I saw the industry collapse,” Stover looks back. “So here I was wanting to have a future in something that everyone was jumping off of.”

Just how did he know?

“My own parents stopped subscribing to the newspaper halfway through my run at a newspaper,” laughs content producer Stover Harger.

“That was an indicator I should've listened to. When your own parents, the generation before you, stopped actually paying for a thing that pays your bills? Yeah, it's time to get out.”

Creating the Best BBQ Show Podcast:

The pivot for Stover was podcasting – more specifically BBQ podcasting. Using audio as a medium rather than writing was unconventional based on his background. Still, his confidence was unfazed.

“We called it the Best Barbecue Show,” Stover reflects on the first podcast creation with his Glencliff Media production company that he created during his time living in Austin, Texas. “Neither of us had any experience doing podcasts. We wanted to do it as a test to see if we could make a popular show in a genre that we didn't really know that much about.”

https://www.instagram.com/tv/B2mXllbgYfe/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Picking the title and topic off SEO insight, something strange happened.

“It started to work!” Stover recalls the early fanfare for his BBQ podcast. “I was like, ‘Wow, I have an audience for that.’ I mean, I'd worked at a daily newspaper that had hundreds of thousands of readers and I never felt that people were connecting with me until I had a barbecue podcast with only a thousand listeners.”

Stover's BBQ expertise and knowledge of the modern business world has led him to being featured on television, numerous podcasts like The BBQ Central Show, industry articles and more, including an appearance in Playboy magazine.

Eventually Stover left the Best BBQ Show in order to move onto bigger and better things for his career in digital media and the barbecue industry. Yoni Levin still hosts the Best BBQ Show from Austin as of 2020. The show is published much less frequently now and has a different format than when it was produced by Stover during his time hosting the Texas barbecue podcast with Yoni in Austin.

Entering, and to some degree creating, the BBQ digital content space, Stover’s path led him to a fruitful friendship that’s still cooking today. Linking with our own Shawn Walchef, then host of the Behind the Smoke Podcast, the two would blaze a trail for the Digital Hospitality world we live in today.

“I met Shawn years ago doing the barbecue podcast,” Stover says on his Cali BBQ/Digital Hospitality content collaborator. “We connected, both thinking that we were the only ones doing ‘the game within the game.’ I was watching him, he was watching me, and neither of us really knew that. We connected like a lot of people do these days on Instagram and then the relationship just didn't stop.”

As alluded, the online, and then offline, friendship between Shawn and Stover led to creating what you’re reading and listening to right now: The Digital Hospitality Podcast as featured on the Cali BBQ Blog.

Creating content with BBQ veterans like Meathead to media mavens like Lisa Ann, Shawn and Stover’s curiosity in cooking ribs, running a business and evolving digitally has led them...