Podcasting for business, meetcasting?
I’ve never understood podcasting. It’s not that I don’t think it’s a good idea for long tail radio, that I understand. What has always confused me about it is why business cares about it at all.
I’m sure a big portion is the “pod” part, and by “pod” I mean someone in the company said “I want us to be as big as the iPod”. Podcasting must seem pretty close to jumping on the iPod phenomena to someone standing on the platform still waiting for the train to come in.
The truth is that creating a quality podcast is hard, in deed very hard. It’s significantly easier to say something in a blog than to record a postcast of it. The drop off rate of podcasters has been substantial enough that the e-vernacular now includes the word “podfading” to describe the dropoff rate.
Recently though I was asked to put together a high level summary of blogs, wiki, RSS and podcasting. For each I was able to outline what they where and why they were important for business today, that is until I came to the podcast
Podcasting, while certainly the technology that receives the most attention, is ultimately nothing more than an audio file delivered over an RSS feed. Traditionally this has been used to provide radio type programs at very low cost. By subscribing to a podcast via RSS, you receive new programs as they become available. Like all RSS services, this saves you from having to go out and find the content yourself, or guessing when there might be new content available.
As far as business is concerned, podcasting is just a harder way to blog which also lacks the ability for the content to be chunked since audio usually requires real-time attention. There is a personal preference issue, some people may just feel more comfortable talking rather than writing and there are services that will convert podcasts into text, but for the most part blogging will serve the user better than podcasting for communicating most types of information.
I then pondered the idea of podcasting company meetings and the more it bounces from synapse to synapse the more I like it. The bigger projects get, the more stake holders there are who need to be involved in a project. In reality most don’t want to be involved they just don’t want to uninvolved. That is they don’t really have anything to contribute but they need the information discussed to do their jobs, or at least sleep at night.
For most stake holders, gathering for a meeting will directly interfere with their ability to do their real jobs. The ultimate result of which is the high paid manager who does nothing but meet so they can gather information to disseminate to those who are actually doing the work.
By podcasting meetings peripheral stake holders are given the ability to time-shift their meeting involvement. This saves them from being inundated with meetings, and also allows the primary stake holders more flexibility in scheduling meetings in the first place since there are fewer individuals to coordinate.
There would still be some leg work required in getting the podcast onto a server, but that work could be unloaded onto an employee who, presumably, would make significantly less than any of the stake holders. Going forward this would be an opportunity for the nearly ubiquitous Polycom SoundStation to evolve their product into a system for recording and casting meetings, a PodStation?
Does “radio style” podcast serve some sort of business goal, or is it just the buzzword of the month. Would you business be open to podcasting meetings internally?
.
Meeting minutes (or transcripts, even!) would be very useful, then. =)