Six Reasons Your Company NEEDS Private Podcasts and Internal Podcasts

Duration: 8 mins

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In this video, John, the head of marketing at Podbean, highlights six compelling reasons why your company should consider using private internal podcasts.

Private podcasts offer a mobile, secure, and engaging way to connect with your employees. They can keep your mobile and traveling employees in the loop, maintain content security, highlight outstanding employees and inspire others, standardize training, track engagement, and categorize content based on department needs. Additionally, podcasting is an enjoyable and personable medium that aligns with how people consume content today.

If you're interested in private podcasts for your company, Podbean offers business and enterprise podcasting solutions to help you get started.

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Podcasting for Training and Internal Communications

Better Training SolutionsTraining is an ongoing need for every organization. As the great Richard Branson said, “Train people well enough so that they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to”. But, when your employees are busy, and on the move, training is a significant challenge.Not only that, when your leaders provide great content at an event, how do you ensure that such high-value content is fully leveraged? How do you extract the best moments, those golden nuggets, and make sure that they are available to people that are not even part of your organization yet?Well, part of the answer is that innovation is core to the human condition; faced with a problem, we innovate a solution. Our very own John Kiernan, Podbean’s Head of Marketing, met with Marty Boyzuk, the Direct of Enablement Technology Architecture and Design at VMware, a virtualization company. 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His audience does a great deal of travel for work, and so it made sense to support them to use this time effectively.How Do You Use Podcasting?VMware uses podcasting in 3 main strands, customer-facing content, partner-facing content, and internal content. Marty is responsible for the internal stream, which is composed of 8 very active channels.These channels are audience-targeted. One of the key channels is aimed at the sales team, while others are targeted at technical teams. Their purpose falls into 2 categories; internal communication and training.VMware has been particularly innovative in its approach to utilizing Podbean for training. With a little extra code, VMware’s learning management system (LMS) was smoothly integrated with Podbean’s app. This enables employee’s consumption of the podcasts to be monitored, allowing their progression through internal training content to be marked as completed and credits assigned to the trainee.Not only that, VMware is using podcasts as a way to preserve institutional knowledge. So, for example, a global training session held over Zoom is recorded. The channel team then extract the evergreen content that should not be lost, this is packaged as a cast and the knowledge retained.How Is the Podcast Created?Being a technical company, Marty discovered that they have a pool of podcast geeks who were super keen to learn more about audio editing. In addition, what has been very effective at VMware is encouraging the audience to become co-creators. Employees have taken on the responsibility of creating training content for other people in the company.VMware keep podcasting so simple that they advise users to use Zoom to record a session, to download the resulting MP3/4, and to get editing! When folk begin to love the medium and push for more, VMware provides these internal producers with Adobe Studio and a good-quality microphone.VMware’s internal communications team also see that promoting the podcast material is as important as creating it. SharePoint banners, newsletters, emails, mentions in meetings are all used as a mechanism to increase the audience’s awareness of new content on the various channels.So, What Are the Benefits of Corporate Podcasting?For VMware, having Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication was mandatory to ensure the security of the content they produced that was intended to be used outside of the corporate physical perimeter. 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The Impact of Corporate Storytelling

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Signature Performance applies a hosted interview format to assist those content providers through the process. Also, one team member takes responsibility for the post-processing of the audio material before the podcast is released.Signature Performance’s approach is to channel content toward a particular target group. Their belief is that creating curated, targeted content is the most effective strategy for creating high levels of engagement. They also focus on curating content for the people who are their biggest center of influence, their management team.What Are the Benefits of Corporate Podcasting?The simple answer, connection.Signature Performance’s business model evolved rapidly during the pandemic – as the needs of the healthcare providers changed. This meant that new strategies had to be communicated effectively, at speed, across a scattered team. So, what did podcasts offer over MS Teams or Zoom? The element of storytelling; a deeper and richer experience than offered by the written word. There’s also the element of convenience for team members to listen and relisten as they wish.Signature Performance also used podcasts as a way to introduce new members of management. The changes to the business model brought new additions to their C-suite team. By creating podcasts, these managers were able to introduce themselves across the company in a personal way that communicated the essence of their personalities, not just their words.As Mark says, the impact of management sharing their vision for the future comes across much more strongly when presented in their own voice.Is There Any Take-Home Advice?Mark’s advice is to leverage podcasts to give your management team their voice back. He says: “get a microphone that’s clear and get a message that’s impactful”. 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