Jason Van Orden provides an excellent summary of the benefits and drawbacks of corporate podcasting based on what he saw and heard at the Corporate Podcasting Summit.

One thing he didn’t mention – Most of the case studies presented at the Summit reported their success as if it were an accident or a freak of nature. I wasn’t happy with that. It bugged me to hear people say:

“Wow, and that was totally unexpected.”

I interviewed the manager of the Butterball Turkey Talk account as to why Butterball chose to publish only 6 episodes. When I asked her what were the results, she gave me concrete numbers. She said they were expecting 5000 downloads and got just under 10,000. There was no apologetic tone in her voice, no hint of surprise. Butterball put together some numbers and evaluated the outcome based on their initial projections.

Very good approach. I would urge corporations to do the same. Write down some hard numbers and measure your success based on your initial projections. Stop treating podcasts like they’re this accident waiting to happen.

Second thing that bugged me is that many people were calling their podcasting strategy a pilot, trial or a test. I’ve been in corporate for many years and I’ll tell you what that means to me – it’s corporate speak for CYA or Cover Your Ass. In other words, I won’t take responsibility if it fails, but I will take the praise if it succeeds.

I highly recommend that instead of using the words test or pilot, instead call it a limited run. If you plan on publishing less than 10 episodes, saying its limited run will help people to take it more seriously and treat the strategy as if it has legs.

So again:

1. Measure your podcast using numbers, not excuses.
2. Call your podcast a limited run and not a pilot, trial or test.

Tags: corporate podcasting, podcasting, cpslondon