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By David Erickson
Podcasting is a strategic approach to leveraging the power of customer reach while simultaneously serving as an effective and efficient communications tool. Podcasting allows your business to appear bigger than it is by allowing you to share information with a global or traveling workforce, as well as with suppliers, vendors or partners. Meetings, conference calls and training tutorials, for example, can be recorded and shared with relevant employees, who then could access the information on a portable device while traveling or during down-time.
Audio conferencing has recently emerged as an ideal application for podcasts. With built-in features offered through teleconferencing services to record the discussion and convert them to .WAV files or RSS news feeds, team meetings can easily become podcasts. Project team members never have to miss a meeting and can easily track action items and deliverables.
Some of the more dynamic conferencing providers are enhancing their services with virtual voice mail boxes with support for RSS feeds via podcast, which provides users with the capability to download messages to their iPod or other mobile devices. For example, each time a voice mailbox message changes, a RSS feed is sent to the user’s group of subscribers. This process is totally automated and it eliminates the need for subscribers to enter any code. Subscribers within an organization can listen to a CEO speech anytime or anywhere. With conference recording, if a sales executive is traveling and cannot listen to a conference call, he/she can download the recording to their PCs, retrieve it from iTunes to download to an iPod, or receive it via RSS news feed and click to stream it on a desktop PC.
Audio conferencing in tandem with the podcast can serve in a multitude of applications including investor relations and the dissemination of important public information, employee and customer training, and overall marketing efforts. This powerful combination offers a new medium to communicate and save the cost-conscious SMB significant money while improving overall efficiencies.
Today, simply having a Web presence no longer provides a competitive advantage to SMBs. These organizations must consider new and innovative tools to allow them to grow their customer base, expand their business, improve internal efficiency and maximize profits. As an emerging technology in the business world, podcasting has limitless potential to do just that.
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