Part 2 (of 2): Increasing Productivity Through Internal Communications Podcasting

Transcript for Part 2:

Host: Podcasting certainly seems like a great way to communicate with employees. What's the process for producing a podcast?
The process for producing and internal podcast starts with planning. We sit down with the client, we understand the objectives and we design strategies and tactics for communicating with the organization. We also pick a format for the podcast. There's the monologue format, the interview format and the documentary format. Each one has its associated costs and level of effort on the client side. They also have varying levels of audience engagement. The goal here is to create a compelling program and not to create a boring program. So after that comes the site inspection where we go to the conference room where the podcast is going to be recorded. We make sure it's up to standard in terms of low HVAC noise, the acoustics aren't too live because that's not good either, and also there's not too much ambient noise. Most conference rooms can be appropriated for recording but we have to just check it out before hand.
Then comes the recording session and one of the mistakes that a lot of people make in the recording session is they put one microphone in between two people and that's a big mistake because when you don't have a microphone up close and it's far away, you're getting a lot more of the sound of the room. A conference room is not a recording studio - it doesn't have good acoustics. You get a lot of ambient noise and the things that we talked about. You're not going to hear the voices very loud compared to that ambient noise so that's a big mistake people make.
There's only supposed to be one microphone per person or guest speaking and each one has a pop filter on it to catch the plosives because otherwise you can drive people crazy with the booming of the base of their speakers every time they say "P" and you pop the microphone so you have a pop filter for that. It's important to have an engineer that sets up these microphones and makes sure everybody has proper microphone technique. That everybody's not too close and not too far and they're not moving off microphone as they get excited when they're talking. And that also the engineer stops the recording when something's going wrong, such as somebody is rolling a pencil or kicking the table. It makes a big sound in the recording. If nobody's monitoring that and it gets in, once the guests leave and the recording is over, you've got to get your guests back somehow. The recording has to be thrown away basically. So that's why we always have an engineer to setup and monitor the recording.
It's also important not to use phone conversations. When you're trying to use the opportunity to convince and create emotional connections, you can't make a very good connection over the phone versus in person. When you have high quality microphones and high quality gear, it's almost like being there in person. You can carry a lot of fidelity. That's lost over the phone. For the cost of a phone recording, for just a little bit more, we can actually put a person onsite. We have engineers in the major metro areas, we do what 's called a tape synch. The guest and interviewer get on the phone, they do their interview. We have live microphones in front of each of them. Later in post-production those two are married and it sounds like they are being recorded high quality in the same room.
Then comes editing. This is the point where we assemble all of the different "takes" of a performance. Let's say someone wanted to try to respond to a question three times to get their best performance. We put the best performance into one complete piece and that's the podcast. We submit it to the client for their approval, they'll either have some comments, say change this, change that, or we want to re-record, or whatever the case may be. So we get it so it's just right and then it gets approved and it goes up on the internal website, it's released. People download it. They download it by right clicking and downloading into iTunes. It gets pushed up to their mobile device such as their iPod or they can listen to it right at their computer.
We serve the Silicon Valley San Francisco Bay Area including, San Jose, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Fremont, Palo Alto and the 408, 650 and 415 area codes.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Internal
• communications
• podcast
• production