Corporate podcasting making news

Steve Ruble at Micropersuasion points to two signs indicating corporate interest in podcasting.

First, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ (AAPG) just did its first official corporate podcast. Second, Cameron Reilly, an internet/e-business consultant since 1995, working for leading companies such as Microsoft and OzEmail, and now co-founder of The Podcast Network says that over the last couple of days he has been having a very interesting conversation with a senior manager from a tier one US company who is interested in engaging his services to help produce an internal podcast for a certain segment of their staff around the world.

LexBlog is also taking a look at podcasting for its own blog and some its customer’s professional marketing blogs.

Gerald Buckley, of the AAPG, commented on Rubel’s post about the company podcast saying, among other things:

The AAPG hopes it will be perceived by it’s audience as offering an interesting new way to stay up to date with the goings on (whether they avail themselves of the service or not). We currently provide the info via email blasts (some think it’s spam and opt out), web site and RSS.

ALL not for profit associations are facing a common problem – retention of both aging members AND student members. We’re giving it our best shot to serve the entire spectrum in ways they appreciate. Early coverage in the blogoshpere of what we’re doing suggests we might just be onto something good.

Buckley nails it as far as podcasting. It’s not whether its sexy and cool to do. It’s all about the preferences of your target audience.

Some members of a law firm’s audience may enjoy getting regular RSS feeds of brief sound broadcasts so they may play them from their computer or their iPod. Others will prefer RSS and going to the blog. Bottom line – if it’s easy to do podcasts, give ’em what they want.