Converting Pre-Existing Assets into Corporate Podcasts

For those who don’t think they have enough time to continually post new content to their private podcast - think again. Many existing assets would serve as great podcast topics and can be easily transformed into the appropriate format for your employees to consume. And, if you want to get your program started quickly, looking at what helpful business messages you have in the queue or have already produced is an easy way to begin.

Migrating existing media libraries to your podcast is easy. The uStudio interface accepts many common formats for podcast upload. If you feel as if you are running out of ideas for your private podcast, take a look at these existing items that you might already own.

Webinars or Presentations.

Are you looking to turn old webinars or presentations into audio podcasts for your employees?

With uStudio, you can upload a video to an audio-only podcast show and the audio of the video will be played as a podcast episode. The thumbnail of your new podcast episode will be shown in the same area of the player as the video would normally play. This functionality makes it easy for uStudio users to repurpose old material. As long as your pre-existing webinar is in an acceptable file format for upload, you can upload it to your podcast management console without any additional work if you are needing podcast content in a crunch. Note that once files have uploaded, uStudio will take a few minutes to process and convert the file into the best format for the podcast application.

This website also lists some free tools for extracting audio files from video. If there are old training webinars that you believe would make a nice podcast episode, it could be worth extracting the audio and uploading the file to uStudio for your next podcast episode.

Zoom Recordings

In today’s rising health concerns, many businesses are now holding important meetings and all-hands via Zoom. The software can also serve as a podcast recording tool. Our friends at Resonate Recordings recently posted a helpful blog that explains how to record a podcast interview with Zoom video conferencing. 

The blog contains a checklist of steps and best practices to record with the software such as the following:

“For podcasting with Zoom, the most important tabs are Audio and Recording. Verify that your microphone appears in the list of available mics, select it and then tap the Test Mic button to record some test audio and play it back.

Select your headphones and run a quick test by tapping Test Speaker. You should hear the Zoom ringtone in your headphones. We recommend that you enable the “Press and hold spacebar” unmute shortcut. Zoom calls work best when everyone except for the speaker is muted, but the participants can rapidly unmute without having to click around to find the mute button.

Be sure to record a separate audio file for each participant. This will allow our team to mix your episode properly. You also want to allow Zoom to keep temporary recording files. If something happens to your computer during the call, this may help you recover the audio and not lose a valuable interview. I recommend having Zoom ask you where to save the recordings after the meeting ends so you don’t forget where the files are saved.

If you don’t have at least 16GB of space remaining, you should consider upgrading or freeing space on the computer before you start recording calls,” the article states.

Next time you are holding an important Zoom meeting or call, consider recording it and turning it into your next private podcast episode.

Blogs

What if you currently have a blog or helpful written asset and want to create a podcast episode based on your content? Depending where your blogs are posted, and if you have analytics available on those platforms, it can be helpful to assess which pieces are performing best by looking at those that have the highest amounts of visits. Would those high-performing blogs make for a great podcast episode?

For the blogs that have yet to be written, but are incorporated into your content calendar, consider planning to produce an accompanying podcast episode at the same time an internal blog is published. A podcast can allow you to dive deeper into the blog subject. Turning text into audio allows companies to enhance their tone, meaning, and emotional elements to their employees - which is a great advantage to get your message across.

Sales Enablement Collateral.

Chances are, you already have a ton of valuable sales enablement collateral within your organization. However, getting sales professionals to find and read your emails, PDFs and slide decks is the hardest problem faced by sales enablement professionals. Consider turning those assets into a new private podcast episode!

Written customer feedback can be transformed into live conversations with your customers on a podcast, sharing their experience with your company. Competitive battlecards can become tutorials with the reps who know the competition inside and out, and product one sheets can become recorded demos. The opportunities are endless!

Town Halls

Certain activities in the workplace lend better to live podcasting. If you are hosting a corporate event, executive address, town hall meeting soon, you can live stream the occasion via podcast. This way, your employees can listen to the event in the same way your employees listen to Spotify and won’t have to juggle with any dial-in codes. This helpful blog discusses how you can best determine when it is more useful to live stream a podcast versus when you should record a podcast for later upload.

Employee Stories

Next time you feel as if you are running out of things to talk about, turn to your employees! Featuring employee success stories, personal stories, or more through a private interview podcast is a great way to increase company culture and ensure your workers are super-engaged. Not to mention, people love to talk about themselves and listen to their fellow peers.

As always, if you are migrating media or converting a pre-existing asset into a podcast, it’s important that you notify your employees ahead of time of any changes. When it comes to producing material for your podcast, don’t feel obligated to reinvent the content wheel. Getting started creating material for your private podcast is easy, especially when you take a step back and look at what you already have right in front of your eyes.