65 | Using internal podcasting to connect more powerfully with your people with Jen Grogono

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

But there is so much fear, to your point, of what if I get this wrong, and this is not a medium I'm used to working in. It takes as long to record a podcast as it does to build a good PowerPoint. In fact, much, much less in many cases. If you think about it in those terms, it's a much more efficient mechanism.

Hi there, and welcome to this episode of Building Better Cultures. Um, it's an exciting day, and before I get on with today's show, I want to tell you a little bit about our sponsor. Yes, somebody has decided that they like the podcast enough to want to align their brand with our podcast. Um, Workvivo is the sponsor, and I know firsthand from chatting with their clients the difference that their internal communications and engagement platform has made in giving those company staff a real sense of togetherness over the past 12 months. And I think that, you know, that whole idea of connectedness is something that I've spoken about before, and they've really helped with that. So if you want to learn more about what Workvivo does, then you can just simply pop over to workvivo.com. So thanks a million to them. I really appreciate the support. Moving on to today's guest. I'm a big fan, as you might tell, of podcasts. And it's funny how They've been around for years and years and years and years, and there are literally millions of them out there, all outbound, all kind of customer-led, all going out into the ether. And I've always thought that actually there is a massive market, surely, to use podcasting as an internal platform, to be able to use that as part of your internal communications and engagement mix within an organization. So I'm really pleased that today I'm being joined on the podcast by Jen Grogono, who is the founder and president of uStudio, a tech company based in Austin, Texas. And this is what they do. They provide the, the infrastructure and the backend to allow organizations to have podcasts internally and secured for their staff. Jen, I hope I haven't got that wrong.

Yeah, no, very well done. Thank you.

Thank you. Well, listen, thanks very much for coming on today. I really, I appreciate you taking the time.

Well, thank you for having me. This is a treat to be able to talk to you about some of the things we're working on.

Brilliant. Well, listen, why don't you kick us off? I just like to kind of settle people in gently. Why don't you tell me maybe a little bit, a minute or two about you, about your background, and maybe a bit about UStudio and where that all came from?

Yeah, sure. We started UStudio years ago as a platform to help organizations stream more media, right? Just use more video, embed more video inside of their internal applications, but primarily video. Some companies were doing audio recordings, but not quite as popular as it is now. And over the years, uh, we were asked by a couple of companies to develop an app, a private application, a media streaming application, a podcast application, primarily for their employees. And we just thought, well, how interesting, you know, an actual consumer-like application that would allow them to take all of the the great habits that we've come to know in the consumer world. You talked about how many podcasts exist and how many listeners there are, and try to use that internally and sort of gear that towards an internal audience. And we had spent many years, and I personally spent a lot of my career at the intersection of technology and media and streaming. And this was an opportunity for us to really bring those two things together and help organizations that wanted to turn the power of podcasting on toward their internal workforce. So we built an application in 2018 and launched it sort of later that year. And we now have almost 100 large enterprises using it today.

Wow. And can you tell us who some of the names are? Who are some of the big names?

Yeah, we, uh, Nike uses it for one. Uh, we've got companies like Morgan Stanley, Boston Consulting Group, um, AXA Insurance has used it in, in the UK. Yeah, we've got, we've had a number of large management consulting firms and pharmaceutical companies, Novo Nordisk, Astellas Pharmaceuticals. So we've been very fortunate to work with companies like that who have really brought us forward with our initial product and have helped us continue to develop it and make it just even better.

Brilliant. And what do you think is, what do you think are the challenges that, that podcasting solves some of the challenges that organizations are facing today with how they communicate with their people?

Well, I think part of what we're dealing with is a set of what I would call ineffective and sort of low-throughput channels, right? So documents are being shared via Dropbox and PowerPoints are being shared via PDFs and online presentations, and, you know, we've just not really transformed the internal communications world for many years. You know, it really is truly email is the lingua franca and primarily read/write channels versus listen/watch channels. And we started seeing the more video, now more audio be produced and these listen/watch channels is what I call them, gain a lot of momentum in the enterprise. But it really wasn't until COVID, I think, that created sort of a tailwind for that. Part of communications inside. And why? Because it sort of exposed the weaknesses in most organizations' internal infrastructure when it comes to communications. And you had several workforces feeling even more disconnected. So we've seen a great deal of investment and time and energy now be put towards how to create a Netflix experience for the enterprise. How do you actually build a true listen and watch platform? Platform for businesses. So that— and not to say that you wouldn't build those capabilities or those formats into other apps. And we have— most of our customers are integrated with the intranet and with their learning management system and with the WorkVivos of the world. Very, very important to not just have a listen-watch channel that's siloed, right, but to have, you know, sort of a Netflix-style experience or an Apple Podcasts-style experience, but then also take that content and integrate it and weave it into, you know, all of the other applications that the enterprise has already invested in. Hmm.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And it's interesting that when we think about the whole idea of, if I say, you know, podcast, even if it's whether it's external or internal podcast, you use that word and everyone immediately thinks it's this kind of thing. Whereas if you say, well, we've just introduced an audio channel, into the organization so you can now speak to people. Although it's exactly the same thing, it's quite a different offer in people's minds. And I also think that as a channel, I still think that people don't really like being on video. I'm probably one of the few that doesn't mind it, but they don't mind— they mind less their voice being heard. And it's easy to do, of course, with an iPhone. It's very easy for me to record 5 minutes of audio, a little shout out to some staff who've done a great job on a project, or maybe doing an all-hands meeting on audio rather than sending out, you know, the quarterly results deck.

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I think there are habits that have just been ingrained, and for whatever reason, audio and recording our voice is a lot more accessible to most organizations and leaders than recording a video. I think, you know, that maybe the younger generation coming up, the future workforce, will be slightly more attuned towards creating video and slightly less probably inhibited in terms of being in front of the camera. But, you know, the interesting thing that, or the newness, I guess, for a lot of internal communicators is this show episode framework, right? This concept of, I'm going to make a show and it's going to be called, you know, our town hall meetings, you know, certainly be more creative than that. But if you follow me, then you've got, you know, a list of episodes underneath that, and those episodes come out on a schedule. And so you start to think about the characteristics of what is a podcast. Embodi. It needs to have that type of a framework. There needs to be some element of consistency in publishing. There needs to be an element and consistency of format, right? So some shows will be interview shows, some shows will be corporate leadership speaking to employees about a quarterly, you know, earnings update if it's public. So that is, that is the part that I would say is, is new and is being learned. It's not terribly which is really challenging for a lot of communicators to think about messages in a show episode framework. But that's kind of borrowing from the media world and turning your content into something that looks and feels, right? I click a box with an image on it and I see lots of related pieces of content. That's what our employees are used to. That's the preference switch, the behavioral switch we've seen over the course of the last, really, 5 to 7 years. And in terms of just, as a consumer, it's what we do now, right? Whether it's your Apple TV or your, you know, HBO Max or pick your favorite streaming network, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, you're— you— we are— we have become accustomed to that looks like an interesting topic, that looks like an interesting host, that looks like interesting content, I'm going to click on that box and subscribe or follow. I'm going to be notified when a new episode is released. These are all concepts and features, if you will, that we take for granted, but it is sort of what the expectation has become when we think about learning something.

I think if nothing else, what the pandemic has done, as we've all been stuck at home, is make us realize that actually what we want to have is some of the experiences that we get when we are consuming media outside of work. To your point, I think we'd like to see those same types of channels be inside of work too. And I think, you know, for me, the incredible thing when you look at some of the research, and we touched off a little bit of this earlier on, that if you look at Podcast Insights, there are now nearly 2 million podcasts out there with 47 million episodes of content. I wonder from your perspective, why do you think it is that internal private podcasting has been so comparatively slow really to take off? Like, I couldn't really point to many of my clients who've got one. And if they have got one, they're kind of doing it themselves. You know, they kind of got it lumped on back of an intranet or they got it lumped on the back of SharePoint, they're self-managing. It's okay to start with, but it's just not the same type of quality we'd expect to see and quantity from external podcasts. Why is that?

Yeah, because most of these companies are dealing with a behavioral change, right? I talked about the habit on the part of the consumer, right? To click a box and select content or choose to follow or subscribe to a show. That's very well ingrained. Right? That, but an internal communicator, and actually even as a consumer, what's not ingrained is recording a podcast. And, and that's not a habit that I would say has solidified to the degree that it is second nature. You're absolutely right that voice is much more accessible. So I think that's why a lot of organizations have made the move. There is, the bar is much lower, right? If I said you have to make a TV show for your company, you know, there would be people who are scared to death. And yet, and actually the workforce may be scared as well, but the creators who listen to podcasts themselves, when I say the creators, I mean the leaders, the executives, and the internal communicators, most of them are, and again, the early adopters, if you will, they are looking at this medium and they're looking at the, what it takes to record a podcast and publish a podcast and We'll get into our 6 Ps curriculum in a second because I think that's an important piece of this enablement, if you will. But most of them will look at it and go, well, you know, we've been recording conference calls forever. And I do think thanks to the pandemic, there again some good tailwinds came out of the last year, and that is, you know, they all had to do Zoom. You know, those who didn't believe in video conferencing, right? And whether you primarily used it for audio or video. And so There is, there has been a move on the part of many, many internal communicators to just jump over the line, right? Just to get started. But there is so much fear to your point of what if I get this wrong? And this is not a medium I'm used to working in. It takes as long to record a podcast as it does to build a good PowerPoint. In fact, much, much less in many cases. And that is, if you think about it in those terms, much more efficient mechanism.

Yeah. And I, for a listener's perspective, I am nodding vigorously at that point, for I have built many PowerPoints and I've recorded many podcasts. I know for sure that recording voice and just getting your message out in a way that's a bit more engaging, hopefully, he says, is way more powerful. It's really interesting, Jen. One thing you picked up on there when you talked about producers, those that are recording the content and the place that you went straight to there was execs and senior leaders and those types of people. I see this as a channel, actually very similar. I remember when we first launched SharePoint in a company I worked in years ago, and we let people have access to their own sites. We just said, well, look, here's a button, you push the button and it'll say to us, can I have a site? And we'll say, yes, here's a site. And you put together a site for your team and you make it happen and it'll be amazing. And you take that responsibility in the empowerment locally to do that. I think with something like in-house podcasting, there is a massive opportunity just to say to staff, listen, we're going to have some guidelines. Don't say bad words, don't throw people under a bus, don't sully the reputation of the organization. But you know what? Go for it because we want to hear about your favorite recipes. We want to hear about your penchant for chess. We want to hear about the LGBTQ plans that we have for the summer. We want to hear about these things and actually hand over responsibility for content to staff and get them to start publishing. I think that's probably one of the most exciting things about a channel like this.

It really is. And it's funny, you're 100% right. The mature organizations we work with, Pure Storage comes to mind, I think they have about 80 shows. These are companies that once they've launched the podcast, and they've usually got a very strong leader internally who's championing it, they always have a good executive support, they have in many cases created a federated model, just like your intranet example, where they've launched the platform, they've launched a series of shows, maybe 2 or 3, and no question, you know, a certain department in India wants to come on and do their own podcast. Or we've seen lots of IT organizations actually want to come on and talk to the rest of the company about what's happening in the IT group and what they're developing. If it's it's, you know, a heavy R&D-oriented business. And so yes, it's exactly the same impact, right? I've put this platform in place and then all of a sudden, you know, the imagination of your workforce opens up and everybody has a show idea. And I think that's the part of this business and this initiative, forget the commercial part of it, but the change that's happening in the internal comms space, We know just as humans, anytime you put something new inside of a company, anytime you ask people to make change or change how they're doing things, you are going to deal with some fear and some reticence to just get started. And so our big push is to enable people to just get started. We don't have to work with the companies that have 80 shows and 100 shows and 30 shows, because most of them have figured it out on their own after that initial push. And that is exactly what you said, you know, the ultimate end game for them is to allow conversation to happen and community to build around streaming media. And we know, you know, there's so much more meaning that can be imparted. You know, for me to sit and think about how to get the tone right in an email, and maybe it's only a 4-line email, you know, every employee deals with that. These read-write channels are so inefficient in so many ways. And as much as I love to read, and actually, I love to write. There's no question that I could listen to a podcast and get lots more meaning and get the message a lot more clearly than if I were having to either write it or read it.

Yeah. And I think, for me, one of the big things for an organization rolling out a platform like this or a video platform is not necessarily just thinking about how do I use this from an internal comms perspective, actually, how do we use this broadly through the organization? How could HR use it for onboarding? How could we use that to get people telling, you know, that part of the onboarding program is listening to some small audio files or little podcasts with people telling their stories? Hi, I'm Jen. I work in IT. I've done this, this, and this. I come from here. I've been here for years. What I love about it is this. What I don't like about it is that. And just bringing that whole human auditory sense that we don't get necessarily when we're reading through the onboarding manual, ugh, or HR using it for training or compliance using it for little 5-minute monthly updates. Here's what you need to know this month, rather than paging through pages and pages of PDFs. And I think the really, really switched-on companies, and I'm guessing that, I think it was Pure Media you mentioned there with their 80 shows.

Pure Storage.

Pure Storage. I can't imagine that all of those shows are—

They should be called Pure Media now.

Yeah, they should be. I can't imagine that all their stuff is internal comms. It must be a mix of shows across different functions. Yeah, for sure.

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One thing you touched on there earlier on was this whole idea of your 6 Ps, which are people, programming, production, publishing, promotion, and performance. I didn't remember those. I just read them off the screen.

That's very impressive.

I was going to say, yeah, that would have been impressive. I can barely remember my own name these days. Talk me through them, maybe one at a time briefly, just about each one of them and why they're important when people are thinking about starting an internal podcast.

Yeah. So we developed this curriculum as a way— curriculum's sort of a heavy word, but we developed this framework to help companies who were, uh, and people who were just sitting on the side. Maybe they decided to podcast, but they were just sort of hanging back, not launching very quickly. Still a little bit nervous about rolling out a program. And so it was really designed to just reduce the barriers, right, to getting started. And the people one is very interesting because a lot of companies forget that the, the difference between a successful initiative and a non-successful initiative is usually who's involved. Do you have executive support? Do you have some, you know, workforce evangelism happening So you sort of have the top and the bottom covered. And do you have the right team of people to actually push forward and execute the program? And so that's a lot of coaching around how you help make your organization ready for this, right? And how you just don't underestimate the change management piece. The second one is really around programming, thinking like a a TV executive, right? How often am I going to— what's my show, but how often am I gonna release an episode? What is the format of my show? What is the genre? Am I gonna have music in it, or is it gonna be just folks talking? And what's the length? What's the perfect length? We get that question a lot as well. So it's a lot of consultation around and guided, you know, guided programming conversation where we can brainstorm, we can get— provide worksheets. We have a university launch with a whole, you know, set of content elements around that particular topic. But that's one that I would say is where that show episode framework comes in, where you need to start thinking about your communications or your training or your, you know, whatever your use case is in terms of that show episode construct.

From a programming perspective, how much have you seen clients bring in, like, when they have gone with a federated model, as you said, where they've gone out to teams within their organization and said, said, "Here's the channel, crack on, create something, work away." How much training have they done for those people, or have they just literally handed over the toys to the candy store and said, "There you go, crack on"?

In some cases, they've handed it over, but I haven't seen anyone do that without providing some sort of set of guidelines. You said it well, we're gonna try to keep the language clean. We wanna make sure we don't throw people under the bus, I think was the phrase you used. That has been the norm. So if you're going to open the channel up, in some cases companies have internal studios, sound studios, where they'll allow people to sign up to use the studio so then they can control the audio. There are guidelines, I mean, for lack of a better word. I think the natural next step might be to enable some sort of training internally. Right, so once this internal team, this comms team is up and running and feels sufficiently trained themselves and able to help others, I think they're then able to provide some sort of ongoing training, monthly training that they hold, office hours if you will, to allow the organization or those within the organization that wanna take advantage of the channel, but just don't really, again, know how to get started. So this is very much train the trainer for us. Make sure that the folks that we're working with know how to get a podcast program right. And of course, once you have the programming piece set, it's just about producing it. Which mics do you use? You know, which— do I need to have an editing suite or can I just online, you know, cut this together? And there's so many tools out there. We provide all sorts of helpers to make sure that folks have the equipment and the tools they need. It's not expensive. You know, this— It's not a heavy lift, as you know.

And most people can actually do it directly on their phone or their iPad.

Absolutely.

There are tools out there to let you do that just locally, record it on the phone. I mean, as long as you don't care too much about— I've got expensive mics and stuff like that and decent headphones, but if you don't have that, then the headset from your iPhones or your mobile with a little mic into the phone and off you go. And as long as the organization's comfortable that it's not production studio quality all the time. I personally quite like that.

I know. And it's authentic.

And you know what? That's the word that I was gonna touch on there. When just at the beginning of the pandemic, I was doing some work with Enterprise Ireland, who is an Irish semi-state agency. They were producing some videos, but of course we couldn't get people into a studio because it was a pandemic. So we just said to them, listen, just record yourself on your phone and send it into us. Some of the quality wasn't amazing. Some of the sound wasn't amazing. Some of the picture quality was a bit iffy, But you know what? It was real. And I think that was the really, really big thing. So that was production. Let's talk a little bit about publishing.

Yeah, so on the publishing front, it's about making sure you have the date and the metadata, what the fancy word for the episode description, right? So when you're publishing content, you need to make sure that you are putting the right words to describe what the content is. Down, right? Because we know that when people press play, there's an expectation you've set. So it's making sure that all of the elements, the time of day you want it published, you're, you're mindful of the day of the week you want it published, etc., is all organized and you've got some sort of a calendar set up for your team. Again, not hard, it's just a matter of doing it and making sure that you've got those pieces prepared. Keywords for search, And you'd be surprised. I mean, just the title of an episode. If I said, um, you know, XYZ movie starring Brad Pitt, uh, that's gonna get a heck of a lot more people pressing play than if I just maybe said the name of the movie. So there are lots of things we can take from our consumer world even there, again, where if you're interviewing, for example, a very senior executive at your company who's got some sort of star power internally, um, you wanna make sure that person person's name is in the headline, or in the episode title. And that description, of course, you may want to reinforce the name. But that's the sort of tricks that we help people think through when they're getting through kind of the publishing angle. And I think, you know, consistency there. Again, making sure that you're consistently publishing on a schedule, because people will come to expect, "Oh, that show's got a new episode coming out every week or every two weeks." Yeah.

And that's one thing that I say to my— it used to be, you know, now it's podcasts. It used to be newsletters. We want to do a newsletter. And I used to say to them, okay, that's fine. If you can give me an outline structure for the next 6 editions of your newsletter, we'll do it. And if you can't, we shouldn't. Because what's going to happen is you'll get 2 in and then you'll lose steam, you'll lose momentum, and you won't go on. And that's exactly the same as this. And it's something that I learned fairly early on. This goes out twice a month. It has done since the beginning. And you're right, people do have an expectation. And if you don't meet that expectation, you lose people. They just won't listen to it. And I think if you want to create a following internally, then that publishing piece is so, so important and ties in very nicely to your fifth P, which is promotion.

Yeah, it does. Because ultimately, you know, if a tree falls, we all know the old adage. For us. We have to make sure that people are aware of the podcast program as, as internal communicators or trainers or the HR team, if you will. And we need to make sure that all of the places where our workforce is living online day to day, we're able to put little breadcrumbs back to the application and back to the episode. So we work to help our customers identify What are the well-traveled places, right? Is it email? Is it the intranet? Is it a social site? Maybe it's Workplace, you know, the Facebook Workplace offering or Yammer. We want to make sure that any and all of those applications, you're able to drop in what we call a promotional embed, which really just rounds off to an ad for the show or the episode. In some cases, we allow folks to embed that content straight inside of those applications. So if you actually want to click on it and have it in situ play, you can do that. So again, just like a podcast in the consumer world, I might go to your website, maybe I can listen there, maybe you point me to Apple Podcasts to have a better experience. Those are all options we offer as well. And if you want the end user to download an app or download the episode and be able to listen offline, right? Then you want to obviously direct them back to an application. If you want them to just be able to stream it right there, than having a link, but those are all good options. And the key again is discovery. It's just, it's discovery and what we call resource links and how do we make sure that you don't create this amazing content and then nobody knows about it. So, you know, it's easy when you have the CEO of an organization raise his or her hand and say, I'd like to do a podcast because that creates sort of a groundswell. So there are also tricks where you can put diversity and inclusion content. Some of the content in your company that is mandatory. Now have that be inside the podcast as well. So that will naturally have folks begin to use it and adopt the mechanism. But we haven't seen adoption be the biggest issue because people are actually hungry for this, right? They're hungry for an easier place to go consume content. And once they're there, of course, you can see you have options to consume other content, to play back other content. So I would say promotion is really about getting folks in. And then once they're in, there's sort of a natural organic discovery of content inside of the app.

And I guess one of the big things then, just finishing off your 6 Ps, is of course knowing that people have consumed, that people have listened, and performance therefore. And of course, we all now these days love data. The whole idea of knowing, well, is this working or is it not working? And that 6th P then is performance.

Yeah, and that's huge, right? We really don't know if somebody read an email. We don't know if they read the PowerPoint or the PDF. Um, you know, we absolutely have absolutely no idea. With streaming media, you know, down to the second, we are tracking every second. Every 1%, actually, is a better way to say it, because every length, you know, every episode is a different length, right? Every 1% is being tracked, and we know which content performs well and which content doesn't And so your ability as a communicator to actually have a feedback loop that the rest of our, you know, businesses, organizations have enjoyed forever, especially the marketing function, right? We just haven't had that level of data at our fingertips. And so to know which shows are performing well, to know your top episodes, to understand where in an episode someone's rewinding, or maybe a lot of people are rewinding, there's a hotspot there. Maybe there was a really good great point to understand which ones get shared the most and liked the most and bookmarked the most. I mean, these are just amazing pieces of data that most communicators salivate over because now finally there's a way to understand if the thing that they're getting compensated to do, talk to people, message to people, is actually being consumed. And that's just, that's an exciting, area for us. It's growing in its sophistication, in its importance. In fact, I just worked with Kohl's, which is a big customer of ours, to assess the consumption, what we call the engagement index. How long are people sticking with and playing back content?

Okay. That's a really interesting point, I think, that we can understand that if we look back at that data and we see that people are dropping off at 2 minutes 40 seconds, consistently in the episodes, we've been putting in the main meat and two veg, the main content at 3 minutes, then nobody's heard any of that.

That's exactly right. And so, you can decide to change the arc, right? And so, maybe your next episode, you put all the meat up front. The truth is we've got a pretty strong index internally, benchmarks, because of the companies we work with and the amount of data we have, the amount of episodes we have. So, in aggregate, we're actually able to say a training video podcast or a training audio podcast performs this way. Typically, a corporate communications-oriented podcast performs this way. And it's, it's pretty interesting when you see, you know, you always see a drop in the beginning. That's typically a promotional— did you tell the user, did you set the expectation appropriately, right? I just started, I press play, oh, this wasn't really what I wanted, I'm dropping off. You you always see a dip there. Not a massive one, but 10, 15 points, percentage points. And then you wanna see that middle, you know, between 10% and 90% consumption playback to be a pretty flat line because that says you're holding the audience's attention almost throughout the entire piece. And then at the very end, 10 to 100, sorry, 90 to 100%, that last 10%, you always have a drop-off. Right, in fact, in the early days of tracking this data, this was probably 10 years ago, I remember talking to a data scientist who said, "Well, there's something wrong with your system. You know, there's always a drop-off at the end." And I said, "That is human behavior." We know when an episode is wrapping up. We know when the story arc is coming to an end. We intuit it. You might say it. You might say, "Well, you know, thanks so much for being here. And you know, I just wanna recap what so-and-so said." And we know. And guess what? A large number of people go, yep, I'm good. To your point, the meat is done, right? I've consumed it. So it's exciting to, to think about now what can you do with that data using AI, right? What kind of recommendations? How does the system now tell you how to construct a perfect podcast episode? So it's— this is an area that, um, even by the way, looking at pre-pandemic and post-pandemic engagement huge difference. We've seen a huge difference. The level of engagement is much, much higher in 2020 and 2021 so far.

Because people want to hear human voices.

That's right.

We really miss that.

Yeah, yeah. No, there's no question. And we don't necessarily all want to be crammed on a Zoom, you know, hearing those human voices at the same time. If I could do it while I'm doing my dishes or cooking or, you know, trying to homeschool my children and work at the same time, I mean, there's just, gives you an amazing opportunity to multitask as well, which we didn't really talk about, but it's sort of a no-brainer. So it's that time-shifting, place-shifting, you know, type of concept we get with digital media in general. So it's, yeah, that performance piece is one that I get personally very excited about because it's, I think it's the first time in a long time we've been able to really understand and study communications inside of the enterprise.

Yeah, and I think as an internal communicator, I'd be looking at that and going, oh my God, so the analytics at the backend, the AI engine can tell me not what a best format podcast looks like in general, but based on the data of my listeners in my organization, what a best practice podcast episode looks like for my organization and for my listeners. That is very exciting. That the last 10% nobody listens to is extremely useful because I kind of go, well, that's normally where we put in our call to action. So that means that nobody's hearing our call to action.

Yep.

You know, even to your point about, you know, seeing where people rewind, you know, is it because there was a really well-made point, or is it because the person doing the speaking said something too quickly that people didn't quite get? And we have to therefore say to that person, the next time you record an episode, slow Really, really exciting, really interesting stuff.

Well, and actually, I mean, I have a real-world example of that. On a video podcast, there was an individual who had a shirt, a t-shirt with a phrase on it. And there was a lot of rewinding in this one spot where the individual was standing up, but not for a terribly long period of time. People wanted to read the shirt. And it was unbelievable. It was almost everybody would rewind. The person in the podcast was a bit of a character too. So there was, it was a snarky, Marky saying on the shirt, but it— there was this huge heat map, you know, uh, explosion of rewinds, and we just went, what is going on? The customer asked us, and that's what we determined it was. So you're absolutely right, it's curiosity, or I didn't hear that, or I didn't see that. And, um, and those are just fun, you know, the fun side of it, right? But there's no question that with that data, there's all sorts of things we'll be able to do. And, and, and by the way, this is why YouTube doesn't have a lot of, you know, those post-roll videos those ads, right? People aren't necessarily buying those in droves because everyone knows that at the bitter end, no one's sticking on to— it's pre-roll, it's mid-roll, it's overlays. Um, but no, you don't know. And so, so what does that mean for the enterprise? Yeah, don't put your call to action at the bitter end. Um, you know, make sure you're mentioning it somewhere in the middle, make sure you're mentioning in the beginning. Hey, if there is something at the end you need someone to stay for, you need to say it in the podcast. Hey, Don't hang up at the end, you know, don't quit listening. We've got a really important thing for you to go do. The other thing we recommend is in the episode description, put your show notes and your links in there. You know, make sure that you take advantage of that episode description section because that's where you can really start driving people to other spots.

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. Let me ask you, I think those will— in our own show notes for this show, we'll make sure that those 6 Ps are listed up there and we'll have a link back to the section on your website that has them there too, so people can go and have a look at those. Which of those 6, they're all important obviously, or else you wouldn't have put them in there. Which of the 6 do you think is the trump card? Which is the one that's most important to get right, briefly?

Yeah, I think it's the programming. I think if you are clever about the content you're making, the show episode framework you're putting in place, and the format you're using, I really believe that great content content, whether it's, you know, user-generated or not, right? Great doesn't necessarily mean high production value or it has music in it. It means it's useful, it's engaging, it's what your audience needs and wants, it's what your workforce has been clamoring for. Um, getting that right, which is, you know, matching the programming to your people, is I think the most important thing to do. Because once you've got great content, the cream will rise to there will be conversations, there will be more sharing, there will be more liking. And if you've nailed that piece of it, which as communicators, that's kind of the most fun part and the thing that we're best suited for, which is great. And we can get people to help us with all the other pieces, the production and the publishing and the promotion, the performance measurement. But getting that programming piece right is critical. And of course, I'd say second to that is the people.

And I think from a programming perspective, I would argue that that is the case with any channel. If you introduced SharePoint 10 years ago, if you introduced Workvivo or Ustudio or Slack or whatever channel, a channel is only as good as the plan and the content behind the channel. Build it and they will come does not work. No, no, I would agree that. I think that programming piece is fundamentally important to get that right, to know what it is we're trying to achieve and know most importantly how we're therefore going to achieve it. Let me ask you one final question, Jen, just conscious of time as usual, because I could talk for hours about this stuff, as could you. If somebody's sitting here listening to this, they work in internal comms and they're sitting on the fence about starting an internal podcast, what's the first thing other than buy U-Studio, which would be the obvious answer, What's the first thing they should do? How can they get going simply?

Yeah, well, actually, it's funny. Yes, buy uStudio. No, actually, we tell people not to buy our software until they're ready. We have a pretty strong diagnostics conversation up front, and if you're not ready, we definitely don't want you buying, you know, a private white-label application for your workforce. The first thing we tell people to do is to get the people aligned, right? To make sure that the IT organization, the executive leadership, and your individual team, whether you're on the training or HR internal comms team, we want to make sure that you've got the people aligned. And I think once you've got that internal objective set, the strategy has been cemented, right? The objective is we want to communicate better and bring communications up to the 21st century. The strategy being we're gonna try podcasting or streaming media to do this. It's about getting the right folks inside the company ready and on board. And I think once you've got that support, everything else can be learned and handled. But, you know, too often companies will— people will inside of companies will have a great idea and an initiative, and we love to work with them and help them. But, you know, all of a sudden somebody in IT says there's no way. Hey, we can't put the CEO's message in a podcast app, or we're gonna need to do months of InfoSec reviews and make sure that, and we've done that, by the way, of, you know, we've got big financial services companies that use our software and we have to go through those InfoSec reviews all the time. For us, it's second nature, but often we know more than they know when they come in and say, hey, I wanna do this. We know what some of those hurdles and barriers are. And so we really do push folks out of the gate, make sure you've got the right folks, especially the IT organization on board, because nothing will stop an internal initiative faster than, you know, the tech guys saying, "We can't do this. This is our crown jewels, cannot be trafficked across this platform that we just have never used before." So it's a learning curve for everybody. And I think that's the key is get that internal coalition built.

Yeah. I think what I've seen work really well is, and actually I was on a podcast with Workvivo and Permanent TSB because they launched one themselves, very lo-fi, not much tech behind it, and off they went. And it's working really, really well for them. So certainly, to add to what Jen just said there, my advice is just go for it, just start. When I listen back to my first podcast episode back 3 years ago with Mary Davis, I just cringe. You can hear me eating biscuits in the background, like seriously. But thankfully, thankfully, thankfully we've moved on from there. We are out of time. If people want to get more on uStudio, then I presume website is the best place, uStudio, capital U, uStudio.com. I know having had a look through the website, there's tons of stuff up there on podcasting in general. So a really, really good set of resources if you are interested in looking at having your own internal white label podcast. For now, Jen, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Really interesting, and I hope for listeners, really, really helpful if that's a channel they are considering introducing in their organization. So thanks so much for taking the time.

Oh, likewise. I loved it. Thank you so much for having me on.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders on our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.