Effective ways to distribute a corporate podcast for internal employees only
Summary: Companies need to weigh up the need for privacy against the need for easy accessibility for staff. There are three options to choose from: public, unlisted, private. Read on to learn the advantages and disadvantages of each.
If you are making an internal podcast for thousands of employees, or even just a small team, you certainly want to make sure they don't have to struggle to listen to it. Today we all expect access to content in one or two clicks; to be available on mobile phones or smart speakers within seconds of selecting them. But for companies who wish to make their internal podcasts private (and there are many good reasons for doing so), this presents a problem - how do you make your internal podcast both readily available for staff via popular or common listening apps AND yet make them accessible only to your staff and not the entire internet?
The typical way to distribute podcasts is to make them as public as possible. We distribute them by creating unique RSS feeds, often by third party platforms who publish the file on as many platforms as possible: Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts to name but a few.
Companies who wish to distribute their internal podcasts privately, often publish audio files on the company intranet system, or send an email link to a password-protected URL. Whilst this might meet standard enterprise IT security standards, it is not at all convenient to the staff who would likely prefer to listen to the podcast on their personal phone.
But wait - there is an option in between these two extremes. On his blog at Pacific Content, Dan Miescher has made a great summary of the pros and cons to Unlisted Podcasts.
Unlisted Podcasts
An Unlisted Podcast has everything a publicly available that a podcast should have:
A website
A publicly available RSS feed
Embedded audio players
Dan Miescher writes: “But if you search for the podcast in Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts, you won’t find it. And if you do a Google search for “Example Unlisted Podcast,” you won’t find it there, either.
Staff can subscribe when they receive links and buttons, but anyone outside the organisation will not find it by searching for it.
In most podcast apps, it’s simple and straightforward to follow or subscribe to an unlisted podcast. And in most cases, there’s no need to copy and paste cumbersome RSS feed URLs.”
Unlisted podcasts are made by:
- including <itunes:block> and <googleplay:block> tags in the RSS feed to discourage podcast directories from indexing it.
- using the robots meta tag in an internal podcast minisite to discourage search engines from indexing it
- adding an entry to the private feed blocklist of popular podcast platforms to keep the internal podcast from appearing in the Podcast Index
(paraphrased from https://blog.pacific-content.com/unlisted-podcasts-not-quite-public-not-quite-private-2f61314d58ca)
Comparison of some popular public, unlisted and private distribution routes
Conclusion
For companies who need to make their internal podcasts accessible only to staff, it means that staff probably won't be able to listen to company podcasts via the same podcast platforms they usually use on their smartphones. Or, companies can make Unlisted Podcasts which are easily accessed by staff but not 100% secure, in which case they should adjust the content and scope of the podcasts accordingly.
There are some enterprise-level products out there which allow enterprise staff to listen via dedicated apps, such as UStudio and Storyboard. These will have enterprise-level costs attached, so companies will need to consider whether the need for corporate privacy in their internal podcasts outweighs easy accessibility for staff.