As podcasting took off in a company setting, it has led to intense demand for private, secure podcasts for use cases as diverse as sales enablement, training and development, culture building, leadership and strategy as well as guided meditation to ease the stress of the job. However, too many of these well-intentioned projects lack the security the firms producing them expect of their vendors.
Allow me to explain – most public-facing podcasts use a decades-old technology called the RSS feed and many ‘private’ podcast vendors simply do not publish the RSS feed. This method of publishing a private podcast means that the content is simply not secure. Anyone with access to the RSS link – such as a friend of the employee who has forwarded the link – can access the content and the company cannot monitor or validate users. If you are contemplating private podcasting for your business, ask your prospective vendor whether they are using this method, and note that if they also publish public-facing podcasts, they most likely are.
RSS Feeds Are Not Secure
RSS feeds have grown the public-facing podcast ecosystem to where it is today, but for your business’s private, secure podcast they cannot be trusted. Many of our clients formerly worked with other vendors who used unpublished RSS feeds to ‘secure’ their private internal content. Often, they find out after the fact – sometimes the result of a disgruntled former employee – that the content was simply not secure at all.
However, RSS feeds are not the only way to distribute content. FieldCast, for instance, has built a totally secure private content distribution network, whereby you can distribute podcasts to your employees, measure their engagement and even port podcast engagement data into your Human Capital Management (HCM) system or other cloud based workforce management solution. By controlling both the administration and consumption of content, FieldCast offers a more robust analytics solution than an RSS feed supported system.
SSO Authentication Podcast Hosting Platform
FieldCast was founded to offer the industry’s only end-to-end secure podcast hosting platform using SSO authentication. Our technology has endured penetration testing, extensive load testing, and the intense scrutiny of numerous domestic and international Fortune 500 companies in industries as diverse as finance, insurance, automotive, CPG, construction, pharma, and oil and gas.
On a client call recently, a new partner in the wealth management industry remarked to me that they had been searching for a truly secure platform to distribute podcast content to their financial advisors and their high-net-worth clients for several years. He felt it was incredibly fortuitous that we had a chance to speak and ultimately work together as several of the other vendors he contemplated working with simply did not pass muster during IT and compliance review.
Record at Home
The FieldCast system allows executives to script, record and edit podcasts right from their desks. For those who prefer, we can provide end-to-end production services. All of this can be completed in a reasonable timeframe so that messages can be distributed in a timely manner, allowing companies to address important issues as they occur. Our website provides blogs and webinars to help companies understand how to use and develop engaging, effective podcasts.