Case Study: Podcasting In Corporate Training
By Frank Nguyen and Mike Giordano

How one company explored the delivery of sales promotion and product information using podcasts and vodcasts.

Imagine that you are a sales representative for a Fortune 500 company. You live the majority of your life out of a suitcase, there’s more mileage on your frequent flier account than your car back home, and you’re concerned that you may have developed a yet-to-be-discovered-repetitive stress injury due to Blackberry overuse. The products that your company offers evolve faster than certain species in remote areas of the Brazilian rainforest, and promotional campaigns expire and emerge faster than weekly specials at your local discount store. To ensure that you stay up-to-date, the corporate office has asked you to dial into a two-hour conference call at 7 p.m., but you’d like to grab your trusty non-fat decaf soy macchiato before catching the red eye flight back home. You have no time to keep up with all of this new information or even think about attending a training class.

Now imagine that you're a sales representative for a different Fortune 500 company. You still live out of a suitcase, prefer the aisle over the window seat, and dream of overflowing inboxes while your Blackberry is tucked away safely under the pillow. Instead of enduring a two-hour conference call late in the evening merely to extract 10 minutes of relevant content, you log into your email and find several new messages alerting you of a new sales campaign for the product channel that you are subscribed to you. Another feed that you’ve signed up for notifies you of new products in development, their features, and when they're expected availability date. You select the few items that seem most interesting to you and download them. On your drive to the airport, you plug your MP3 player into the car and listen to an audio-only recording describing an upcoming sales promotion. On the flight, you decide to skip the in-flight movie and watch a demonstration of next-generation product offerings using your laptop. While running on the treadmill at the hotel’s gym, you listen to the quarterly update from the chief executive officer of your company on your video-enabled wireless phone.

While these scenarios may sound somewhat fictional, they are in fact based on reality. In late 2005, the sales and marketing division of a major semiconductor manufacturing company began exploring ways to optimize the delivery of training and communication content to its global workforce of several thousand sales employees. To address this issue, the company conducted a performance analysis and deployed interventions to better meet the challenges of training its sales force.

Business problem

The company’s sales employees often complained about how difficult it was to stay informed with constant changes in the environment. Historically, primary means of receiving training and information was through two-hour presentations every other week. These conference calls, known as Marketing Forums, often included new product introductions, details on promotions, as well as general information from a corporate perspective. As shown in Figure 1, these forums were repeated three times to accommodate employees located in different time zones and geographies. This meant that each presenter was required to repeat the same information three times and potentially answer similar questions during each session.

Despite the fact that the conference calls were repeated to accommodate a global audience, attendance was quite low in comparison to the total sales population. On average, 75 to 100 sales employees dialed into each Marketing Forum session, whereas the company employed more than 2,500 sales representatives. For the remaining 88 percent of employees, a written summary of the meeting was distributed shortly after the conclusion of the last Marketing Forum. Non-attendees had to rely on this written summary as their exclusive source for information.

Even more, Marketing Forums were conducted using phone conferences, which were charged to the company at the rate of 18 cents per minute, per user. Therefore, an average 90-minute session with 100 attendees would cost approximately $1,620. It was estimated that the annual cost for operating Marketing Forum phone conferences was $145,860.

Enter podcasts and vodcasts

Marketing Forum managers wanted to deliver more dynamic and engaging content to the company’s highly mobile workforce. Instead of forcing sales employees to spend hours at a time on conference calls to receive information or read written summaries from presentations, they wanted to provide promotional and product information in smaller, more easily consumable chunks. More important, they wanted to make this content accessible to employees when and where they needed it: in the airport terminal, from a coffee shop, or at a client’s site.

The group chose to explore two emerging technologies: podcasts and vodcasts. Accroding to a white paper on the Apple website, podcasting is the "process of capturing an audio event, song, speech, or mix of sounds and then posting that digital sound object to a Web site or blog in a data structure called an RSS 2.0 feed." In the context of the Marketing Forums, the sales and product content from the forum could be captured, posted as a digital sound file, and distributed via the company intranet. Such content could be downloaded and played using a personal media device, laptop computer, or other device capable of playing electronic audio files. Vodcasts, also known as vlogging or vidcasting, are similar to podcasts but introduce a video component.

These solutions offered several unique characteristics that indicated they would help the organization bridge the gap from the actual to the desired state. First, both podcasts and vodcasts facilitated the segmentation of content into smaller, more readily consumable chunks. For example, a Marketing Forum session that was previously 120 minutes could potentially be subdivided into 12 10-minute podcasts or vodcasts based on the topic discussed. Second, really simple syndication (RSS) technology that is often associated with podcasting enables users to subscribe to content feeds that may interest them and ignore others. As a result, sales representative specializing in small to medium businesses could subscribe to an RSS feed specifically designated for this segment and receive only podcast or vodcast content specifically focused on that audience. Finally, in comparison to other forms of training and communication, podcasts and vodcasts are relatively easy to author which was a critical factor in enabling subject matter experts and even average sales employees to generate content.

Case study

Before deploying these technologies to the entire sales and marketing organization, the company chose to conduct a trial where traditional Marketing Forum calls were delivered alongside podcasts and vodcasts of the same content. The information from this trial was collected from three Marketing Forum calls conducted over the course of six weeks.

During this trial period, sales employees could chose to receive Marketing Forum information through a podcast, vodcast, or phone conference. Content was identical for each of these three delivery methods. Podcast users could download MP3 audio recordings of the Marketing Forum calls and could then play them on their computer or portable audio device. Vodcast users downloaded Flash-based audio-visual recordings of the Marketing Forum calls that could then be played on their computer. The phone conference attendees called into 90-minute presentations that featured live presenters delivering information over an audio phone bridge. Unlike employees who selected podcasts or vodcasts, the phone conference attendees could pose questions to presenters, receive feedback, and reference printed materials provided by the presenters to support their presentation.

Because the company did not want to eliminate phone conferences until the newer technologies were proven entities, the Marketing Forum calls were reduced from three sessions to one during the trial period. To minimize cost and redundancy, podcasts and vodcasts were developed using actual Marketing Forum calls. As illustrated in Figure 2, audio from the phone conference was electronically captured using a VoiceTap device that allowed the audio to be delivered to both a local phone and computer. The audio stream was recorded using Techsmith Camtasia. In addition, visuals used during the presentation, such as animations, figures, graphics, tables, and PowerPoint presentations, were recorded in Camtasia and synchronized with the presenters’ remarks.

Camtasia was used to export an audio-only MP3 file for use as a podcast at the conclusion of the live phone conference. At the same time, a Flash-based vodcast including audio and visuals was exported for use as a vodcast. These files were then posted to a pre-determined location on a web server approximately two hours after the live phone conference concluded.

Table 2 shows that the average overall attitude rating on follow-up surveys was 3.36 for the podcast group, 3.27 for the vodcast group, and 3.05 for the phone conference group. This suggests that sales employees preferred the segmented, recorded versions of the Marketing Forum over the phone conference.

Table 1: Use of Sales and Marketing Materials

Table 2: Attitude Scores

The company’s primary motivation in pursuing podcasting and vodcasting was to potentially reduce operating costs for the Marketing Forum. Table 3 details a comparative cost analysis for delivering 26 Marketing Forum sessions every year. While phone conferencing does not typically require any production costs, it does require a phone bridge that is billed to the company at the cost of 18 cents per minute per user. In addition, presenters have to provide information to employees not just once, but three times to accommodate all time zones. Delivering Marketing Forums using phone conferences was estimated at a cost of $5,610 assuming an average of 300 employees per week, leading to an estimated annual cost of $145,860.

In comparison, while both podcasts and vodcasts require additional costs to produce the content, phone conference costs could be completely eliminated and presenters would only have to deliver content a single time—either in a live public setting or via a pre-produced recording in a controlled setting. These efficiencies would lead to an estimated cost of $500 and $550 per podcast and vodcast respectively. It was estimated that the company could save more than $130,000 by eliminating phone-based Marketing Forum calls and implementing podcasts or vodcasts exclusively.

Table 3: Marketing Forum Comparative Cost Analysis

Bottom line

By implementing podcasts and vodcasts, the company sought to realize three primary benefits: deliver information to a highly mobile sales workforce in smaller segments, reach a broader audience than traditional Marketing Forum conference calls, and reduce operating costs. At the conclusion of the trial period, it was clear that all three of these objectives could be met through the adoption of podcasts and vodcasts, some beyond original expectations.

Beyond these benefits, there were other notable observations from the case study. The time to produce the podcasts and vodcasts was quite low. Live events could be recorded, edited, published, and released within hours after the live events. The company found the tools easy enough to use that subject matter experts could be trained to pre-record and post their own podcast and vodcast content, thereby reducing or eliminating the need for live synchronous events.

Because Marketing Forum calls could be recorded, sliced, and published as multiple podcasts or vodcasts, sales representatives were no longer obligated to endure the entirety of a conference call but could select the individual content that interested them. In addition, employees noted that the podcast and technology content allowed them to access and consume the content when and where it was convenient for them. One participant noted, "I am really excited about [this] new technology. That is what technology does—it changes the way people live and work."

References

Meng, P. (2005). Podcasting & vodcasting: a white paper. Retrieved May 3, 2007 from http://%20edmarketing.apple.com/adcinstitute/wp-content/Missouri_Podcasting_White_Paper.pdf.