Town Hall speeches and emails to staff are common places for the CEO of an organisation. Some bosses actually create videos and share them with staff, but how about your own company’s flash briefing played via Alexa on the Amazon Echo or via Google Home?
In order to publish audio, you need a voice content management system before you can start to deliver broadcast messages. The science of creating a podcast is quite technical and therefore provides a barrier to entry.
Now playing audio from simply the CEO is one thing but playing audio from employees, management and customers is something else. What if you played the customer testimonials of that month on your company’s flash briefing? Perhaps it’s a manager been giving special praise for work. Yes, the CEO can broadcast the latest strategic updates against the plan but getting this stories from other parts of the business told makes a truly engaging internal company podcast.
Audio brings the message to life and easily beats email. What I’m not saying is to replace the bulk email messages sent top to bottom within an organisation. Nor am I saying that printed letters or handwritten messages don’t work. What is true is that the voice conveys emotion and the tone of the message helps for better understanding.
One reason why podcasting can be complicated is the need to edit the audio which is a technical task. If you remove the need to edit audio just in time podcasting becomes possible and therefore time to delivery is decreased and non-technical people can get involved. This is where Sound Branch comes in as a voice content management system that allows you to deliver compelling audio experiences to your employees and other stakeholders.
On Sound Branch, all voice notes are recorded in 10 to 20 seconds. This, therefore, means the margin of error of getting the audio wrong or simple mistakes can be eliminated. Instead of editing audio you simply re-record the snippet in question until you get it right. The small snippets of audio piece together which means that you think about what you say a little bit more and therefore the quality of the audio goes up.
So in reality what does this mean? It means that the CEO of a global organisation can enter the office at 7 a.m., think of an important message that he’s got to get out to the entire business, record this on his smartphone device or through his desktop PC on a web browser and instantaneously can be played via Alexa on the Amazon Echo or via Google Home devices and other smart speakers.
Now if your organisation does not have smart speakers at the workplace all the content is available via the web or mobile apps. All employees and staff need to do is to download the Sound Branch app from the Apple App Store or Google Play or simply visit soundbranch.com. Better still, all the audio is transcribed and therefore is searchable with elastic search. On Google, you search people’s web pages and on Sound Branch you search people’s thoughts. Searching people’s thoughts and the ability to recall important messages about your business and play them back is a different way to communicate internally.
Instead of the old agenda for a board meeting where there is an A4 print out of the meeting agenda, perhaps, the chairman will simply play the voice notes. Listening to these voice notes is a lot more compelling for the board than simply reading from an A4 piece of paper. Understanding the numbers in the business is important when reviewing the financial performance and sales figures within an organisation. This can be enhanced by commentary and overlaying the voice notes with the financial data can vastly improve decision making.
In the consumer world, podcasting is rapidly growing as on-demand entertainment and education becomes mainstream. The opportunity is for internal podcasting to enhance internal communications within large organisations. In many big businesses, managers read out the latest figures and KPI’s to their departments and their teams. Sometimes, Chinese whispers ensue and the message is not clear. Internal podcasting can give clarity of message, authenticity and breathe life into messages which are sometimes misconstrued or misunderstood. Making it easy for anyone and everyone to contribute to your companies flash briefing offers a new refreshing way to communicate.