Podcasting and Business: A Series of Tubes or a Dynamic Medium?

Podcasting is made possible by a series of tubes. You shout down one end, and your audience hangs out at the other end and listens to you talk. The sound quality can be echoey, but if you’re strong of voice, you can shout over everyone else using the series of tubes and make yourself heard. It’s really neat.

But if you’re not Senator Stevens, you might not want to use a series of tubes to communicate with your audience. Instead, you can use the new BlogTalk Radio beta to podcast live over Windows Media Player.

So far, podcasting hasn’t really been the tool that many people imagined it would be. The business applications have been useful, but not dazzling or revolutionary. That’s why live podcasting in the right hands has the potential to be a big step in the evolution of business communications on the Web.

So far, businesses have used podcasts to record and distribute quarterly shareholder meetings or to hold interviews with their resident experts in a particular field. The entertainment industry sometimes uses podcasts to promote various shows, movies, or even new albums. Purina uses their podcasts to reach out to consumers with pet tips.

But for a business to have a meaningful conversation with core constituents, podcasting as it stands today is a sub-optimal medium. Like old-world communications, podcasts are a one-way street. The audience can’t respond to the company’s statement in the same medium in which the information was originally presented. That makes the conversation clunky and one-sided.

But let’s assume for a moment that live podcasting takes off to become the new standard. Companies would be able to have open, two-way, real-time conversations with their customers.

For example, let’s say that Dell wanted to address some of its service issues in a live forum. They could host a round-table discussion with some of their customer service gurus. Customers could call, e-mail, or instant message questions and suggestions during the discussion. Then, the entire conversation could be recorded and placed in a blog post as an ordinary 1.0 podcast after the fact.

Companies could use this sort of podcast to converse with core constituencies on specific issues or occasions–like when there’s a recall, a merger, or when a new CEO is hired. Some companies might decide to host an open forum each week–or even on a daily basis.

It’s possible that when combined with a blogging initiative, or even as a standalone outreach strategy, live podcasting could take companies to a whole new level of connectedness with the people that matter to them.

And no, podcasting is not a dump truck.

Via Gizmodo.

Update: The expansion of the two-way conversation made me think of this article that Fast Company posted yesterday about how Credit Suisse is listening to its customers.

Update: We’ll be covering podcasting as it applies to business at our upcoming conference.