It was a tough sell to get co-workers to start using a portable digital voice recorder to do field based interviews, which we could then edit and then post on the intranet. The next step will be convincing them why embedding those audio files with RSS will drive up the number of people that listen to them.

Imagine that your friend, who is an auto mechanic, picks you up in his car on Saturday morning at 10 a.m. and you notice he is listening to a show hosted by two auto mechanics with British accents. This particular show is about types of car parts you should look for in an auto junk yard so that you can buy them for dirt cheap and then make a profit by selling them on eBay.

After a few minutes of waiting for a commercial, which never comes, you say, “I can’t believe they got this show on the air. What station are you listening to?” To which your friend responds, “Oh, this isn’t a radio station, this is my favorite podcast.”Still confused, you ask, “So…this local show airs every Saturday morning at 10a.m.?” To which he responds, “No. It only comes out once a month, but I don’t pay attention to which day it comes out. And it’s not local, it’s produced in Britain.”

So, here we have the power of podcasting. Plan, record and edit a show and then post it online. Once someone finds out about the show (say by searching the podcast directory in iTunes), they subscribe to the RSS feed. When their computer is connected to the internet, their podcatcher (in this case iTunes) automatically downloads the audio file. Now the person can listen to it on their computer or attach their iPod (or other MP3 player) and take the podcast with them.

Podcasts are useful because they utilize RSS to enable your computer to download them automatically for you. That means the mechanic show produced in Britain and posted online on November 2 one month and December 12 the next month, will be captured by your computer without you having to go look for it every day of the month.

Posting an audio show that you produced on your intranet, and allowing employees to either download it to their computer or stream the audio file does not make it a podcast. To be a podcast, it must have an RSS feed they can subscribe to.

So, say you produce a monthly audio interview with a company executive called ‘On the Record with Bob’. You send an email to employees to tell them Bob is now doing a monthly podcast, and that they can subscribe to it by clicking on the orange RSS button. That way, they will have the podcast shortly after it comes out each month (regardless of when you post it to the intranet), and you won’t have to send an email or just post it on your intranet and wonder why the click rates are so low (people don’t surf the intranet).

Then, the next time you ask an employee, “Hey, did you hear Bob’s podcast?” They’ll reply, “Of course I did. I subscribe to it.”