Mark Blevis

Nearly a year ago, a friend and two of his colleagues launched a monthly podcast to help the public understand important information about their company’s products. The idea came about because they felt the officially sanctioned podcast didn’t speak to its intended audience on the audience’s terms.

The resulting podcast series is informative and fun and serves to augment information from official corporate channels — as disclaimed during the intro of each episode. They record after hours (read: on the employees’ personal time), taking turns making the complicated understandable and addressing what they feel are the kinds of questions and concerns the public will have.

Powers that be within the organization recognized the value of the podcast and publicized it on the company website in a list ranked by downloads, which didn’t appear to be a problem until the thousands of downloads each month of the unofficial podcast caused it to rank (several) higher than the official one.

The disappearance of the very popular unofficial podcast from the “top” list suggests the guys who do this from their heart have been able to do something the paid folks haven’t.

Whether a senior person was protecting a financial investment or someone didn’t like being seen as second (or fourth in this case) to an unofficial effort, you have to question a decision that punishes the public and the organization to preserve pride.

All this to say, there is a fantastic opportunity for every organization — commercial, political and non-profit — to embrace podcasts, blogs, videos, etc… produced through unofficial and external channels that support their efforts. Noone’s pride needs to be hurt. In fact, you’ll make yourself more valuable to your consumers/clients, partners and stakeholders if you promote the hand that feeds.

Photo: Lion that Lunches by rofanator on Flickr.