Podcasting Hacks

Integrate Audio and Email Feedback

Engage your audience in a conversation by integrating their audio feedback and email into your podcasts.

One of the distressing elements of podcasting is that you never know if you are talking to an empty room. You can check the logs and see the downloads. But did they listen? And more importantly, what did they think of the show? This is why feedback is so important, and why you should spend the time making it easy for people to interact with you.

The first thing to do is to build several feedback mechanisms that listeners can use. I’ve included several ideas in the sections that follow. Once you’ve set these up, you need to encourage people to comment and send feedback on every show you produce.

Blog Comments and Bulletin Boards

The easiest feedback mechanism is the one you already have on your blog: the comments system. Both the Movable Type and WordPress blogging systems [Hack #38] support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds that include comments. You should create these feeds and subscribe to them so that you are notified when people post feedback. In the early days of your show, the feedback will be minimal, so you need to jump right on it.

If you get too many comments or the comment system is not easy enough to use from your listeners’ perspective, you can switch to a bulletin board system such as phpBB (http://phpbb.com/). Then you can link the blog to the bulletin board and shut down the comment system in the blog. Regardless of which ...