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I'm just wondering why you guys are making member only podcasts as well as a weekly podcast? You have plenty of references between them both so I would think that it is just harder for newcomers to find the appropriate information.

If they are both free anyway, then I would think you are just limiting your listeners if you have a members only podcast. OK, to be honest, I find it annoying actually that I can't get it automatically in my Itunes to my ipod like the rest of your podcasts. Just an observation...

mauzenne's picture
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Thanks for the feedback. As always you know we appreciate it! As you'll see below, we had some positive intent on the members podcasts ... but the only thing that matters is our listeners' perceptions, so this is very worthy of a conversation. Thanks for bringing it up!

Our intent ... Mark and I wanted to start building a community on Manager Tools; something ultimately we could leverage into something like we're starting to build here in the discussion forums. To do that, we thought it necessary to start collecting data about our listeners. The obvious starting point was using the "registration process" on Wordpress. However, we thought that if we were going to ask our listeners to do something extra (i.e., go to the website and register), we should thank them for their efforts. Hence, we endeavored to spend some extra time and record a monthly members-only podcast .... something of a bonus for sharing something about yourself by registering with us. Our thought was that we would be providing real value for the act of registering, our listeners would recognize that, and it would be perceived positively (i.e., a *lot* of value for a simple act like registering).

I recognize that having to go to the website to download the show was inconvenient at best. To improve that, we created a Registered Member RSS feed that you can use so you can now receive your member podcasts in iTunes (or any other podcatcher) as well (look on the Registered Users Podcast page on the site for the RSS URL). It was also covered on the last Members email newsletter that went out. If for some reason you didn't get the email or you need help walking through the process of adding the URL to iTunes, I'd be more than happy to help!

I'd welcome more feedback on this one. If several more of you perceive the members podcasts as negative, perhaps Mark and I need to think differently.

Thanks again! And looking forward to others' comments.

Mike

MikeK's picture

Thats perfect Mike! I didn't know you had the members only RSS setup and I definitely didn't know you could add in RSS feeds directly for itunes. All is WELL, thanks for pointing that out!

I see your reasoning now for the member only, I have no problem with your idea just personally don't think it will help all that much. If people know they HAVE to sign up to get access to extra podcasts, they will, but that won't encourage quality management discussions really. It could actually force more "surfers" who aren't serious to be in the forums since they had to sign up. Reason I think this is a risk, is from my own experience in running a sports club website, I moved some of our videos and pictures into a signin only forum from the main site to encourage more forum activity and it ended up causing more unwanted junk in the forum than anything. It went back to how it was! Now, that was a different type of site because the average viewers are kids with that sport interest so I can understand why that happened. Anyway, I hope your idea works here, its worth a shot to try to develop this 'community'.

Mike K