Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Case Study: Darden BusinessCast



Another Draft for the upcoming Feedburner case study - what was interesting to me about this is how the creative team of a large institution can put "boutique" services like Feedburner (although Feedburner certainly offers enterprise-class services as well) to help them work around the red tape so often present in a large organization. I also just wrapped a great interview that will be included in this podcast - we'll let you know when it's posted. Here's the script so far:

So what if you work in a large institution, you've got the go-ahead on a podcasting initiative, and your IT department is handling the considerable effort of maintaing the back-end support services? I also spoke to some of the folks who produce the Darden School's Business Cast, and found some not-too surprising challenges.

Given the show's success as a key part of the school's communications strategy it's not surprising to find that the program receives input and support from resources throughout the school, not the least of which comes from the IT department who acts as the web host for the audio files. However if you've ever worked with an IT department in a large institution you surely know and likely understand that access to webserver details and statistics are heavily guarded by permissions and security settings, and for good reasons. On of the initial problems the creative team at the Darden school ran into was getting meaningful statistics on the show.


While they were working with the web team to figure out a way to get the on-demand statistical feedback they were also investigating Feedburner as an option to solve the problem of browser-unfriendly RSS files. After burning their feed to solve this problem they pleasantly discovered that their feedburner account was supplying them the stats they had been seeking, and they could get full accounts of show activity without having to trouble the IT Staff. The Darden creative team also enabled email-subscription to their feed and are able to see who amongst their various constituencies is subscribing to the show.

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