Hack62.Integrate Audio and Email Feedback

Hack 62. 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.

9.3.1. 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 way you go, you should always have comments enabled so that listeners can tell you what they like and don't like about your show.

Once you get your text feedback, you should read the most interesting ones in your podcast. People are encouraged to give you more feedback when they hear others mentioned on the site. To mix it up a little, you can have someone else read your mail and turn the response into a full-fledged conversation.

9.3.2. MP3 Email Feedback

For listeners who are also podcasters, or who want to hear their comments aired on the show, you should accept audio comments encoded as MP3s. These can get quite large, so check your web hosting account, if you receive mail that way, to make sure the quota is set large enough to handle at least 100 MB of messages.

If space is an issue, you can get an account with one of the leading Internet mail providers. Google's Gmail (http://gmail.com) has 2 GB of storage space, and Yahoo! Mail's Plus account has 2 GB of storage space for email messages.

9.3.3. Phone Messaging

To make it even easier for your listeners to give audio feedback, you can set up a voice mail account that will send the messages directly to your email as audio files. Here are a few of these services:

RingCentral (http://ringcentral.com/), eVoice (http://evoice.com/), and j2 (http://j2.com/)

These services have free voice mail via email accounts, with phone numbers provided in your local area code. The messages arrive in your email account as attachments, or you can check them on the Web. Upgrade options enable you to send and receive faxes. Other handy services also are available.

MaxEmail (http://maxemail.com/)

The basic MaxEmail voice mail-to-email service is around $15 a year, with a 30-day free trial period. This service can also receive faxes.

Vonage (http://vonage.com/)

Vonage is an Internet-based Voice over IP (VoIP) solution whose basic service ($14.99 per month) includes voice mail that you can forward to your email.

Onebox (http://onebox.com/)

This service provides voice-mail-to-email routing using a toll-free number. The basic service starts at $12.95 per month. Fax services are also included, as is a new email address that you can use.

Frankly, having one of these accounts, particularly one of the free ones, is a benefit even if you don't use it for your podcast work. You can use it when you have to supply a phone number to companies that you suspect might sell your information, and then dump it if you get too much unwanted solicitation.

Another phone option is to use your home answering machine to take messages, but there are two downsides to this. The first is that you are giving away your home number, which removes a level of privacy and might have you startled awake at all hours of the night.

The other problem is getting the messages off the machine. To fix that, you can buy a voice modem that supports an answering machine feature. If the machine doesn't come with software that supports it, try EzVoice 3.0 ($26.80) from http://internetsoftsolution.com/.

9.3.4. See Also

• "Record Telephone Interviews" [Hack #34]

• "Record Interviews on Skype" [Hack #35]

• "Blog Your Podcast" [Hack #38]