Over the past few years, I’ve heard this lament many times: “We really want to produce podcasts for our upcoming conference, but our IT Department says they won’t support us. What should we do?”
In a former life, I was a systems analyst, so I’m familiar with some of the workings behind the sometimes-mysterious doors of the IT world. There may be good reasons for not supporting your organization’s multimedia efforts, but I haven’t heard a valid one yet. As my friend Shel Holtz has noted (and I’m paraphrasing): “Has anyone ever said that we don’t have enough paper to print the company newsletter?” Of course not.
Let’s suppose that your IT Department won’t offer technical support for podcasting. Well, that’s OK, because your IT people probably aren’t podcasting experts in the first place. You can hire help or learn to do it yourself.
What if the IT gurus tell you that there isn’t one megabyte of storage space available to you. Here are some suggestions:
- Host your audio or video files externally.
- Build a microsite on WordPress for all the information and multimedia content about your conference. Link to this microsite from your organization’s main site.
Problems solved.
Have you run into roadblocks from the IT people? Please share your experiences in the comments section.
