Protect Your Podcast Assets When You Outsource

A few weeks back I received an email from someone in my podcasting community regarding a question she couldn't find online.  She had a concern about protecting her content because she was thinking about outsourcing all of he work for her podcast.  

 

This meant she wanted to outsource the editing and promotion of her podcast and she feared that one of her contractors would have control over some of her social media accounts as well as the content that she created.  Furthermore, she wanted secure access when it came to her RSS feed.

 

Below is my response to her when it came to solutions for her concerns if she decided to outsource her podcast.  I've edited the email to her for this blog.

 

 

 

If you're going to have someone produce a show for you, they would only need access to a digital audio workstation (DAW) like Adobe Audition or Audacity.  Those don't require any permissions if someone is using their own DAW.  

 

If someone is putting your podcast together for you, make sure you have access to all of the sounds and assets they produce.  I do this with my clients and make sure they own all of the content that is created/purchased.

 

Do yourself the favor and create a Google Drive folder and make sure your producer is saving all of your show assets into those folders for you to download.  This is protection for you in case your show designer decides to bail on you unexpectedly.

 

As much as I understand your concern for having control over the RSS feed, there is no way to assign an "admin" or "editor" to any of the the hosting providers. I think most hosting providers should, but it's just not something that exists yet.  

 

Further, they don't have any way of providing 2-Factor Authentication on their platforms as well. 

 

Unfortunately, this is a risk you're going to have to take if you're outsourcing the work completely.

 

My only recommendation is to build in a workflow where your contractors are building out the content and saving it into a Google Drive/Dropbox folder for your review.  Once it is ready for your review, you would go in and copy/paste/upload all details inside of your hosting provider. 

 

If you're looking to embed the players into your website, it's as simple as finding the embed code of particular episodes and putting them on your blog's post. There are also plugins out there like Powerpress that create an automatic player for you inside of Wordpress. 

 

Powerpress functions directly inside of Wordpress and is best used if you've got service with Blubrry (because it's their plugin). You can upload directly to Blubrry via the Powerpress plugin.

 

Again, all of this will be totally up to you.

 

If you're running a page (not profile) on Facebook, there should be the ability to make someone an "Editor" or "Moderator" from the page itself. I know this is under the Settings tab at the top of the Facebook page.  Once you are in that page, you have to go to Page Roles on the left-hand side and there you can assign someone to a page role.  They must have a Facebook profile in order for this to work. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once they are assigned, they can go in and schedule posts inside of Facebook and even manage the comments. 

 

I do know there is a way to assign a page role for someone if you have a company page, but not for a profile. Someone just showed it to me the other day and and I didn't realize it existed on LinkedIn.  Still, LinkedIn has some flaws as they continue to rebuild the platform.

 

I do realize this becomes a problem with profiles and LinkedIn. Unfortunately there isn't a solution to this other than going with 3rd party scheduling software like Hootsuite or Agorapulse.

 

In my opinion, Agorapulse is the best platform to use because it actually allows you to assign roles to contractors without them actually having access to your Facebook page.  They are able to not only schedule content to platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, but they can also respond to comments within the scheduling platform without being kicked out of LinkedIn or Facebook. 

 

Agorapulse also allows you to "assign" comments to different manager if it's something you want someone else to follow-up on.  This all depends on your workflow when it comes to publishing your content.  

 

The platform is wildly powerful if you're looking to promote consistently. 

 

The only thing you must be aware of is that it does cost a bit of money to have the service, but it does solve your LinkedIn problem.  Otherwise, you'd need to log out.

 

With most of your accounts, I would recommend you set up 2-Factor Authentication for most of your accounts--Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.  When you have 2-Factor Authentication set up on your computer or phone, you can allow contractor access to your accounts or boot them from your account if you need to. 

 

If password access becomes a problem, I would recommend looking into a Password manager like LastPass or 1Password. 

 

My recommendation would be 1Password since it is the best password manager that I have used by far. They provide a great solution to strong passwords to access your account--all of which you don't have to remember. 

 

If you decide that a password manager is something that will help you out, I recommend purchasing the service through the mobile app first before doing it on Desktop. It's more affordable on the mobile phone for some reason. 

I recommend purchasing a 2TB drive to transfer all of your content from your computer onto a hard drive.

 

As an added safety net, I would create a private folder in my Google Drive or Dropbox that no one has access to other than you.  This way you own all of the content.  It seems like a lot of work, but I can't tell you how many times I've lost content because I accidentally deleted it or someone else accidentally deleted it or removed it. 

 

I hope I have provided some solution to your problem.  Again, a lot of this is going to depend on how you want to see the workflow happen from your contractors all the way back to you.  Some accounts you will be taking a risk, but you have the ultimate say in who has access to those accounts.