What’s Up? Part 1 - Our Latest Watch This Space Podcast

The pandemic continues, and we’re past the New Normal. In fact, we’re so used to it, that I think many have OD’d on video calls as we seem to be spending most of our time there. That’s the jumping off point for our June podcast – Longer Term Implications and Opportunities - as Chris and I look a bit ahead to what the workplace landscape could resemble post-pandemic.
As usual, JAA subscribers get to hear our takeaways - right now, in this newsletter. Otherwise, I’ll be posting the podcast publicly on my website in a couple of weeks, so non-subscribers will have to wait a bit.
If you haven’t checked our earlier podcasts, you can do that from the podcast archive on my website. The archive has just been updated, showing both the 2020 podcasts, and a separate archive for previous podcasts.
Current podcasts also feature AI-driven transcripts that complement the audio replay link. This feature comes courtesy of Otter.ai, and I hope you like it. Otter transcribes in real time, and I should also note that this transcription feature only comes with the newsletter. The publicly-shared posts of our podcasts are audio-only, and for some, that will be enough. But really, wouldn’t you rather be a subscriber?

**Latest Watch this Space Podcast & Transcript, June 2020**

Workplace Perspectives in Pandemic Times

What’s Up? Part 2 – More Highlights and Insights from May

Conference roundup – live events have been off the table for a while now, but virtual events are popping up regularly to keep people connected. Some are proxies for live events that were scheduled much earlier, but had to be postponed, and others are simply new events that can be run with very few resources and on short timelines. This is an important trend of its own that I have been following, and I’ll come back to that later in the newsletter. I was as busy as ever on the event front last month, participating in four virtual events, as well as a fifth one at the very end of April. Each of these events was quite different, and a post I wrote for BCStrategies summarizes them – it’s also cited down below. I’ve never been to five in-person events during that amount of time, so I’m definitely keeping busy.
- Talkdesk’s Opentalk conference
- Huawei 2020 Analyst conference
- Cloud Conventions
- Jeff Pulver’s #140ConfLive
Otherwise, here are the working highlights for May, and links to most of these can be found in my May blog posts:
- New report – for Metaswitch:
  - Mobile UX with UCaaS – based on focus group research I conducted
- Podcasts – aside from this month’s Watch This Space podcast, I had three others published in May:
  - The Future of Conferences, BCStrategies podcast
  - Post-COVID Business World Predictions, BCStrategies podcast
  - The Evolving New Normal, our May Watch This Space podcast
- Guest post - for UC Today’s 2020 CX Market Guide:
  - CX – Remember, it’s Their Experience, not Yours
May writing spotlight – top pick would be my latest BCStrategies post – How do you do Virtual Events During COVID-19? Let me Show you the Way
Here’s my Writing Roundup post for May – it’s a monthly digest of my thought leadership across various channels, including Toolbox.com, Tech Target, No Jitter and BC Strategies
May was quiet on the media front – just one citing
Here are the social media highlights for last month. Since these stats change every day, the metrics are just a basic snapshot, but they provide a good sense of reach beyond my blog and newsletter. For my business, I use Twitter and LinkedIn, and here are some approximate tallies for May:
- For LinkedIn – I shared 45 posts, which registered 24,610 views, and those numbers were very similar to April. My top LinkedIn post registered 2,483 views, and 15 posts had 500+ views.
- For Twitter - there were 39,200 impressions, 152 profile visits, 33 mentions, 42 tweets, and 8 new followers. Very similar profile to April as well.
- My “top tweet” was adding to a post from Rich Tehrani about Microsoft acquiring Metaswitch - it had 2,320 impressions. Overall, 9 tweets had 700+ impressions.
I recently added a new tab on my website – My Music. This showcases my fun side, mainly from playing keyboards and guitar with the SIPtones. The stars finally lined up for a long-awaited update here, and a few new photos have been added, along with 10 new video clips from our recent Chicago gig, and a few others from our 2018 gig in Annapolis. Enjoy!

What's Coming? JAA Outlook for June

So far, I’ll be participating in two virtual events this month:
- June 2-3 – Cisco Live
- June 12 – SCTC’s annual Canadian regional event – it’s virtual this year, and I’m a speaker, as well as being on the planning committee
Two of the long-form deliverables cited last month have still not been published, but am optimistic they’ll finally run this month:
- White paper on UCaaS
- White paper on cloud collaboration
June 4 - am doing a fireside chat on the state of UCaaS for an audience of US financial analysts and portfolio managers
June 23 – will be moderating on an Informa webinar with Oracle – details coming
I’m a judge for UC Today’s UC Awards 2020, and that takes place during June
Several active projects are on the go and should be published this month, including a case study, an eBook, two Insight Reports (for different clients), two guest blog posts without bylines, and an executive Q&A
Beyond that, the pipeline is busy, with new work set to begin on two white papers (for different clients), a follow-on webinar to an eBook, another Insight Report for an existing client, another guest post for another client, and a thought leadership program for a new client

Hey Did You Know?

…that my way-back photos from Metaswitch Forum in this section last month turned out to be very prescient?

Not only were they a great memory from a time when conferences really were fun - and I think being pre-social media might have something to do with that – but less than a month later Metaswitch was acquired by Microsoft. Nobody saw that one coming - not even me, and I’ve been close to this company for almost 20 years.

Metaswitch was a pretty special company; aside from being a first-rank engineering organization – a key reason why MSFT bought them – they had a great culture. It was the kind of company you never wanted to leave, and I’ll certainly miss Metaswitch. On that note, here’s another ode to their fun side, a concoction courtesy of Gleavie Boy (Steve Gleave), their Marketing guru. So, what on earth is this?

This isn’t rocket science, folks – it’s exactly what it looks like. Yes, it’s a USB pet rock. It does “absolutely nothing” as Steve would say, but looks cool and is a great conversation starter. We need more of this, folks, not less.

Maybe it’s this kind of playful thinking that led MSFT to buy them, and if your engineers aren’t coming up with stuff like this every now and then, they need to get out more often or maybe crack open a box of Lego.