What’s Up? Part 1- Our Latest Podcast and Big Changes to Watch This Space

Changes to our podcast have been taking shape over the past few months, and the biggest one is making it available on commercial platforms like iTunes. This takes Watch This Space beyond our local footprint, and not only will this expand our known audience, but also reach new audiences. This means we’ll be new voices for a lot of listeners, including those outside our technology community, so we’re excited to make our world more accessible and relevant to a broader listenership.
This month’s episode is titled “Why Collaboration is the Right Technology for COVID Times”, and aside from talking about these changes to WTS, we took a step-back look at how essential today’s collaboration technologies have been for enabling a sustainable shift to work from home. The last few months have been a boon to most of the vendors in this space, and we talked about just how well these companies are faring, and where we should expect to see innovation coming from going into Q4. Newsletter subscribers can directly access it any time here on the brand new WTS website.

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

Why Collaboration is the Right Technology for Covid Times

Being new, the WTS website will host our episodes for 2020 and beyond. The site is formatted specifically for podcasts, including an embedded player so you can listen directly from the site – check it out here: www.watchthisspace.tech.

If you’re a regular consumer of podcasts, you’re more likely to access WTS from your favorite feed, and you’ll soon be able to subscribe to WTS on iTunes, Google, Spotify, Stitcher and Amazon TuneIn as well as Amazon Music/Audible – all these feeds should be up and running in the next week or so. Once those feeds are live, I’ll make the links easy to find on my websites and via social media, so it should be really easy to get WTS on your podcast playlist.
Other feeds will be added over time, and aside from these popular podcast channels, you can also access all our episodes here on my JAA website.
With Watch This Space now shifting to a proper podcast platform, it will become public when the newsletter is published – at least for now. As such, my newsletter subscribers will no longer have exclusive access to the podcast for two weeks, and I realize losing that perk may cost me some subscribers. Hopefully not, but as things evolve, sometimes you have to give up things to get other things that I believe will be better overall.
Another important change – at least for the time being – is stepping back from the Otter.ai transcription feature. There’s no place for that on a podcasting platform, but I think it’s a really cool feature, and am optimistic we’ll be able to keep it going somehow.
For now, the priority is getting WTS launched across the major podcast platforms to build up our following, and soon after to determine if WTS can sustain itself independent of this newsletter as its own brand.
Finally, if you haven’t checked out our earlier podcasts, just go to the podcast archive on my JAA website. The archive shows both the 2020 podcasts, as well as a separate archive for previous podcasts, namely Seasons 1 and 2.

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

Virtual conference roundup – last month, I was involved with just one virtual event, but two times:
- August 3-6 – Enterprise Connect Virtual – gave a presentation
- August 19 – my presentation was chosen as one of the top five from the event, and was invited back to give an encore presentation, including live Q&A
Otherwise, here are the working highlights for last month, and links to some of these can be found in my August blog posts:
- Panelist on a session hosted by Talkdesk during Customer Contact Week about the impact of Covid on the patient experience in the healthcare sector
- Unified Comms Influencers – was a guest on Dominic Kent’s podcast
- Completed work, which should publish in September (some were expected to publish in August, but that’s how it goes sometimes):
  - Insight Report – for a cloud service provider
  - Insight Report – for a Canadian cloud provider
  - Case study for a leading video services provider about how their platform was used to host a virtual conference for channel partners
  - White Paper – adapted version of an existing white paper for a service provider to help migrate enterprise clients to the cloud
  - Final revisions to an IoT e-Book
New kudo – Top 10 CX Contact Center Influencers, as compiled by Shelf.io – thanks!
August writing spotlight – top pick would be my latest No Jitter post – CX’s Real Driver in 2020? Changing Consumer Habits Due to COVID-19
Here’s my Writing Roundup post for August – it’s a monthly digest of my thought leadership across various channels, including Tech Target, No Jitter and BC Strategies
Media citings – nice bump here from recent months, with six citings
Social media highlights - 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 August:
- For LinkedIn – I shared 27 posts, which registered 25,697 views – that’s the highest number of views since February. My top LinkedIn post registered 4,570 views – that’s the highest tally since I began tracking this data in November 2019. Overall, 6 posts had 1,000+ views, and 14 posts had 700+ views.
- For Twitter - there were 29,000 impressions, 143 profile visits, 48 mentions, 32 tweets and 22 new followers– on the whole, an upward trend from July.
- My “top tweet” was as a shout-out for an article on No Jitter about my talk at Enterprise Connect - it had 3,457 impressions. Overall, 6 tweets had 1,000+ impressions, and 19 had 500+.
Client work aside – and in addition to new developments with my podcast - August was also busy with website updates, adding current work samples and new client logos – and more updates are coming. Am also working on a logo refresh, and that should be ready by next month.
Updates were recently added about my musical interests, with both new video clips and photos. You can find all this on the My Music tab, and I continue to mention this here in case new subscribers don’t know about my fun side.

What's Coming? JAA Outlook for September

So far, I’ll be participating as best I can in six virtual events this month, and you’ll have to check my blog and social feeds for further details – and other events could very well come up during the month:
- September 1-2 – ADTRAN Connect
- September 15 – Five9 CX Summit
- September 15-16 – NICE/inContact Interactions
- September 29-October 1 – UC Expo – will be moderating a session
- September 30-October 1 – Twilio SIGNAL
- September 30-October 1 – British Telecom Global Analyst Event
Got four webinars in the works, all scheduled for the end of September/first week October – check my blog and social feeds for details/dates:
- September 30 - IoT for social good, hosted by Huawei
- October 1 - CPaaS opportunity with IntelePeer, hosted by Informa
- New CX challenges with COVID-19 with Mitel, hosted by TMC
- At least one more webinar coming around that time – details to be announced
During August, five new projects landed, four of which are with new clients – and six others are looking very promising, so it’s already going to be a busy fall!

Hey Did You Know?

… that the Watch This Space podcast has its own logo?

My podcast listeners may recognize the logo below, which was recently developed to establish WTS as its own entity. I’m exploring how WTS will fare in the broader world of public podcasting, so I need to brand it separately from the work done under my J Arnold & Associates indie analyst moniker. That brand is going through its own modest update, and as noted above, watch for a new JAA logo soon.