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

Season 5 of Watch This Space continues with an episode titled “Future of Work Expo Review – Making Hybrid Work Work”. Having just returned from this event, Jon recaps the key themes, and co-host Chris Fine adds his perspective as to why hybrid work is harder to do than it looks. Having served as Chair for four years now, Jon explains why this year’s Future of Work Expo was the best to date, and provides a strong foundation for the 2023 edition, coming in February.

For those of you who don’t subscribe to our podcast directly from a commercial platform, you can access it any time here on my website, or on the Watch This Space website.
If you don’t know where to subscribe to Watch This Space, it’s posted now on many of the leading platforms – namely iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Stitcher.

What’s Up? Part 2 – JAA Highlights from June

While the Watch This Space podcast is the main form of original content for this newsletter, Part 2 here is a digest of JAA activities from the previous month, including my other forms of original content, and my social media stats. More detail for most of these will be on my blog.
Conference roundup – three events for June, with FOW Expo being the big one:
- Genesys Xperience, June 8-9
- Cisco Live, June 13-14
- Future of Work Expo, Ft. Lauderdale, June 21-23
Future of Work Expo – aside from being the subject of our July podcast, I shared my thoughts and some photos on this post from my blog
UC Awards 2022 – I’m a judge again this year, and the judging process is complete now – I evaluated entries from 46 companies across 3 categories; finalists will be announced July 8, and the winners will be announced July 28
NICE blog – I’ve been writing guest posts for their blog for a few months now, and the posts are finally being published, with the first one out now – you can read it here, and I’ll provide updates when subsequent posts run
Writing roundup – here’s the digest, and if you just read one, this would be my choice: “3 Building Blocks for a Better Customer Experience”, on No Jitter
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 June:
- For LinkedIn – I had 26,087 views and 22 posts – fourth strong month in a row
- My top LinkedIn post registered 2,687 views, and overall, 7 posts had 1,000+ views, and 12 posts had 400+ views
- For Twitter – there were 5,654 impressions, 2,520 profile visits, 40 mentions, 18 tweets, and 18 new followers – mixed bag compared to May – impressions down, but profile visits way up
- My “top tweet” was about the UC Awards, with 509 impressions, and overall, 3 tweets had 400+ impressions
Updates were recently added about my musical interests, with both new video clips and photos, including our latest gig in November at the SCTC conference. For those who don’t know about my fun side – we all need that! - you can find this on the My Music tab.

What's Coming? JAA Outlook for July

No scheduled events for July, but that could change in a hurry
June webinar with Servion has now been pushed out to August – details coming soon
Judging for the CX Innovator Awards, hosted by Talkdesk – has now been pushed out to early Fall
Client work has eased up with summer, but several new things are in the works that will play out soon – a few high-level examples:
- Early planning for Future of Work Expo 2023
- Early planning for my involvement in Enterprise Connect 2023
- Speech tech opportunity assessment for a major vertical market segment
- Renewing a contributor arrangement with a leading EU tech publisher
- Mapping out both speaking roles and our next SIPtones gig for the SCTC annual conference this October in Dallas
- Mapping out speaking roles for upcoming industry events, both in the US and EU

Hey Did You Know....

Everyone knows this cliché, but in today’s always-on, hyperconnected world, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s happening around us. However, if you pick your spots, uttering plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose can land really well, especially with a Gallic shrug for dramatic flair.

I didn’t have anything in mind for this section of the newsletter for July, and sometimes I go retro and share old posts from my blog archive – which goes back to 2005. Ten years seemed like a good wayback spot, so I came across this blog post of mine from July 4, 2012.

Titled “Up for air”, I was recounting how busy I was at the time, juggling client work and travel to various industry events. As I try to be chill over the Canada Day/July 4th holiday weekend, I have mixed feelings when thinking that if I wrote a post right now about what’s happening with me, it would pretty much be exactly the same message. Plus ça change, indeed.

While I’m grateful to have a steady mix of ongoing client work and new clients, the ongoing state of busy-ness can be a bit of a trap. Thankfully, I have plenty of healthy diversions to balance things out, but seeing this 2012 post provides good cause to look at the bigger picture. The technology sure has changed a lot since then, and there will always be a need for analysts to do what we do – at least until the bots take over. Happy Canada Day, and Happy 4th!