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

We continue with Season 7 for Watch This Space, where the focus is my upcoming Future of Work Expo in Ft. Lauderdale. Our sessions will cover a lot of timely topics that should be familiar to our regular listeners - but some new ones too - including privacy, identity, immersive tech, large language models, endpoint usage, evolving role of IT, collaboration trends, agent experience, organizational structures, and workspaces for FOW. To set the stage for all this, we took a broader view for FOW through our analog lens, raising fundamental concerns about the very nature of work as our world becomes more digital and more virtual, and as we work increasingly in isolation from each other.

For those of you who don’t subscribe to our podcast directly from a commercial platform – you can access it any time here on the new Watch This Space website. Otherwise, the easiest platforms and sources to find WTS are Apple Podcasts, Google Chrome/Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, iTunes, Spotify and Amazon Music. Believe it or not, we’re also getting found on LinkedIn, Safari, and Alexa-enabled devices. For a more extensive replay archive, you can access all our podcasts here on my JAA website.

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

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 last month, including my other forms of original content, along with my social media stats. More detail and links for most of these activities can be found on my blog or posted on the website.

Industry events: as with last month, there was no event travel, but very different story for February – see next section
Video segments: did six last month, so this activity kept me busy
- Big UC News - latest episode on current news with UC Today, Jan. 31
- Cognigy - was interviewed as part of their CX Disruptors series, Jan. 26
- BCStrategies - LinkedIn Live segment - What to Expect from AI for UC and CC in 2024, Jan. 25
- Evan Kirstel - LinkedIn Live/Facebook segment - Future of Work Expo preview, Jan. 12
- Winning on Wednesday podcast - in conversation with Juan Vides, Jan. 4
- SCTC Fireside Chat, episode 176 - was Steve Leaden’s guest - Major Trends for 2024, Jan. 3

Writing roundup for January: details here, but note that I actually had no public writing last month, and instead listed the above video segments
Industry news: two items of note to share
- Call Center Geek Weekly - new kudo for being a call center thought leader - https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/call-center-geek-weekly-6917834039873744896/
- SCTC – announced their 2024 slate of executives, and am continuing to serve as a VP and on the Board of Directors

Awards judging: details coming soon, but am returning as a judge for the 2024 UC Awards, run by UK-based UC Today
Media citings – just one to report for January
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 LinkedIn – fyi: have now stopped using Twitter/X – so, here are my approximate tallies for LinkedIn during January:
- I had 14,651 views and 20 posts – similar numbers to December, and both lower than normal due to no event travel during these months
- My top LinkedIn post registered 1,507 views
- Overall, 4 posts had 1,000+ views, and 14 posts had 500+ views

What's Coming? JAA Outlook for February

In terms of industry events, I’ll be in constant motion for all of February, with five events:

Zoho analyst event, McAllen, TX, Feb. 6-8
Future of Work Expo, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Feb. 13-15
Cognigy CX Summit, Dusseldorf, Germany, Feb. 20-21
RingCentral 2024 Analyst Event, San Jose, CA, Feb. 26-28
8x8 Analyst Summit, San Diego, CA, Feb. 28 -29

Active work to keep watch for:

Two new white papers will be publishing soon – both for Tier 1 vendors
Will be recording a new podcast about telecom fraud on Feb. 23
Continued guest posts coming – some with my byline and some without – will post about these as they are published
New projects are in play with several vendors, both current and new clients
My Future of Work Expo agenda is now firm - February 13-15 in Ft. Lauderdale – and we’re done recruiting speakers. I’ll be posting as time allows, and maybe I’ll see you there!
Looking ahead to March, Enterprise Connect will be my next big event, where I’ll be doing my annual enterprise speech tech session – details here

Hey, Did You Know?

… I didn’t get a lot of public writing done last month, but I did my share of video segments. Being a visual medium, a good way to illustrate this is with a set of visuals from those recordings last month. Links to some of these can be found on my website or my blog, and otherwise, drop me a line to check them out.

It’s always nice to be on camera, but my bigger idea here is for all of us to expect more of this in 2024. Writing has always been in my DNA, but there are shifts for sure in how we communicate. Attention spans are shorter now, and there’s less appetite for longer articles and reports. Many of my peers are using more video and doing less writing, and the market seems to like this.
The attention economy is a thing, and if we’re not careful, ChatGPT will be doing all of our writing, putting more writers out of work. For both content creators and consumers, video is just easier, but analog old-schoolers like me still believe that good writing belongs, especially when done by humans. Would love to get your take on that, and all I can say is that I’m going to keep doing what I’ve been doing, so long as the work keeps coming.