https://www.spreaker.com/show/flash-briefing-february
A video every day in February giving you all you need to know about the mindset, skillset and marketing needed to create a successful Alexa Flash Briefing.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>enTechnologyCopyright Suze Cooperhttps://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/14fce33dc3e845735281840f13392bd5.jpghttps://www.spreaker.com/show/flash-briefing-februarySun, 04 Jul 2021 20:06:03 +0000Suze CooperSuze Cooperfeeds@spreaker.comProfessional broadcasters and top UK Flash Briefing creators Suze Cooper and Peter Stewart present Flash Briefing February. A video every day in February giving you all you need to know about the mindset, skillset and marketing needed to create a...
A video every day in February giving you all you need to know about the mindset, skillset and marketing needed to create a successful Alexa Flash Briefing.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>cleanepisodicSuze Cooperfeeds@spreaker.comProfessional broadcasters and top UK Flash Briefing creators Suze Cooper and Peter Stewart present Flash Briefing February. A video every day in February giving you all you need to know about the mindset, skillset and marketing needed to create a successful Alexa Flash Briefing. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocialNohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-028
I'm not sure after that introduction, I can say very much but my name is Cece keeper. I am radio broadcaster and I also work for a voice console. See over in London creating skills and actions for Alexa and Google smart speakers and the like. And yes, it has been an amazing 28 days of running through what it takes to put together a flash briefing. So I started up my own flash briefing in March last year. There's been ups and downs. Have I had a different episode every single day? No, have I hit technical trouble? Yes. Have I had my head in my hands and not always had it go out every day as I thought it would? Yes. Because that is the life of a flash briefer isn't it? Peter, and you find that you know, once you've committed to doing this flash briefing, and you know, it's it's quite a task, but it is also really, really quite rewarding. Absolutely. And also that that's the life of a mom of three children.

Sue's not me. So you know, life does sometimes take over, you know, it's not the be all and end all you know, things aren't going to fall apart. If you don't managed to get something up for one day. But, you know, hopefully we've made it easier for you to see some of the tricks that you can use you can implement to make it go a little bit more smoothly. And soon as I've kind of broken this down into into five steps, our final show, as we kind of remind people of some of the of the basics that we've spoken about over the last 27 days, and I recompete could stand for personality because as we said, on one day of the course, you you've got to have a bit of personality, you've got to have Verve, you got to have a bit of vitality, you've got to know about your topic and understand it and and be able to present it in a way that is intriguing, engaging and so on. And and we also spoke to him about having the kind of the voice and the presentation style because if we were just sitting next to each other in in one of our homes, then you know, our voices and our presentation will be completely different. I think It happens we're not actually too far away I guess we're in about 30 miles or so. But you know, our voice will be a bit more quiet and bit more subdued and so on. But because we presenting because we want to intrigue and engage and infuse, you know your voice, your personality kind of goes up. So I'm going to give a p for personality. And I reckon after p comes easy for equipment, so what what are your top tips as far as equipment goes,

Yeah, and our equipment, we spoke about how this shouldn't be a barrier, you know, you shouldn't think that you've got to go out and spend an absolute fortune to get all the top notch tech to be able to record your flash briefing. It can be just as simple as recording into your phone. It could also be as easy as a USB mic into your your computer or your laptop and write the way up to if you wanted to try and create a soundproof area. But absolutely equipment should not be a barrier to you creating your your your flash briefing. And that's one of the things that we've covered in this in this 28 day course, and I hope that we've got across to people because what we really want to be doing is empowering you to go away and do this stuff. So try not to put too many barriers in the way equipment in tech certainly shouldn't be one of them

until you for time because over time, you know what you will improve. Sue said about the mindset a few days ago, and it can be really quite daunting. To start off with. If you're not from a presentation background, perhaps you're not even used to speaking much in the office or doing presentations to a small group of people in your team. You can be really quite daunting. We appreciate that. You know, Susan, I've been doing it for years and you know, hopefully we're not being too blase about it. But over time, you will improve you'll improve with knowing what buttons to press, you'll improve about your your presentation about what topics are really engaging with people, and you know what buttons to press, you know, literally and kind of emotionally as well to, to engage people and So bring them into into a marketing funnel, and you'll become more confident and with a little bit more, a few more flash briefings under your belt, your confidence will improve. And then you're you'll want to publicise it more and then you'll get more listeners. And you can see how that is kind of a bit of a snowball effect, how everything, you know, kind of mounts up in a good way, and makes you a better presenter. And I think really, perhaps it's easier to present flash briefings, you know, in your back bedroom with no one else there and it can make you perhaps bit more confident potentially. So then you all a bit more used to just speaking to your team or at a meeting or at a presentation in real life. So, so there's step number three, step number four, I thought he would stand for exercise and practice and plan and shedule your content, whether it be the kind of content it is and also we spoke about was yesterday wasn't just about, about bulk recording. So, so So all of that under the heading of exercise? Yeah, I mean, absolutely there's there's certainly ways that you can group together your content Peters spoken about repeating episodes, having some evergreen episodes that you can kind of pull out of your back pocket on those days, when you might feel like there isn't anything to talk about. And you know, there's lots of different ways that you can group your content. And really kind of put together a plan organisation is key with flash briefings, particularly if you're producing something that goes out every single day. So, you know, a nice Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet is going to be your friend with all the days down the side and as many content ideas as you can fill it with. And so yeah, absolutely kind of exercising that that organisational skills will that will really stand you in good stead as you go forward with your flash briefing. And then I think after those first four steps, you know, we could perhaps finish off with our because hopefully you will reap the rewards at the end of The day you know, we've given you as we like to say the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing, and hopefully bring people into your, into your marketing funnel. And hopefully there will be a bit of money at the end of it, you know, it's kind of good fun. And at the end of the day, it's only a minute or so out of your life. Every day to produce this kind of content, we gave you some tips about how you can make it really almost seamless integration with your other work. But, but also, it's not the be all and end all if you do miss a couple of days. But hopefully, we've given you the the the ideas, the skills, the confidence, the tricks, some of the apps, the tech as well, and also the enthusiasm for you to go ahead and to reap rewards so reaping rewards may not necessarily be financial, it may just be another skill that you've got, as I mentioned a few moments ago, maybe it adds to your own confidence. It's something else your CV or a resume perhaps it it may make you Why maybe fresh briefings aren't for me, but actually I prefer a longer form podcast or something like that. Or maybe neither of those perhaps I'm not a presenter, but I could hire myself out as, as a producer or an editor for someone else's audio content or flash briefings are interesting, but I'm more interested in, in the skills and the, the hugely evolving and opening market of skills and actions and capsules and things like that. So there you are, there are five I've only just realised that they p E. T and our spells

are saying how embarrassing.

Seriously, keep in touch. We really appreciate you watching our 28 day guide. Thank you so much. Hopefully you've learned lots. We'll be back tomorrow with a special live edition of flash briefing februari where you can ask some more questions of us. Sue's Good luck. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if you do want to go back and perhaps listen to any of these episodes, rather than watching the videos again, then it is available as a podcast. The links are all up on the voice works Facebook page, do stay in touch with us, as Peter says, You can also sign up at voice works dot info for our weekly newsletter, which is all about audio production, flash briefings, you know, podcasting, all those kind of things. So yep, join us here tomorrow. If you've got questions that perhaps have popped up over the over the days, then Tomorrow's the day when you can actually ask us we will be here live. And we're looking forward to seeing you all then. So thanks very much for joining us for 28 days of flash briefing February. And Susan thank you as well for being my more than able co host and doing all the the techie stuff behind the scenes. It's been a learning curve but a good one

you tomorrow

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/23035597Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:05:03 +0000Suze CooperHello, hello, and it's nearly Goodbye, goodbye. But this is day 28 of Flash Briefing February Hello, I'm Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper over the last month, we've brought you day by day step by step, breakdown by breakdown, a guide for...
I'm not sure after that introduction, I can say very much but my name is Cece keeper. I am radio broadcaster and I also work for a voice console. See over in London creating skills and actions for Alexa and Google smart speakers and the like. And yes, it has been an amazing 28 days of running through what it takes to put together a flash briefing. So I started up my own flash briefing in March last year. There's been ups and downs. Have I had a different episode every single day? No, have I hit technical trouble? Yes. Have I had my head in my hands and not always had it go out every day as I thought it would? Yes. Because that is the life of a flash briefer isn't it? Peter, and you find that you know, once you've committed to doing this flash briefing, and you know, it's it's quite a task, but it is also really, really quite rewarding. Absolutely. And also that that's the life of a mom of three children.

Sue's not me. So you know, life does sometimes take over, you know, it's not the be all and end all you know, things aren't going to fall apart. If you don't managed to get something up for one day. But, you know, hopefully we've made it easier for you to see some of the tricks that you can use you can implement to make it go a little bit more smoothly. And soon as I've kind of broken this down into into five steps, our final show, as we kind of remind people of some of the of the basics that we've spoken about over the last 27 days, and I recompete could stand for personality because as we said, on one day of the course, you you've got to have a bit of personality, you've got to have Verve, you got to have a bit of vitality, you've got to know about your topic and understand it and and be able to present it in a way that is intriguing, engaging and so on. And and we also spoke to him about having the kind of the voice and the presentation style because if we were just sitting next to each other in in one of our homes, then you know, our voices and our presentation will be completely different. I think It happens we're not actually too far away I guess we're in about 30 miles or so. But you know, our voice will be a bit more quiet and bit more subdued and so on. But because we presenting because we want to intrigue and engage and infuse, you know your voice, your personality kind of goes up. So I'm going to give a p for personality. And I reckon after p comes easy for equipment, so what what are your top tips as far as equipment goes,

Yeah, and our equipment, we spoke about how this shouldn't be a barrier, you know, you shouldn't think that you've got to go out and spend an absolute fortune to get all the top notch tech to be able to record your flash briefing. It can be just as simple as recording into your phone. It could also be as easy as a USB mic into your your computer or your laptop and write the way up to if you wanted to try and create a soundproof area. But absolutely equipment should not be a barrier to you creating your your your flash briefing. And that's one of the things that we've covered in this in this 28 day course, and I hope that we've got across to people because what we really want to be doing is...]]>598alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperHello, hello, and it's nearly Goodbye, goodbye. But this is day 28 of Flash Briefing February Hello, I'm Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper over the last month, we've brought you day by day step by step, breakdown by breakdown, a guide for the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing and Today is our last kind of formal day of the course. I said I bring Hey, I couldn't actually come up with cake but you know what I bought when I put a rice cake, I bought this rice cake which is covered. So I recommend that it looks a little bit like an elixir, doesn't it? Yeah, I that? I think so. So I shall talk into that as soon as he introduces herself and to tell us what we're going to be talking about today the last day of the formal course. I'm not sure after that introduction, I can say very much but my name is Cece keeper. I am radio broadcaster and I also work for a voice console. See over in London creating skills and actions for Alexa and Google smart speakers and the like. And yes, it has been an amazing 28 days of running through what it takes to put together a flash briefing. So I started up my own flash briefing in March last year. There's been ups and downs. Have I had a different episode every single day? No, have I hit technical trouble? Yes. Have I had my head in my hands and not always had it go out every day as I thought it would? Yes. Because that is the life of a flash briefer isn't it? Peter, and you find that you know, once you've committed to doing this flash briefing, and you know, it's it's quite a task, but it is also really, really quite rewarding. Absolutely. And also that that's the life of a mom of three children. Sue's not me. So you know, life does sometimes take over, you know, it's not the be all and end all you know, things aren't going to fall apart. If you don't managed to get something up for one day. But, you know, hopefully we've made it easier for you to see some of the tricks that you can use you can implement to make it go a little bit more smoothly. And soon as I've kind of broken this down into into five steps, our final show, as we kind of remind people of some of the of the basics that we've spoken about over the last 27 days, and I recompete could stand for personality because as we said, on one day of the course, you you've got to have a bit of personality, you've got to have Verve, you got to have a bit of vitality, you've got to know about your topic and understand it and and be able to present it in a way that is intriguing, engaging and so on. And and we also spoke to him about having the kind of the voice and the presentation style because if we were just sitting next to each other in in one of our homes, then you know, our voices and our presentation will be completely different. I think It happens we're not actually too far away I guess we're in about 30 miles or so. But you know, our voice will be a bit more quiet and bit more subdued and so on. But because we presenting because we want to intrigue and engage and infuse, you know your voice, your personality kind of goes up. So I'm going to give a p for personality. And I reckon after p comes easy for equipment, so what what are your top tips as far as equipment goes, Yeah, and our equipment, we spoke about how this shouldn't be a barrier, you know, you shouldn't think that you've got to go out and spend an absolute fortune to get all the top notch tech to be able to record your flash briefing. It can be just as simple as recording into your phone. It could also be as easy as a USB mic into your your computer or your laptop and write the way up to if you wanted to try and create a soundproof area. But absolutely equipment should not be a barrier to you creating your your your flash briefing. And that's one of the things that we've covered in this in this 28 day course, and I hope that we've got across to people because what we really want to be doing is empowering you to go away and do this...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-026-new
Absolutely. Unfortunately, we've run out of time. So thanks very much. No, no, no teasing with you. So I'm going to raise you from audiograms. I'm going to raise with you smart links. Now this is my top tips. smartlink. So someone is following you on Twitter. And most people who's using Twitter or using Facebook on their phone, that's where most people are. And you obviously want to share another way. Yep. As well as having your flash briefing, which obviously people can access there. You obviously want people to be listening to your audio as a podcast as well. You've produced it doesn't actually matter where they consume it, what device they're actually using, so long as they do consume it and lap it up from one day to the next. But it's really awkward with the restricted character count, certainly in Twitter, and it can get very unwieldy say on Facebook, if you're having to link to the various different platforms that people could listen to your podcast on yet. It's one link for Google podcast is one link for Apple podcast is one link for your own podcast host. It's another link for Spotify and all the rest of it can get really, really awkward. Unless you use a smart link. Now, there are various companies that produce smart links for you. It's bit like Bitly Yeah, you know, Bitly, the URL shortener. It's a bit like that. But it's way more clever than just Bitly. Because what you can do is, you can drop in, you can go to a page in your smartlink Host. Yeah. And uv smartlink providers, pop in the URL or You're of your podcast. And what it'll do then is it'll automatically create a link that whatever device people see that link on, and tap through it on, will take them to the appropriate podcast player to hear your audio. So if they're clicking through, they see your tweet with this link on an iOS Apple device. It'll automatically take them to guess what, Apple podcast, if they see your link that you've tweeted on a Android device, then there, tap it, and it'll take them through to Google podcast is really, really clever. Now there are various of these hosts, the one I use is pod follow, and it is kind of URL shortener and takes people to the best player for the device they are actually clicking through on at that time. It's really clever. It's really magic is really smart. And a lot of these other lots of The smart, smart link providers actually give other help and information as well. They give other attributes and other features. And you know what the best thing it's all for free, it's all for free. So don't claim your shortlink at a smartlink host now pod fellow is the one I use. So let's bring Sue's back on because together we can bounce over some more ideas. Obviously, you're going to be using social media let's just kind of knock this back and forth, you know, Twitter and Facebook over to you.

Yeah. Again, if you're kind of looking for a free way to market yourself then social media has to be the way to go really. You do have to put in the effort there you are going to need to tell people exactly what it is what a flash briefing is what they need to say to their Alexa smart speaker to be able to hear it or or provide them with the link to the store as I say so they can enable the skill and But yeah, I think certainly Twitter and LinkedIn, two really good places and and yeah, Facebook and Instagram kind of equally. I suppose personally I found Twitter is really good especially if you've got the right hash tags behind it.

And I would say off the back of that was something we haven't actually mentioned in this episode is also explained to people how to listen not just link here to listen to a podcast but if they are going to be listening through an Amazon Echo device, have somewhere maybe on your website have made maybe a link in your tweet or pinned to the top of your Facebook page to explain how people can actually listen on an echo device because frankly, it's bit complicated. You go here you go to settings you tap through, you choose you decide you scroll through, you put it in you search you use a magnifying glass, you scroll up, you add you change, you edit you move and all the rest of it and then you've got to say the right secret phrase, just it all going Not quite. Okay does that but not far off it. business cards, email, auto cigs, and things like that archive. Of course, all of your content may be on your Facebook page or on your own personal page, don't forget to of course, also use SEO with the title of your of your podcast slash, slash flash briefing, and also in any show notes that you do as well, and all sorts of things as well. Because, you know, it's really important to get out there. One final thing perhaps soon as I can knock this back to you is you're taking time and trouble to create audio for your flash briefing, then perhaps have that transcribed or to be reading from some kind of script. So you've got another blog post, you've got content to put somewhere else in another form.

And there's a really simple way of doing this as well because actually, if you're fat flash briefing is as short as we're suggesting it should be which is kind of two or three minutes, and then you know, JT transcribing. It shouldn't be a massive job. But there is an application that makes it just so simple. You can upload th]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/23035595Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:05:19 +0000Suze CooperWelcome to day 26 of Flash Briefing February My name is Susan Cooper. And this is Peter Stewart, we have been bringing you a video every day in February to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing behind building a better at flash...644alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperWelcome to day 26 of Flash Briefing February My name is Susan Cooper. And this is Peter Stewart, we have been bringing you a video every day in February to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing behind building a better at flash briefing. And it's been great. We've gone through all kinds of different things from the tech that you might need to try to sort out your content to setting up your Amazon developer dashboard. And today, we're going to be speaking a bit about sharing your briefing. So the first thing I'm going to start talking about, which I'm really excited about, and I'm sorry, Peter, I'm probably not even gonna let you say hello today because I want to speak all about audio grounds. So I'm going to press the button and you can just toggle off for a minute. So I'm going to speak about audiograms. So these are really, really exciting little bits of content that you can create, to let people know about your flash briefing and they work really, really well on social media. What am I talking about? These are little things that you might have seen they're generally speaking images that have got a waveform that runs along the bottom or somewhere within the image that actually tallies within a small audio and mp3 file that's there, you can have subtitles on it as well. And they generally work if they're kind of 30 seconds or shorter. It's a little clip that you upload. And you can brand it whatever way you like. So you can create a little image there that is kind of relates to the audio that you've put up, and it can have your logo on it, you can brand the waveform in any way you like. So you can put your brand colours on there. And most of the apps that I use, I've got quite an array now of different waveforms that you can use from kind of little brick waveforms, to proper full flowing things that make the whole thing bounce as as it goes. Now, because these aren't kind of all the rage quite yet. It means that when someone's sat there scrolling through their phone on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn when they see one, it's what I call scroll, stopping Content people going to stop and want to know what that is that they're looking at. Now, lots of people don't have the sound on their phone all the time. And of course, what we're trying to let people know about here is a an audio product. So by having something that kind of moves and looks a little bit different and has some subtitles on there, that really helps because it still gives people a sense of the content that you're producing without them actually having to have their audio on. And you can also add a little sound on symbol onto your image there if you want to, and to let people know that they can click and have a listen. Now what I'd suggest doing is creating some of these audio grounds and then putting them out over on LinkedIn and Twitter work really, really well and on Facebook as well. You can have them in different ratios. The square one works really well across the board and works well on Instagram actually as well. And then I'm basically just put up a link to your flash briefing in the Amazon skill store so that people can go there and can enable your flash briefing. So that I can listen to it each and every day. As I say, I've had some really, really good results not only with people kind of then listening to the flash briefing, but people are really interested in this as a kind of little piece of content podcasters are using them quite a lot. Over here, the BBC are also using them to promote the audio that they're putting together across the the different radio stations. So where do I go to do this, it is an online It is called headliner dot app, you're allowed to make 10 of these audiograms on their free level, they do have a paid for tier. And but I would suggest really, if you're just getting going and you're just wanting to kind of play about with it and have a look at it. The free tier is absolutely great. And even if you just make...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-025
The Smart speakers. So if you're interested in Flash briefings, you may want to listen to the smart speakers daily, so that I can record not so much at a time, not necessarily six weeks ahead of time, but certainly a week, a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks, talking about great case studies, developments, stats, and so on to do with voice tech. Now, there's somebody else that I would mention, and that is Amy summers. Now, Amy summers produces the pitch, which is a really fantastic daily flash briefing, just have a couple of minutes about some ideas that you can implement if you're running your own business. Now, I don't know whether Amy does this because it sounds different every single day. So good on you, Amy. However, what she could do is every six weeks or six months, she could start repeating some of the very best ones that she's produced already. So there's three different things you can do that you can either record every day like you might do with a

topical News Service flash briefing, or you can bulk record well in advance like I do with my flash briefing called watch on in Guilford. Or Finally, before we pop back to Sue's, what you could do is you could start repeating some, because you know what the information is never going to change. If you've got a flash briefing, I don't know about first aid skills, for example, or local history, that ain't gonna change. So what you could do is start repeating, obviously, not too soon. Yeah. But you could start repeating not necessarily in the same order, but you could start repeating or you could have themes. So maybe, maybe once a week, you've done a throwback Thursday, or a mindset Monday or something. And then after a while, what you could do is to put all of those flash briefings with the same kind of content together and have a special run for a week or a couple of weeks. So therefore, you're repeating your best content Suze, I know you've got some fantastic hints and tips as well. What are your ideas?

Yeah, that's right. I mean, what you've just said there about kind of putting the stuff together and creating this kind of week's worth of content, if you like out of a few different episodes would be a really great idea. If you wanted to take a break for a week, so you're on holiday or something like that, that that would be a really good way of making sure that your contents still going to go out because you've then got those episodes kind of in the drawer if you like, and you can pull them out and, and put them together as something just slightly different. But just for that week to give you that that time off, so you're not kind of panicking and trying to try to do it while you're away. Another way of doing that, and I know some flash brief is within kind of the the community over on Twitter, if they're going away, they'll actually switch with other flash briefing producers, perhaps invite them on to do some guest productions for a week and kind of hand over their briefing for the week. You know, it mixes it up for the listener, it gives the listener someone new to hear from a different spin on the subject and it always

So again allows you to kind of take that step back. Now another thing that I would definitely suggest is making sure that your workflow is really simple and easy. So if you can have everything that you need setup, so that you can just hit record, and then that is obviously going to cut down on that feeling of, Oh, no, I've got to go and record the briefing, you know, it's not so much I've got to set up the mic, and I've got to plug it into this and I gotta find that and I've got to find the quiet spot and all the rest of it, if you can find kind of somewhere that is kind of permanently set up if you like for you to go in there and be able to record then particularly if yours is a reactive flash briefing and is kind of something that does need topping up every single day. Then, you know, it just cuts down on the friction barrier of something kind of getting in the way of you actually hitting record and doing it. And the other thing people can do is kind of have a look at their analytics, isn't it PT you know bit about this kind of looking into perhaps what's gone gone well, and

And what hasn't, and that can kind of generate some more content as well comment. Absolutely. And just to go back to what you were saying there avoiding task switching costs, because every time you set up your studio, obviously, that's more time, it could be 10 minutes every day. Because if you bulk record, obviously, you're only spending that 10 minutes, and then you're knocking off a week or a fortnight worth of audio all together. So that is really what and also early on in the course, we talked about recording on your mobile phone as well. And another way to save time is doing that. And another way to save time is perhaps recording straight into spreaker, whether it's on your desktop, or whether it's on your app, because that is where you can play in as you record your theme tune, which is really, really useful. And if you play in your theme tune and your theme tune already has a fade on it, then you don't have to bother about that either. Yeah, so you're saving all that mixing and production and editing time. But as far as analytics go, yeah, it makes sense if you're gonna be repeating audio a little bit further down the line.

You want to repeat your best stuff, don't you? So it kind of makes sense to go into your analytics and to see what kind of content gets listened to most regularly. So it's pretty difficult to do that through your Amazon developer account. But go to your podcast host, you'll be able to see your titles you'll see which of those titles, has persuaded has engaged has teased has trailed your your listeners to listen to your audio, whether as a podcast or whether as a flash briefing and if you can see that every time you mentioned this particular kind of subjects, more people are engaged more people listen, maybe more people comment, maybe more people share, maybe more people get in contact with you, then that makes perfect sense to repeat that kind of content as well. And of course soon as the final thing is, I don't know about you but every morning what do you do you go to Alexa and top of your own list of flash briefings is mine obviously but second off to that t is your very own flash briefing here because you've got to be able to check that your content is going out that he's up to date, you haven't missed something maybe or you've put in the wrong type can wrong time for it to be uploaded and be replayed automatically to be made available for a for Alexa. So make sure you listen, make sure you monitor your own output. So you know it's there. And also you can get a bit of a feel if it's among other people's flash briefings to that it is that the right kind of audio level, the right kind of duration, it's the right kind of pace, it's the right kind of content. So all of those things put together.

That's right. Definitely listening to you at your own briefing is a really good top tip. So we'll be back tomorrow with day 26.]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/23035596Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:05:02 +0000Suze CooperHello, it's us again. And welcome back to flash briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Suze Cooper, we've been here for the last 24 days. Today is day 25. A flash briefing February where we give you the skill set the mindset and...
The Smart speakers. So if you're interested in Flash briefings, you may want to listen to the smart speakers daily, so that I can record not so much at a time, not necessarily six weeks ahead of time, but certainly a week, a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks, talking about great case studies, developments, stats, and so on to do with voice tech. Now, there's somebody else that I would mention, and that is Amy summers. Now, Amy summers produces the pitch, which is a really fantastic daily flash briefing, just have a couple of minutes about some ideas that you can implement if you're running your own business. Now, I don't know whether Amy does this because it sounds different every single day. So good on you, Amy. However, what she could do is every six weeks or six months, she could start repeating some of the very best ones that she's produced already. So there's three different things you can do that you can either record every day like you might do with a

topical News Service flash briefing, or you can bulk record well in advance like I do with my flash briefing called watch on in Guilford. Or Finally,...]]>601alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperHello, it's us again. And welcome back to flash briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Suze Cooper, we've been here for the last 24 days. Today is day 25. A flash briefing February where we give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing. So you can build your very own flash briefing. My background is audio, presentation and production. I've done lecturing, I've also written several books and so on. And I've also trained for the BBC. And I currently work for an organisation, which is Britain's biggest and best Broadcasting Company, which seems to have exactly the same initials as who I used to work for. But you know what, I can't tell you who I work for now, but I can tell you that I used to work for the BBC. Go figure. Anyway, Susan Cooper is also a professional broadcaster as well, which is why we decided to get together and combine our mind power and our own skill set to bring you everything you need to know about putting together these flash briefing Suze's. Yes, that's right. So as Peter mentioned there, I'm also in radio. I'm a news presenter on a commercial radio station. And I also work for a voice consultancy in London, creating voice skills and actions for Alexa and google assistant and all such like so, as Peter says, Here we are. Today we're going to be talking about how to feed your briefing. Now, if you've been following this, these little videos day by day, you should be at the point where you know which equipment you need, what topic you might want to be thinking about doing your flash briefing on, and all kinds of different tips and tricks that we've given you over the different days to be building up your briefing. So now you've got your briefing. It's all plumbed into the animal Amazon developer dashboard. How do you keep it going, Peter, this is something that is kind of an an ever growing topic for us, isn't it as flash briefing creators? How do we sustain this level of content and and keep it going to day after day. How do you do it? Okay, so we got some hints and some tips. The best briefings are the ones that go out every single day. So it's 365 bits of content. No, no, no, it's not. Because sometimes you can repeat your content. Let me give you a couple of ideas. I've got a daily events guide. And obviously, I can't repeat what happened last year, for today, because that won't make sense, obviously. So you can't do it for that. However, with that kind of flash briefing, you can bulk record, you know that something is going to be happening in six days or six weeks time. So you can certainly plan and perhaps produce and record that content way ahead of time. So you can do bulk recording of your flash briefings, if you've got everything together. Now, another of my flash briefings is looking at kind of a tech news to do with voice is called the The Smart speakers. So if you're interested in Flash briefings, you may want to listen to the smart speakers daily, so that I can record not so much at a time, not necessarily six weeks ahead of time, but certainly a week, a couple of weeks, maybe three weeks, talking about great case studies, developments, stats, and so on to do with voice tech. Now, there's somebody else that I would mention, and that is Amy summers. Now, Amy summers produces the pitch, which is a really fantastic daily flash briefing, just have a couple of minutes about some ideas that you can implement if you're running your own business. Now, I don't know whether Amy does this because it sounds different every single day. So good on you, Amy. However, what she could do is every six weeks or six months, she could start repeating some of the very best ones that she's produced already. So there's three different things you can do that you can either record every day like you might do with a topical News Service flash briefing, or you can bulk record well in advance like I do with my flash briefing called watch on in Guilford. Or Finally, before we pop back to...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-024_1
And I work for a big British Broadcasting Company. You've written several books and one of your awards for for journalism, production presentation, that kind of thing, and also spoken around the world and when are here to bring you the skill set the mindset and the marketing for building a better briefing. So we've talked about the skill set and the mindset over the course of the last 23 days, day 24, as Sue says, talk a little bit more about the marketing and your launch, first of all, because when are you going to launch? When is that going to be big that isn't just going to be tomorrow? And it could be? You want to get out there really, really quickly? Are you building up? Have you actually built in a schedule for launching on a specific day? Why might it be a specific day, it might just be the first of the month might be really convenient and handy for you to do that might be on a Saturday rather than a Monday. Think of the day of the week that you may want to do it. It may tie in with your content or with your business. It may tie in perhaps with a conference that is going on. So you can actually go to the conference and tell people I launched my flash briefing all about what we're talking about at this conference today. Or you may want to launch before the conference starts build up a bit of head of steam, as we mentioned before, talk about what he's going on in the conference who the speakers are, what your take is going to be on the different subjects that are going to be discussed at that conference. So, Workout, when is the optimum time when is the best time for you to launch. And then when you've got that date, you're working back from that date with your pre launch publicity. And we're talking about things like teasers and maybe put a countdown timer or something on your website together with a teaser, explaining what it's all about how people can listen, and how people can get involved with your flash briefing. Okay, but also, it's not just the audio we're talking about when it comes to publicity. An awful lot of people nowadays are using audiograms, which Soos knows an awful lot about. So, Suze, this is where you kind of got a bit of audio, but you're combining it with some video to make it much more attractive on social media.

That's it. So sharing audio on social isn't the simplest thing to do up until recently when these audiograms that have really come into being and podcasters are really going crazy using them, because it's a lovely, neat little thing that looks quite good. It's quite scroll stopping when you see one, it's quite different. So what are they? Well, effectively, what you do is you upload a clip and I mean kind of seconds worth of your audio and to a platform such as headline adult output, which is one of the ones that I recommend. There's also wave, which I'll pop the links down in the comments of this episode, but basically, you upload that piece of audio. The software will then convert that into text for you so that it comes up with some subtitles. You can choose to either have moving images and static image or some video playing behind it, it will create a waveform of your audio. That waveform can usually be colour branded, so if you've got a colour, like my pink hair, I generally All of mine with a pink waveform, and there are all kinds of different waveforms that you can choose from, from bars, to actual waves to all kinds of kind of mad, crazy, throbbing kind of lip image imagery that can kind of move in time with with the beat of what the audio is, is the rhythm of the audio. So it really is quite a nice compact little little file that can be used and put out there to support and promote your flash briefing. So what you can do is send that out on your social media channels and say to people if you want to hear more, and direct them to where they can hear your flash briefing, or even let them know what the phrase is to be able to enable your flash briefing. So in my case, it would be Alexa enable social days, and that would then enable the social days flash briefing and it would Alexa within goes through that dynamic to kind of explain through the conversation, how they can then listen to the flash briefing and it will all be set up for them. Then we have to run But the flash briefings and voice technology and smart speakers in general, people are still kind of getting used to the fact that they can put these third party apps, these skills, these flash briefings onto their speaker and customise it in that way. So if you have gone to all the trouble of creating your flash briefing, you're going to need to put a little bit of work in to let people know how they can enable it, where the skill stories, drop the link in there as well. I quite often do some screen share little short videos, and send those out on Facebook and on Twitter as well, just to show people how they can actually enable enable the flash briefing and here the work that I've put together there for them. So it's a little bit of education. It's a little bit of marketing and promotion. But it is a really exciting time because hopefully, you're really on the way now to driving people to listening to your flash briefing on a daily basis. So Peter, we we use social media channels ourselves. We're not talking about massive marketing budgets here are we were really talking about promoting using these channels that we used to Graham, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and and certainly that's what we've done with ours, isn't it?

Absolutely. So maybe you've got those channels already. If you don't know really obviously easy and straightforward to set up. Don't forget, if you're talking about Facebook, I'd be getting two different Facebook groups to promote the flash briefing. I don't know maybe you're doing something about about about dogs. Yeah. So obviously you're going to be getting into some some groups which are talking about dogs, not necessarily just local groups, because your flash briefing is going to be able to be heard around the world. So promote it in other Facebook groups, about dogs about dog walking, dog care, choosing dogs looking after puppies, all sorts of different things. Think laterally going to Google see what people are searching for. And also, don't forget just to go to and this probably will have to be local. Go to your local vets ask if they can put up a poster in the in on the notice board or in the window or something like that get involved maybe they get a sponsor it so think laterally but all the Different places, maybe go to dog shows, put an advert in the dog show magazine, give out leaflets perhaps at a dog show, maybe that be could be a local local event down at your local park or maybe could be a larger event at a big Convention Centre in another town or city, perhaps putting notices up in the local park where people are walking their dogs. Think of all these different places where the touch points are that people will be interested in the content that you are talking about, as well as things like emails and out of office and email signatures and things like this. Talk to people at events, give out business cards, make sure maybe Sue's does this on the back of her business card. It tells people how they can download how they can invoke flash briefing so all sorts of ideas to help you market and then of course when it is up and running, that you got to continue your marketing that marketing doesn't just stop when you launch on Day one, keep up with that kind of publicity. But also then you're going to be talking to the people who are listening. encourage people to share your flash briefing content. encourage people to talk about it. encourage people to leave comments, encourage people to leave reviews as well. Now, we've spoken about this before on the course. It's not very sexy to sound too desperate on a flash briefing. Oh, please leave comments, please leave reviews, please, I love you or mention you five stars. Please don't beg. But just a matter of fact, if you've enjoyed this, and you think other people might enjoy listening to it as well, then leaving a review and five star review would be really appreciated. And it will make us it more easy to discover by other people just something as straightforward as that and maybe occasionally mentioned people who have left you a review but don't try and game the system. As we've spoken about before. If you got other people in the family who are linked to the same Amazon account account for deliveries and for payment purposes. And several people leave a review from that same account. It won't be allowed. And you've got to have bought something from Amazon in the last six months for your account to be active for this kind of reason to be able to leave a review. If you get stuck, and you can't leave review on on the site on the website, then try and leave a review incidentally for someone else's briefing. If you got a reciprocal arrangement via the flash briefing page on your phone. Okay, that's it for today.]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/22028359Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:05:20 +0000Suze CooperHello, and welcome to day 24 of flash briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking all about the pre launch to launching your flash briefing. After all the work that you've done with all your audio, getting all your tech together, sorting out...
And I work for a big British Broadcasting Company. You've written several books and one of your awards for for journalism, production presentation, that kind of thing, and also spoken around the world and when are here to bring you the skill set the mindset and the marketing for building a better briefing. So we've talked about the skill set and the mindset over the course of the last 23 days, day 24, as Sue says, talk a little bit more about the marketing and your launch, first of all, because when are you going to launch? When is that going to be big that isn't just going to be tomorrow? And it could be? You want to get out there really, really quickly? Are you building up? Have you actually built in a schedule for launching on a specific day? Why might it be a specific day, it might just be the first of the month might be really convenient and handy for you to do that might be on a Saturday rather than a Monday. Think of the day of the week that you may want to do it. It may tie in with your content or with your business. It may tie in perhaps with a conference that is going on. So you can actually go to the conference and tell people I launched my flash briefing all about what we're talking about at this conference today. Or you may want to launch before the conference starts build up a bit of head of steam, as we mentioned before, talk about what he's going on in the conference who the speakers are, what your take is going to be on the different subjects that are going to be discussed at that conference. So, Workout, when is the optimum time when is the best time for you to launch. And then when you've got that date, you're working back from that date with your pre launch publicity. And we're talking about things like teasers and maybe put a countdown timer or something on your website together with a teaser, explaining what it's all about how people can listen, and how people can get involved with your flash briefing. Okay, but also, it's not just the audio we're talking about when it comes to publicity. An awful lot of people nowadays are using audiograms, which Soos knows an awful lot about. So, Suze, this is where you kind of got a bit of audio, but you're combining it with some video to make it much more attractive on social media.

That's it. So sharing audio on social isn't the simplest thing to do up until recently when these audiograms that have really come into being and podcasters are really going crazy using them, because it's a lovely, neat little thing that looks quite good. It's quite scroll stopping when you see one, it's quite different. So what are they? Well, effectively, what you do is you upload a clip and I mean kind of seconds worth of your audio and to a platform such as headline adult output, which is one of the ones that I recommend. There's also wave, which I'll pop the links down in the comments of this episode, but basically, you upload that piece of audio. The software will then convert that into text for you so that it comes up with some subtitles. You can choose to either have moving images and static...]]>605alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperHello, and welcome to day 24 of flash briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking all about the pre launch to launching your flash briefing. After all the work that you've done with all your audio, getting all your tech together, sorting out your logo, deciding what to call it, all of the stuff that you've done has been working up to now, which is when you're going to be launching it. So you're going to need to know how to let people know that it's there. And we're going to be talking a little bit about that today. And who are we? I'm Susan Cooper. This is Peter Stewart. We're both professional broadcasters. I work for a radio station in Kent, the London Evening Standard as well, and also for vixen labs, which is a voice consultancy, working out of London, but creating skills and actions for brands and businesses around the world. Peter, tell us about you. And I work for a big British Broadcasting Company. You've written several books and one of your awards for for journalism, production presentation, that kind of thing, and also spoken around the world and when are here to bring you the skill set the mindset and the marketing for building a better briefing. So we've talked about the skill set and the mindset over the course of the last 23 days, day 24, as Sue says, talk a little bit more about the marketing and your launch, first of all, because when are you going to launch? When is that going to be big that isn't just going to be tomorrow? And it could be? You want to get out there really, really quickly? Are you building up? Have you actually built in a schedule for launching on a specific day? Why might it be a specific day, it might just be the first of the month might be really convenient and handy for you to do that might be on a Saturday rather than a Monday. Think of the day of the week that you may want to do it. It may tie in with your content or with your business. It may tie in perhaps with a conference that is going on. So you can actually go to the conference and tell people I launched my flash briefing all about what we're talking about at this conference today. Or you may want to launch before the conference starts build up a bit of head of steam, as we mentioned before, talk about what he's going on in the conference who the speakers are, what your take is going to be on the different subjects that are going to be discussed at that conference. So, Workout, when is the optimum time when is the best time for you to launch. And then when you've got that date, you're working back from that date with your pre launch publicity. And we're talking about things like teasers and maybe put a countdown timer or something on your website together with a teaser, explaining what it's all about how people can listen, and how people can get involved with your flash briefing. Okay, but also, it's not just the audio we're talking about when it comes to publicity. An awful lot of people nowadays are using audiograms, which Soos knows an awful lot about. So, Suze, this is where you kind of got a bit of audio, but you're combining it with some video to make it much more attractive on social media. That's it. So sharing audio on social isn't the simplest thing to do up until recently when these audiograms that have really come into being and podcasters are really going crazy using them, because it's a lovely, neat little thing that looks quite good. It's quite scroll stopping when you see one, it's quite different. So what are they? Well, effectively, what you do is you upload a clip and I mean kind of seconds worth of your audio and to a platform such as headline adult output, which is one of the ones that I recommend. There's also wave, which I'll pop the links down in the comments of this episode, but basically, you upload that piece of audio. The software will then convert that into text for you so that it comes up with some subtitles. You can choose to either have moving images and static image or some video...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-023_1
absolutely Sue's coming your way over the course of the next 567 minutes or so all sorts of different ideas of flash briefings that other people are doing their content, the variety their styles, and you know, I'm not suggesting that you you take you steal these exact ideas, but what you may want to do is think to yourself, hold on, there's something hold on that kind of fits in with something I'm interested in I could make some measure merge the ideas of other people with with with an idea I've already got. Okay, so let's go to the top of the slides that you can see here. Yeah, you know, traditional news outlets and Sue's you I feel free to to pop in if you got any more to add to the so Got a couple of,

of traditional New suppliers. Now obviously a broadcast news provider like the BBC has already got a lot of content is already got audio content, either audio that's being recorded as audio for the radio stations or audio that is the soundtrack for video. So they've already got the content there. They've got professional presenters, readers, prescript, writers and so on. So it should be really, really easy for them to produce content. So if yours is a is a radio station, yeah, flash briefings, lot of radio stations putting out flash briefings, where they are simply recording their top of their news bulletins, and popping them out as a flash briefing. Moving along there. There's the there's the Daily Telegraph, which is a newspaper here in the United Kingdom. So obviously, they've got content, but it's not necessarily in an audio form. Increasingly, of course, newspapers are doing multimedia content, but in this particular instance, the telegraph over the course of the last few years In fact, I was involved at a very early stage, training their staff to go from print to online and then more recently, of course, they've been gathering audio with sorry, they've been gathering us with audio or they're buying in audio or video reports from other places as well. So they've also got audio for that flash briefings to movie along the top there we go, what Sony Medway and I also produce what's on in Guilford. So a daily events guide for your area, potentially eminently sponsible. Maybe by the local Tourist Board, maybe by local restaurant, if people are going to go out and about in your town, in your city in your area, perhaps they want somewhere to to have a little bit of rest and recuperation. They want something to eat and drink that kind of thing. Or maybe it could be sponsored by one of the big local attractions who then will get a mention every day. There's an idea for that, it's a lot of lot of work for you it's going to be every single day is probably just going to be down to you. But if you can get the content from a supply and they give it to you, then pretty much the hard work is done. It's just putting that into a format already divided into into different days and recording it and uploading it. What about a training course? Well, my 28 day flash briefing briefing, yeah, you're watching the flash briefing February. But I've also got a flash briefing all about how to do a flash briefing. Well, I'll be a little bit agree if you copy that exact idea. But what about a training course for you either every single day that you could produce some kind of content to lead people through from A to Zed could just be on a month by month basis? So like the 28 day flash briefing briefing, or it could be open ended every day, giving them some kind of teaching or lesson What about a course to learn another language, a different vocabulary, maybe Every single day, maybe different sentence structure or something like that. So bear that in mind. The Smart speakers is another one of mine. So I have a flash briefing all about this voice tech, voice technology and Lexus and Google homes and big speakers and the case studies and how people are using voice tech around the world. So different different ideas, different stories, different case studies, talk about that for a couple of minutes every single day, maybe you could be the authority, the news provider for what is happening in your particular business. So keep a lookout for that as well. So all sorts of different kinds of content there as well. Let's look down at some of the other ones there. So you'll see another one there, which is about breast cancer. So actually, that is somebody's personal diary. Yeah. Someone's diary day by day about how they are coping with breast cancer from the initial diagnosis to the treatment. How they get on the reaction from friends and family and so on the tips that they pass on to other people as they live their life coming to terms with and working out how to work around the different problems and issues that they have got from the treatment and reaction to others and so on. You can see that on the bottom line there. Let's continue with the with the bottom line. And there's a police force here in the United Kingdom. So what they do is they you've got text to speech. So we spoke about this a bit earlier on in the course, where you can link up your flash briefing. And Alexa will actually read out for you the content that's on your website, not terribly successful, because of course, you've got to make sure that it's in a manner that she's going to be able to read it because otherwise you will read everything there including picture captions, which of course won't mean anything to people that can't actually see the pictures. And also in this particular circumstance with the police force, then she's also reading out in a very light bubbly kind of Alexa voice for people were murdered in a house it. So that sounds a little bit awkward, doesn't it because she doesn't realise the context of what she's reading. So bear that in mind if you're going to be going along the text to speech route. Our good friend canes cane Sims has very often clips of his podcast. So it's another way for you to promote your podcast, take clips of that and put it out as a flash briefing and point people back to hear the full audio a little bit later on. The last one there. bottom right is about a daily dilemma. Just a quick question really easy, really straightforward every single day. Really quick, one question, what would you do in this particular circumstance? Now let's hit that middle line for you. We got some hints and tips. The first one on that middle line is gardening hints and tips. Well, there's so much information about gardening about the plants what to plant at this time of year about different soils, different gadgets and so on, eminently sponsored, of course by a gardening magazine or maybe a local gardening centre, tips and inspiration could go and the next one, and that's where the sun logo comes in. That's the kind of stuff that you can record bulk record, weeks and months in advance. And also you can recycle a lot of that kind of inspirational quotes as well. news from your local sports club, it could be a local club, it could be a national club, Team News, transfer news, injury news, what's going on where the club is going to be playing next week, travel arrangements and so on. The next one is from a local cycling club every week instead of sending out a newsletter or doing a site different way. And they just tell their members where they're going to be meeting, what the route is, how long it is where they're stopping for refreshments where the car park is, and those kinds of things. What the weather forecast is for their particular Saturday morning cycle route. So that's really interesting as well. So all sorts of ones which are going on there. And I'm not going to tell you what that last one is on the middle row. Because I want you to think if that was my logo, if that was my flash briefing for what Peter's been talking about over the last seven or eight minutes, what would I have as the content for that particular logo? So there you go. All sorts of ideas, mix a mesh and merge those with ideas you've already got from your business, your background, your personal experience, and come up with a flash briefing content all of your own, and hopefully, it'll be award winning. I look forward to hearing that. Okay. Sue's back tomorrow with more. Yes.

Yes, that's right. We will be back tomorrow. We're going to be talking all about the pre launch of your flash briefing. So we'll see you again here then. Till then. Bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/22028358Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:05:06 +0000Suze CooperHello and welcome to Day 23 of Flash Briefing February. And today we're going to be speaking about the vast variety of flash briefings that are out there just to give you a little taster and some inspiration for what you could create for your own...
absolutely Sue's coming your way over the course of the next 567 minutes or so all sorts of different ideas of flash briefings that other people are doing their content, the variety their styles, and you know, I'm not suggesting that you you take you steal these exact ideas, but what you may want to do is think to yourself, hold on, there's something hold on that kind of fits in with something I'm interested in I could make some measure merge the ideas of other people with with with an idea I've already got. Okay, so let's go to the top of the slides that you can see here. Yeah, you know, traditional news outlets and Sue's you I feel free to to pop in if you got any more to add to the so Got a couple of,

of traditional New suppliers. Now obviously a broadcast news provider like the BBC has already got a lot of content is already got audio content, either audio that's being recorded as audio for the radio stations or audio that is the soundtrack for video. So they've already got the content there. They've got professional presenters, readers, prescript, writers and so on. So it should be really, really easy for them to produce content. So if yours is a is a radio station, yeah, flash briefings, lot of radio stations putting out flash briefings, where they are simply recording their top of their news bulletins, and popping them out as a flash briefing. Moving along there. There's the there's the Daily Telegraph, which is a newspaper here in the United Kingdom. So obviously, they've got content, but it's not necessarily in an audio form. Increasingly, of course, newspapers are doing multimedia content, but in this particular instance, the telegraph over the course of the last few years In fact, I was involved at a very early stage, training their staff to go from print to online and then more recently, of course, they've been gathering audio with sorry, they've been gathering us with audio or they're buying in audio or video reports from other places as well. So they've also got audio for that flash briefings to movie along the top there we go, what Sony Medway and I also produce what's on in Guilford. So a daily events guide for your area, potentially eminently sponsible. Maybe by the local Tourist Board, maybe by local restaurant, if people are going to go out and about in your town, in your city in your area, perhaps they want somewhere to to have a little bit of rest and recuperation. They want something to eat and drink that kind of thing. Or maybe it could be sponsored by one of the big local attractions who then will get a mention every day. There's an idea for that, it's a lot of lot of work for you it's going to be every single day is probably just going to be down to you. But if you can get the...]]>602alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperHello and welcome to Day 23 of Flash Briefing February. And today we're going to be speaking about the vast variety of flash briefings that are out there just to give you a little taster and some inspiration for what you could create for your own flash briefing. So flash briefing February has been presented every day this month by myself, Sue's Cooper and Peter Stewart. We are both professional broadcasters with a background in radio. And we also create our own flash briefings. So we have been trying to encourage everybody who's interested in Flash briefings to get their their selves behind the microphone start recording and uploading and creating their own flash briefing and that is you so if you're there and you've got all your mic set up, you've got a vague idea of kind of where you want to go with this but you're not completely fixed them. Peter has got a whole host of different bits of inspiration for you today he's going to be talking about lots of different flash briefings that are available that may will just spark off that little thought that's needed to be absolutely sure as to what your content is going to be for your flash briefing. So I'm going to hand you over now to Peter Stewart, Peter, absolutely Sue's coming your way over the course of the next 567 minutes or so all sorts of different ideas of flash briefings that other people are doing their content, the variety their styles, and you know, I'm not suggesting that you you take you steal these exact ideas, but what you may want to do is think to yourself, hold on, there's something hold on that kind of fits in with something I'm interested in I could make some measure merge the ideas of other people with with with an idea I've already got. Okay, so let's go to the top of the slides that you can see here. Yeah, you know, traditional news outlets and Sue's you I feel free to to pop in if you got any more to add to the so Got a couple of, of traditional New suppliers. Now obviously a broadcast news provider like the BBC has already got a lot of content is already got audio content, either audio that's being recorded as audio for the radio stations or audio that is the soundtrack for video. So they've already got the content there. They've got professional presenters, readers, prescript, writers and so on. So it should be really, really easy for them to produce content. So if yours is a is a radio station, yeah, flash briefings, lot of radio stations putting out flash briefings, where they are simply recording their top of their news bulletins, and popping them out as a flash briefing. Moving along there. There's the there's the Daily Telegraph, which is a newspaper here in the United Kingdom. So obviously, they've got content, but it's not necessarily in an audio form. Increasingly, of course, newspapers are doing multimedia content, but in this particular instance, the telegraph over the course of the last few years In fact, I was involved at a very early stage, training their staff to go from print to online and then more recently, of course, they've been gathering audio with sorry, they've been gathering us with audio or they're buying in audio or video reports from other places as well. So they've also got audio for that flash briefings to movie along the top there we go, what Sony Medway and I also produce what's on in Guilford. So a daily events guide for your area, potentially eminently sponsible. Maybe by the local Tourist Board, maybe by local restaurant, if people are going to go out and about in your town, in your city in your area, perhaps they want somewhere to to have a little bit of rest and recuperation. They want something to eat and drink that kind of thing. Or maybe it could be sponsored by one of the big local attractions who then will get a mention every day. There's an idea for that, it's a lot of lot of work for you it's going to be every single day is probably just going to be down to you. But if you can get the content from a supply...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-022_1
Absolutely. And that is exactly what you said to me when I first met you. And I was there wondering how on earth I was ever going to get this flash briefing together. So yeah, thanks, Peter. So we're going to be speaking a little bit about your own personal skill set that you're going to need to put together your flash briefing. So as I kind of alluded to there, I had an idea for a flash briefing and I desperately wanted to put it together. And I kind of thought I had the right content. I have the broadcasting experience. So you would have thought that talking and recording myself into a microphone wasn't something that would would have been a problem for me, but it took me months and months. months to actually get something recorded and start the process with the developer account and the logo and everything else. And why was that? It was because I was putting my own hurdles in my way. Now. Absolutely. With a flash briefing, there are technical issues that might hold you back. There are content issues that might hold you back. But the biggest hurdle I think, sometimes is ourselves. Now get old imposter syndrome does love to come and tap us on the shoulder and kind of say, Well, why would anyone listen to your briefings? There's lots of people out there doing flash briefings, why would yours be any different and most certainly, it completely and utterly froze me it paralysed me and stopped me from moving forward and making the briefing. And it was only once I've met Peter, and we realised we obviously had this broadcasting background in common. And you know, he's a prolific flush briefer with like three flash briefings going on. And it was him saying exactly that to me, you know, that the best thing you can do to get this underway, is to start and he's totally Right. So how do we do that? How do we kind of quiet in that little voice inside? That's kind of telling us that our briefing is just going to be one of lots of others? Well, firstly, is it really one of lots and lots of others? There is still relatively few of us flash briefing producers out there, in terms of kind of other ways of getting information in terms of podcast. Certainly, you know, we have actually got quite a smooth small pool of flash briefing creators, a lot of us are quite active over on Twitter, you'll see that I'm at Big 10, social Peters Twitter, Stuart, and we do all chat with each other and kind of as a bit of a community around it. And that's because the kind of smart speaker skill producer and flash briefing producer pool is actually quite small at the moment. So it is actually quite a good time to be starting up your flash briefing and you're actually probably not quite such a small fish in a big pond. However, it is also making sure that you have got all the things That we have kind of run through during February to give you that confidence that you're going to be able to put together something that you're really proud of and that you want other people to listen to. So remember that your flash briefing is going to be unique. It doesn't matter if someone is doing something on the same topic as you, because they're not going to be saying it in the same way that you are. And to be honest, if you choose a topic that you're really passionate about, and that you really enjoy your enthusiasm creates such a connection with your listener, that it's you that they're going to want to hear from. So it really is just reminding yourself that no one can do it quite like you. It is completely your own little audio entity to play with and to, to do what you want with and to test with and at the moment in this space is a really great place to be and really quite a supportive community around the world actually. And we've asked without creators, now we put together flash briefing February because we really wanted to try and encourage other people to come along. And join in and get their flash briefing off the ground. We put all of this content together for you, there is an episode every single day. And it really has run through exactly what you're going to need in terms of all the tech stuff in terms of filling out your developer account, choosing a podcast host, all those kinds of things. And if you follow through what we've been doing, and then you will end up with your flash briefing, ready to hit that button and get certified by Amazon. But if you do need that little support, that little reminder that you can do this, then do by all means drop us a message. We are very approachable, very friendly, and totally up for supporting you and helping you where we can, whether it's with the developer dashboard, whether it's needing to know which microphone to buy. So do please go along, follow us on Twitter, and get in touch and let us know that you've been been watching this drop us a message. And we also put together a flash briefing newsletter every week that goes out on a Friday called the Friday flash briefing briefing. So if you want to sign up for that and stay in touch with us. You can do that over at voice works dot info. So Peter, what will we be learning about in the next episode tomorrow? Tell us tell us more about that.

Okay, so you took the floor, you took centre stage today, and tomorrow we'll swap roles. I'll be taking kind of centre stage as well. And you may be thinking after Sue's kind of inspirational talk there, you know what I, I want to do it. I know what microphone to get. I know my podcast host. I've taken a look at the developer accounts. I've but I still don't know what it is I'm going to be talking about because like, I don't actually have a business, but I want to be out there. I can see the opportunities, I can see the possibilities, but I still don't know what to talk about. Okay, so tomorrow, I'm going to be running through all sorts of different flash briefings that are out there and hopefully giving you a bit more inspiration as our 28 day Flash Briefing February course continues. You want to be inspired. You want some ideas, you want to Know what other people are talking about on their flash briefings. Join us tomorrow. Bye bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/22028356Sat, 22 Feb 2020 00:05:10 +0000Suze CooperHello, welcome back to another edition of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stuart. And together with Susan Cooper, we are rocking the world with our flash briefings. We got several flash briefings out there. And it's kind of not surprising...
Absolutely. And that is exactly what you said to me when I first met you. And I was there wondering how on earth I was ever going to get this flash briefing together. So yeah, thanks, Peter. So we're going to be speaking a little bit about your own personal skill set that you're going to need to put together your flash briefing. So as I kind of alluded to there, I had an idea for a flash briefing and I desperately wanted to put it together. And I kind of thought I had the right content. I have the broadcasting experience. So you would have thought that talking and recording myself into a microphone wasn't something that would would have been a problem for me, but it took me months and months. months to actually get something recorded and start the process with the developer account and the logo and everything else. And why was that? It was because I was putting my own hurdles in my way. Now. Absolutely. With a flash briefing, there are technical issues that might hold you back. There are content issues that might hold you back. But the biggest hurdle I think, sometimes is ourselves. Now get old imposter syndrome does love to come and tap us on the shoulder and kind of say, Well, why would anyone listen to your briefings? There's lots of people out there doing flash briefings, why would yours be any different and most certainly, it completely and utterly froze me it paralysed me and stopped me from moving forward and making the briefing. And it was only once I've met Peter, and we realised we obviously had this broadcasting background in common. And you know, he's a prolific flush briefer with like three flash briefings going on. And it was him saying exactly that to me, you know, that the best thing you can do to get this underway, is to start and he's totally Right. So how do we do that? How do we kind of quiet in that little voice inside? That's kind of telling us that our briefing is just going to be one of lots of others? Well, firstly, is it really one of lots and lots of others? There is still relatively few of us flash briefing producers out there, in terms of kind of other ways of getting information in terms of podcast. Certainly, you know, we have actually got quite a smooth small pool of flash briefing creators, a lot of us are quite active over on Twitter, you'll see that I'm at Big 10, social Peters Twitter, Stuart, and we do all chat with each other and kind of as a bit of a community around it. And that's because the kind of smart speaker skill producer and flash briefing producer pool is actually quite small at the moment. So it is actually quite a good time to be starting up your flash briefing and...]]>427alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperHello, welcome back to another edition of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stuart. And together with Susan Cooper, we are rocking the world with our flash briefings. We got several flash briefings out there. And it's kind of not surprising because our background is in radio, in audio presentation and production as well here in the United Kingdom. And as you can see, I'm in London. And Sue's is just outside London in the county of Kent. Sue's will make us on screen appearance in a few moments time, because most of today's episode is going to be with Susan now she's going to be in a bit of a bit of a sandwich if you like because I the size of suit, that is suits, there's going to be there's going to be me so I'm going to introduce her. And also I'll be back at the end to say what's going to be in tomorrow's episode which is going to be mainly presented by my good self. So what is Suze's talking about today? Well, we always say don't wait. We're talking about the skill set the mindset and the marketing of producing a better briefing so so this is going to be taking up one of those ideas and going with it over the next few minutes on today's edition of flash briefing February. And Souza, I guess a good way to kind of introduce you. But one tip I would have is the best way to start is to start. Absolutely. And that is exactly what you said to me when I first met you. And I was there wondering how on earth I was ever going to get this flash briefing together. So yeah, thanks, Peter. So we're going to be speaking a little bit about your own personal skill set that you're going to need to put together your flash briefing. So as I kind of alluded to there, I had an idea for a flash briefing and I desperately wanted to put it together. And I kind of thought I had the right content. I have the broadcasting experience. So you would have thought that talking and recording myself into a microphone wasn't something that would would have been a problem for me, but it took me months and months. months to actually get something recorded and start the process with the developer account and the logo and everything else. And why was that? It was because I was putting my own hurdles in my way. Now. Absolutely. With a flash briefing, there are technical issues that might hold you back. There are content issues that might hold you back. But the biggest hurdle I think, sometimes is ourselves. Now get old imposter syndrome does love to come and tap us on the shoulder and kind of say, Well, why would anyone listen to your briefings? There's lots of people out there doing flash briefings, why would yours be any different and most certainly, it completely and utterly froze me it paralysed me and stopped me from moving forward and making the briefing. And it was only once I've met Peter, and we realised we obviously had this broadcasting background in common. And you know, he's a prolific flush briefer with like three flash briefings going on. And it was him saying exactly that to me, you know, that the best thing you can do to get this underway, is to start and he's totally Right. So how do we do that? How do we kind of quiet in that little voice inside? That's kind of telling us that our briefing is just going to be one of lots of others? Well, firstly, is it really one of lots and lots of others? There is still relatively few of us flash briefing producers out there, in terms of kind of other ways of getting information in terms of podcast. Certainly, you know, we have actually got quite a smooth small pool of flash briefing creators, a lot of us are quite active over on Twitter, you'll see that I'm at Big 10, social Peters Twitter, Stuart, and we do all chat with each other and kind of as a bit of a community around it. And that's because the kind of smart speaker skill producer and flash briefing producer pool is actually quite small at the moment. So it is actually quite a good time to be starting up your flash briefing and you're...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-021_1
The next step in producing a Flash Briefing is to create an Amazon developer account. Building it is basically answering a series of questions. It’s almost like filling out a long form. And it only needs to be done once. https://developer.amazon.com/home.html

Professional broadcasters and top UK Flash Briefing creators Suze Cooper and Peter Stewart present Flash Briefing February.

A video every day in February giving you all you need to know about the mindset, skillset and marketing needed to create a successful Alexa Flash Briefing.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/22028354Fri, 21 Feb 2020 16:29:28 +0000Suze CooperDAY 21 – Setting Up Your Flash Briefing Developer Account The next step in producing a Flash Briefing is to create an Amazon developer account. Building it is basically answering a series of questions. It’s almost like filling out a long form. And...
The next step in producing a Flash Briefing is to create an Amazon developer account. Building it is basically answering a series of questions. It’s almost like filling out a long form. And it only needs to be done once. https://developer.amazon.com/home.html

Professional broadcasters and top UK Flash Briefing creators Suze Cooper and Peter Stewart present Flash Briefing February.

A video every day in February giving you all you need to know about the mindset, skillset and marketing needed to create a successful Alexa Flash Briefing.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>612alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperDAY 21 – Setting Up Your Flash Briefing Developer Account The next step in producing a Flash Briefing is to create an Amazon developer account. Building it is basically answering a series of questions. It’s almost like filling out a long form. And it only needs to be done once. https://developer.amazon.com/home.html Professional broadcasters and top UK Flash Briefing creators Suze Cooper and Peter Stewart present Flash Briefing February. A video every day in February giving you all you need to know about the mindset, skillset and marketing needed to create a successful Alexa Flash Briefing. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocialNohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-020_1
It is. So I'm Susan Cooper. I am a broadcast journalist as well. I work for a radio station here in Kent, reading the news mainly. And I also read news for the London Evening Standard for the Google News that can be heard over in the US on the Google Assistant and I work with vixen labs as well, which is a voice consultancy based over in London building skills and actions for big brands and businesses around the world. So between the two of us, we've certainly got some knowledge and know how that we would absolutely love to pass on to you guys. And that's what Flash Briefing febri has been all about. So yes, today we are talking all about hosting services, and how to choose one because there are absolutely loads of them out there. Peter on there, how do we pick which one to use?

Absolutely. So just to remind you, your Flash Briefing is a little piece of audio. So pretty much like a podcast but it can only be heard on the device by Amazon Echo. It can be heard on other devices, but as a podcast. Now, there are lots of places where you can upload your podcast to you could actually use your own websites to host your audio file. And that would mean that when you ask Alexa to to play Flash Briefing, she would scurry away and find the address where is hosted that you have given her already as the as the provider as the content producer of that audio. And, as I said, we have said previously on the course, could actually be on your own website, that kind of slows things down my mean that you've got to know a little bit of technicalities and things like that much easier to use a podcast host, which is also a Flash Briefing host if you like so you need somewhere to upload all of your audio, that audio will then potentially be stored up there forever. And they are pretty cheap as well. So let's go into some of these details of some of the things that you may want to be looking for. So first of all, I would say it's got to be one of the reasonable big players. You know what there are dozens and dozens of podcast hosts out there. And some of them are brand new startups, some of them do really original, really different things. Have a look around will give you a bit of a guide here, but usually the most reliable ones are going to be one of the big players. So I wouldn't look down a list of, you know, to the 30s and 40s of podcasts, I'd look certainly in the top dozen or so. And these are the kind of things you need to look out for one that has fast and reliable service. Because the last thing you want when someone asks Alexa to play your Flash Briefing, the last thing you want is for your audio to to start and to judge or not being able to be played at all because if your audio isn't being played and people will, very, very quickly will just simply unsubscribe. And it's very, very difficult to get them back. Okay, that's my top tip number one in this battle of the podcast host. So let's move over to Suze's Come on top that.

So one of the things that you really need to think about is kind of future proofing yourself how much stories in storage is your podcast is going to allow you to have how many episodes are they going to allow you To upload before they either start kind of knocking them off the back so you can upload more or before they're going to start charging you because cost is obviously going to be something that is going to be a factor in your choice. Now, lots of these different platforms and the ones were, you know, kind of thinking of here, there there is this spreaker, a cast pod, bean Lipson, there's all kinds of different ones out there. And most of them, if not all of them have a free tier level way to kind of get you going and get you started. But it's really important to look at that free tier level and just see how long you're actually going to be able to use it for free and how much it's going to be if you do want to or need to move on to the next level. So I think I'm right in saying that the cost generally is around 15 to 20 pounds dollars a month, which isn't a huge outlay, however, again, you do want to be thinking that if you're going to try and do this over a certain number of months, it's gonna rack up and it is going to cost you that kind of annual blood Some of the podcast hosts will actually give you a discount if you sign up for a year rather than just going month by month. However, if like me, you want to kind of try it out first, which is absolutely what I did. I went month by month for a few months and then thought, No, this is okay, I'm into the routine of it, I'm finding the content, I'm getting the lessons, I'll dive straight in and go for a yearly plan, which will save me 25%. So that's my my first tip for choosing your podcast host.

And you made a really good point there because one of my Flash Briefings is an event guide. So obviously, that there's no reason for me want to keep all of the event guides from from last month, no one will ever want to listen to them. So what I can do is I can use a service, which allows a certain amount of content to be saved to be archived. And then I just delete them from the bottom, the oldest states first and then just add some more onto the top. So really good tip there. From Suze's obviously as you would expect, okay. I'm going to raise you one. Now, it's got to be easy. It's got to be straightforward. It's got to be able to save you time, it's got to have a nice interface for you to use. And it's got to have some nice support. I'm throwing a whole load in on this one, but essentially, straightforward, clean interface. Nice a user experience both for you and also people who may want to hear your Flash Briefing as a podcast and to go to the site to hear it rather than to hear it as a Flash Briefing. And don't forget the value of support. Now, I used to use a podcast host, which is actually closed down, it's been bought out by another one paper. I don't know them up. They've gone now really, really great, superb contacts and help desk they were there at all times of day and night. And they were really useful and that saved me an awful lot of perspiration and frustration and also spreaker r us as well now, and they are good as well. So I'm sure the others are too. But do consider how easy it is, what the support is like. Because after all, you want to save time when you're doing all this, you're uploading something for every single day of the year, hopefully. So look out for something that's going to save you time and save you frustration. Okay, back to Suze's.

So the other thing you might want to think about is actually where the podcast host that you're uploading to then syndicates your audio to. And this is really quite important in terms of people who might want to listen to it as a podcast because I'm certainly on Alexa, you can't actually listen directly to podcast, you need that to be fed through something like Spotify or Intune at the moment. And so you need to make sure that really your Flash Briefing is still hitting those main players and it is on Spotify. You know, it's making sure it's on iTunes, all those kinds of things and lots of these podcasts hosts, it's as easy as connecting your account to that That other hosts account and kind of linking the two and it will send out your briefing your audio out to Spotify out to to, to the other big players that are out there. And that's really quite important. Another thing that you might want to consider is the analytics and making sure that you know which analytics you're going to want, and how they might be useful to you in the future, I think possibly, Peter, I'd say the main one really is how many listens you're getting, because that might be an area where you may be able to monetize in future if if you've got those stats. That's right, isn't it?

Absolutely. So all sorts of analytics or how many people are listening. Also, perhaps where they are listening, what country how long they listen for, before perhaps they stopped playing that kind of thing. Some analytics as we've said before, you can actually get from your Amazon dashboard for your actual account when you set up your flash briefly. We'll come to that in in a few days time. But other analytics as we've said before, will be on your podcast host because what Alex will do is your pool the audio from there, then cash it herself in case other people want to hear it. So you need to put together the analytics both from your podcast host number one, number two from your Alexa developer account. And number three, potentially also go to Google podcasts and Apple podcast and Spotify as well to see how many plays work through that server as well. Okay, one more thing. And that's everything else, all sorts of other features, because some podcast hosts will also give you other features like a custom domain, a kind of mini website page, allow you to embed the audio, take a code and embed the audio on your own website, perhaps audiograms Dental audiograms acids will explain that in a couple of days time. So all sorts of things that you need to be looking out for. Don't just go for the biggest name and the biggest price.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/22027419Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:09 +0000Suze CooperHello, hello. Welcome to another edition of Flash Briefing February. This is where we bring you the skill sets the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing and hopefully you've been following us during the course of the last couple of three...
It is. So I'm Susan Cooper. I am a broadcast journalist as well. I work for a radio station here in Kent, reading the news mainly. And I also read news for the London Evening Standard for the Google News that can be heard over in the US on the Google Assistant and I work with vixen labs as well, which is a voice consultancy based over in London building skills and actions for big brands and businesses around the world. So between the two of us, we've certainly got some knowledge and know how that we would absolutely love to pass on to you guys. And that's what Flash Briefing febri has been all about. So yes, today we are talking all about hosting services, and how to choose one because there are absolutely loads of them out there. Peter on there, how do we pick which one to use?

Absolutely. So just to remind you, your Flash Briefing is a little piece of audio. So pretty much like a podcast but it can only be heard on the device by Amazon Echo. It can be heard on other devices, but as a podcast. Now, there are lots of places where you can upload your podcast to you could actually use your own websites to host your audio file. And that would mean that when you ask Alexa to to play Flash Briefing, she would scurry away and find the address where is hosted that you have given her already as the as the provider as the content producer of that audio. And, as I said, we have said previously on the course, could actually be on your own website, that kind of slows things down my mean that you've got to know a little bit of technicalities and things like that much easier to use a podcast host, which is also a Flash Briefing host if you like so you need somewhere to upload all of your audio, that audio will then potentially be stored up there forever. And they are pretty cheap as well. So let's go into some of these details of some of the things that you may want to be looking for. So first of all, I would say it's got to be one of the reasonable big players. You know what there are dozens and dozens of podcast hosts out there. And some of them are brand new startups, some of them do really original, really different things. Have a look around will give you a bit of a guide here, but usually the most reliable ones are going to be one of the big players. So I wouldn't look down a list of, you know, to the 30s and 40s of podcasts, I'd look certainly in the top dozen or so. And these are the kind of things you need to look out for one that has fast and reliable service. Because the last thing you want when someone asks Alexa to play your Flash Briefing, the last thing you want is for your audio to to start and to judge or not being able to be played at all because if your audio isn't being played and people will, very, very quickly will just simply unsubscribe. And it's very, very difficult to get them back. Okay, that's my top tip number one in this battle of the podcast host. So let's move over to Suze's Come on top that.

So one of the things that you really need to think about is kind of future proofing yourself how much stories in storage is your podcast is going to allow you to have how many episodes are they going to allow you To upload before they either start kind of knocking them off the back so you...]]>620alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperHello, hello. Welcome to another edition of Flash Briefing February. This is where we bring you the skill sets the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing and hopefully you've been following us during the course of the last couple of three weeks. Me Peter Stewart, as you can see, and also together with Susan Cooper. We're broadcasting professionals here. Kind of Yeah, we are broadcast professionals here in the United Kingdom. Working just outside London, I work for a big, big British Broadcasting Company, and doing all sorts of of media and video and radio and written several books on it all as well. And Suze's Introduce yourself before we crack on with today's topic, which is hosting. It is. So I'm Susan Cooper. I am a broadcast journalist as well. I work for a radio station here in Kent, reading the news mainly. And I also read news for the London Evening Standard for the Google News that can be heard over in the US on the Google Assistant and I work with vixen labs as well, which is a voice consultancy based over in London building skills and actions for big brands and businesses around the world. So between the two of us, we've certainly got some knowledge and know how that we would absolutely love to pass on to you guys. And that's what Flash Briefing febri has been all about. So yes, today we are talking all about hosting services, and how to choose one because there are absolutely loads of them out there. Peter on there, how do we pick which one to use? Absolutely. So just to remind you, your Flash Briefing is a little piece of audio. So pretty much like a podcast but it can only be heard on the device by Amazon Echo. It can be heard on other devices, but as a podcast. Now, there are lots of places where you can upload your podcast to you could actually use your own websites to host your audio file. And that would mean that when you ask Alexa to to play Flash Briefing, she would scurry away and find the address where is hosted that you have given her already as the as the provider as the content producer of that audio. And, as I said, we have said previously on the course, could actually be on your own website, that kind of slows things down my mean that you've got to know a little bit of technicalities and things like that much easier to use a podcast host, which is also a Flash Briefing host if you like so you need somewhere to upload all of your audio, that audio will then potentially be stored up there forever. And they are pretty cheap as well. So let's go into some of these details of some of the things that you may want to be looking for. So first of all, I would say it's got to be one of the reasonable big players. You know what there are dozens and dozens of podcast hosts out there. And some of them are brand new startups, some of them do really original, really different things. Have a look around will give you a bit of a guide here, but usually the most reliable ones are going to be one of the big players. So I wouldn't look down a list of, you know, to the 30s and 40s of podcasts, I'd look certainly in the top dozen or so. And these are the kind of things you need to look out for one that has fast and reliable service. Because the last thing you want when someone asks Alexa to play your Flash Briefing, the last thing you want is for your audio to to start and to judge or not being able to be played at all because if your audio isn't being played and people will, very, very quickly will just simply unsubscribe. And it's very, very difficult to get them back. Okay, that's my top tip number one in this battle of the podcast host. So let's move over to Suze's Come on top that. So one of the things that you really need to think about is kind of future proofing yourself how much stories in storage is your podcast is going to allow you to have how many episodes are they going to allow you To upload before they either start kind of knocking them off the back so you can upload more or before...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-019-newhttps://youtu.be/2DIovctCP4I

Hello, welcome to Episode 19 day 19 of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here to help you with your Flash Briefing production and presentation, your ideas, your tech, what you say how you say it all sorts of different things over our 28 day course. And today we're going to be talking a bit more about bulk recording. So this is something that you can do to avoid what we call task switching costs. Because you know what, it can be quite daunting to think yourself, oh, I've got a set up all my key to all my gear, I've got to set up the recording. I've got a plug in my microphone every single day to do my Flash Briefing on a bit of it, actually, it's going to save time. If you actually think about the logistics, and you actually put aside an hour or two a week or an hour or two a month to get everything all done at the same time and then you don't have it kind of hanging over you it's going to be much more Joy, much more of a nice experience. But Suze is going to be going into this in a bit more depth in a few moments time. But before I go, I must tell you about our newsletter, because every single week, every Friday, we produce a newsletter for you, which is all to do with audio production. Because the Flash Briefing briefing comes out every every Friday. And if you want to sign up for that, all sorts of links, and tips and features and tech and offers and discounts all to do with audio presentation and production for you. If you produce audio in any form, that could be a Flash Briefing, could be a podcast, could be radio, all sorts of different things for that. And why do we put it together? Well, my name is Peter Stewart. And I've spent 30 years in audio presentation and production for companies such as the one I work for at the moment, which I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but it's a big British Broadcasting Company. And also I've written several books on audio presentation and production. done some lectures around the world, and also want a couple of awards as well with that kind of stuff. But enough about me. Let's hand over to Suze Susan Cooper Suze's introduce yourself and also head headlong into why bulk recording is going to be so much better for people's time. And frankly, sanity.

Absolutely. That's right. And so yeah, I'm CS keeper. I am a professional broadcaster. I work at a radio station here in Kent. I also record news for the London Evening Standard that can be heard by Google Assistant over in the US. And I create my very own Flash Briefing called social days, which comes up every single day just as a Flash Briefing should and if you've been listening to or watching this month for Flash Briefing February, you'll have heard us recommend that Flash Briefings are indeed a daily affair Now that means that you need ideas and audio for every day. of the Week, 365 days a year. And it sounds a pretty daunting task, it has to be said. But I'm here to let you know that if you can get yourself organised, that is going to be the key to producing this day after day, and ensuring that your listener is going to stay with you and hear from you every single day. So what you need to do is make sure that you have got a topic that your Flash Briefing on that is definitely got legs, it needs to have something new to say about it every single day. I'm talking generally about a briefing that you're expecting to have a long lifespan not something that's kind of a shorter one that you might just do for a month say so we're looking for the long term. You want to make sure first of all that you have got a subject that has got that content in it. Once you know it has, you want to then sketch out your first month say of content see put down those bullet points. Peter spoke yesterday about presentation skills, perhaps having a very strict script for each One is not key, but perhaps a couple of bullet points. Remember, Flash Briefings are really only two to three minutes long, we're not really going much beyond that. So it's not impossible to have kind of two or three little pointers for each one of those content ideas for each day. Now, once you've got those, you set up your kit, as we've discussed in the last few days doesn't have to be the top notch, professional, highly expensive stuff. But you get your microphone out, you're sorted and plugged into whatever it is you're about to record into. And you can then record that first month's worth of content all in one go. Now, what that does is batches all of that together, it means that it may well take you an hour or so to sit there and record that long file and then perhaps there's several ways of doing it. You might do the way I do it, which is literally to press record. And then to record one after the other after the other. What I do is between each one I do this. Why do I do that? Because it peaks on the waveform. So then once I've finished my recording, I end up with a really long audio file with lots of flat lines in it. And I know that those straight lines are where one single episode begins and ends. Now I don't go back and edit every minute detail, I don't edit out arms and as the only reason In fact, I generally, if I make a mistake, I start again because it is such a short audio file that it's easier just to take a deep breath and start again than it is to start fiddling about and trying to edit the the arms, the ears, the breaths, all of that kind of thing. So I really do do it as a one take wonder and and I will take lift literally that piece of audio, mix it down with my music bed that I use each day my theme tune and then upload that mp3 audio file onto the podcast host and we'll be talking about the host Staying and which podcast hosts and different things like that in the coming days as well. Of course, you may want to record each one individually, which is another way, obviously of kind of categorising it live live reading it if you like. And in which case, you're kind of pressing stop and start. The reason I don't do that is because I have to come in and out of my little studio, I actually put my laptop outside of the acoustic curtain that I use, because otherwise, I can hear the fan starting up on my laptop and I can't seem to deaden that sound. So that would be me kind of going backwards and forwards, which is why I just press record and stop once. However, it may be that you want to press record, do one day press stop, upload that and then do the next one which be absolutely fine by absolutely guarantee that if you are prepared enough, you're prepared with your content. You set aside that couple of hours one weekend, you can batch record a large number of the short files so that you are ready and able to provide the content that it needs. that it takes to create and produce Flash Briefing every single day, and really show up food for your listeners. So that's the way that we would recommend doing it. And certainly, Peter, you have three Flash Briefings. So really without doing this, I'm not quite sure how, how on earth you would you'd actually do it.

So what do I do a quick moment on my on my workflow? So I've got three Flash Briefings. Let's think about these. So the first one of those let's talk about the 28 day Flash Briefing briefing, which is a Flash Briefing all about how to do a Flash Briefing. So if you want to follow that as a Flash Briefing, it's a few minutes every day with tips and tricks and suggestions about how you can do a Flash Briefing. And what happens with that. Well, of course, even though that is different every single day from day one to day 28. It repeats from one month to the next. So I've recorded all of those, and they have to be rescheduled every single month but they go up Pastor kind of set and forget through the host of paper, which is around at the moment, but he's in the process of changing to a cast. And what that allows you to do is to unschedule something which has already gone out and then easily reschedule it to go out again, in a month's time. So that's quite straightforward. And I update those occasionally. But I don't have to actually update the content every single month. One of my others is a what's on events guide for a county here in the United Kingdom. So I get all that information in advance. It's given to me by Tourist Information group, they print all that out for me. So I scribble on each of those days events, and make a few notes and so on. And then I record directly into the spreaker desktop app, which is then quite straightforward. As soon as says again, if I make a mistake, I go back and I start that again, but hopefully I'm okay. ad libbing a reading off a reading of a script of ad libbing around some notes that I've got for each of those days events. So that's quite straightforward. I've also got a desk here and panel controls, through which I can play my theme tune it directly. So I record it with the theme tune and get through that. So that's a couple of minutes. And then with my smart speakers daily podcast or Flash Briefing, I do the same kind of thing. I ad lib around an article and play in the theme tune the intro and the outro live as it were. And if I make a really big mistake, I go back and record that again, because it's quicker to go back and record than it is to edit and join different bids together and check their okay. So much easier to bulk record with that kind of setup than it is to set up my home studio every single day. So Suze's absolutely right in that regard. Gotta work out the workflow that it's going to work for you. which in itself is quite a good phrase Isn't it just came off the top my head back to work out the workflow that works for you.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21819842Wed, 19 Feb 2020 00:00:12 +0000Suze Cooperhttps://youtu.be/2DIovctCP4I Hello, welcome to Episode 19 day 19 of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here to help you with your Flash Briefing production and presentation, your ideas, your tech,...https://youtu.be/2DIovctCP4I

Hello, welcome to Episode 19 day 19 of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here to help you with your Flash Briefing production and presentation, your ideas, your tech, what you say how you say it all sorts of different things over our 28 day course. And today we're going to be talking a bit more about bulk recording. So this is something that you can do to avoid what we call task switching costs. Because you know what, it can be quite daunting to think yourself, oh, I've got a set up all my key to all my gear, I've got to set up the recording. I've got a plug in my microphone every single day to do my Flash Briefing on a bit of it, actually, it's going to save time. If you actually think about the logistics, and you actually put aside an hour or two a week or an hour or two a month to get everything all done at the same time and then you don't have it kind of hanging over you it's going to be much more Joy, much more of a nice experience. But Suze is going to be going into this in a bit more depth in a few moments time. But before I go, I must tell you about our newsletter, because every single week, every Friday, we produce a newsletter for you, which is all to do with audio production. Because the Flash Briefing briefing comes out every every Friday. And if you want to sign up for that, all sorts of links, and tips and features and tech and offers and discounts all to do with audio presentation and production for you. If you produce audio in any form, that could be a Flash Briefing, could be a podcast, could be radio, all sorts of different things for that. And why do we put it together? Well, my name is Peter Stewart. And I've spent 30 years in audio presentation and production for companies such as the one I work for at the moment, which I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but it's a big British Broadcasting Company. And also I've written several books on audio presentation and production. done some lectures around the world, and also want a couple of awards as well with that kind of stuff. But enough about me. Let's hand over to Suze Susan Cooper Suze's introduce yourself and also head headlong into why bulk recording is going to be so much better for people's time. And frankly, sanity.

Absolutely. That's right. And so yeah, I'm CS keeper. I am a professional broadcaster. I work at a radio station here in Kent. I also record news for the London Evening Standard that can be heard by Google Assistant over in the US. And I create my very own Flash Briefing called social days, which comes up every single day just as a Flash Briefing should and if you've been listening to or watching this month for Flash Briefing February, you'll have heard us recommend that Flash Briefings are indeed a daily affair Now that means that you need ideas and audio for every day. of the Week, 365 days a year. And it sounds a pretty daunting task, it has to be said. But I'm here to let you know that if you can get yourself organised, that is going to be the key to producing this day after day, and ensuring that your listener is going to stay with you and hear from you every single day. So what you need to do is make sure that you have got a topic that your Flash Briefing on that is definitely got legs, it needs to have something new to say about it every single day. I'm talking generally about a briefing that you're expecting to have a long lifespan not something that's kind of a shorter one that you might just do for a month say so we're looking for the long term. You want to make sure first of all that you have got a subject that has got that content in it. Once you know it has, you want to then sketch out your first month say of content see put down those bullet points. Peter spoke yesterday about presentation skills, perhaps having a very strict script for each One is not key,...]]>641alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze Cooperhttps://youtu.be/2DIovctCP4I Hello, welcome to Episode 19 day 19 of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here to help you with your Flash Briefing production and presentation, your ideas, your tech, what you say how you say it all sorts of different things over our 28 day course. And today we're going to be talking a bit more about bulk recording. So this is something that you can do to avoid what we call task switching costs. Because you know what, it can be quite daunting to think yourself, oh, I've got a set up all my key to all my gear, I've got to set up the recording. I've got a plug in my microphone every single day to do my Flash Briefing on a bit of it, actually, it's going to save time. If you actually think about the logistics, and you actually put aside an hour or two a week or an hour or two a month to get everything all done at the same time and then you don't have it kind of hanging over you it's going to be much more Joy, much more of a nice experience. But Suze is going to be going into this in a bit more depth in a few moments time. But before I go, I must tell you about our newsletter, because every single week, every Friday, we produce a newsletter for you, which is all to do with audio production. Because the Flash Briefing briefing comes out every every Friday. And if you want to sign up for that, all sorts of links, and tips and features and tech and offers and discounts all to do with audio presentation and production for you. If you produce audio in any form, that could be a Flash Briefing, could be a podcast, could be radio, all sorts of different things for that. And why do we put it together? Well, my name is Peter Stewart. And I've spent 30 years in audio presentation and production for companies such as the one I work for at the moment, which I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but it's a big British Broadcasting Company. And also I've written several books on audio presentation and production. done some lectures around the world, and also want a couple of awards as well with that kind of stuff. But enough about me. Let's hand over to Suze Susan Cooper Suze's introduce yourself and also head headlong into why bulk recording is going to be so much better for people's time. And frankly, sanity. Absolutely. That's right. And so yeah, I'm CS keeper. I am a professional broadcaster. I work at a radio station here in Kent. I also record news for the London Evening Standard that can be heard by Google Assistant over in the US. And I create my very own Flash Briefing called social days, which comes up every single day just as a Flash Briefing should and if you've been listening to or watching this month for Flash Briefing February, you'll have heard us recommend that Flash Briefings are indeed a daily affair Now that means that you need ideas and audio for every day. of the Week, 365 days a year. And it sounds a pretty daunting task, it has to be said. But I'm here to let you know that if you can get yourself organised, that is going to be the key to producing this day after day, and ensuring that your listener is going to stay with you and hear from you every single day. So what you need to do is make sure that you have got a topic that your Flash Briefing on that is definitely got legs, it needs to have something new to say about it every single day. I'm talking generally about a briefing that you're expecting to have a long lifespan not something that's kind of a shorter one that you might just do for a month say so we're looking for the long term. You want to make sure first of all that you have got a subject that has got that content in it. Once you know it has, you want to then sketch out your first month say of content see put down those bullet points. Peter spoke yesterday about presentation skills, perhaps having a very strict script for each One is not key, but perhaps a couple of bullet points. Remember, Flash Briefings are really...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-018https://youtu.be/751oQ-erH7Q

Hello and welcome to day 18 of Flash Briefing febri. Today, myself and Peter Stewart are going to be speaking about presentation skills. So Flash Briefing February hopefully you'll have already caught up with what we've been doing this month here on The Voice works Facebook page, we've been bringing you a short snippet every day around 10 minutes long a video you can also listen to it as a podcast, just giving you the the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. So whether or not you've never heard a Flash Briefings, perhaps you've got an idea for a Flash Briefing, but you don't know where to start. Or perhaps you've just started it and you want to know the little tips and tricks that you could put into practice to really polish your Flash Briefing. That is exactly what we are here for every day in February, bringing you our experience as Flash Briefing creators but also our experience from our careers as professional broadcasters. So I work For the London Evening Standard, recording news for Google Assistant and I also work for a local radio station as a news reader here in Kent in the UK, and this is Peter Stewart and I work for a big British Broadcasting Company banned me from telling you who they actually are not too difficult to work it out though big British Broadcasting Company. And from London, I produce three daily Flash Briefings, and I've been involved with audio production and presentation for more years than I care to remember actually, but I'll give you some idea by looking the amount of hair that I've got. I call it headphone rub, to be quite honest with you. So today presentation skills and it has to be said that at one stage, I was the only voice and presentation coach for the whole of the BBC. Dan said it in the whole of the UK. So going around and training people in their presentation and their news reading styles, both the radio and the TV. So there's a few tips that over the next few minutes I'm going to be passing on to you about how you come over when you're presenting. And one of the main things is, don't be yourself, okay? Because if you're going to be yourself, there are various styles of you. Okay? And at the moment, I'm overreacting a little bit my end. But hopefully, when you're watching this, it's coming over is quite natural. Now, if I was really natural, it would come over to you watching it as really quiet, really straight laced, little bit boring, and so on. What do I mean by that? So think about it. If you're actually talking to your other half, maybe know in front of the TV or when you're on the way to the shops or something like that. Your voice is probably going to be much quieter, much softer, is not going to be much variety in it. The whole presentation is going to be a little bit flatter as I'm doing now. Now if I was just talking to you, in that kind of voice, that kind of presentation in that kind of way, with that kind of personality, it was going to be so boring, that actually, you would fall asleep. Yeah. So you've got to act up a little bit, you've got to crank up the volume, you got to crank up the personality, you got to crank up the presentation, not over the top to be wildly exciting and manic that some people might think that you're on drugs or something like that. You got to kind of keep it under control. But you got to crank it up a little bit. Okay, be yourself. But yourself. Plus, a little bit more. Turn up that presentation. Turn up the personality, a little bit over act a little bit you plus,

but you've still got to keep that one to one engagement. Yeah. Because if you are presenting to everybody in the whole all of If your listeners were all gathered in a seminar kind of situation, or in a massive hole where you're doing a massive presentation to 100 200 1000 people, your presentation, your production style would be completely different again, because it will be huge, everybody. Thank you for that fellow. Wembley will be that kind of thing, wouldn't it, you will be big, you will be loud, you'll be bold, you have a huge presentation. But just imagine how people would listen to your Flash Briefing, perhaps by themselves, or maybe one other person in the kitchen, in the car, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, something like that. So if you did that huge presentation, you would come over as false. As inauthentic. It wouldn't be appropriate. It would sound odd, it would be too much in their face. So again, you got to tone it down from that but Tone It Up from your Normally, one to one presentation that you might have with a member of the family, you've got to get your message over, you've got to get your message across, you've got to be able to engage. Now another part of this as well as your personality is the presentation. Now, I'm ad libbing to a certain extent. But don't tell anyone. But I've got some notes. I've got some notes, which are just off screen, you can't see them. But you may be able to see occasionally that I just kind of glanced at my notes, just to remind me, the next thing I want to say, and they just bullet points, they are just notes. And hopefully, I know what I'm talking about. I know where I'm going so much so that I don't need a script. And you see the problem with the script is that not many people unless you're a trained actor can actually read from a script in an authentic way and are able to lift the words off a page to make it sound as though they are just kind of ad libbing. Yeah. Most people would read a script and make it sound rather staid, the words would be perhaps lifted and stressed the wrong ones. The magical thing about the human personality and the human voice is that when you know your topic, when you know your subjects, you're going to lift the important words in exactly the right way, almost every single time. The problem is that when we're reading hieroglyphics scribbled on a bit of paper, bit of dried wood, essentially, is what it is. We're still not as human beings. Kind of trained in that way we can learn how to do it, but it's not in built into our psyche into our personality to be able to read these scribbles and to make them sound authentic. We have to be trained into how to do that. So if you've got a script, and you're reading it, you're going to sound too formal. You're gonna sound to stayed. So I would really recommend you just to have some bullet points. If you got bullet points, then you're just going to gloss over that. And then you're going to riff from what you've written down. And even if you might trip up over yourself, occasionally, you might have an r&r or something like that, you will sound much more engaging, your sound much more authentic, your sound much more real, or sound much more friendly, and so on, too polished, and you'll sound too inauthentic, you'll lose that one to one connection. So don't script anything unless you're a fantastic actor. And then when you've recorded your Flash Briefing, or your podcast or whatever it happens to be, don't edit out. Every, every our every stumble, first of all, it will take you forever, potentially, you want to get this done. You want to get it up there. You want to get that content out so people can act on it can be inspired by what it is that you are saying. And secondly, it won't sound as authentic. If You've taken out every slight hesitation. If you've read on sentence after sentence, people will notice and edit at 50 paces. Couple of other tips, smile, have fun, enjoy yourself have a bit of rehearsal. Nobody is that you want to say, ya know what message you want to get across know where you're going with your particular topic with that particular episode with your content for that day, no way it is that people would want to listen to you.

Okay, that's about it. Tomorrow, we'll both be back. As soon as he's going to take the lead tomorrow on day 19 of the Flash Briefing February course. And tomorrow we're going to be talking we've mentioned a couple of times in passing, but tomorrow we're going to be talking about the value of bulk recording because sometimes you know, I've got three daily Flash Briefings, and sometimes you might think to yourself, that's a huge problem to do three daily Flash Briefings. That you into a bit of a bit of a secret, I bulk record them. I set aside a couple of hours every week or a little bit longer every month and do them all in a row. It saves time in the long run, and also saves your sanity too. And Susan's got a whole stack of tips and tricks and tech to help you with that. As Flash Briefing February continues tomorrow. The skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai


Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21819771Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:00:03 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/751oQ-erH7Q Hello and welcome to day 18 of Flash Briefing febri. Today, myself and Peter Stewart are going to be speaking about presentation skills. So Flash Briefing February hopefully you'll have already caught up...https://youtu.be/751oQ-erH7Q

Hello and welcome to day 18 of Flash Briefing febri. Today, myself and Peter Stewart are going to be speaking about presentation skills. So Flash Briefing February hopefully you'll have already caught up with what we've been doing this month here on The Voice works Facebook page, we've been bringing you a short snippet every day around 10 minutes long a video you can also listen to it as a podcast, just giving you the the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. So whether or not you've never heard a Flash Briefings, perhaps you've got an idea for a Flash Briefing, but you don't know where to start. Or perhaps you've just started it and you want to know the little tips and tricks that you could put into practice to really polish your Flash Briefing. That is exactly what we are here for every day in February, bringing you our experience as Flash Briefing creators but also our experience from our careers as professional broadcasters. So I work For the London Evening Standard, recording news for Google Assistant and I also work for a local radio station as a news reader here in Kent in the UK, and this is Peter Stewart and I work for a big British Broadcasting Company banned me from telling you who they actually are not too difficult to work it out though big British Broadcasting Company. And from London, I produce three daily Flash Briefings, and I've been involved with audio production and presentation for more years than I care to remember actually, but I'll give you some idea by looking the amount of hair that I've got. I call it headphone rub, to be quite honest with you. So today presentation skills and it has to be said that at one stage, I was the only voice and presentation coach for the whole of the BBC. Dan said it in the whole of the UK. So going around and training people in their presentation and their news reading styles, both the radio and the TV. So there's a few tips that over the next few minutes I'm going to be passing on to you about how you come over when you're presenting. And one of the main things is, don't be yourself, okay? Because if you're going to be yourself, there are various styles of you. Okay? And at the moment, I'm overreacting a little bit my end. But hopefully, when you're watching this, it's coming over is quite natural. Now, if I was really natural, it would come over to you watching it as really quiet, really straight laced, little bit boring, and so on. What do I mean by that? So think about it. If you're actually talking to your other half, maybe know in front of the TV or when you're on the way to the shops or something like that. Your voice is probably going to be much quieter, much softer, is not going to be much variety in it. The whole presentation is going to be a little bit flatter as I'm doing now. Now if I was just talking to you, in that kind of voice, that kind of presentation in that kind of way, with that kind of personality, it was going to be so boring, that actually, you would fall asleep. Yeah. So you've got to act up a little bit, you've got to crank up the volume, you got to crank up the personality, you got to crank up the presentation, not over the top to be wildly exciting and manic that some people might think that you're on drugs or something like that. You got to kind of keep it under control. But you got to crank it up a little bit. Okay, be yourself. But yourself. Plus, a little bit more. Turn up that presentation. Turn up the personality, a little bit over act a little bit you plus,

but you've still got to keep that one to one engagement. Yeah. Because if you are presenting to everybody in the whole all of If your listeners were all gathered in a seminar kind of situation, or in a massive hole where you're doing a massive presentation to 100 200 1000 people, your presentation, your production style would...]]>574alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/751oQ-erH7Q Hello and welcome to day 18 of Flash Briefing febri. Today, myself and Peter Stewart are going to be speaking about presentation skills. So Flash Briefing February hopefully you'll have already caught up with what we've been doing this month here on The Voice works Facebook page, we've been bringing you a short snippet every day around 10 minutes long a video you can also listen to it as a podcast, just giving you the the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. So whether or not you've never heard a Flash Briefings, perhaps you've got an idea for a Flash Briefing, but you don't know where to start. Or perhaps you've just started it and you want to know the little tips and tricks that you could put into practice to really polish your Flash Briefing. That is exactly what we are here for every day in February, bringing you our experience as Flash Briefing creators but also our experience from our careers as professional broadcasters. So I work For the London Evening Standard, recording news for Google Assistant and I also work for a local radio station as a news reader here in Kent in the UK, and this is Peter Stewart and I work for a big British Broadcasting Company banned me from telling you who they actually are not too difficult to work it out though big British Broadcasting Company. And from London, I produce three daily Flash Briefings, and I've been involved with audio production and presentation for more years than I care to remember actually, but I'll give you some idea by looking the amount of hair that I've got. I call it headphone rub, to be quite honest with you. So today presentation skills and it has to be said that at one stage, I was the only voice and presentation coach for the whole of the BBC. Dan said it in the whole of the UK. So going around and training people in their presentation and their news reading styles, both the radio and the TV. So there's a few tips that over the next few minutes I'm going to be passing on to you about how you come over when you're presenting. And one of the main things is, don't be yourself, okay? Because if you're going to be yourself, there are various styles of you. Okay? And at the moment, I'm overreacting a little bit my end. But hopefully, when you're watching this, it's coming over is quite natural. Now, if I was really natural, it would come over to you watching it as really quiet, really straight laced, little bit boring, and so on. What do I mean by that? So think about it. If you're actually talking to your other half, maybe know in front of the TV or when you're on the way to the shops or something like that. Your voice is probably going to be much quieter, much softer, is not going to be much variety in it. The whole presentation is going to be a little bit flatter as I'm doing now. Now if I was just talking to you, in that kind of voice, that kind of presentation in that kind of way, with that kind of personality, it was going to be so boring, that actually, you would fall asleep. Yeah. So you've got to act up a little bit, you've got to crank up the volume, you got to crank up the personality, you got to crank up the presentation, not over the top to be wildly exciting and manic that some people might think that you're on drugs or something like that. You got to kind of keep it under control. But you got to crank it up a little bit. Okay, be yourself. But yourself. Plus, a little bit more. Turn up that presentation. Turn up the personality, a little bit over act a little bit you plus, but you've still got to keep that one to one engagement. Yeah. Because if you are presenting to everybody in the whole all of If your listeners were all gathered in a seminar kind of situation, or in a massive hole where you're doing a massive presentation to 100 200 1000 people, your presentation, your production style would be completely different again, because it will be huge, everybody. Thank you...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-017-newhttps://youtu.be/z80nZAx7mss

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Hello and welcome to day 17 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking all about your sound levels, the formats and the different soundproofing that you might want to use to keep out some noise. And, you know, make sure that your sound recording sound as good as I possibly can. When you're recording, you don't even putting all that effort into the content of it and everything else, just to come out with a recording that's got a whole load of background sound in there. So my name is Cooper. I'm a Flash Briefing creator myself, I create the social days Flash Briefing, and this is Peter Stewart, who actually creates more than one Flash Briefing.

Absolutely. I've got three daily Flash Briefings, and no social life. I reckon I've done about 2000 various Flash Briefings and podcasts over the course of the last several years and also I've been involved heavily in in radio presentation and production for a big British Broadcasting Company, and also have written a lot about it and done some Muslim lectures and so on around the world, too. So today we're talking a little bit more depth about, about audio, and the kind of audio that you need, and also about soundproofing and sound treatments. But first of all, kind of stands to reason doesn't it to the very best quality audio that you can put in to your Flash Briefing, or your podcast or any other kind of audio that you're producing is going to mean that it's better being heard on a speaker. Now some of the Amazon Echo devices are quite small, some of the speakers aren't terribly good. So it kind of stands to reason that good quality in means that kind of good quality out even if you're not using one of those really big speakers with a more robust sound systems on them. So how do you do that? Well, Suze was talking yesterday about the consistent volume and So on minus six to minus nine on the decibel reader, and you will be fine minus nine and you'll be fine. So somewhere around that mark. And also, it's really important to have a consistent volume as well, because of course, people will be listening to your Flash Briefing alongside other people's Flash Briefings. And you don't want your Flash Briefing to be up here,
and really kind of a certain volume that people will turn up the volume four, and then the next Flash Briefing introduced by Alexa. That's gonna be really annoying. I said, that's going to be really annoying, isn't it? If people kind of have to keep going up and down on their volume every time and if they're going to have to do that, then frankly, they're probably going to disengage with your skill mentally and also disregarded and get rid of it and not have it as part of their particular playlist. Also, it means if you're not meeting the volume and quality criteria, the guys over at Amazon genocide, hold on not playing the game, not producing quality, quality audio, we're going to send them a note or we're just going to cancel it. So they no longer have a Flash Briefing, you don't want obviously that to happen. So record at a consistent Volume One that you would have had certified and passed by Amazon when you first put in your your pilot Flash Briefing, which will come to a little bit later on in the course. And also make sure that your bitrates a good quality high quality as well. 256 kilobytes per second I'll be one of the drop downs when you save your audio or whatever it is that you're using, whether it be audacity or whether it be Hindenburg or any other recording device that you have, and also save it as an mp3 as well. Now as far as sound proofing goes, there is a difference between soundproofing and sound treatment. Now, we’ll hear from Suze about sound treatment in a few moments time, but soundproofing is the rather more expensive and rather more professional way of making sure that no extraneous noises come in. Now you're probably going to be recording in your back bedroom to coin the phrase, yeah, your home office somewhere like that. So as I say, soon as we'll talk about sound treatment for that kind of situation in a few moments time, if you want soundproofing, that's going to be rather more expensive, that's going to be rather more of a professional studio setup. This is things like under-floor treatment, where you've actually got acoustic treatments built into the wall. It may even be a raised or a floating studio or something like that. It's going to stop outside noise coming in, it's going to stop people hearing on your microphone. Things like aeroplanes going overhead or the rumble of lorries. going past in the street outside is also going to stop things like a song From emergency vehicles is going to stop. If you live in a block of flats or you live next door to somebody, we've got a shared or a party Ward, it's going to stop you hearing the baby crying from next door, and that kind of thing. Now, as I say, that's really expensive, you're going to probably have to bring in external acoustics specialists to do that kind of work for you. You're probably going to have to have a room within a room, maybe and locked doors and all sorts of things like that. It's going to be expensive. Is it necessary for a Flash Briefing? It isn't necessary for a Flash Briefing, or a podcast or for 99% of the work you do. If you're going to be doing some high production work for voiceovers or narration, which perhaps is going to be broadcast or you've got somebody who's you know, a high profile brand which is asking for your work. There may be you may have to consider hiring a specialist studio To do that, but for most of the work, you won't have to do that, as long as you've got a good microphone, as long as you are recording at a high bitrate, and as long as you've got some pretty decent sound treatment, in your home studio, your home office, or your back bedroom, so that's the soundproofing is the high value, high expense, super professional kind of stuff. The sound treatment is rather more accessible, rather more affordable, and it's something you can do with a couple of clicks on Amazon and looking around your room to see what you can do to help deaden the sound to stop the echoes to stop the sound bouncing off the walls. You may occasionally have to stop broadcasting. If that police car goes past. If you get the rumble of the rebel lorry driving past and if you're on the flight path to Heathrow, you probably do have a bit of a problem, but you can do your best Your burst is what Suze is going to be talking about right now take it away.

That's right, it really doesn't have to cost you an absolute fortune. Certainly I started out recording using a single rail clothes rail, and bought from Argos for about 12 to 15 pound with the dubay over the top of it, clicked to a picture out in my room, and that was my soundproofing. I know people that record into a wardrobe using the clothes as soundproofing and cutting out outside noise as well. Now beyond that other things you can think about is to make sure that you are in a room that has got lots of nice soft furnishings, so a carpeted room rather than a hardwood floor, you know, somewhere that's got curtains, we're not looking for anywhere that's near a window, or a kind of very flat on unfinished wall or anything like that. That's going to allow the sound to echo and bounce back and, and give us all kinds of acoustic problems with our audio. Other things That you can purchase that are relatively cheap that you can then use to deaden the sound of things like acoustic foam, you can pick that up over on eBay, and also acoustic cannons. Now these are really heavy, thick cannons. And in fact, they're amazing for cutting out the sound. It's incredible how once you're stood behind them, that kind of silent squeal that you get from stepping one side of them to the other, so they really are worth investing in. And the other thing I would say about acoustic cannons is that because they are so heavy, you do need some fairly heavy duty fixings to make sure that they're not going to fall out of the ceiling. Basically, make sure you've got something above you this is something that someone actually recommended to me when I was trying to create a soundproof area in my home and make sure that you're not somewhere that's got a really high ceiling because again, the sound is going to disappear up and off and bounce around. So if you can, and perhaps you might need to put in a full ceiling, and I've done that quite well. relatively cheaply actually with stuff from the DIY store. And so I've got a kind of plastic corrugated piece that's been got acoustic foam stuck to the bottom of it, very homemade, does the job beautifully. And so it's all these kinds of things you need and go out there as Peter says, and kind of design your own amazing professionally soundproof studio sound treatment, thinking about the things you've got around them, making sure you've got cushions, carpets, all that kind of thing, and even trying it into the wardrobe. See what kind of a sound you get. And that will be plenty good enough at for recording your Flash Briefing. So there you have it, sound levels format, soundproofing sound treatment will be back tomorrow Peter what we'd be talking about then.

So tomorrow, we are going to be talking a bit more about your presentation skills. So we've talked about the kind of the technical stuff about microphones about recording about the tech had mentioned things like kilobytes per second. We've mentioned things like mp3 minus nines and decibel, the techie stuff, but as well as the content, something which you can do and you can learn is your presentation. But tips for that as we continue with the Flash Briefing February. The skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing with both back tomorrow.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21819686Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:05:10 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/z80nZAx7mss Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello and welcome to day 17 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking all about your sound levels, the...https://youtu.be/z80nZAx7mss

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Hello and welcome to day 17 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking all about your sound levels, the formats and the different soundproofing that you might want to use to keep out some noise. And, you know, make sure that your sound recording sound as good as I possibly can. When you're recording, you don't even putting all that effort into the content of it and everything else, just to come out with a recording that's got a whole load of background sound in there. So my name is Cooper. I'm a Flash Briefing creator myself, I create the social days Flash Briefing, and this is Peter Stewart, who actually creates more than one Flash Briefing.

Absolutely. I've got three daily Flash Briefings, and no social life. I reckon I've done about 2000 various Flash Briefings and podcasts over the course of the last several years and also I've been involved heavily in in radio presentation and production for a big British Broadcasting Company, and also have written a lot about it and done some Muslim lectures and so on around the world, too. So today we're talking a little bit more depth about, about audio, and the kind of audio that you need, and also about soundproofing and sound treatments. But first of all, kind of stands to reason doesn't it to the very best quality audio that you can put in to your Flash Briefing, or your podcast or any other kind of audio that you're producing is going to mean that it's better being heard on a speaker. Now some of the Amazon Echo devices are quite small, some of the speakers aren't terribly good. So it kind of stands to reason that good quality in means that kind of good quality out even if you're not using one of those really big speakers with a more robust sound systems on them. So how do you do that? Well, Suze was talking yesterday about the consistent volume and So on minus six to minus nine on the decibel reader, and you will be fine minus nine and you'll be fine. So somewhere around that mark. And also, it's really important to have a consistent volume as well, because of course, people will be listening to your Flash Briefing alongside other people's Flash Briefings. And you don't want your Flash Briefing to be up here,
and really kind of a certain volume that people will turn up the volume four, and then the next Flash Briefing introduced by Alexa. That's gonna be really annoying. I said, that's going to be really annoying, isn't it? If people kind of have to keep going up and down on their volume every time and if they're going to have to do that, then frankly, they're probably going to disengage with your skill mentally and also disregarded and get rid of it and not have it as part of their particular playlist. Also, it means if you're not meeting the volume and quality criteria, the guys over at Amazon genocide, hold on not playing the game, not producing quality, quality audio, we're going to send them a note or we're just going to cancel it. So they no longer have a Flash Briefing, you don't want obviously that to happen. So record at a consistent Volume One that you would have had certified and passed by Amazon when you first put in your your pilot Flash Briefing, which will come to a little bit later on in the course. And also make sure that your bitrates a good quality high quality as well. 256 kilobytes per second I'll be one of the drop downs when you save your audio or whatever it is that you're using, whether it be audacity or whether it be Hindenburg or any other recording device that you have, and also save it as an mp3 as well. Now as far as sound proofing goes, there is a difference between soundproofing and sound treatment. Now, we’ll hear from Suze about sound treatment in a few moments time, but soundproofing is the rather...]]>626alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/z80nZAx7mss Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello and welcome to day 17 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking all about your sound levels, the formats and the different soundproofing that you might want to use to keep out some noise. And, you know, make sure that your sound recording sound as good as I possibly can. When you're recording, you don't even putting all that effort into the content of it and everything else, just to come out with a recording that's got a whole load of background sound in there. So my name is Cooper. I'm a Flash Briefing creator myself, I create the social days Flash Briefing, and this is Peter Stewart, who actually creates more than one Flash Briefing. Absolutely. I've got three daily Flash Briefings, and no social life. I reckon I've done about 2000 various Flash Briefings and podcasts over the course of the last several years and also I've been involved heavily in in radio presentation and production for a big British Broadcasting Company, and also have written a lot about it and done some Muslim lectures and so on around the world, too. So today we're talking a little bit more depth about, about audio, and the kind of audio that you need, and also about soundproofing and sound treatments. But first of all, kind of stands to reason doesn't it to the very best quality audio that you can put in to your Flash Briefing, or your podcast or any other kind of audio that you're producing is going to mean that it's better being heard on a speaker. Now some of the Amazon Echo devices are quite small, some of the speakers aren't terribly good. So it kind of stands to reason that good quality in means that kind of good quality out even if you're not using one of those really big speakers with a more robust sound systems on them. So how do you do that? Well, Suze was talking yesterday about the consistent volume and So on minus six to minus nine on the decibel reader, and you will be fine minus nine and you'll be fine. So somewhere around that mark. And also, it's really important to have a consistent volume as well, because of course, people will be listening to your Flash Briefing alongside other people's Flash Briefings. And you don't want your Flash Briefing to be up here, and really kind of a certain volume that people will turn up the volume four, and then the next Flash Briefing introduced by Alexa. That's gonna be really annoying. I said, that's going to be really annoying, isn't it? If people kind of have to keep going up and down on their volume every time and if they're going to have to do that, then frankly, they're probably going to disengage with your skill mentally and also disregarded and get rid of it and not have it as part of their particular playlist. Also, it means if you're not meeting the volume and quality criteria, the guys over at Amazon genocide, hold on not playing the game, not producing quality, quality audio, we're going to send them a note or we're just going to cancel it. So they no longer have a Flash Briefing, you don't want obviously that to happen. So record at a consistent Volume One that you would have had certified and passed by Amazon when you first put in your your pilot Flash Briefing, which will come to a little bit later on in the course. And also make sure that your bitrates a good quality high quality as well. 256 kilobytes per second I'll be one of the drop downs when you save your audio or whatever it is that you're using, whether it be audacity or whether it be Hindenburg or any other recording device that you have, and also save it as an mp3 as well. Now as far as sound proofing goes, there is a difference between soundproofing and sound treatment. Now, we’ll hear from Suze about sound treatment in a few moments time, but soundproofing is the rather more expensive and rather more professional way of making sure that no extraneous noises come in. Now...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-016https://youtu.be/CRGnsA8oXIM

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial


Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. I'm Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here for 28 days in a row. I know bringing you the skill set the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing. Yes, this is Flash Briefing February, give you all sorts of information, the tips and the tricks from two professional broadcasters. As I say my name is Peter Stewart. I kind of did a whole load yesterday. On the Flash Briefing February 28. day course I'm going to hand over to Susan a few moments time. My background is audio through and through. You know what I reckon I've done nearly 2000 Flash Briefings and podcast I've been involved in radio presentation and production for more years than I care to remember and frankly, more years than my hair cares to remember as well as a bit of a giveaway for you working for a big British Broadcasting Company who have told me I cannot tell you their name, but you can kind of work it out. Can't you I've also done lectures around the world and trained people in audio presentation and production as well as my background. I'm now going to hand straight over to Suze's. And she's going to tell you about her background. But also as yesterday, we told you about a cheap and easy way to record a Flash Briefing, Suze's going to take it on from here to tell you about recording a Flash Briefing on your desktop, on your PC, or on your Mac. Take it away, Suze.

Thank you very much, Peter. Yeah, that's right. My name is Suze Cooper. And I'm a journalist. I work reading the news for a local radio station where I live here in Kent in the UK. I also work with vixen labs over in shortage creating skills and actions and voice experiences for big brands and businesses around the world. And I also record news for the Evening Standard that can be heard by the Google Assistant over in the US so lots of broadcasting experience and also quite a lot of voice technology. That's, that's coming your way and really enjoying putting together this Flash Briefing February, a whole month full of stuff, free stuff, us telling you all of our kind of golden ideas and knowledge as to how to put together a Flash Briefing. And as Peter says, today, we're speaking about how to record your Flash Briefing using your desktop. So yesterday, Peter spoke a bit about how to record it directly into your mobile phone using an app. Today I'm going to be speaking about how to connect your computer to a microphone so that you can then record directly onto your desktop and have your audio files there on your laptop ready to upload to a podcast host. So how do you do that? Well, one of the simplest and probably one of the most cheap ways of doing it is to buy a USB microphone and to connect that to your laptop directly. Now that's great. And you will need to change in your preferences where your audio input is coming from and select the microphone that you have connected to your machine. But where are you going to record one That microphone is attached? Well, there are lots of different digital audio workstations as they're called doors. And that you can use, some are fairly expensive, but there are quite a few that are around that are free. So it just takes a bit of a Google and a download, and you will be ready to go. So what are these free pieces of software? Well, there's audacity, which is one not dissimilar to a rather pricey one called audition, which is an Adobe and part of the Adobe Suite. So audacity is one that you might want to have a look at quite a simple setup. They're quite intuitive, and probably the one that I would recommend actually. And there's also repo which is a really good one, but perhaps a little bit more tricky to navigate. And there's Hindenburg as well that's out there, as well as I'm sure various other ones but as I say, I would probably recommend to go with audacity First off, so it's about googling that downloading that, getting it onto your laptop, plugging your microphone in selecting it to make sure that you Your audio input is coming from the right place and you're ready to go. Now what if you want just a bit more of an advanced sound quality perhaps a USB mic is fine. Great for starting up absolutely wonderful for for getting you up and running and going. But you might want to perhaps mix things in you might want to have some guests perhaps you might want more than one microphone active you might want to mix your your music, your bed, you know any kind of sound effects and things like that in with it. And if that is something that you're thinking about doing then it may well be worth investing in a little mixing desk. Now, these again don't have to be wildly pricey, they go up to ridiculous prices. But there are some that are quite simple, easy to use a few faders on there, perhaps some little pads to to be able to load some sound effects and maybe your theme tune on to the cost around 50 pounds euros or dollars. And so again, kind of get out there and have a look at what's available. Now. What This allow you to do allows you to upgrade your microphone a little bit, because instead of having a USB input, although some of them do have a USB input, it will probably have an XLR input. And this is a kind of three pin adapter from a professional microphone and that will plug straight into the mixer and your mixer will then probably USB you might need a sound card in the middle to USB into your machine. This is starting to sound really tacky and it really doesn't need to be and this is kind of another level up from just putting a microphone through your system on your computer. So all of that would feed straight back into what ever workstation you've decided to use, as I say whether it's audacity, Reaper, Hindenburg, any one of those and it will be a case of hitting record on there and you'll start to see your levels moving within that workstation and your your life you're going you're ready to record your piece of audio ready for your flesh. Everything. Now no matter how you're getting that audio in there, one of the things you definitely want to be watching for is your levels. Now this will probably be somewhere on a counter. And within the workstation that you choose the numbers that you're looking for a somewhere between minus six and minus nine, which sounds completely wrong. But

the way that decibel is kind of work, it's a whole mathematical nightmare, believe me, so just look that to see that your levels are peaking somewhere between minus six and minus nine. Also, a lot of these interfaces have the kind of graphical LED lights are kind of the equivalent on your screen. And of course, the red is telling you that you're too high. And the green is quite an you know, a nice level and the orange is telling you you're nearly getting kind of to distortion kind of levels. Now, as long as you're recording me within that safe space within that minus six to minus nine it should mean that when your audio comes out of someone's smartphone, They're not having to fiddle around with the volume too much, you shouldn't be shouting at them from the speaker, but equally, they shouldn't need to turn you up to be able to hear you. So that's just kind of an additional little tip there about levels once you've got everything set up. So there you go, day 16 of Flash Briefing, February how to record your Flash Briefing into your laptop using a USB mic, possibly an XLR mic and a mixer. And what you then do once you've recorded that file is to download it, and you'll need to upload it to your chosen podcast host so that it joins your feed, and then goes out as one of your Flash Briefing episodes. So that's the end of day 16. Tomorrow day 17. We're going to be speaking a little bit more about what you might need to record from home, and we'll be speaking a little bit about soundproofing. So do join us then, and yeah, we'll see you on day 17 Bye bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21819620Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:05:16 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/CRGnsA8oXIM Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. I'm Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here for 28 days in a...https://youtu.be/CRGnsA8oXIM

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial


Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. I'm Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here for 28 days in a row. I know bringing you the skill set the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing. Yes, this is Flash Briefing February, give you all sorts of information, the tips and the tricks from two professional broadcasters. As I say my name is Peter Stewart. I kind of did a whole load yesterday. On the Flash Briefing February 28. day course I'm going to hand over to Susan a few moments time. My background is audio through and through. You know what I reckon I've done nearly 2000 Flash Briefings and podcast I've been involved in radio presentation and production for more years than I care to remember and frankly, more years than my hair cares to remember as well as a bit of a giveaway for you working for a big British Broadcasting Company who have told me I cannot tell you their name, but you can kind of work it out. Can't you I've also done lectures around the world and trained people in audio presentation and production as well as my background. I'm now going to hand straight over to Suze's. And she's going to tell you about her background. But also as yesterday, we told you about a cheap and easy way to record a Flash Briefing, Suze's going to take it on from here to tell you about recording a Flash Briefing on your desktop, on your PC, or on your Mac. Take it away, Suze.

Thank you very much, Peter. Yeah, that's right. My name is Suze Cooper. And I'm a journalist. I work reading the news for a local radio station where I live here in Kent in the UK. I also work with vixen labs over in shortage creating skills and actions and voice experiences for big brands and businesses around the world. And I also record news for the Evening Standard that can be heard by the Google Assistant over in the US so lots of broadcasting experience and also quite a lot of voice technology. That's, that's coming your way and really enjoying putting together this Flash Briefing February, a whole month full of stuff, free stuff, us telling you all of our kind of golden ideas and knowledge as to how to put together a Flash Briefing. And as Peter says, today, we're speaking about how to record your Flash Briefing using your desktop. So yesterday, Peter spoke a bit about how to record it directly into your mobile phone using an app. Today I'm going to be speaking about how to connect your computer to a microphone so that you can then record directly onto your desktop and have your audio files there on your laptop ready to upload to a podcast host. So how do you do that? Well, one of the simplest and probably one of the most cheap ways of doing it is to buy a USB microphone and to connect that to your laptop directly. Now that's great. And you will need to change in your preferences where your audio input is coming from and select the microphone that you have connected to your machine. But where are you going to record one That microphone is attached? Well, there are lots of different digital audio workstations as they're called doors. And that you can use, some are fairly expensive, but there are quite a few that are around that are free. So it just takes a bit of a Google and a download, and you will be ready to go. So what are these free pieces of software? Well, there's audacity, which is one not dissimilar to a rather pricey one called audition, which is an Adobe and part of the Adobe Suite. So audacity is one that you might want to have a look at quite a simple setup. They're quite intuitive, and probably the one that I would recommend actually. And there's also repo which is a really good one, but perhaps a little bit more tricky to navigate. And there's Hindenburg as well that's out there, as...]]>478alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/CRGnsA8oXIM Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the show. I'm Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, we are here for 28 days in a row. I know bringing you the skill set the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing. Yes, this is Flash Briefing February, give you all sorts of information, the tips and the tricks from two professional broadcasters. As I say my name is Peter Stewart. I kind of did a whole load yesterday. On the Flash Briefing February 28. day course I'm going to hand over to Susan a few moments time. My background is audio through and through. You know what I reckon I've done nearly 2000 Flash Briefings and podcast I've been involved in radio presentation and production for more years than I care to remember and frankly, more years than my hair cares to remember as well as a bit of a giveaway for you working for a big British Broadcasting Company who have told me I cannot tell you their name, but you can kind of work it out. Can't you I've also done lectures around the world and trained people in audio presentation and production as well as my background. I'm now going to hand straight over to Suze's. And she's going to tell you about her background. But also as yesterday, we told you about a cheap and easy way to record a Flash Briefing, Suze's going to take it on from here to tell you about recording a Flash Briefing on your desktop, on your PC, or on your Mac. Take it away, Suze. Thank you very much, Peter. Yeah, that's right. My name is Suze Cooper. And I'm a journalist. I work reading the news for a local radio station where I live here in Kent in the UK. I also work with vixen labs over in shortage creating skills and actions and voice experiences for big brands and businesses around the world. And I also record news for the Evening Standard that can be heard by the Google Assistant over in the US so lots of broadcasting experience and also quite a lot of voice technology. That's, that's coming your way and really enjoying putting together this Flash Briefing February, a whole month full of stuff, free stuff, us telling you all of our kind of golden ideas and knowledge as to how to put together a Flash Briefing. And as Peter says, today, we're speaking about how to record your Flash Briefing using your desktop. So yesterday, Peter spoke a bit about how to record it directly into your mobile phone using an app. Today I'm going to be speaking about how to connect your computer to a microphone so that you can then record directly onto your desktop and have your audio files there on your laptop ready to upload to a podcast host. So how do you do that? Well, one of the simplest and probably one of the most cheap ways of doing it is to buy a USB microphone and to connect that to your laptop directly. Now that's great. And you will need to change in your preferences where your audio input is coming from and select the microphone that you have connected to your machine. But where are you going to record one That microphone is attached? Well, there are lots of different digital audio workstations as they're called doors. And that you can use, some are fairly expensive, but there are quite a few that are around that are free. So it just takes a bit of a Google and a download, and you will be ready to go. So what are these free pieces of software? Well, there's audacity, which is one not dissimilar to a rather pricey one called audition, which is an Adobe and part of the Adobe Suite. So audacity is one that you might want to have a look at quite a simple setup. They're quite intuitive, and probably the one that I would recommend actually. And there's also repo which is a really good one, but perhaps a little bit more tricky to navigate. And there's Hindenburg as well that's out there, as well as I'm sure various other ones but as I say, I would probably recommend to go with audacity...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-015https://youtu.be/9a-4NGwedFQ

Suze Twitter @BigTentSocial
Peter Twitter @TweeterStewart

Hello and welcome to day 15 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking to you about the easiest way to record a briefing now. My name is Suze Cooper, and I'm here with Peter Stewart to speak to you about Flash Briefings. Here we are on day 15. We've already talked about a whole load of stuff about getting your briefing off the ground to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. I work with vixen labs over in Shoreditch building skills and actions for brands and businesses. And also working with the London Evening Standard to create Google News for the assistant over in the US. And this is Peter Stewart.

Absolutely we are both from London. Yeah. So a flying the flag for the Brits. So the bones about wherever you're watching around the world, this is going to be appropriate for you particularly in the English speaking world. We'll come back to that a little bit later on in our Flash Briefing. februari course this free course, as Suze says, to give you the skill set the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing. This is like a sleeping giant of audio production and of skills. If you've heard of the skills that you can create for Amazon Alexa devices, then this is something that maybe it's a real entry point into creating a skill to getting your message across to help with your branding, to help your marketing to help with your advertising or publicity to help with your group, your business, maybe your charity, or nonprofit or maybe just something for you and your family. And hopefully, you'll be following our whole course during the course of February. And of course, if you've missed any, then you can go back and listen from day one in our 28 day guide. So as Suze said, Today, we're going to be bringing you some information about the easiest and indeed the cheapest way to create a Flash Briefing, this is going to save you time. And also it's going to be saving you money. So I'm going to be essentially talking about this today, and Susie's gonna be taking the helmet tomorrow. And what we're talking about today is, as I say, the easiest and cheapest way, because it's on your smartphone. Yeah, absolutely. You've got a smartphone already. So you don't have to shell out any money for that. I'm going to be talking about a free app. So you don't have to spend any money on that. It's free to download, it's free to use, it's free to then upload your audio content as well. It's a win win situation. Now, you don't have to buy the next bit of kit, but I'm going to suggest you do and it's something like this. Okay, so here it is. And so what you want is one of these Lavalier microphones or a tie mic or a clip mic is what they you know where the news readers will wear on the telly and I'll tell you, the reason And behind that in a few moments time, but first of all, let's go back to basics and actually tell you about that app though. It's called spreaker and spreaker. It's like a loudspeaker, but with an R there. So it's Spreaker. And you can download that. And essentially what it is, it's a podcast host. So you can upload your audio to it. And this is where Alexa will scurry away and find the link and will play your podcast or your audio, your Flash Briefing to anyone who requests it. So that's the, that's the playout system. But also you can use it as a production suite as well. It's like a mini studio on your phone when you record or when you download the spreaker Studio app. Now, let me show you what it's like here. So you can see some of the controls there. You can go live directly to your followers from this particular I have, but also you can record via the app as well. Well, so if I press the record button, then you can also see here that you can, as you record, you can play in various clips for your sound effects and so on. Well, you know what sound effects may be useful. But also what's going to be useful is to play in your theme tune. We talked about Sonic branding a few days ago on the course. And this is how you can automatically produce your voice mixed with your Sonic branding with your theme tune at the beginning at the end, maybe an interview clip, maybe a sound effect during the course of your Flash Briefing recording as well. You'll be able to see at the bottom, there's a little guide there about how loud your audio level is. Now, what you could do is you could just record your Flash Briefing like this. Yeah, talking into the microphone or across the microphone in the base of your mobile phone. Now have you spotted a problem here? Possibly you have because if you then want to play in any Those sound effects or an audio clip, or your theme tune, you can't see it very well because it's right down here underneath your nose. And if you're like me, you're wearing specs, that's going to be even more of a problem. So you're going to have to kind of move it away. So it's over here so you can actually see what button it is depressed to start the recording to play in the clips, and to finish the recording as well. So what do you do? Well, this is where these time mics come in. Yep. So you need to buy something like this. Maybe from this company, maybe from another company. This is obviously a box of two. You only really need one of these that can be quite cheap.

Don't forget obviously if you're using an iPhone, you will need one with with a lightning connector rather than the one of these connectors here or by the little bit of cable that will transfer from this kind of in This kind of jack into a lightning connector jack, I think they're about 10 or 14 pounds dollars euros which is all pretty much interchangeable to a to a large extent at the moment. So you just need one of these, one of these you could get from iRig you could get from the company road, our Eau de very various other companies as well. I have seen them for as little as about 15 pounds, one by the company called tau nor t o n o r, I use it for the company I work for and I can't tell you what company I work for. But he's a big British Broadcasting Company, try and work out where I work and they've never had any problem with the audio quality of one of those. Something else to look for. Okay something else to look for. You will see here the connection. Now make sure you get one with the three different black bands on the sometimes called a T r s For the for the tip and the are the the various rings that go around it te RS not trs because a trs will not work in your mobile phone, you won't arm with the with the three different black bands around separated by the gods of the T r s variations. Why? Because then you can clip one end to hear as the TV news readers have just underneath your chin, just just come down here, top of your chest, plug the other end in to the bottom of the mobile phone. Then what you can do is you can hold your phone at arm's length, but still be on the mic and I'll message you can see what buttons you've got to press to start and end the recording. See what buttons you can press to play in the different bits of audio. If you have a desire to do that. Plus, you can also use two hands to maybe tab between different pages on your phone to read from the notes that you've made for that particular Flash Briefing episode, so everything is self contained. Now, even though I don't use this concept and this workflow. Now, I used to, and I still can, if I want to, about a year or so ago, I was on my travels on my holidays on vacation in America. And every single day in the hotel room, I recorded my Flash Briefing there, my smart speakers daily Flash Briefing was recorded you using this kind of workflow, this kind of concept. Now, you can't actually edit so if you make a mistake, you're a bit done for you just start again, but Heck, a Flash Briefing is only about 90 seconds anyway, so not too much time lost. And once you've recorded it now, because of a recent update at the start of 2020. What you can do is you can also schedule direct from your mobile phone as well, so either you can put it out and upload it directly to the spreaker as a podcast as a Flash Briefing immediately, or you can schedule it to go out tomorrow or the next day or the next day or the next day. So you can bulk record in this format as well. So free hosting, doesn't have editing, but it's really good if you're on the move, or if there's breaking news or anything like that. Also consider the backpacker studio app as well. So something else that you could consider to as even more powerful, even more useful. You do have to download the audio before you can upload it to a podcast host of your choice. Okay, Suze's that's about it. So we'll be back tomorrow as Flash Briefing February continues, and Suze's is going to be taking the helm tomorrow to talk about producing a Flash Briefing on your desktop. But until then, bye bye for now. Bye bye

Transcribed by https://otter.ai


YouTube: https://youtu.be/9a-4NGwedFQ]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21819587Sat, 15 Feb 2020 00:05:02 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/9a-4NGwedFQ Suze Twitter @BigTentSocial Peter Twitter @TweeterStewart Hello and welcome to day 15 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking to you about the easiest way to record a briefing now....https://youtu.be/9a-4NGwedFQ

Suze Twitter @BigTentSocial
Peter Twitter @TweeterStewart

Hello and welcome to day 15 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking to you about the easiest way to record a briefing now. My name is Suze Cooper, and I'm here with Peter Stewart to speak to you about Flash Briefings. Here we are on day 15. We've already talked about a whole load of stuff about getting your briefing off the ground to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. I work with vixen labs over in Shoreditch building skills and actions for brands and businesses. And also working with the London Evening Standard to create Google News for the assistant over in the US. And this is Peter Stewart.

Absolutely we are both from London. Yeah. So a flying the flag for the Brits. So the bones about wherever you're watching around the world, this is going to be appropriate for you particularly in the English speaking world. We'll come back to that a little bit later on in our Flash Briefing. februari course this free course, as Suze says, to give you the skill set the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing. This is like a sleeping giant of audio production and of skills. If you've heard of the skills that you can create for Amazon Alexa devices, then this is something that maybe it's a real entry point into creating a skill to getting your message across to help with your branding, to help your marketing to help with your advertising or publicity to help with your group, your business, maybe your charity, or nonprofit or maybe just something for you and your family. And hopefully, you'll be following our whole course during the course of February. And of course, if you've missed any, then you can go back and listen from day one in our 28 day guide. So as Suze said, Today, we're going to be bringing you some information about the easiest and indeed the cheapest way to create a Flash Briefing, this is going to save you time. And also it's going to be saving you money. So I'm going to be essentially talking about this today, and Susie's gonna be taking the helmet tomorrow. And what we're talking about today is, as I say, the easiest and cheapest way, because it's on your smartphone. Yeah, absolutely. You've got a smartphone already. So you don't have to shell out any money for that. I'm going to be talking about a free app. So you don't have to spend any money on that. It's free to download, it's free to use, it's free to then upload your audio content as well. It's a win win situation. Now, you don't have to buy the next bit of kit, but I'm going to suggest you do and it's something like this. Okay, so here it is. And so what you want is one of these Lavalier microphones or a tie mic or a clip mic is what they you know where the news readers will wear on the telly and I'll tell you, the reason And behind that in a few moments time, but first of all, let's go back to basics and actually tell you about that app though. It's called spreaker and spreaker. It's like a loudspeaker, but with an R there. So it's Spreaker. And you can download that. And essentially what it is, it's a podcast host. So you can upload your audio to it. And this is where Alexa will scurry away and find the link and will play your podcast or your audio, your Flash Briefing to anyone who requests it. So that's the, that's the playout system. But also you can use it as a production suite as well. It's like a mini studio on your phone when you record or when you download the spreaker Studio app. Now, let me show you what it's like here. So you can see some of the controls there. You can go live directly to your followers from this particular I have, but also you can record via the app as well. Well, so if I press the record button, then you can also see here that you can, as you record, you...]]>600alexadev,alexaflashbriefingexample,alexasmartspeaker,amazonalexa,amazondeveloper,amazonflashbriefing,flashbriefing,flashbriefingalexa,flashbriefingskill,flashbriefingskillalexa,smartspeakers,voice,voicefirst,voicetechnologycleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/9a-4NGwedFQ Suze Twitter @BigTentSocial Peter Twitter @TweeterStewart Hello and welcome to day 15 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking to you about the easiest way to record a briefing now. My name is Suze Cooper, and I'm here with Peter Stewart to speak to you about Flash Briefings. Here we are on day 15. We've already talked about a whole load of stuff about getting your briefing off the ground to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. I work with vixen labs over in Shoreditch building skills and actions for brands and businesses. And also working with the London Evening Standard to create Google News for the assistant over in the US. And this is Peter Stewart. Absolutely we are both from London. Yeah. So a flying the flag for the Brits. So the bones about wherever you're watching around the world, this is going to be appropriate for you particularly in the English speaking world. We'll come back to that a little bit later on in our Flash Briefing. februari course this free course, as Suze says, to give you the skill set the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing. This is like a sleeping giant of audio production and of skills. If you've heard of the skills that you can create for Amazon Alexa devices, then this is something that maybe it's a real entry point into creating a skill to getting your message across to help with your branding, to help your marketing to help with your advertising or publicity to help with your group, your business, maybe your charity, or nonprofit or maybe just something for you and your family. And hopefully, you'll be following our whole course during the course of February. And of course, if you've missed any, then you can go back and listen from day one in our 28 day guide. So as Suze said, Today, we're going to be bringing you some information about the easiest and indeed the cheapest way to create a Flash Briefing, this is going to save you time. And also it's going to be saving you money. So I'm going to be essentially talking about this today, and Susie's gonna be taking the helmet tomorrow. And what we're talking about today is, as I say, the easiest and cheapest way, because it's on your smartphone. Yeah, absolutely. You've got a smartphone already. So you don't have to shell out any money for that. I'm going to be talking about a free app. So you don't have to spend any money on that. It's free to download, it's free to use, it's free to then upload your audio content as well. It's a win win situation. Now, you don't have to buy the next bit of kit, but I'm going to suggest you do and it's something like this. Okay, so here it is. And so what you want is one of these Lavalier microphones or a tie mic or a clip mic is what they you know where the news readers will wear on the telly and I'll tell you, the reason And behind that in a few moments time, but first of all, let's go back to basics and actually tell you about that app though. It's called spreaker and spreaker. It's like a loudspeaker, but with an R there. So it's Spreaker. And you can download that. And essentially what it is, it's a podcast host. So you can upload your audio to it. And this is where Alexa will scurry away and find the link and will play your podcast or your audio, your Flash Briefing to anyone who requests it. So that's the, that's the playout system. But also you can use it as a production suite as well. It's like a mini studio on your phone when you record or when you download the spreaker Studio app. Now, let me show you what it's like here. So you can see some of the controls there. You can go live directly to your followers from this particular I have, but also you can record via the app as well. Well, so if I press the record button, then you can also see here that you can, as you record, you can play in various clips for your sound effects and so on. Well, you know what sound effects...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-014_1https://youtu.be/5-IZD7N3aq0

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial


Hello and welcome to day 14 of Flash briefing February. Today we are going to be speaking about your intros and outros, and why they aren't so important in your Flash briefings. My name is Suze Cooper I am a presenter, a news broadcaster on a local radio station here in Kent and also produce news for Google via London Evening Standard. And I work with vixen labs over in Shoreditch as well creating skills and actions and all kinds of voice experiences for brands and businesses around the world and myself and Peter Stewart's have been bringing you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to creating a better briefing all throughout February and here we are on day 14 about to speak about intros and outros. So Peter, over to you.

We're halfway through guys. Thanks very much indeed for for watching and listening for the last 14 days. Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day to you Suze? She's a married woman. But you know, in a in a friendly kind of way. And I'm Patrick Stewart live from from London town, as you can see behind me from my Penthouse Suite overlooking the fantastic city, the best city in the world. My background is not only in working for the big British Broadcasting Company that I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but it's quite obvious, bizarre rules and guidelines. I also have various Flash briefings. And also I contributed to the Oxford University and Reuters report in 2019, about about voice about smart speakers and so on, and also spoken at several conferences about voice techniques and Flash briefings as well. So the importance then of the ins and outs of your Flash briefing, we've spoken before about how you need to get to the meat and potatoes how you need to get to the content as quickly as possible. So essentially What that means is, if you've got a theme shoot, don't let it go on for several seconds. Now, I have listened to a Flash briefing before where the Introduction Music goes on for 10 seconds. And then the presenter comes on and says in a slightly boring, tedious voice, who they are, what it is they're doing the name of the Flash briefing again, what they're going to be talking about. And it's a good 20 or even 30 seconds sometime before they actually talk about the actual content before they bring you anything of value. By that time. I've moved on. I've said skip to Alexa. I don't I don't. Now, in fact, it's deleted. So I don't listen to that Flash briefing anymore. What you need to do is you need to need to get in and out really, really quickly. The essay is the Special Air Service the elite force of military in the United Kingdom, one of their mottos Who Dares Wins Another one is get in and out quickly. And that's what you've got to think about when you're producing your Flash briefing when you're presenting your Flash briefing. So, a couple of seconds intro, then say what it is that people can learn from you over the next 90 seconds or so, and then bring that to them almost immediately make them stay with that initial teaser tells them what it is that they're going to learn. explain to them why it is worth investing their time in the next 90 seconds of their lives with you. And then get on we've actually, we've actually bringing them that main content of value. So getting quickly and make it valuable to them to invest their time in you. And then of course, comes the content. We've spoken about the content before. And then the outrage and the outro is just as important because you've got various things that you want to Haasan various bits of information, various calls to action that you want them to do. And let's hand over to pop over to Suze's for for her advice on how you get out of your Flash briefing.

That's right. So the outro is actually quite an important part of the Flash briefing because this is where you can encourage people to take action on what they've heard. And perhaps it point them off to somewhere else within your marketing strategy that might get them to sign up for something, follow you somewhere on social media, visit your website, all kinds of different calls to actions that you can come up with. Now, what you don't want is your outro. To become an advert. People don't want to be listening to this two minute piece of content. And for a whole minute of it to be a big ad for you kind of trying to hard sell whatever it is, your brand or your businesses is trying to sell onto people. And what you want is for it to be short and pithy and snappy, and a really simple instruction to people remember people are listening to these Flash briefings while they're doing other things. You know, it's not real kind of active listening, it is quite passive. So whatever instruction it is that you're going to give needs to be really simple and really easy to remember. So it might be that you want someone to follow you on Twitter, I've certainly used that call to action myself at the end of my briefing going onto Twitter follow at Big Tent social and and that sums up the end of my Flash briefing. As I say you might want to give a web address and and you might want to suggest that people download something a bit like how voice works, newsletter, you know, go along to voice works dot info and download and sign up to receive our weekly Flash briefing briefing, you know that there may well be something you can move them on to certainly a Flash briefing can be used within a marketing strategy in that way so that it is another one of your steps towards your funnel or whatever else it is that you might be looking at to try and put Someone towards a product or downloading something online. And you know, and certainly can be it can be thought of and used in that way. So your call to action can be used as your outro, and can actually be a really quite important part of your Flash briefing. And it's another reason why the Flash briefing should be short, because you want to make sure that people hear that, that last action, and hopefully they will take action on it, as well. So what you want to do perhaps, is to have a different call to action for every day of the week, perhaps change them up every month, and you know, don't keep that call to action, the same. certainly be creative with it. Perhaps one day you might want to direct people over to your Instagram account and other day, you might want to send them to your website or your landing page. And you know, there's lots of different things that you can think of to use as a call to action in that space. So make good use of it, but make it short, pithy, make it snappy. So that's day 14. That's all about intros and outros during our Flash Briefing February. Peter, is there anything else that you've got to add about intros and outros,

I think also another thing that you may and other call to call to action and we could probably spend a short minute or so just talking about reviews that are asking for us. Really important to you don't actually beg for reviews. But you do once people have left your review. It's quite nice. It's quite polite to thank them for doing that. Maybe read out what it is that they've said about you if you could be a bit flattering, someone so you don't mind doing that. But also press mentioned the person that left that people like to hear their name like to have confirmation that the review has been left that the review has been noted as well. Obviously reading out a review is going to add time to your Flash briefing. Probably best at the end then so people can skip through it if they want to get to another Flash briefing. Be careful when you're asking for reviews. You don't game the system because it's a real temptation to Start leaving reviews yourself for your own Flash briefing or to ask friends and family to leave reviews for you. These are people who've never actually experienced the Flash briefing directly. Now, as soon as you perhaps know a bit more about this than I do, but I think that if you've got people associated with the same Amazon account, ie, the same home address, it's going to be really difficult for them to leave a review for, for the same thing, because obviously, that is kind of gamification gaming the system. And also you've got to be careful about how recently you bought something from Amazon because if you've got an Amazon account, but didn't buy anything for the past three years, it's probably just not going to recognise that you exist much anymore.

That's right. It's, it's, it is a bit of a system. The whole kind of leaving with us is quite a hot potato in the Flash briefing. So I think you'll agree, Peter, and but you know, certainly they are quite tight on the fact that like my husband couldn't leave a review for My Flash briefing because we are within the same account, we've got a shared amazon prime account as well. So you know, they, they do kind of spot that in there. The other thing is, I think I think I'm right in saying that part of the regulations when you sign up and agree to the terms and conditions when you're creating your Flash briefing is that you don't actually ask directly for reviews. So you kind of have to be, again, a little bit creative. You can't be hammering, hammering it over over the head, you know, hammering your listeners over the head with it every single day. And it might be that you want to direct them to the skill store. And you know, you have to be a little bit clever with the way that you're asking for it because, you know, they will pick up on these things and and obviously, you know, your certification and authentication by Amazon is the reason that you're they're doing the Flash briefing, so you don't want them coming down on you and say, No, you can't do it anymore because you've you've broken the rules. So do check that out in the terms and conditions when you're signing up to put your Flash briefing together.]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450726Fri, 14 Feb 2020 00:00:17 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/5-IZD7N3aq0 Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello and welcome to day 14 of Flash briefing February. Today we are going to be speaking about your intros and outros,...https://youtu.be/5-IZD7N3aq0

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial


Hello and welcome to day 14 of Flash briefing February. Today we are going to be speaking about your intros and outros, and why they aren't so important in your Flash briefings. My name is Suze Cooper I am a presenter, a news broadcaster on a local radio station here in Kent and also produce news for Google via London Evening Standard. And I work with vixen labs over in Shoreditch as well creating skills and actions and all kinds of voice experiences for brands and businesses around the world and myself and Peter Stewart's have been bringing you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to creating a better briefing all throughout February and here we are on day 14 about to speak about intros and outros. So Peter, over to you.

We're halfway through guys. Thanks very much indeed for for watching and listening for the last 14 days. Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day to you Suze? She's a married woman. But you know, in a in a friendly kind of way. And I'm Patrick Stewart live from from London town, as you can see behind me from my Penthouse Suite overlooking the fantastic city, the best city in the world. My background is not only in working for the big British Broadcasting Company that I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but it's quite obvious, bizarre rules and guidelines. I also have various Flash briefings. And also I contributed to the Oxford University and Reuters report in 2019, about about voice about smart speakers and so on, and also spoken at several conferences about voice techniques and Flash briefings as well. So the importance then of the ins and outs of your Flash briefing, we've spoken before about how you need to get to the meat and potatoes how you need to get to the content as quickly as possible. So essentially What that means is, if you've got a theme shoot, don't let it go on for several seconds. Now, I have listened to a Flash briefing before where the Introduction Music goes on for 10 seconds. And then the presenter comes on and says in a slightly boring, tedious voice, who they are, what it is they're doing the name of the Flash briefing again, what they're going to be talking about. And it's a good 20 or even 30 seconds sometime before they actually talk about the actual content before they bring you anything of value. By that time. I've moved on. I've said skip to Alexa. I don't I don't. Now, in fact, it's deleted. So I don't listen to that Flash briefing anymore. What you need to do is you need to need to get in and out really, really quickly. The essay is the Special Air Service the elite force of military in the United Kingdom, one of their mottos Who Dares Wins Another one is get in and out quickly. And that's what you've got to think about when you're producing your Flash briefing when you're presenting your Flash briefing. So, a couple of seconds intro, then say what it is that people can learn from you over the next 90 seconds or so, and then bring that to them almost immediately make them stay with that initial teaser tells them what it is that they're going to learn. explain to them why it is worth investing their time in the next 90 seconds of their lives with you. And then get on we've actually, we've actually bringing them that main content of value. So getting quickly and make it valuable to them to invest their time in you. And then of course, comes the content. We've spoken about the content before. And then the outrage and the outro is just as important because you've got various things that you want to Haasan various bits of information, various calls to action that you want them to do. And let's hand over to pop over to Suze's for for her advice on how you get out of your Flash briefing.

That's right. So the outro is actually quite an important...]]>611alexa,amazon,audio,briefing,february,flash,flashbriefing,intro,outro,podcast,podcasting,production,smart,smartspeaker,speaker,tech,technology,voice,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/5-IZD7N3aq0 Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello and welcome to day 14 of Flash briefing February. Today we are going to be speaking about your intros and outros, and why they aren't so important in your Flash briefings. My name is Suze Cooper I am a presenter, a news broadcaster on a local radio station here in Kent and also produce news for Google via London Evening Standard. And I work with vixen labs over in Shoreditch as well creating skills and actions and all kinds of voice experiences for brands and businesses around the world and myself and Peter Stewart's have been bringing you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to creating a better briefing all throughout February and here we are on day 14 about to speak about intros and outros. So Peter, over to you. We're halfway through guys. Thanks very much indeed for for watching and listening for the last 14 days. Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day to you Suze? She's a married woman. But you know, in a in a friendly kind of way. And I'm Patrick Stewart live from from London town, as you can see behind me from my Penthouse Suite overlooking the fantastic city, the best city in the world. My background is not only in working for the big British Broadcasting Company that I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but it's quite obvious, bizarre rules and guidelines. I also have various Flash briefings. And also I contributed to the Oxford University and Reuters report in 2019, about about voice about smart speakers and so on, and also spoken at several conferences about voice techniques and Flash briefings as well. So the importance then of the ins and outs of your Flash briefing, we've spoken before about how you need to get to the meat and potatoes how you need to get to the content as quickly as possible. So essentially What that means is, if you've got a theme shoot, don't let it go on for several seconds. Now, I have listened to a Flash briefing before where the Introduction Music goes on for 10 seconds. And then the presenter comes on and says in a slightly boring, tedious voice, who they are, what it is they're doing the name of the Flash briefing again, what they're going to be talking about. And it's a good 20 or even 30 seconds sometime before they actually talk about the actual content before they bring you anything of value. By that time. I've moved on. I've said skip to Alexa. I don't I don't. Now, in fact, it's deleted. So I don't listen to that Flash briefing anymore. What you need to do is you need to need to get in and out really, really quickly. The essay is the Special Air Service the elite force of military in the United Kingdom, one of their mottos Who Dares Wins Another one is get in and out quickly. And that's what you've got to think about when you're producing your Flash briefing when you're presenting your Flash briefing. So, a couple of seconds intro, then say what it is that people can learn from you over the next 90 seconds or so, and then bring that to them almost immediately make them stay with that initial teaser tells them what it is that they're going to learn. explain to them why it is worth investing their time in the next 90 seconds of their lives with you. And then get on we've actually, we've actually bringing them that main content of value. So getting quickly and make it valuable to them to invest their time in you. And then of course, comes the content. We've spoken about the content before. And then the outrage and the outro is just as important because you've got various things that you want to Haasan various bits of information, various calls to action that you want them to do. And let's hand over to pop over to Suze's for for her advice on how you get out of your Flash briefing. That's right. So the outro is actually quite an important part of the Flash briefing because this is where you can encourage people to take action on what they've...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-013_1https://youtu.be/tkTEUFqVhMA

Hello, and welcome to Flash Briefing February. It is day 13. Today we're going to be speaking about updating your briefing. My name is Suze Cooper. I'm a broadcaster and I work for the London Evening Standard, producing Google News for the US market and also for the Vixen Labs over in Shoreditch creating skills and actions for businesses and brands around the world. So today we are speaking about the importance of updating your Flash Briefing. And Peter, I haven't given you a chance to introduce yourself

I’m Peter Stewart and I work for a big British broadcasting company. I've written several books about the presentation and production in TV and radio. And I've been in this business of producing and presenting audio and visuals for nigh on 30 years. I know that There's a picture in the attic and all that kind of stuff. And really interested in the new era of Flash Briefings. I've done podcasts for a while. And also Flash Briefings. I've got three of those on the go as well. But coming from a kind of broadcast background, it's, it's really important to keep giving people fresh content, fresh information, updated news, and so on. So that's what we're talking about today about the value then this Saturday night for updating your briefing because people don't want to hear the same stuff over and over again, people don't want to hear the same stuff over and over again, people don't want to hear this. You see what I mean? It's tedious. It's boring. It's unnecessary. So let's hop back to Suze's, who's going to be telling us a little bit more about the skill set the mindset and the marketing about why we need to update every day.

Yeah, that's right. So you know, we have already touched on it a little bit in that, you know, creating a Flash Briefing. It's expected to be a daily experience. So you do need to have that fresh content out there every single day. Because it's not just about you as a creator, it's really about the experience that you're creating for your listener and you want your briefing to become kind of part of their daily routine. And a bit of a habit, you know, they don't want to miss out on what it is you might be saying on the next day. So it's really important that you come up with some new and fresh and exciting content each and every day. Now, the echo doesn't read anything older than seven days, either. So you want to make sure that people aren't getting the error message that that your Echo Dot that Alexa will read out if there's not fresh content there. Because that's been a bad listener experience. And we don't want any of those. We don't want anyone's have any reason to disable your Flash Briefing at all. So, you know, in order to do that, it's really important that you just keep that content topped up, and nice and fresh. So yeah, Alexa will actually say, give an error message basically, if there's not too A new file there, and to pull up and play out when someone asks for the latest from their Flash Briefing, creator, and Peter,

it's all about kind of return on investment. We spoke a couple of days ago about producing and finding the content and making sure that it's available to you when you actually want to produce it into presented. And and that's the key, you really, it's going to be much simpler for you to put aside an hour a couple of hours once a week or once a month, and sit in your home studio and to record a whole load of Flash Briefings than it is to set aside time every single day for a couple of reasons. First of all, you don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next your child could be ill, you may be invited to a to a get together down the pub, a party you may have to stay late at work and maybe snowfall or something like that. your washing machine may be on the blink all sorts of different things, which means that you can't actually do that day's Flash Briefing. But if you put your sides some time once a week or once a month, with a little bit of headroom as well. So you're not just up to the wire, it stands to reason that you are going to have much better return on investment. You're in your home studio, you've set up your microphone, you've put the kids out to pasture, you've, you've put the cat out, you've made sure it's quiet, you've set up your computer, and then you get into a bit of a routine you get into a bit of a system, you're going to clip this, cut that record that paste it here, shedule there, click that, post that and so on, and it becomes much easier to do, it's going to be much faster than do then setting it all up setting up all that equipment, all that process, all that logistics, all that workflow every single day. Choose a routine that you can manage as well. We would always suggest a couple of minutes, seven days a week. If you can only do it five days a week. Okay, bit disappointing, but at least commit to five days a week. Don't make That five days actually become three days or every other day, because then frankly, you know, people will begin to unsubscribe from listening to your Flash Briefing. And also, here's another little tip as well. You don't actually have to have new content for 365 days, you got a great bit of content that went three months ago, you can post that again, yeah, you can recycle some stuff occasionally. In fact, it's always a good idea to have a few little bits in your back pocket on your computer that you can schedule. If the washing machine goes on the blink. If your car breaks down, you can easily just rush home, you can post stuff without setting up your whole workflow system. Now, there is another slight complication with things and that is that by default, Alexa will play the last several briefings and we don't reckon that's a very good idea. He Suze's with why

That's right. So it's set up on the dashboard to play the last five episodes of your Flash Briefing. Now, we've been talking about how important the length is of your briefing briefing. And if it's two minutes long, that's fantastic. But if Alexa is suddenly playing out the last five, that's 10 minutes worth of listening. And that really, again, it's all about the listener experience, that kind of isn't what people are dipping into these Flash Briefings for, as Peter said, you know, it's flash is briefing, it's meant to be short, snappy, quick, and move on to the next providers. So we need to in that dashboard, just adapt a little bit of the code and stuff that's in there that makes it sounds really tacky, and it really isn't. There's, there's an area in there that has got kind of how many episodes it's going to play. And you can actually alter that so that it just plays the latest version. I mean, you know, it kind of sounds like it's trying to help you out, you know, someone might listen to the last five episodes and that means that you know, the contents got a longer lifespan and all that kind of jazz, but To be honest, if someone wants to listen to your back isSuzes, they can do that via whatever podcast host it is that you're listening to, it kind of isn't the right place for people to be listening to 2345 of your Flash Briefings all in one go. So yeah, there is a little bit of a tweak that needs doing. And perhaps that's something we can do a bit of a kind of screen share on it at some point. And if anybody wants any information about how to do that, then please do reach out to us and we'll be more than happy to show you where that is on the Alexa dashboard and how you can change that little kind of area to make sure that it's just your latest episode that's going out and not the last five because that that really could get quite don't couldn't eat pizza.

Absolutely. You know what you want to encourage FOMO you want people to go Oh no, I missed yesterday's I really wanted to hear it every single day. I've really got to make an effort to listen every day. So that FOMO experience consuming has got to be a habit for me. And don't forget if you are playing as Suze says those five episodes every Single Day, or four or three or two, then the problem is that those people, you may be helping the people that did miss episodes. They're not your loyal fans. They're not your loyal listeners, your loyal listeners, the people that listen every day. And they don't want to hear every single day's episode for the past five days on a rolling basis, every single day, that will really pick up them. And what they'll do then is they will delete and it's going to be really, really difficult to get back a listener who's deleted your Flash Briefing from their routine than it is to get a brand new listener. So make it easy on yourself. Make it easy on your loyal, loyal listeners, the loyal listeners who listen every single day, who move up, who helped you move up the rankings, who give you the reviews, look after them and give them a little bit of FOMO yet treat them harsh but treat them fair. You didn't hear it yesterday. Bad on you, but you've got to listen to it today because otherwise you will We'll be missing out. Okay, that's about it Suze's tomorrow. We gotta be talking about the ins and outs of how you start, how you finish a Flash Briefing. In the meantime, heck, we've got a newsletter with even more content and we the people can get it for free.

We certainly have if you want to hear from us every Friday to find out about the skill set the mindset and the marketing of creating the best briefing you possibly can then go along now to voice works dot info and sign-up there for the Friday Flash Briefing briefing....

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450724Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:04 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/tkTEUFqVhMA Hello, and welcome to Flash Briefing February. It is day 13. Today we're going to be speaking about updating your briefing. My name is Suze Cooper. I'm a broadcaster and I work for the London Evening...https://youtu.be/tkTEUFqVhMA

Hello, and welcome to Flash Briefing February. It is day 13. Today we're going to be speaking about updating your briefing. My name is Suze Cooper. I'm a broadcaster and I work for the London Evening Standard, producing Google News for the US market and also for the Vixen Labs over in Shoreditch creating skills and actions for businesses and brands around the world. So today we are speaking about the importance of updating your Flash Briefing. And Peter, I haven't given you a chance to introduce yourself

I’m Peter Stewart and I work for a big British broadcasting company. I've written several books about the presentation and production in TV and radio. And I've been in this business of producing and presenting audio and visuals for nigh on 30 years. I know that There's a picture in the attic and all that kind of stuff. And really interested in the new era of Flash Briefings. I've done podcasts for a while. And also Flash Briefings. I've got three of those on the go as well. But coming from a kind of broadcast background, it's, it's really important to keep giving people fresh content, fresh information, updated news, and so on. So that's what we're talking about today about the value then this Saturday night for updating your briefing because people don't want to hear the same stuff over and over again, people don't want to hear the same stuff over and over again, people don't want to hear this. You see what I mean? It's tedious. It's boring. It's unnecessary. So let's hop back to Suze's, who's going to be telling us a little bit more about the skill set the mindset and the marketing about why we need to update every day.

Yeah, that's right. So you know, we have already touched on it a little bit in that, you know, creating a Flash Briefing. It's expected to be a daily experience. So you do need to have that fresh content out there every single day. Because it's not just about you as a creator, it's really about the experience that you're creating for your listener and you want your briefing to become kind of part of their daily routine. And a bit of a habit, you know, they don't want to miss out on what it is you might be saying on the next day. So it's really important that you come up with some new and fresh and exciting content each and every day. Now, the echo doesn't read anything older than seven days, either. So you want to make sure that people aren't getting the error message that that your Echo Dot that Alexa will read out if there's not fresh content there. Because that's been a bad listener experience. And we don't want any of those. We don't want anyone's have any reason to disable your Flash Briefing at all. So, you know, in order to do that, it's really important that you just keep that content topped up, and nice and fresh. So yeah, Alexa will actually say, give an error message basically, if there's not too A new file there, and to pull up and play out when someone asks for the latest from their Flash Briefing, creator, and Peter,

it's all about kind of return on investment. We spoke a couple of days ago about producing and finding the content and making sure that it's available to you when you actually want to produce it into presented. And and that's the key, you really, it's going to be much simpler for you to put aside an hour a couple of hours once a week or once a month, and sit in your home studio and to record a whole load of Flash Briefings than it is to set aside time every single day for a couple of reasons. First of all, you don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next your child could be ill, you may be invited to a to a get together down the pub, a party you may have to stay late at work and maybe snowfall or something like that. your washing machine may be on the blink all sorts of different things, which means that you can't...]]>603alexa,amazon,audio,briefing,february,flash,flashbriefing,production,smart,smartspeaker,speaker,tech,technology,voice,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/tkTEUFqVhMA Hello, and welcome to Flash Briefing February. It is day 13. Today we're going to be speaking about updating your briefing. My name is Suze Cooper. I'm a broadcaster and I work for the London Evening Standard, producing Google News for the US market and also for the Vixen Labs over in Shoreditch creating skills and actions for businesses and brands around the world. So today we are speaking about the importance of updating your Flash Briefing. And Peter, I haven't given you a chance to introduce yourself I’m Peter Stewart and I work for a big British broadcasting company. I've written several books about the presentation and production in TV and radio. And I've been in this business of producing and presenting audio and visuals for nigh on 30 years. I know that There's a picture in the attic and all that kind of stuff. And really interested in the new era of Flash Briefings. I've done podcasts for a while. And also Flash Briefings. I've got three of those on the go as well. But coming from a kind of broadcast background, it's, it's really important to keep giving people fresh content, fresh information, updated news, and so on. So that's what we're talking about today about the value then this Saturday night for updating your briefing because people don't want to hear the same stuff over and over again, people don't want to hear the same stuff over and over again, people don't want to hear this. You see what I mean? It's tedious. It's boring. It's unnecessary. So let's hop back to Suze's, who's going to be telling us a little bit more about the skill set the mindset and the marketing about why we need to update every day. Yeah, that's right. So you know, we have already touched on it a little bit in that, you know, creating a Flash Briefing. It's expected to be a daily experience. So you do need to have that fresh content out there every single day. Because it's not just about you as a creator, it's really about the experience that you're creating for your listener and you want your briefing to become kind of part of their daily routine. And a bit of a habit, you know, they don't want to miss out on what it is you might be saying on the next day. So it's really important that you come up with some new and fresh and exciting content each and every day. Now, the echo doesn't read anything older than seven days, either. So you want to make sure that people aren't getting the error message that that your Echo Dot that Alexa will read out if there's not fresh content there. Because that's been a bad listener experience. And we don't want any of those. We don't want anyone's have any reason to disable your Flash Briefing at all. So, you know, in order to do that, it's really important that you just keep that content topped up, and nice and fresh. So yeah, Alexa will actually say, give an error message basically, if there's not too A new file there, and to pull up and play out when someone asks for the latest from their Flash Briefing, creator, and Peter, it's all about kind of return on investment. We spoke a couple of days ago about producing and finding the content and making sure that it's available to you when you actually want to produce it into presented. And and that's the key, you really, it's going to be much simpler for you to put aside an hour a couple of hours once a week or once a month, and sit in your home studio and to record a whole load of Flash Briefings than it is to set aside time every single day for a couple of reasons. First of all, you don't know what's going to happen from one day to the next your child could be ill, you may be invited to a to a get together down the pub, a party you may have to stay late at work and maybe snowfall or something like that. your washing machine may be on the blink all sorts of different things, which means that you can't actually do that day's Flash Briefing. But if you put your sides some time once a week or once a...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-012_1https://youtu.be/66PfSOkCIM8

Welcome to day 12 of Flash Briefing February is the skill set and mindset in the marketing to build a better briefing. And hopefully, we are building all of that intelligence with you over the course of these 28 days of February. So we've spoken about all sorts of different things about the content, about the style, about music, about logos, all sorts of different things. Today, we're talking about the duration length matters, as they say, and ironically, today's episode is actually going to be quite short, because shortness, brevity is kind of the key isn't it to having a fantastic briefing. Suze's

Yeah, it really is. And it's a little bit and you have to really think about how people are listening to these Flash Briefings. You know, they're they're packed into this playlist that people have enabled. And you know, if you're anything like me, kind of yell at Alexa, what's my news first thing in the morning and, you know, I'm a sandwiches for the lunch box. I've got the kids rushing about the washing machines probably on the kettle's going. There's 100 other things going on. And so really what I'm after is really short, snappy news and audio from from the smart speaker to update me on those topics that I've chosen to listen about. But it does kind of need to be sure because otherwise, you know, I'm not there listening in a very kind of active way is a very, very passive listen. And while I want to hear from these providers each day, I you know, if I wanted to listen to longer form content, then I would probably sort of look at them, listen to their podcast or something like that rather than their Flash Briefing. Listening to a Flash Briefing is a very specific type of Listen, I think and so keeping the Flash Briefing short is really really important. Now, you know, Amazon Alexa, say you can have it up to 10 minutes, and some people do some people are creating 10 minute Flash Briefings. In my mind, that is really a podcast. Short podcast at that. But you know, I think, really this the sweet spot that we seem to be finding with Flash Briefing creators is that your content needs to be a couple of minutes cut. So kind of two minutes long is a really good lesson for people before they then move on to to the next provider and listen to somebody else isn't the right pizza?

Absolutely. You know, I've got a good way of kind of remembering this Suze's you have been to networking events, you've been to conferences, you've been to dinner parties, you've been to New Year's Eve parties, and you're stuck speaking to somebody who is just so boring, and goes on and on and on. And every minute. Seems like an hour. Yeah. So what I'm saying is it's not just the duration, but it's also the perception of the duration. Because you know what, you could have a Flash Briefing, that is that is two or three minutes long, but it's full of Verve and vitality is read by a human being It's got some sound effects in there. It's got a fantastic, but short theme tune. We spoke about theme tunes a couple of days ago. And so if it's crammed full of fantastic information which is presented and an exciting and informative infused gastic way, it's actually going to feel much shorter. You can have a one minute Flash Briefing, that feels as though it's two or three minutes, because it is dull. It is slow, it is repetitive, and it is boring. So what we're saying is not just the duration, but the perception of the duration as well. And we've spoken about some of those different elements, about the presentation to have a human voice, about the use of music, about the use of sound effects about your content in previous days of the course if you haven't heard those already. It's all online and do go back to previous days of Flash Briefing February. And also as part of that, what I say is dive straight in. So, have your theme tune, but after a couple of seconds start talking stop giving people the meat and potatoes, tell them why they should be listening. No preamble, but just get straight on with it. People, as soon as we're saying do not have the time or where the where the clue. Suze's is twice in the name, isn't it? Flash Briefing, it's got to be done in a flash, it's going to be brief. I don't know how much more straightforward. Amazon is going to make it for people to say, guys, keep it short,

let's say and actually, it's a lot to do with discoverability as well actually, if you think about it, Peter, because you want someone to listen to the entirety of your Flash Briefing from beginning to end that kind of gives you brownie points in being discovered in the skills store. You're kind of playing to the algorithm a little bit and the idea is that if someone's listening to your briefing, all the way through and then it will get kind of promoted a little bit more when people are searching for the briefings because it will be spotted as kind of really valuable content, people They're listening. So it must be good. So we'll serve this out to more people to see if more people would like to listen to it. So actually, if people aren't getting to the end of your briefing, that might actually cause a bit of a problem for you, in terms of being found. And as I've said, before, you know, you're putting all this effort and energy into putting together a Flash Briefing, you want people out there to know it's there, and to be able to find it, and enable it. So yeah, creating a piece of content that someone's going to listen to from beginning to end is really quite important for lots of different reasons. And also, it makes it far more manageable for you to create as a creator, we spoke yesterday about needing 365 days of content, you know, surely that's much more doable when you imagine that that's kind of a two minute piece of content each day. So yeah, here we are on Flash Briefing febri piece of what will we be speaking about again, tomorrow.

So tomorrow, kind of associated with this, because obviously, there's a bit of fee, we put these in a certain order, updating your briefing. So you've got the content, you know, the duration, as Susan was just saying, and now we're going to be Talking about tomorrow about updating your briefing. In the meantime, don't forget, you can sign up for our newsletter. It brings you all sorts of tech and tips and tricks to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to building a better briefing. It's out every, every Friday, Suze's, how do people sign up for that?

Yeah, you can sign up for that at voice works dot info, which is our website, and you can sign up there, pop your email address in and it gets sent out every Friday, as Peter says, it's the skill set the mindset and the marketing to creating a Flash Briefing also quite good for podcasters. Anyone who's kind of into audio production, lots of different links to things and sometimes some discount codes too. So yeah, definitely want to sign up for if you're interested in creating audio. So yeah, we'll be back again tomorrow for Day 13 of Flash Briefing, a brief but for today. We'll say goodbye.

Bye for now. Bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450721Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:10 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/66PfSOkCIM8 Welcome to day 12 of Flash Briefing February is the skill set and mindset in the marketing to build a better briefing. And hopefully, we are building all of that intelligence with you over the course of...https://youtu.be/66PfSOkCIM8

Welcome to day 12 of Flash Briefing February is the skill set and mindset in the marketing to build a better briefing. And hopefully, we are building all of that intelligence with you over the course of these 28 days of February. So we've spoken about all sorts of different things about the content, about the style, about music, about logos, all sorts of different things. Today, we're talking about the duration length matters, as they say, and ironically, today's episode is actually going to be quite short, because shortness, brevity is kind of the key isn't it to having a fantastic briefing. Suze's

Yeah, it really is. And it's a little bit and you have to really think about how people are listening to these Flash Briefings. You know, they're they're packed into this playlist that people have enabled. And you know, if you're anything like me, kind of yell at Alexa, what's my news first thing in the morning and, you know, I'm a sandwiches for the lunch box. I've got the kids rushing about the washing machines probably on the kettle's going. There's 100 other things going on. And so really what I'm after is really short, snappy news and audio from from the smart speaker to update me on those topics that I've chosen to listen about. But it does kind of need to be sure because otherwise, you know, I'm not there listening in a very kind of active way is a very, very passive listen. And while I want to hear from these providers each day, I you know, if I wanted to listen to longer form content, then I would probably sort of look at them, listen to their podcast or something like that rather than their Flash Briefing. Listening to a Flash Briefing is a very specific type of Listen, I think and so keeping the Flash Briefing short is really really important. Now, you know, Amazon Alexa, say you can have it up to 10 minutes, and some people do some people are creating 10 minute Flash Briefings. In my mind, that is really a podcast. Short podcast at that. But you know, I think, really this the sweet spot that we seem to be finding with Flash Briefing creators is that your content needs to be a couple of minutes cut. So kind of two minutes long is a really good lesson for people before they then move on to to the next provider and listen to somebody else isn't the right pizza?

Absolutely. You know, I've got a good way of kind of remembering this Suze's you have been to networking events, you've been to conferences, you've been to dinner parties, you've been to New Year's Eve parties, and you're stuck speaking to somebody who is just so boring, and goes on and on and on. And every minute. Seems like an hour. Yeah. So what I'm saying is it's not just the duration, but it's also the perception of the duration. Because you know what, you could have a Flash Briefing, that is that is two or three minutes long, but it's full of Verve and vitality is read by a human being It's got some sound effects in there. It's got a fantastic, but short theme tune. We spoke about theme tunes a couple of days ago. And so if it's crammed full of fantastic information which is presented and an exciting and informative infused gastic way, it's actually going to feel much shorter. You can have a one minute Flash Briefing, that feels as though it's two or three minutes, because it is dull. It is slow, it is repetitive, and it is boring. So what we're saying is not just the duration, but the perception of the duration as well. And we've spoken about some of those different elements, about the presentation to have a human voice, about the use of music, about the use of sound effects about your content in previous days of the course if you haven't heard those already. It's all online and do go back to previous days of Flash Briefing February. And also as part of that, what I say is dive straight in. So, have your theme tune,...]]>418alexa,amazon,audio,briefing,content,dot,echo,flash,flashbriefing,marketing,podcast,podcasting,porduction,smart,smartspeaker,speaker,tech,technology,voice,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/66PfSOkCIM8 Welcome to day 12 of Flash Briefing February is the skill set and mindset in the marketing to build a better briefing. And hopefully, we are building all of that intelligence with you over the course of these 28 days of February. So we've spoken about all sorts of different things about the content, about the style, about music, about logos, all sorts of different things. Today, we're talking about the duration length matters, as they say, and ironically, today's episode is actually going to be quite short, because shortness, brevity is kind of the key isn't it to having a fantastic briefing. Suze's Yeah, it really is. And it's a little bit and you have to really think about how people are listening to these Flash Briefings. You know, they're they're packed into this playlist that people have enabled. And you know, if you're anything like me, kind of yell at Alexa, what's my news first thing in the morning and, you know, I'm a sandwiches for the lunch box. I've got the kids rushing about the washing machines probably on the kettle's going. There's 100 other things going on. And so really what I'm after is really short, snappy news and audio from from the smart speaker to update me on those topics that I've chosen to listen about. But it does kind of need to be sure because otherwise, you know, I'm not there listening in a very kind of active way is a very, very passive listen. And while I want to hear from these providers each day, I you know, if I wanted to listen to longer form content, then I would probably sort of look at them, listen to their podcast or something like that rather than their Flash Briefing. Listening to a Flash Briefing is a very specific type of Listen, I think and so keeping the Flash Briefing short is really really important. Now, you know, Amazon Alexa, say you can have it up to 10 minutes, and some people do some people are creating 10 minute Flash Briefings. In my mind, that is really a podcast. Short podcast at that. But you know, I think, really this the sweet spot that we seem to be finding with Flash Briefing creators is that your content needs to be a couple of minutes cut. So kind of two minutes long is a really good lesson for people before they then move on to to the next provider and listen to somebody else isn't the right pizza? Absolutely. You know, I've got a good way of kind of remembering this Suze's you have been to networking events, you've been to conferences, you've been to dinner parties, you've been to New Year's Eve parties, and you're stuck speaking to somebody who is just so boring, and goes on and on and on. And every minute. Seems like an hour. Yeah. So what I'm saying is it's not just the duration, but it's also the perception of the duration. Because you know what, you could have a Flash Briefing, that is that is two or three minutes long, but it's full of Verve and vitality is read by a human being It's got some sound effects in there. It's got a fantastic, but short theme tune. We spoke about theme tunes a couple of days ago. And so if it's crammed full of fantastic information which is presented and an exciting and informative infused gastic way, it's actually going to feel much shorter. You can have a one minute Flash Briefing, that feels as though it's two or three minutes, because it is dull. It is slow, it is repetitive, and it is boring. So what we're saying is not just the duration, but the perception of the duration as well. And we've spoken about some of those different elements, about the presentation to have a human voice, about the use of music, about the use of sound effects about your content in previous days of the course if you haven't heard those already. It's all online and do go back to previous days of Flash Briefing February. And also as part of that, what I say is dive straight in. So, have your theme tune, but after a couple of seconds start talking stop giving people the meat and potatoes, tell...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-011_1
Yeah, I'm Susan Cooper. And I create a Google News for the London Evening Standard. And I also work for vixen labs over in Shoreditch creating skills and actions and all kinds of different voice experiences for different brands and businesses around the world. So yeah, it's really can be quite daunting. You're right. If you're doing a Flash Briefing, then kind of the optimum way of putting this together is to actually have content that is daily 365 days a year, and that means having content that will stretch for 365 days a year and yeah, that is daunting. That's an empty calendar full of stress, unless you can be super super organised and a little bit savvy and we're going to give you a few tips as to ways that you might be able to think of bits of content that you can pull together, and perhaps even be really super organised with and prepare in advance. And in that way, the more organised that you are, the less daunting it kind of feels. Now, why does it have to be daily? Well, the Flash Briefing is set up as a routine on the Alexa devices. And the idea is that someone will ask Alexa, what's my news or what my Flash Briefings each day and hear a new episode from you every single day? Now you can set them up in the dashboard to be daily or weekly or hourly, even. But I would kind of push you away a little bit from doing it weekly. Just because if someone is asking every single day that question in order to hear the playlist of briefings that they've put together, and they come across yours and they're hearing the same content they heard the day before, then they're quite likely to skip it. And in the end, they may well actually get so fed up that they decided to disable the Flash Briefing altogether, which would be a real shame. So I think really, we have to think about the context that this Flash Briefing idea has been presented to us by Amazon. And that idea really is that it can be listened to daily. And for that reason, we do need to come up with 365 different things to say, but Peter, it really doesn't have to be quite as daunting as it sounds, does it?

You know, you know what, you can be a little bit more strategic, we are here to help you find shedule and stockpile your content. So let's kind of it's a bit like eating an elephant As the old saying goes, just take it bit by bit by bit mouthful by mouth for cut it up into manageable chunks. So let's give you an example. If you're in a business, and you're likely to be going to a conference, say in a few months time, what can you get from that conference is going to help you with your Flash Briefings? Well, once you've got the conference details in the agenda, then that's going to perhaps break down for you over the course of one day or two days. What half a dozen different events on each day that people are going to be speaking about. So, immediately you've got content for a couple of weeks, because each day you can take their topics, and you can Muse about what your take is on the topic that someone's going to be speaking out of the conference, what you hope to be getting out of going to that particular seminar, and there is your content, as I say, each day for a couple of weeks, yeah, a half a dozen topics. On each day of a two day conference, you've got a couple of weeks worth of material. Okay, then maybe you go to the conference, and you can actually talk to an interview some of the delegates, what did you get out of this? What was your take? What did you find this interesting? What's your takeaway? What are you looking forward to? And each of those could potentially be another Flash Briefing because each of those is going to be one Immediate couple of minutes really short interview that you can then put out over the course of the next couple of weeks. You can also speak to some of the speakers as well summarise what he is you were saying, what was your main thrust? What's you? what's the takeaway you wish people would take away from listening to your presentation? Yeah, again, it's another couple of minutes. I don't have an audio recorder, what am I going to do, you do have an audio recorder, and it's called your phone. It's really straightforward, obviously, to record on your phone. So my notifications came out there. It's really easy to do that on your phone. So that is not a problem at all. When you come back. You've got the content that you've gathered there, but also you've got your own take as well. Here's another idea. When you're at the conference, as well as speaking to the delegates and the speakers about what they got from the conference, you could also ask them a question each along the lines of what is your tip for people starting off in this industry? Or what is your best bit of advice for people Want to get on in the industry? or What is your favourite bit about the industry? The Yeah, all sorts of different questions. If you ask each person, one or two of those other questions, you've now got content for several more weeks that you can schedule a little bit later. What I'm saying is you need to think, quite strategically to help you find shedule and stockpile content. So there's just one series of ideas about going to a conference, but you know what, Suze? It strikes me that we things like Valentine's Day and Halloween and new year and Christmas and all sorts of other kind of special days during the course of the year. Doesn't take much to kind of kind of crowbar a bit of content that you've got already into those separate days. Yeah, that you can you can diarize those days.

Absolutely. And you're, you know, you're talking to the queen of social days, aren't you? My Flash Briefing is all about these days. That comes And you know, if you enable the social based Flash Briefing, you'll hear each day what these wacky days are, some of them are way out there. Others, you know, are quite straightforward Valentine's Day, New Year's Day, the longest day of the year Easter, all those kinds of different things that you can build some content around. But there's also the wacky wild ones like oatmeal cookie day or rhubarb and custard day. And who knows, you might be able to kind of squeeze some content in around those as well. And it's quite easy to find those online. There are various websites that give you full lists of different weird and wonderful days. And as I say this the social days Flash Briefing as well another way and certainly if you're kind of active on social media, you'll have noticed this is quite a common thing that happens kind of on Twitter and also on Facebook as well is to use the days of the week, but to kind of use them in a very strategic way so that you might have mindful Monday or top tips Tuesday. Throwback Thursday is the classic one over on where someone might, you know, post a picture of them from years ago or whatever and hashtag it Throwback Thursday, those kinds of things. If you can think of a little kind of run of days for yourself, you will always have a little nugget of information that you could give that relates to that each day. And it will help to structure your content and stop it feeling quite so overwhelming. So there's just a few ideas there of how you can kind of come up with the ideas but but Peter, I know you've got a very an amazing way I'm totally in awe of your way of keeping your content all together. And you use weight clip. It's amazing. Tell me about weekly.

Absolutely. So if you're thinking to yourself, okay, so I need to find all these different bits of information maybe to fit in with the days of the week or maybe Valentine's Day, okay, let's use Valentine's Day as an example, or New Year's Day, you know, something I love about the industry or my new year's resolutions for the industry. Each of those could be a whole week worth of series of content in themselves. So your looking out for content that could fill those kinds of slots, and you're looking online and you find an article or you find a tweet, or you find a Facebook post that pertains to that particular kind of topic, you go to waitlet.com, which is available on your desktop and an app and you can set up different categories. And then all you have to do is to save that article into the different books into the different file for love, or for Monday or Tuesday or for conferences or something else that you can talk about in the future. Wakelet.com. It's free. It's a lifesaver for me. I use it every day.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450718Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:12 +0000Suze CooperHello, hello, welcome to another day of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper through this month of February from day one to day 28, we're giving you the skill set that get it in the right order the skill set...
Yeah, I'm Susan Cooper. And I create a Google News for the London Evening Standard. And I also work for vixen labs over in Shoreditch creating skills and actions and all kinds of different voice experiences for different brands and businesses around the world. So yeah, it's really can be quite daunting. You're right. If you're doing a Flash Briefing, then kind of the optimum way of putting this together is to actually have content that is daily 365 days a year, and that means having content that will stretch for 365 days a year and yeah, that is daunting. That's an empty calendar full of stress, unless you can be super super organised and a little bit savvy and we're going to give you a few tips as to ways that you might be able to think of bits of content that you can pull together, and perhaps even be really super organised with and prepare in advance. And in that way, the more organised that you are, the less daunting it kind of feels. Now, why does it have to be daily? Well, the Flash Briefing is set up as a routine on the Alexa devices. And the idea is that someone will ask Alexa, what's my news or what my Flash Briefings each day and hear a new episode from you every single day? Now you can set them up in the dashboard to be daily or weekly or hourly, even. But I would kind of push you away a little bit from doing it weekly. Just because if someone is asking every single day that question in order to hear the playlist of briefings that they've put together, and they come across yours and they're hearing the same content they heard the day before, then they're quite likely to skip it. And in the end, they may well actually get so fed up that they decided to disable the Flash Briefing altogether, which would be a real shame. So I think really, we have to think about the context that this Flash Briefing idea has been presented to us by Amazon. And that idea really is that it can be listened to daily. And for that reason, we do need to come up with 365 different things to say, but Peter, it really doesn't have to be quite as daunting as it sounds, does it?

You know, you know what, you can be a little bit more strategic, we are here to help you find shedule and stockpile your content. So let's kind of it's a bit like eating an elephant As the old saying goes, just take it bit by bit by bit mouthful by mouth for cut it up into manageable chunks. So let's give you an example. If you're in a business, and you're likely to be going to a conference, say in a few months time, what can you get from that conference is going to help you with your Flash Briefings? Well, once you've got the conference details in the agenda, then that's...]]>606alexa,amazon,audio,briefing,content,creation,flash,flashbriefing,marketing,production,smart,smartspeakers,speakers,tech,technology,voice,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperHello, hello, welcome to another day of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper through this month of February from day one to day 28, we're giving you the skill set that get it in the right order the skill set the mindset of the marketing to build a better briefing, all sorts of stuff to tell you about with tips and tricks and techniques and a bit of a tech as well. My name is Peter Stewart, as you can see below, and I've got several Flash Briefings to my name. And also I work for a big British Broadcasting Company, that I'm not allowed to tell you which one, but it's quite easy to work out when I say British Broadcasting Company. Okay. Now today what we're going to be talking about is kind of the meat and potatoes. This is really what a Flash Briefings all about. And that is the content what it is that you're saying. So yesterday we spoke about how important it was for you to be saying what it is in your briefing rather than have a lexer to say that, but today we're talking about what is Is that you'll actually be saying what is the meat of potatoes? What is the actual content? So let's hand straight over to Suze's to introduce yourself properly. And also, I mean can be quite daunting, couldn't it? But let's hear Suze's thoughts on this. Yeah, I'm Susan Cooper. And I create a Google News for the London Evening Standard. And I also work for vixen labs over in Shoreditch creating skills and actions and all kinds of different voice experiences for different brands and businesses around the world. So yeah, it's really can be quite daunting. You're right. If you're doing a Flash Briefing, then kind of the optimum way of putting this together is to actually have content that is daily 365 days a year, and that means having content that will stretch for 365 days a year and yeah, that is daunting. That's an empty calendar full of stress, unless you can be super super organised and a little bit savvy and we're going to give you a few tips as to ways that you might be able to think of bits of content that you can pull together, and perhaps even be really super organised with and prepare in advance. And in that way, the more organised that you are, the less daunting it kind of feels. Now, why does it have to be daily? Well, the Flash Briefing is set up as a routine on the Alexa devices. And the idea is that someone will ask Alexa, what's my news or what my Flash Briefings each day and hear a new episode from you every single day? Now you can set them up in the dashboard to be daily or weekly or hourly, even. But I would kind of push you away a little bit from doing it weekly. Just because if someone is asking every single day that question in order to hear the playlist of briefings that they've put together, and they come across yours and they're hearing the same content they heard the day before, then they're quite likely to skip it. And in the end, they may well actually get so fed up that they decided to disable the Flash Briefing altogether, which would be a real shame. So I think really, we have to think about the context that this Flash Briefing idea has been presented to us by Amazon. And that idea really is that it can be listened to daily. And for that reason, we do need to come up with 365 different things to say, but Peter, it really doesn't have to be quite as daunting as it sounds, does it? You know, you know what, you can be a little bit more strategic, we are here to help you find shedule and stockpile your content. So let's kind of it's a bit like eating an elephant As the old saying goes, just take it bit by bit by bit mouthful by mouth for cut it up into manageable chunks. So let's give you an example. If you're in a business, and you're likely to be going to a conference, say in a few months time, what can you get from that conference is going to help you with your Flash Briefings? Well, once you've got the conference details in the agenda, then that's going to perhaps...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-010_1
Absolutely. So Suze underplays herself a little bit because Suze actually presents audio not only for herself, not only For one of the big commercial radio players here in the United Kingdom, but also for the evening standards in London, so that obviously is heard around the world, especially, or particularly in the United States and also for one of the biggest and best skills companies in the UK as well. vixen left, so she works for all sorts of different companies. So she knows her audio stuff. me I've got three Flash Briefings on the go. And one of them is the second highest rated in the UK. And also I work for one of the big British Broadcasting companies can't tell you what it is. I'm not allowed to. But guess what it is when I say one of the big British Broadcasting companies and try and work it out from that and also I've written several books about audio, presentation and production for TV and for radio as well. So we reckon we kind of know a little bit of thing about the presentation of Flash Briefings and podcasts. There are two ways you can go. You can make it really easy for yourself or really engaging for your audience. And it's up to you which of these two roads you decide to travel down. So let me first of all, talk to you about making it easy for yourself, you make it really easy for yourself by having Alexa, read your Flash Briefing for you. Which is quite straightforward to do. You essentially set up the RSS feed in a different way. And you have the text to speech option, Incorporated, which means that Alexa will read out what is on your website and website. And it says, so quite as straightforward to set up. Once you read from your page, you've got to have a couple of things in operation. So you've got to make sure that those sentences are really short because even though the intonation of Alexa is reasonably good, she does stop A bit if the sentences are really long, it's so if there are too many kind of sub clauses, too many kind of bits in within commerce as it were, then she finds it difficult to know where to go with the intonation. So keep the sentences really short. Also make sure that you finish sentences as well, because otherwise the intonation won't be quite right. For example, if you have a phrase, which is just got ellipsis at the end, so dot, dot, dot, even though you could carry that off as a human being, she quite won't quite know how to pronounce that where to go with that kind of intonation. It's really important that you have proper punctuation, with commerce and with full stops because that will guide her into the kind of style and presentation when she's reading you from your website. Also, make sure it's plain text and no captions. One of the problems is that she will read everything that's there unless you tell her not to. So she may very well read a caption A photograph, which says,

this is something like Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith receiving the check. That doesn't mean anything if I'm just listening who are these characters? And anyway, why would I need to know that that is a phrase in the middle of of what she's saying would sound totally out of place. Also, if you're linking to other pages, she may very well read that as well, you know, so it might actually be something like, click here for more. That would obviously sound completely odd for somebody that is listening to your Flash Briefing. Also, you've got to make sure that it's under 4500 characters because when it gets to that limit, she will simply stop the limit of the duration when you are reading a Flash Briefing yourself is 10 minutes. The limit for the duration when Alexa is reading is 4500 characters, so be aware of that. You don't want someone to be listening to a Flash Briefing and then she just stops in the middle of Set like that. Also one of the really big problems which Suze's now kind of kind of pick up on is that even though Alexa is pretty good with the integration, and all of these API's are improving all the time, there's no verb, there's no vitality, there's no wait. There's no understanding of what it is that she's actually reading. And also, if you've got several Flash Briefings all in a row, all read by Alexa, but all from different people, then yours is going to sound exactly the same as the ones from other brands and other businesses and other individuals, which won't be particularly good. Also, it'll sound exactly the same as the host. The linking person that links and introduces all of these Flash Briefings is Alexa herself. So she'll be introducing herself with your Flash Briefing. I think you want a bit of differentiation, I think you want a bit of a human touch nothing. So Is as engaging as the human voice.

Absolutely. And you know, the human voice adds emotion, detail intent, we understand intonation, all of those kinds of things. And one day, maybe these synthetic voices will get some of that emotion and detail in there. But at the moment, they really don't have that. So the way that we communicate with people is to speak, and it really gives that connection. So why not use your own voice to provide that connection to someone you know, yourself, when you're listening to the radio or a podcast or something like that. You hear that person, they're speaking just to you. It doesn't matter to you that they're speaking, you know, to lots of other people that might have downloaded it or have tuned in that day. So the human voice is just so so powerful, and certainly with the Flash Briefing, you know, hopefully you've picked content and a topic that you really love and you're really passionate about, and there is no way of Alexa getting that passion and joy out and over across to the audience and you know, if you want to really get connect with your audience. And certainly if you're doing this in a marketing sense, that's something that you're probably going to want to do, you're going to perhaps add a call to action, you want to actually move people to make a decision or act on whatever it is that you're saying, then you want the best connection possible with them. And that is the human voice. I mean, after all, you know, as, as a pregnant Mom, I was told to speak to my baby, you know, the baby in the womb, he is the human voice. It's one of those very first human connections that we make. So I really would urge and encourage you to use your own voice. And, yes, there's a little bit more kind of having to get the equipment setup and recording it. And there's actually been quite a few people quite recently who've come to me and said, I don't like the sound of my own voice. It really doesn't matter. It's something that you kind of have to get over. You don't need to listen to it. Again. It's about making that connection with your audience. So really, try to put everything you can into using your own voice to present this con And really get out there and make that connection with people. If you're going to put the effort into creating a Flash Briefing, coming up with the content and everything else, then this is kind of the icing on the cake that will really make such a difference to the way that it sounds. And as Peter says, it means that your briefing then sounds different to the next person's briefing. Because your voice is unique. It is you and you know, Alexa is never going to be able to kind of take that on and be the person that you are and, there's lots and lots of other stuff that we're going to be talking to you about during Flash Briefing February. But Peter, how can people stay in touch with us, kind of throughout throughout the year,

it's all part of your branding Your voice is your personality is part of your branding is part of your content. And we're gonna be talking a bit more about content and how you find it. Tomorrow as Flash Briefing febri continues. In the meantime, don't forget, you could always sign up to our newsletter. It's a Friday flash. briefing briefing, it's a briefing or a newsletter if you're like all about Flash Briefing and audio production, whether it be presentation or whether it be the music or whether it be the technical essentially, as we always say, get it in the right order, the skill set the mindset and the marketing to building a better briefing. And you can find that by going to www dot voice works. dot info, dot info voice works dot info, sign up for that newsletter, and you'll get it every Friday as the title of may suggest, and you'll get all sorts of links and tips about how to build a better briefing. We're back tomorrow, of course, Flash Briefing February continues with tips about your content.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450716Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:12 +0000Suze CooperHello, and welcome to day 10 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking about who presents your Flash Briefing. And who are we? Well, I'm Susan Cooper, and this is Peter Stewart is that way there is. And we are both professional...
Absolutely. So Suze underplays herself a little bit because Suze actually presents audio not only for herself, not only For one of the big commercial radio players here in the United Kingdom, but also for the evening standards in London, so that obviously is heard around the world, especially, or particularly in the United States and also for one of the biggest and best skills companies in the UK as well. vixen left, so she works for all sorts of different companies. So she knows her audio stuff. me I've got three Flash Briefings on the go. And one of them is the second highest rated in the UK. And also I work for one of the big British Broadcasting companies can't tell you what it is. I'm not allowed to. But guess what it is when I say one of the big British Broadcasting companies and try and work it out from that and also I've written several books about audio, presentation and production for TV and for radio as well. So we reckon we kind of know a little bit of thing about the presentation of Flash Briefings and podcasts. There are two ways you can go. You can make it really easy for yourself or really engaging for your audience. And it's up to you which of these two roads you decide to travel down. So let me first of all, talk to you about making it easy for yourself, you make it really easy for yourself by having Alexa, read your Flash Briefing for you. Which is quite straightforward to do. You essentially set up the RSS feed in a different way. And you have the text to speech option, Incorporated, which means that Alexa will read out what is on your website and website. And it says, so quite as straightforward to set up. Once you read from your page, you've got to have a couple of things in operation. So you've got to make sure that those sentences are really short because even though the intonation of Alexa is reasonably good, she does stop A bit if the sentences are really long, it's so if there are too many kind of sub clauses, too many kind of bits in within commerce as it were, then she finds it difficult to know where to go with the intonation. So keep the sentences really short. Also make sure that you finish sentences as well, because otherwise the intonation won't be quite right. For example, if you have a phrase, which is just got ellipsis at the end, so dot, dot, dot, even though you could carry that off as a human being, she quite won't quite know how to pronounce that where to go with that kind of intonation. It's really important that you have proper punctuation, with commerce and with full stops because that will guide her into the kind of style and presentation when she's reading you from your website. Also, make sure it's plain text and no captions. One of the problems is that she will read everything that's there unless you tell her not to. So she may very well read a caption A photograph, which says,

this is something like Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith receiving the check. That doesn't mean anything if I'm just listening who are these characters? And anyway, why would I need to know that that is a phrase in the middle of of...]]>588alexa,amazon,briefing,dot,echo,february,flash,flashbriefing,presenter,production,smartspeaker,technology,voice,voiceover,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperHello, and welcome to day 10 of Flash Briefing February. Today we're going to be speaking about who presents your Flash Briefing. And who are we? Well, I'm Susan Cooper, and this is Peter Stewart is that way there is. And we are both professional broadcasters who create Flash Briefings ourselves. And we have put together this month long course Flash Briefing febri to give you the mindset, the marketing and the skill set behind making a Flash Briefing, all the things that you need to know, all the way through. If you've missed any episodes, they're all up on YouTube. They're up on the voice works. Facebook page. So do go back through check the ones that you've missed, and we will be continuing throughout the month as well. As I say today is Day 10. We're going to be speaking about who presents your Flash Briefing and why that might be important, aren't we, Peter? Absolutely. So Suze underplays herself a little bit because Suze actually presents audio not only for herself, not only For one of the big commercial radio players here in the United Kingdom, but also for the evening standards in London, so that obviously is heard around the world, especially, or particularly in the United States and also for one of the biggest and best skills companies in the UK as well. vixen left, so she works for all sorts of different companies. So she knows her audio stuff. me I've got three Flash Briefings on the go. And one of them is the second highest rated in the UK. And also I work for one of the big British Broadcasting companies can't tell you what it is. I'm not allowed to. But guess what it is when I say one of the big British Broadcasting companies and try and work it out from that and also I've written several books about audio, presentation and production for TV and for radio as well. So we reckon we kind of know a little bit of thing about the presentation of Flash Briefings and podcasts. There are two ways you can go. You can make it really easy for yourself or really engaging for your audience. And it's up to you which of these two roads you decide to travel down. So let me first of all, talk to you about making it easy for yourself, you make it really easy for yourself by having Alexa, read your Flash Briefing for you. Which is quite straightforward to do. You essentially set up the RSS feed in a different way. And you have the text to speech option, Incorporated, which means that Alexa will read out what is on your website and website. And it says, so quite as straightforward to set up. Once you read from your page, you've got to have a couple of things in operation. So you've got to make sure that those sentences are really short because even though the intonation of Alexa is reasonably good, she does stop A bit if the sentences are really long, it's so if there are too many kind of sub clauses, too many kind of bits in within commerce as it were, then she finds it difficult to know where to go with the intonation. So keep the sentences really short. Also make sure that you finish sentences as well, because otherwise the intonation won't be quite right. For example, if you have a phrase, which is just got ellipsis at the end, so dot, dot, dot, even though you could carry that off as a human being, she quite won't quite know how to pronounce that where to go with that kind of intonation. It's really important that you have proper punctuation, with commerce and with full stops because that will guide her into the kind of style and presentation when she's reading you from your website. Also, make sure it's plain text and no captions. One of the problems is that she will read everything that's there unless you tell her not to. So she may very well read a caption A photograph, which says, this is something like Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith receiving the check. That doesn't mean anything if I'm just listening who are these characters? And anyway, why would I need to know that that is a phrase in the middle of of what she's saying...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-009_1
Absolutely. And you know, these these are things that are all around us. So you might think audio branding, Sonic branding, whatever you want to call it, you know, what is that and you know, why do we need it, but in fact, you know, everything from the McDonalds, I'm Loving It to the little Intel Inside sound, you know, all of those things are little kind of audio icons, if you like earphones that reminds us of that brand. And what they stand for, you know, it's part of their reputation almost, you know, you hear it and you know exactly who they are, what they're about. So this is your chance to have a little think about what the sound sound of your business or brand is. And you know, the way that your briefing comes across Gemini if someone's just using adult as well and they don't have to show up. They have got to kind of build an image and picture of your brand and business and you yourself is what you sound like. So terribly important for radio stations. both myself and Peter have a broadcast background worked in radio stations. And the production on a radio station is, you know, something that people that the station manager will agonise over, you know, it needs to target the right people, it needs to sound the right way. You need to really think about what sounds go with the content of your Flash Briefing. So if you're doing some kind of something that's about cooking and recipes and things like that, you might not want the bagpipes and unless you're trying to show people how to cook haggis, maybe I don't know, but and you know that there's a real kind of thought process that goes behind the sounds that you might want. For my own Flash Briefing social days. I wanted something that was a bit Pacey. It's a very, very short snappy day to listen. So I wanted something that had that kind of newsy tone to it that kind of drove People through through the little kind of audio clip that that's used each day. And I couldn't find anything online that was royalty free and available to meet myself to kind of use Peters going to speak a little bit about music libraries and stuff in a moment where you can kind of go in and pick up these things. So I actually put mine together using GarageBand. And there are a few different software's that you can use, like GarageBand, which is available on the Mac, and where you can kind of use their sounds and put them all together and create your own little melody and your own little tune your own audio branding. And so it's you know, it's another creative thing to do. And equally, you might want to just hand that over to somebody else, or you might want to dip into one of these music libraries. And that's right, isn't it, Peter?

lots to think about.

Absolutely. There is lots to think about. So various kinds of things to think about MARS think of Mars. It's got to be as soon as we're saying there, let's break it down for you. It's got to be memorable because people as soon as Here is you've got to pick up. Yeah, that is what that music relates to, I'm now expecting this kind of content, this is the start of this particular shows it's going to be memorable, it's going to be appropriate, it's going to fit with the style of the kind of content unless you're specifically going out maybe to be jarring to be a little bit different to be out of the box, or pushing the envelope or whatever phrase you want to do. So maybe something which is completely at odds with the content may possibly work but you have got to be very, very sure of your content. If if that is going to be the case, if you're going to be going down that particular route. So Mars memorable, appropriate, it's got to be royalty free as well. Now, there are various places that you can get your content for, for audio for theme tunes and so on, and some of which will be royalty free will give you some of those addresses in a few moments time. Otherwise, as we said yesterday about the logos are various bots, which are scrambling around the internet and they were trying to make That sharp audio that people have used in podcasts and Flash Briefings with audio, which is owned by the people that they work for. And if they go inside, they know exactly that you have been using their copyrighted sounds that copyrighted theme tunes, and then things are going to get very nasty for you potentially. And they could go back years and years and years. And you could find yourself in an awful mess, so memorable, appropriate, royalty free and the S of Mars. You got to keep it short. So Suze, why should you keep it short? Why should you keep your theme shooting short at the beginning of a Flash Briefing? Talk to us about that.

So obviously, people are enabling your Flash Briefing because they want to hear your content. So what they don't want to hear is a minute and a half of music or noise or you know, anything that's kind of not the actual meat of the content that you're Going to provide for them. So yeah, you can create the most amazing audio branding, but kind of don't get too self indulgent with it. The best thing really is to keep it nice and short and snappy. Give people that really quick. Oh, yeah, that's what I'm listening to now. And then straight into the content and the meat of what you're really talking, you're talking about, that there are places that you can go on there, Peter, you could get somebody else to create your Sonic branding for you. If it's something that just seems way too scary.

Absolutely. Well, let's go through those various tiers. And yet, you're always listening out for a piece of music, a tune, which has a really strong start. Yeah, which doesn't actually build but it has a strong start. So for example, if I put up my fader here on the desk, and I play you the first few seconds of the theme tune that I usually use that you can tell that after the first one or two seconds, it has already established itself as a piece of identifiable memorable Appropriate music and I can fade it out after a couple of seconds. This is how it starts. Yeah, so already after those first couple of beads, people, hopefully no. Oh, that's Peters Flash Briefing. So yeah, so there you go think of something which is short and memorable and get to the point because you will be getting to the point as well pretty quickly. So those various tiers free GarageBand. On Mac and iOS devices, you can compose your own music, various different levels, various channels, and you can put things together another thing to another app to look at his humble tab, it's on your phone, and you can literally hum into the microphone and tap on the screen and create your own music. And if you do that, of course, it means that it's your very own. You could potentially sell that to other people, in fact, and make a make a bit of money out of that way. But no one's going to be chasing you for copyright and royalties and so on. There are themes in YouTube you can use, I don't mean going to YouTube And searching for music that other people have posted. It's going to the themes section of the official YouTube channel and finding the themes that they have created and you can use for your YouTube videos. And for other content as well. If you want some effects, there are Amazon effects, they actually have those for people who are building skills. If you just want to sound effects, you can get them by the developer account. The BBC makes sound effects that you can download and use as well. You can also go and search for Creative Commons audio. Again, as we said yesterday about the logos check for the licences, that you're allowed to use them. It's not just once only but you can continue to use them. You could buy them search for royalty free or stock audio or library audio, places you can go to like audio jungle and pond five and audio network. Again, check how many times you can use those pieces of music may just be for a one off fee, and also check that you're going to be able to use Those for audio which you're publishing externally like in podcast rather than just internally for a company or you can ask a company to compose music for you. So it is yours you will have the rights then they will have composed it especially for you check out my friends at music Radio creative.com and if you use the discount code Peter Stewart all one word My name Peter Stewart, you will get a discount as well. As I said, check out music radio creative not just for music, but also for announcements. Having a voice which will introduce your Flash Briefing to save you doing it every single time as well....

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Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450713Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:08 +0000Suze CooperHello, hello, it is day nine of Flash Briefing February. Hope you're enjoying the course so far every single day throughout the month of February, we're giving you more ideas, the tips tricks and the techniques. The skill sets the mindset to build a...
Absolutely. And you know, these these are things that are all around us. So you might think audio branding, Sonic branding, whatever you want to call it, you know, what is that and you know, why do we need it, but in fact, you know, everything from the McDonalds, I'm Loving It to the little Intel Inside sound, you know, all of those things are little kind of audio icons, if you like earphones that reminds us of that brand. And what they stand for, you know, it's part of their reputation almost, you know, you hear it and you know exactly who they are, what they're about. So this is your chance to have a little think about what the sound sound of your business or brand is. And you know, the way that your briefing comes across Gemini if someone's just using adult as well and they don't have to show up. They have got to kind of build an image and picture of your brand and business and you yourself is what you sound like. So terribly important for radio stations. both myself and Peter have a broadcast background worked in radio stations. And the production on a radio station is, you know, something that people that the station manager will agonise over, you know, it needs to target the right people, it needs to sound the right way. You need to really think about what sounds go with the content of your Flash Briefing. So if you're doing some kind of something that's about cooking and recipes and things like that, you might not want the bagpipes and unless you're trying to show people how to cook haggis, maybe I don't know, but and you know that there's a real kind of thought process that goes behind the sounds that you might want. For my own Flash Briefing social days. I wanted something that was a bit Pacey. It's a very, very short snappy day to listen. So I wanted something that had that kind of newsy tone to it that kind of drove People through through the little kind of audio clip that that's used each day. And I couldn't find anything online that was royalty free and available to meet myself to kind of use Peters going to speak a little bit about music libraries and stuff in a moment where you can kind of go in and pick up these things. So I actually put mine together using GarageBand. And there are a few different software's that you can use, like GarageBand, which is available on the Mac, and where you can kind of use their sounds and put them all together and create your own little melody and your own little tune your own audio branding. And so it's you know, it's another creative thing to do. And equally, you might want to just hand that over to somebody else, or you might want to dip into one of these music libraries. And that's right, isn't it, Peter?

lots to think about.

Absolutely. There is lots to think about. So various kinds of things to think about MARS think of Mars. It's got to be as soon as...]]>610alexa,amazon,audio,branding,content,february,flashbriefing,marketing,podcast,podcasting,production,smartspeaker,sonic,technology,voice,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperHello, hello, it is day nine of Flash Briefing February. Hope you're enjoying the course so far every single day throughout the month of February, we're giving you more ideas, the tips tricks and the techniques. The skill sets the mindset to build a better briefing. So all sorts of things to help you with your Flash Briefing. And you know what I'm sure a lot of it will be of useful if you're involved with audio production of any way shape, or form, or podcast, product production and presentation, all sorts of different things. Now, yesterday, we've been speaking about fat for the last couple of days about your visual kind of logo, if you like your icon, your picture today, audio logos, audio branding, and you know what audio branding Soos is is just as important, isn't it as the visuals. It's just as important as the colours, the fonts The layout is just as important as the content in your Flash Briefing. It's just as important as the voice and the presentation Stop all of these covers a big package, but don't ever undersell the importance of a jingle of a thing to or have a sonic logo. Absolutely. And you know, these these are things that are all around us. So you might think audio branding, Sonic branding, whatever you want to call it, you know, what is that and you know, why do we need it, but in fact, you know, everything from the McDonalds, I'm Loving It to the little Intel Inside sound, you know, all of those things are little kind of audio icons, if you like earphones that reminds us of that brand. And what they stand for, you know, it's part of their reputation almost, you know, you hear it and you know exactly who they are, what they're about. So this is your chance to have a little think about what the sound sound of your business or brand is. And you know, the way that your briefing comes across Gemini if someone's just using adult as well and they don't have to show up. They have got to kind of build an image and picture of your brand and business and you yourself is what you sound like. So terribly important for radio stations. both myself and Peter have a broadcast background worked in radio stations. And the production on a radio station is, you know, something that people that the station manager will agonise over, you know, it needs to target the right people, it needs to sound the right way. You need to really think about what sounds go with the content of your Flash Briefing. So if you're doing some kind of something that's about cooking and recipes and things like that, you might not want the bagpipes and unless you're trying to show people how to cook haggis, maybe I don't know, but and you know that there's a real kind of thought process that goes behind the sounds that you might want. For my own Flash Briefing social days. I wanted something that was a bit Pacey. It's a very, very short snappy day to listen. So I wanted something that had that kind of newsy tone to it that kind of drove People through through the little kind of audio clip that that's used each day. And I couldn't find anything online that was royalty free and available to meet myself to kind of use Peters going to speak a little bit about music libraries and stuff in a moment where you can kind of go in and pick up these things. So I actually put mine together using GarageBand. And there are a few different software's that you can use, like GarageBand, which is available on the Mac, and where you can kind of use their sounds and put them all together and create your own little melody and your own little tune your own audio branding. And so it's you know, it's another creative thing to do. And equally, you might want to just hand that over to somebody else, or you might want to dip into one of these music libraries. And that's right, isn't it, Peter? lots to think about. Absolutely. There is lots to think about. So various kinds of things to think about MARS think of Mars. It's got to be as soon as we're saying there, let's break...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-008
Hi, there. Yeah, I'm Susan Cooper. I'm a broadcaster. And I also have my very own Flash Briefing. So I've been through all of this myself trying to decide what logo to have, how to put it all together, what I can use, what colours to use, what picture to use, all of those things. So yeah, that's kind of my credentials, I guess you would say So yeah, I would absolutely guarantee totally backing up what Peter said they're not using anything that even looks slightly similar to a trademark logo or anything like that. And also, you know, all of these great online libraries, they're really, really cool kind of unsplash, all those pixabay, all of those free photo libraries out there a great, but there are only very few images that kind of relate to smart speakers. And they've been around the block a few times as well. So if you want your Flash Briefing, to stand out in the skill store, and really say shout that it's you rather than somebody else, and the best thing you can really do is to create your own now, don't Don't cry, it's okay. You don't have to be the most creative person in the entire world. You really, really don't. There are some fantastic online tools that are totally free that you can use to create your very own logo with your own font and your own colours and all of those kind of things really, really simply and the one that I used in the one that Absolutely suggest you have a look at two is Canva. Now all the links are going to be in the notes for for the show. But if you go along to Canva and basically sign up there for a free account, you will find a very simple and intuitive way to design your logo, you'll be able to put in sentence sizes that you might need to use to create your logo, you'll also be able to choose very specific colours, if you've already got brand colours and you you know what the hex codes are for those, then you'll be able to input those there and make it exactly the same as all of your other branding. And you can choose various pictures, icons, and different graphics and things it does have a paid for to where you can use other graphics and things as all of these things do. But to be quite honest, the stuff that's on there for free pizza is not so bad, is it?

Absolutely. And you may have to pay perhaps a pound or $1 or something for one of those but make sure that you are One of my tips with Canvas is you have a have a play around, but don't play too much. Yeah, because it's really easy to get sidetracked and really easy to think, oh, I'll just change this. And I'll change that. And I'll change something else. And I'll change that as well. And then it ends up looking a bit of a dog's dinner, you know what I mean? So because they have professional designers that put together hundreds and hundreds of templates, kind of essentially go with what they suggest, just change the picture, or change the colour or something like that. But don't keep changing all the different fonts because you don't want different fonts or too many different colours in your design, because otherwise, you'll look at it and you'll go looks a bit wrong. don't quite know why. And it looks a bit wrong because it is a lot wrong. That's the that's the that's the point. And it looks as I say, like a dog's dinner rather than the dogs. Something else. And if you're in the UK, and you know UK vernacular, you'll know what I mean by that. So if you're really creative, you're really really lucky. So there's Canva to help There are other techniques and other platforms as well, which will list in the show notes, snapper and get stencil and design as well. So all sorts of different things you can use. But if you want to perhaps get a photograph as soon as we're saying a little bit earlier on from somewhere else, pixels on splash unsplash and pixabay. Do make sure that you read all the terms and conditions. I know they're a bit tedious, but sometimes they don't allow you to use their photos unless you have given them a credit and you don't allow them to they don't allow you to use their photos for for professional works and things like that, and certainly no on selling it. So be aware of that you don't want to fall afoul of those particular rules or you find someone else to do it for you on Fiverr or Upwork or something like that. You cannot pitch to them. And do make sure that you check their portfolio to Make sure that you're getting some really quality work because you know what, even though it says fiver, you will end up paying much more than that I've been caught out a couple of times by people who've said they can do something and then it doesn't quite look very good. And also, there's always going to be an upgrade. If you want an HD version of something. Or if you want a JPEG rather than the PNG or something like that, they will charge you more. So do be aware that it's not just going to be five pounds, don't lose it euros. However, it is worthwhile spending a few quid or a few hours putting something together because a quality image reflects on your brand is very, very important to make sure that it's high quality resolution. That is really clear. It's simple. It's straightforward. It follows your own brand design guidelines for your brand, as in the typeface, the font, the colour, and things like that as soon as we're saying a few moments ago with the with the hexes and also do bear in mind a couple of other things about us. size because when you upload your logo to, to Amazon to your developer account, it's going to want your design in a couple of different sizes. So be aware that you should be able to provide those. Now there is a service called promo.com that which will resize your logo. And by that, I don't mean it'll crop it, it will just change the actual actual pixelation will keep the same design, but change the actual size of it, which is really, really helpful. If you're going to then upload your Flash Briefing to Apple as a podcast days, surprise, surprise, wants a slightly different size as well. So again, be aware of that. And also be aware and Susan, I'll throw this back to you that when you upload something to Amazon for your design, it's actually going to appear as a circular design rather than square design. So make sure that you've got everything in the centre Have your square design so that when it's circularise Yeah, when the top and bottom corners are shaved off, or you don't lose any of the words. Yeah,

absolutely exactly what you said there. I mean, they do give you when you're on the developers console, it gives you kind of the ratio that you need to create it, but you do need to remember that they are going to make it circular to put into that little icon that's on the skills store that looks like a speech bubble. So yeah, nothing that kind of goes edge to edge. And you don't want to be losing the edge of your wording, side to side either. So you need to really be aware, perhaps even create it in the custom dimensions that it gives you as a square. But then draw a circle using camber in the middle and make sure all of the really important stuff that's needed fits inside the circle because it does just just kind of condense it and collapse it into that kind of tiny area. Now talking about it being so small, of course you want it to be eye catching and justice. Pete was saying earlier, it's a really good reason not to load it with all the things, you know, keep it really, really simple, really eye catching something that people when they're scrolling are going to be able to see recognise that it's you. And it doesn't need to be really, really complicated. And yeah, the templates that are in Canva, there are an awful lot of them that you can choose from, and kind of all different styles to kind of relate to and represent your brand and your Flash Briefing. So I think that's kind of it summing up for today, all on logos will be back again tomorrow with another Flash Briefing, February episode. So do join us then.

Bye for now. Bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450653Sat, 08 Feb 2020 00:00:04 +0000Suze CooperHello, welcome to another episode of Flash Briefing February. I'm Peter Stewart. And together with Susan Cooper, we are here every day during the month of February to give you more hints and tips, advice, for the skill set the mindset and the...
Hi, there. Yeah, I'm Susan Cooper. I'm a broadcaster. And I also have my very own Flash Briefing. So I've been through all of this myself trying to decide what logo to have, how to put it all together, what I can use, what colours to use, what picture to use, all of those things. So yeah, that's kind of my credentials, I guess you would say So yeah, I would absolutely guarantee totally backing up what Peter said they're not using anything that even looks slightly similar to a trademark logo or anything like that. And also, you know, all of these great online libraries, they're really, really cool kind of unsplash, all those pixabay, all of those free photo libraries out there a great, but there are only very few images that kind of relate to smart speakers. And they've been around the block a few times as well. So if you want your Flash Briefing, to stand out in the skill store, and really say shout that it's you rather than somebody else, and the best thing you can really do is to create your own now, don't Don't cry, it's okay. You don't have to be the most creative person in the entire world. You really, really don't. There are some fantastic online tools that are totally free that you can use to create your very own logo with your own font and your own colours and all of those kind of things really, really simply and the one that I used in the one that Absolutely suggest you have a look at two is Canva. Now all the links are going to be in the notes for for the show. But if you go along to Canva and basically sign up there for a free account, you will find a very simple and intuitive way to design your logo, you'll be able to put in sentence sizes that you might need to use to create your logo, you'll also be able to choose very specific colours, if you've already got brand colours and you you know what the hex codes are for those, then you'll be able to input those there and make it exactly the same as all of your other branding. And you can choose various pictures, icons, and different graphics and things it does have a paid for to where you can use other graphics and things as all of these things do. But to be quite honest, the stuff that's on there for free pizza is not so bad, is it?

Absolutely. And you may have to pay perhaps a pound or $1 or something for one of those but make sure...]]>582alexa,amazon,audio,podcast,podcasting,production,smart,smartspeaker,speakercleanfullSuze CooperHello, welcome to another episode of Flash Briefing February. I'm Peter Stewart. And together with Susan Cooper, we are here every day during the month of February to give you more hints and tips, advice, for the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. You know what, there is no other course like this anywhere around, we bring it all together for you. So by the 28th day of the month, you will know much more about Flash Briefings, the production, the presentation and so on, then you did on day one now yesterday, we were talking about creating your Flash Briefing logo or design or cover art, whatever it happens to be. So this is what we're going to be continuing with for today. And then tomorrow we'll move on to another subject, but there are various things to tell you about. First of all, I think perhaps one of the most important things is don't steal someone else's design, because if you steal someone else's design, then you're going to have solicitors letter, very likely coming through either on the post or through into your email box because there are various bots, which chase around the internet trying to find and trying to match different designs or different pictures, which are the same as their clients. So if you haven't bought a particular design, you haven't bought a particular clipart or photograph or whatever you could, frankly, to use the vernacular be done. Now, having said that, that as a proviso to begin with. That's kind of number one priority. I'll hand over to Suze's to introduce herself won't give Suze such an authority to talk about designing things. Let's find out. Hi, there. Yeah, I'm Susan Cooper. I'm a broadcaster. And I also have my very own Flash Briefing. So I've been through all of this myself trying to decide what logo to have, how to put it all together, what I can use, what colours to use, what picture to use, all of those things. So yeah, that's kind of my credentials, I guess you would say So yeah, I would absolutely guarantee totally backing up what Peter said they're not using anything that even looks slightly similar to a trademark logo or anything like that. And also, you know, all of these great online libraries, they're really, really cool kind of unsplash, all those pixabay, all of those free photo libraries out there a great, but there are only very few images that kind of relate to smart speakers. And they've been around the block a few times as well. So if you want your Flash Briefing, to stand out in the skill store, and really say shout that it's you rather than somebody else, and the best thing you can really do is to create your own now, don't Don't cry, it's okay. You don't have to be the most creative person in the entire world. You really, really don't. There are some fantastic online tools that are totally free that you can use to create your very own logo with your own font and your own colours and all of those kind of things really, really simply and the one that I used in the one that Absolutely suggest you have a look at two is Canva. Now all the links are going to be in the notes for for the show. But if you go along to Canva and basically sign up there for a free account, you will find a very simple and intuitive way to design your logo, you'll be able to put in sentence sizes that you might need to use to create your logo, you'll also be able to choose very specific colours, if you've already got brand colours and you you know what the hex codes are for those, then you'll be able to input those there and make it exactly the same as all of your other branding. And you can choose various pictures, icons, and different graphics and things it does have a paid for to where you can use other graphics and things as all of these things do. But to be quite honest, the stuff that's on there for free pizza is not so bad, is it? Absolutely. And you may have to pay perhaps a pound or $1 or something for one of those but make sure that you are One of...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-007
Absolutely.

That's right. And we're on day seven. So in February, we have been talking about the mindset, the skill set and the marketing needed to create your own amazing Flash Briefing. So we are all about supporting other people to create these little audio files that go out every single day via Amazon Alexa smart speakers.

Absolutely. Today and tomorrow, we're going to be talking a little bit about your logo or your icon, whatever you want to call it, your cover art. Just a couple of tips. We're going to give you some websites to go to tomorrow. But today, it's just talking about why we're talking about how important it is to have your icon and to have your logo. And I suppose the first thing to say is that first impressions really do count is the first touch points. You know what yesterday, we were talking about your name of your Flash Briefing, and the description and the SEO. And before that, we're talking about the content of what you're actually going to be talking about. But before both of those bits of kind of content and ideas, whether it be the name of your show, or what you say within your show. It's what your show looks like rather than what it sounds like. And by that what I mean is when people are scrolling through the directory of different skills, different Flash Briefings, their eye is going to first of all, land on your icon or your logo before they actually read the name or the description of what it's all about. It's the first touch point. And you know what you need to communicate really, really quickly what it is that you're doing, what the show is about, and also how seriously you're taking your audio production. Now, if it's a Flash Briefing with a silly fart joke for kids, then you can imagine that could look a little bit silly could have some crazy colours, some weird fonts, and it could just be exploding out of the screen, and almost deliberately not to have much what you might call professionalism about it. However, if you are using a Flash Briefing, to pass on information, useful information to build a relationship with adults and potentially sell them something a little bit further down the line, then obviously, you want to come over branded, businesslike professional. So therefore, you've got to think about the name as we spoke about yesterday. bit about your colours that you are using the quality of the font. As I said yesterday, if you're using Comic Sans and clipart, then it's going to be saying something different from if you're using perhaps Arial font, and a photograph. So think very carefully about what you use and how it fits in with the rest of your branding, because brand consistency is really, really important. So I would suggest you're using the same kind of colour that you're using with the rest of your brand, whether it be your letterheads, or the logo on the side of a van, or the advert that you've got on people's websites, and your website colour and all of that. So the same kind of colour, the same kind of font, the same kind of typeface, and also for it to be really big and clear, and bold. So he's eye catching because you know what, when people are searching up and down on their phone or on the Amazon site, there's not much real estate there for them to see. It's really small logo It really is a thumbnail image. It's about the size of a thumbnail if someone is looking on their phone so it's got a leap out from the page really, really clear and really, really obvious what it is that you're doing. So not much clutter, not too many words, maybe just a visual representation of what you do have that brand consistency as well. And Suze, it's also important about colours, isn't it because of those alexes with screams because then if your colour as part of the logo, it kind of that is the same main colour that's used behind your logo as well and one could kind of cancel out or be a bit jewellery on the eyes could know.

So lately and I certainly have personal experience of this actually, my Flash Briefing the social days, Flash Briefing, the logo was an idea that I just came up because it was a very obvious image. It is a half black hashtag On the yellow background, I thought it would be eye catching I thought the yellow kind of promoted happiness and kind of being happy with your content and was a kind of sunshine colour really nice idea. And I've used those two together and I really like the logo but someone has been in touch with me and said, did I know that actually on the echo show, the yellow actually comes out really quite vibrant and so vibrant, that they don't like looking at it on their screen. Now, in a way that's you know, it's it's negative feedback, but it's also feedback that I like to hear because I wasn't completely aware of that. And actually, I quite like it on the echo show screen myself their opinion is that it's all too much but it's understanding how your logo is going to be used within the Amazon ecosystem. So not only is it used within the skill store, as Peter says where it will be placed into a circular logo that they have that they basically put your they kind of put it inside their little template is a little speech bubble which all have Amazon skills, everybody These logo gets put into the same place. And that's quite tiny, particularly if you're on your mobile phone screen. But it's also then going to be on this, you know, Echo show screen, which is from Angel age, which actually currently, I don't think there's a way at the moment that you can change that, because the Flash Briefing is audio only currently. So it's not something and they've expanded the skill for the screen and versions of the the echo. Currently, it means that you are kind of stuck with your logo will be the picture that people are going to be seeing while they hear it if they listening on the echo show. So there's an awful lot to think about in terms of how your logo is going to be seen and where it's going to be seen and which colours you might want to use.

Absolutely. So I'll leave it for here today because we're going to be back tomorrow with some websites because if you're thinking to yourself, I know nothing about fonts and colours and designs and things like that. well rested steezy don't lose sleep over it is okay. Don't panic. We're here to hold your hand. On Flash Briefing February, as we go through step by step with the skill set the mindset, the marketing for building a better briefing tomorrow. We're back with some really good websites that you can use. They've got templates. They're cheap, they're easy. They're straightforward. They're really, really professional about so you can dive into those. You can have a little play around and you can create something that looks really, really good. So we're back tomorrow, just looking down at my notes here. All of these websites all and also something it says down here we're going to be talking about size matters done. Well. That's about join us tomorrow. We'll find out together as Flash Briefing February continues until the hamper Bye for now.

See ya.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450428Fri, 07 Feb 2020 00:00:03 +0000Suze CooperHello, hello. Welcome to day seven. Yeah, we're in the first week. We're at the end of the first week of the Flash Briefing February course, that's been presented by me. Peter Stewart's got a background in radio and broadcasting. And also I produce...
Absolutely.

That's right. And we're on day seven. So in February, we have been talking about the mindset, the skill set and the marketing needed to create your own amazing Flash Briefing. So we are all about supporting other people to create these little audio files that go out every single day via Amazon Alexa smart speakers.

Absolutely. Today and tomorrow, we're going to be talking a little bit about your logo or your icon, whatever you want to call it, your cover art. Just a couple of tips. We're going to give you some websites to go to tomorrow. But today, it's just talking about why we're talking about how important it is to have your icon and to have your logo. And I suppose the first thing to say is that first impressions really do count is the first touch points. You know what yesterday, we were talking about your name of your Flash Briefing, and the description and the SEO. And before that, we're talking about the content of what you're actually going to be talking about. But before both of those bits of kind of content and ideas, whether it be the name of your show, or what you say within your show. It's what your show looks like rather than what it sounds like. And by that what I mean is when people are scrolling through the directory of different skills, different Flash Briefings, their eye is going to first of all, land on your icon or your logo before they actually read the name or the description of what it's all about. It's the first touch point. And you know what you need to communicate really, really quickly what it is that you're doing, what the show is about, and also how seriously you're taking your audio production. Now, if it's a Flash Briefing with a silly fart joke for kids, then you can imagine that could look a little bit silly could have some crazy colours, some weird fonts, and it could just be exploding out of the screen, and almost deliberately not to have much what you might call professionalism about it. However, if you are using a Flash Briefing, to pass on information, useful information to build a relationship with adults and potentially sell them something a little bit further down the line, then obviously, you want to come over branded, businesslike professional. So therefore, you've got to think about the name as we spoke about yesterday. bit about your colours that you are using the quality of the font. As I said yesterday, if you're using Comic Sans and clipart, then it's going to be saying something different from if you're using perhaps Arial font, and a photograph. So think very carefully about what you use and how it fits in with the rest of your branding, because brand consistency is really, really important. So I would suggest you're using the same kind of colour that you're using with the rest of your brand, whether it be your letterheads, or the logo on the side of a van, or the advert that you've got on people's websites, and your website colour and all of that. So the same kind of colour, the same kind of font, the same kind of typeface, and also for it to be really big and clear, and bold. So he's eye catching because you know what, when people are searching up and down on their phone or on the Amazon site, there's not much real estate there for them to see. It's really small logo It really is a thumbnail image. It's about the size of a thumbnail if someone is looking on their phone so it's got a leap out from the page really, really clear and really, really obvious what it is that...]]>468alexa,amazon,audio,branding,content,earcon,february,flahsbriefing,logo,marketing,podcast,podcasting,production,sonic,technology,voice,voicefirst,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperHello, hello. Welcome to day seven. Yeah, we're in the first week. We're at the end of the first week of the Flash Briefing February course, that's been presented by me. Peter Stewart's got a background in radio and broadcasting. And also I produce and present Flash Briefings. So it's me together with Suze's Cooper, who's got a background in radio and audio broadcasting, and also produce some presents her own Flash Briefings. It's like we’re made for this show. Absolutely. That's right. And we're on day seven. So in February, we have been talking about the mindset, the skill set and the marketing needed to create your own amazing Flash Briefing. So we are all about supporting other people to create these little audio files that go out every single day via Amazon Alexa smart speakers. Absolutely. Today and tomorrow, we're going to be talking a little bit about your logo or your icon, whatever you want to call it, your cover art. Just a couple of tips. We're going to give you some websites to go to tomorrow. But today, it's just talking about why we're talking about how important it is to have your icon and to have your logo. And I suppose the first thing to say is that first impressions really do count is the first touch points. You know what yesterday, we were talking about your name of your Flash Briefing, and the description and the SEO. And before that, we're talking about the content of what you're actually going to be talking about. But before both of those bits of kind of content and ideas, whether it be the name of your show, or what you say within your show. It's what your show looks like rather than what it sounds like. And by that what I mean is when people are scrolling through the directory of different skills, different Flash Briefings, their eye is going to first of all, land on your icon or your logo before they actually read the name or the description of what it's all about. It's the first touch point. And you know what you need to communicate really, really quickly what it is that you're doing, what the show is about, and also how seriously you're taking your audio production. Now, if it's a Flash Briefing with a silly fart joke for kids, then you can imagine that could look a little bit silly could have some crazy colours, some weird fonts, and it could just be exploding out of the screen, and almost deliberately not to have much what you might call professionalism about it. However, if you are using a Flash Briefing, to pass on information, useful information to build a relationship with adults and potentially sell them something a little bit further down the line, then obviously, you want to come over branded, businesslike professional. So therefore, you've got to think about the name as we spoke about yesterday. bit about your colours that you are using the quality of the font. As I said yesterday, if you're using Comic Sans and clipart, then it's going to be saying something different from if you're using perhaps Arial font, and a photograph. So think very carefully about what you use and how it fits in with the rest of your branding, because brand consistency is really, really important. So I would suggest you're using the same kind of colour that you're using with the rest of your brand, whether it be your letterheads, or the logo on the side of a van, or the advert that you've got on people's websites, and your website colour and all of that. So the same kind of colour, the same kind of font, the same kind of typeface, and also for it to be really big and clear, and bold. So he's eye catching because you know what, when people are searching up and down on their phone or on the Amazon site, there's not much real estate there for them to see. It's really small logo It really is a thumbnail image. It's about the size of a thumbnail if someone is looking on their phone so it's got a leap out from the page really, really clear and really, really obvious what it is that you're doing. So not much...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-006
Absolutely. So we've got some yeses and some nose, some positives and some negatives of what you might want to consider when you're naming your Flash Briefing, and then Susie's back in a few moments time to talk about the description and how you can be really clever with your description to make the most of the real estate that you've got. So for example, let people know what it is you do in the name of your Flash Briefing be really obvious but you really bold so maybe clever names and inside names and little jokes and, and, and pumps and things like that are out, you may consider not to use those because it may just narrow your potential audience too much, even though the people who might have wanted to hear would be interested, but they don't actually get to listen to it because they put off by the title. So what about your name using your name for the title of your show? Well, I would perhaps guard against That To be quite honest with you, because unless you're a superstar, who's going to listen, listen to the Joe Smith show, unless you are an international Hollywood superstar. It doesn't actually say what the show is all about. So again, let people know what it is you do, or maybe the results that they'll get, or the really clear description of the content that they are going to be hearing. Also, I would suggest putting Flash Briefing in the title. So for example, it could be now I live in London, so it could be the London news. Flash briefing, for example, is really clear. It's news about London as a Flash Briefing, because that will really help when people are just putting Flash Briefing in to their skill search, because Flash Briefings are a kind of skill, get all of the Flash Briefings. For example, they might put London Flash Briefing, and it'll come up. So you're thinking about search. Engine Optimization as well. So Suze will be here in a few seconds time to talk about SEO. As far as your description goes, now you're allowed up to 50 characters in the name of your show. So you may want to think clearly about that to have Flash Briefings, obviously going to be taking away some of those characters, you may want to be using the branding that you've got elsewhere. If it's as part of a bigger business or a bigger enterprise, you may be wanting to use that or you may be taking the opportunity to bring the changes and do something a little bit different. Sometimes being fresh and innovative and creative is good. Sometimes it's really good to have brand consistency. Or maybe you can join those two together in some way, shape or form. One more thing for me, and that is you're not allowed to use trademarks unless you own the trademark of course as your company or business. So you can't just suddenly decided to use for example, you're going to do a Flash Briefing all about Coca Cola before You've asked them that you can do a Flash Briefing about Coca Cola, because otherwise it gives the impression that it is endorsed by them in some way, shape or form. You can't do a Flash Briefing all about what it's like to go to a Disney theme park without asking them because that could be breaking their copyrights or be really, really careful on that. And by the same token, you're not allowed to use the name, Amazon, or Alexa in your Flash Briefing name. Okay, that's about it for me for today. Let's pop over to sue because she's got some ideas about not just naming your Flash Briefing, but also then what you put in for the description that people can read if they want to know bit more about it before they add your Flash Briefing to their playlist. So hopping over to Suze's for what you can write in those two descriptions, the 160 character one and also the 4000 character one and how you can be super smart and super clever bit like Susan self

Yes, these descriptions are really the way that people are going to discover your Flash Briefing. And there's absolutely no point in putting all this time and effort and work into creating these super Flash Briefings, if no one's going to be able to find them. And the descriptions are actually very much a way that search engines will be able to pick up on is that you've spoken about. And in terms of search engines, I'm also talking about the Amazon website itself as well, because remember, we spoke about this very early on in Flash briefing febri. That once you've uploaded your Flash Briefing, and once it's there in that Amazon ecosystem, it can potentially be found in an Amazon search. So it is really, really important this time, think about what you put in that description box on the Amazon dash when you're talking about what your briefing is. One of the tips that Amazon actually give themselves when you're filling out this information is to explain how people access your Flash Briefing what it is they need to say, which is Alexa, tell me my news. And although how long your specific Flash Briefing is, its title as well. So Peters been talking about the title there. Remember, people can actually enable your Flash Briefing using voice. So you don't want to pick a title that is too tricky to say. It's got to be something that is quite clear, quite easy to be able to pick up and and understand and then search for and find your specific briefing. So within that description, we are thinking about SEO, we're thinking about keywords. So it's all about describing what your Flash Briefing is about. And there are various different tools that you can use that are free online, where you can put in your subject and it will spit out a whole load of keywords that you once that I use myself are the Google Google's own keyword search, which is within Google ads. And also Uber suggests which is another fun too. Plastic free one that is online. And is really, really useful. Just to give you some ideas of what words people are searching for around the subject that it is your Flash Briefing about. So that really has to be a very descriptive pieces I say it is more about describing what the content is about then actually being the content itself. It can be a bit of a skill, but if you get it right, it's certainly going to help you be discovered and help people for point because it will just boost your lessons. So don't put in all the work on actually creating it and forget about the work. That's kind of the boring paperwork side of it really, isn't it Peter, but it is really, really important to make sure that people find you and that you get your your Flash Briefing heard. So that was basic naming and describing your Flash Briefing. What's coming up in day seven, Peter?

Absolutely. So with Morrow we're going to be talking in fact for the next couple of days about your cover art, your logo, your icon when Whatever it is, because before people even read the name of your show before they read the description of what your Flash Briefing is all about, they could be enticed by the logo. And frankly, if it looks well if you're using Comic Sans and clipart, he's going to say certain something about your business, your brand and your quality of audio. If you're using another clear a font with a fantastic photograph, then that's going to say something else. So we're going to be talking about your clip your about your cover art and about your logos. As the Flash Briefing February course continues tomorrow. In the meantime, don't forget our free, easy to read, easy to subscribe to newsletter, which comes out every Friday. It's Friday's Flash Briefing briefing, and it's all about some links, some case studies about audio production presentation about Flash Briefings, sometimes podcasts as well because well Flash Briefings are podcasts and sometimes podcasts or Flash Briefing. So there is a bit of a cross over there. Got that Venn diagram, it would be like that, wouldn't it? So you can subscribe to that voice works dot info, sign up for that. And we'll see you back on the ice tomorrow, right here. Bye bye for now.

See you then.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450424Thu, 06 Feb 2020 00:00:18 +0000Suze CooperWelcome to Flash Briefing February - it is day six. And today we're going to be to name things. So over the last few days, we have been bringing you the mindset, the skill set and the marketing to create a fantastic Flash Briefing. And we're spending...
Absolutely. So we've got some yeses and some nose, some positives and some negatives of what you might want to consider when you're naming your Flash Briefing, and then Susie's back in a few moments time to talk about the description and how you can be really clever with your description to make the most of the real estate that you've got. So for example, let people know what it is you do in the name of your Flash Briefing be really obvious but you really bold so maybe clever names and inside names and little jokes and, and, and pumps and things like that are out, you may consider not to use those because it may just narrow your potential audience too much, even though the people who might have wanted to hear would be interested, but they don't actually get to listen to it because they put off by the title. So what about your name using your name for the title of your show? Well, I would perhaps guard against That To be quite honest with you, because unless you're a superstar, who's going to listen, listen to the Joe Smith show, unless you are an international Hollywood superstar. It doesn't actually say what the show is all about. So again, let people know what it is you do, or maybe the results that they'll get, or the really clear description of the content that they are going to be hearing. Also, I would suggest putting Flash Briefing in the title. So for example, it could be now I live in London, so it could be the London news. Flash briefing, for example, is really clear. It's news about London as a Flash Briefing, because that will really help when people are just putting Flash Briefing in to their skill search, because Flash Briefings are a kind of skill, get all of the Flash Briefings. For example, they might put London Flash Briefing, and it'll come up. So you're thinking about search. Engine Optimization as well. So Suze will be here in a few seconds time to talk about SEO. As far as your description goes, now you're allowed up to 50 characters in the name of your show. So you may want to think clearly about that to have Flash Briefings, obviously going to be taking away some of those characters, you may want to be using the branding that you've got elsewhere. If it's as part of a bigger business or a bigger enterprise, you may be wanting to use that or you may be taking the opportunity to bring the changes and do something a little bit different. Sometimes being fresh and innovative and creative is good. Sometimes it's really good to have brand consistency. Or maybe you can join those two together in some way, shape or form. One more thing for me, and that is you're not allowed to use trademarks unless you own the trademark of course as your company or business. So you can't just suddenly decided to use for example, you're going to do a Flash Briefing all about Coca Cola before You've asked them that you can do a Flash Briefing about Coca Cola, because otherwise it gives the impression that it is endorsed by them in some way, shape or form. You can't do a Flash Briefing all about what it's like to go to a...]]>557alexa,amazon,audio,dot,echo,february,flashbriefing,flashbriefings,production,technology,voice,voicefirst,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWelcome to Flash Briefing February - it is day six. And today we're going to be to name things. So over the last few days, we have been bringing you the mindset, the skill set and the marketing to create a fantastic Flash Briefing. And we're spending the whole of February myself and Peter Stewart's and giving you really kind of top tips and gems on how to go about thinking about what your topic might be for your Flash Briefing, the text that you might need to think about when you're creating it, and all the ins and outs of how to put together a Flash Briefing that can be heard via the Amazon Alexa smart speakers. So yes, today is all about naming and describing your Flash Briefing and what you name your Flash Briefing is actually really, really important. It's not just about going to your brand or business really and just kind of taking That name you have to be quite considered, don't you, Peter? Absolutely. So we've got some yeses and some nose, some positives and some negatives of what you might want to consider when you're naming your Flash Briefing, and then Susie's back in a few moments time to talk about the description and how you can be really clever with your description to make the most of the real estate that you've got. So for example, let people know what it is you do in the name of your Flash Briefing be really obvious but you really bold so maybe clever names and inside names and little jokes and, and, and pumps and things like that are out, you may consider not to use those because it may just narrow your potential audience too much, even though the people who might have wanted to hear would be interested, but they don't actually get to listen to it because they put off by the title. So what about your name using your name for the title of your show? Well, I would perhaps guard against That To be quite honest with you, because unless you're a superstar, who's going to listen, listen to the Joe Smith show, unless you are an international Hollywood superstar. It doesn't actually say what the show is all about. So again, let people know what it is you do, or maybe the results that they'll get, or the really clear description of the content that they are going to be hearing. Also, I would suggest putting Flash Briefing in the title. So for example, it could be now I live in London, so it could be the London news. Flash briefing, for example, is really clear. It's news about London as a Flash Briefing, because that will really help when people are just putting Flash Briefing in to their skill search, because Flash Briefings are a kind of skill, get all of the Flash Briefings. For example, they might put London Flash Briefing, and it'll come up. So you're thinking about search. Engine Optimization as well. So Suze will be here in a few seconds time to talk about SEO. As far as your description goes, now you're allowed up to 50 characters in the name of your show. So you may want to think clearly about that to have Flash Briefings, obviously going to be taking away some of those characters, you may want to be using the branding that you've got elsewhere. If it's as part of a bigger business or a bigger enterprise, you may be wanting to use that or you may be taking the opportunity to bring the changes and do something a little bit different. Sometimes being fresh and innovative and creative is good. Sometimes it's really good to have brand consistency. Or maybe you can join those two together in some way, shape or form. One more thing for me, and that is you're not allowed to use trademarks unless you own the trademark of course as your company or business. So you can't just suddenly decided to use for example, you're going to do a Flash Briefing all about Coca Cola before You've asked them that you can do a Flash Briefing about Coca Cola, because otherwise it gives the impression that it is endorsed by them in some way, shape or form. You can't do a Flash Briefing all about what it's like to go to a Disney theme...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-005newhttps://youtu.be/BU0NHwWPyQ4

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

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Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Hello, hello, welcome to day five of Flash Briefing February. I'm Peter steward. And together with Susan Cooper, we are your hosts for the month of February for Flash Briefing, February. It's a day by day step by step guide for the skill set, the mindset and the marketing, for building a better briefing. Already, we've been talking about what a Flash Briefing is, how it's used, how it works. Also, yesterday, we talked a little bit of kind of tech tips, you can still see all of that information on the page, which hopefully is going to be really, really useful. And tomorrow we're going to be talking more about naming your show because that's really important. And a few days after that, we're going to be talking about coming up with a logo for your show as well. And it's not just about audio. It's not just about sound is about the whole package. That's what we're going to be bringing you over the course of these 28 Days really, really important stuff, the whole package. But today tell you a little bit about content and Suze's both of us know more than a little bit about content for audio productions don't wait because my background in presentation and production for big media firms.

Yeah, that's right. So, you know, I've worked with in commercial radio building kind of news packages and different things. And also at the moment I'm working with the Evening Standard, where we're creating news package is the can be have UC system. So as an alum that I'm hoping I can share with people who want to create Flash Briefings to ensure that their briefing it sounds as good as it possibly can. All the kind of production stuff, the creative ideas, stuff, all kinds of things that I'm sure you know, people can kind of come to us and ask their questions of us really.

Absolutely. So we're going to be drilling down a bit more into how you come up with 300 and 65 days of content little bit later on in the course in a few days time. But first of all, let's just give you kind of a a nice overview of the kind of content, that kind of why you should be thinking about what you're going to be talking about. Now, first of all, it shouldn't be advertising. I mean, apart from anything else, because all of this is opt in audio, who's going to be opting in to listen to an advert every day? Yeah, it's pretty unlikely, isn't it? So what you've got to be doing is be giving content of value. Maybe you're solving a problem or answering a question, maybe you're entertaining, you're certainly informing, perhaps you're coming over as a thought leader, things like that stuff, which is useful, and content, which is engaging as well. But I suppose really soon as the key thing is coming up with your target audience, who will be interested in what it is that you want to that the information you want to impart to them. And the question They could be asking amongst themselves what they want the answers to coming up with that target demo is really important.

Yeah, it really is. And I think, you know, it's one of these things that marketers grapple with all the time is understanding and knowing that your target audience, and you really do need to know who it is that you want to be listening to your Flash Briefing. And once you've got that idea of that person, then you should be able to understand their likes and their needs and the questions that they might have around the topic that you're going to be Flash Briefing about. And that's the kind of added value content certainly social media mark. Anyone that's that's kind of touched on that kind of thing before creating the adds value to people rather than just giving them a real salesy, knock them over the head by my stuff message. So it is about coming up with those extra pieces of information that will just keep your company and your brand kind of front of mind as And when something related to what they might sell kind of comes along. And you know, Flash Briefing is great at doing that, because of the frequency of it being there daily and people listening to you daily, they're getting this constant little reminder of what it is that you might be able to help them with. But yeah, it's definitely not the hard sell. Certainly, you might want to add a call to action somewhere at the end where you might want to point someone in the direction of a product or a web page or a download or something like that. But it's not about going out there and and and beating people to you know, over the head with your app. tising we've got quite a good example Flash Briefing and might be used in this way to add value rather than advertise.

Absolutely. I like that add value rather than advertised as a I'm going to make a note of that was my pen. So maybe You're in the real estate business, the estate agency businesses, we would say here in the UK, house sales, for example, working in a community and of course, you should really be part of the community anyway, as as an estate agent, let's use the the UK vernacular for that particular profession. So what could you be doing? If you were an estate agent? As far as a Flash Briefing goes? Well, you know, what, if you were just reading out a list of properties for sale, I really don't think people are going to be opting into that. Or if they are, they're not going to be listening for very long because presumably that then find a place and then they're going to stop listening. So that's not going to be adding much kind of value is it? However, if you provide content of value, which is entertaining, which is informative, reflecting the community where you work that you serve, then people will be listening to you for longer so what kind of content Could that be? Well, if you're working in an area, what about super local news service, you could be talking about maybe a new housing development that's going up, you could be talking about how good the local school is that it's just increased these grading with the local inspections, you could be talking about things that are happening maybe at the local hospital, all of which people are really interested in knowing if they are planning on moving to your area. You could also be talking about maybe the local fairs and fates, the local sports teams and so on. It will be talking maybe about a shop that's moved into the high street or into the local shopping centre. All of these things are kind of information that people are going to be interested to know about whether they're going to be moving to the area or they're going to be moving within the area. And of course, if you've also got people who are moving out of the area, then they are going to want a local company which is going to be representing them to sell their house. So how does that work? If you're talking about all of that kind of information. Let's face it, you could also be talking about garden maintenance, house maintenance, DIY, things like that local weather forecasts. Yeah, you become part of the hub of the local community with all of these kinds of information. you're offering content of value. You're building a relationship with your potential customers. And when someone does want to move, who they're going to go to, are they just going to go to the equivalent of the Yellow Pages and kind of run their finger down? I don't know. Never heard of them might be quite good. I don't know. Are they going to be going to the people who've already been giving them free content of value, day after day after day after day for the last several weeks, months? years? I think it's probably going to be the latter, isn't it? Particularly if they've built a relationship with a certain presenter, a particular person who is representing that brand representing that business so they can go into the Go into the shop, go into the estate agency business and ask for john or George or Paul or Ringo or whoever it happens to be that they've been listening to on the Alexa Flash Briefing. So build up a bit of personality, build up content, give stuff a value, so people can come to you a little bit later on in the day, once they've got that relationship with you. You don't know that they always will. But it's more likely they will, then they won't, if they already know like, and trust you. You wanted how long it was going to be before we used that particular phrase. And one more thing, Suze's that perhaps you want to touch on is listen to other Flash Briefing so you can get an idea of what you like about what other people are doing both their content, their style, the duration, the music, the logos, everything. Don't just launch straight in there. But get to kind of put your toe in the water and see and feel what other people are doing what you like and don't like about that.

Absolutely. Do your research and look around and see, you know which areas don't have a Flash Briefing, you know, see who your competitors might be, with whatever subject it is that you come up with. But also, you know, this is an area where you can be really super, super niche, and you can really target that little known hobby or skill and that little known area of interest and really provide something really, really useful to the people that are going to be opting in and listening every single day. You know, it's not about building a massive audience and catering for everyone. It's about having engaged listeners, and if you only have say 100 people listening every day, you know, that is but there are 100 engaged listeners who really, you know, really benefit and take your content and run with it, and then potentially will maybe buy from you or download more than having hundreds of thousands of People on your stats....]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450419Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:02 +0000Suze CooperWATCH IN YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/BU0NHwWPyQ4 Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter...https://youtu.be/BU0NHwWPyQ4

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Hello, hello, welcome to day five of Flash Briefing February. I'm Peter steward. And together with Susan Cooper, we are your hosts for the month of February for Flash Briefing, February. It's a day by day step by step guide for the skill set, the mindset and the marketing, for building a better briefing. Already, we've been talking about what a Flash Briefing is, how it's used, how it works. Also, yesterday, we talked a little bit of kind of tech tips, you can still see all of that information on the page, which hopefully is going to be really, really useful. And tomorrow we're going to be talking more about naming your show because that's really important. And a few days after that, we're going to be talking about coming up with a logo for your show as well. And it's not just about audio. It's not just about sound is about the whole package. That's what we're going to be bringing you over the course of these 28 Days really, really important stuff, the whole package. But today tell you a little bit about content and Suze's both of us know more than a little bit about content for audio productions don't wait because my background in presentation and production for big media firms.

Yeah, that's right. So, you know, I've worked with in commercial radio building kind of news packages and different things. And also at the moment I'm working with the Evening Standard, where we're creating news package is the can be have UC system. So as an alum that I'm hoping I can share with people who want to create Flash Briefings to ensure that their briefing it sounds as good as it possibly can. All the kind of production stuff, the creative ideas, stuff, all kinds of things that I'm sure you know, people can kind of come to us and ask their questions of us really.

Absolutely. So we're going to be drilling down a bit more into how you come up with 300 and 65 days of content little bit later on in the course in a few days time. But first of all, let's just give you kind of a a nice overview of the kind of content, that kind of why you should be thinking about what you're going to be talking about. Now, first of all, it shouldn't be advertising. I mean, apart from anything else, because all of this is opt in audio, who's going to be opting in to listen to an advert every day? Yeah, it's pretty unlikely, isn't it? So what you've got to be doing is be giving content of value. Maybe you're solving a problem or answering a question, maybe you're entertaining, you're certainly informing, perhaps you're coming over as a thought leader, things like that stuff, which is useful, and content, which is engaging as well. But I suppose really soon as the key thing is coming up with your target audience, who will be interested in what it is that you want to that the information you want to impart to them. And the question They could be asking amongst themselves what they want the answers to coming up with that target demo is really important.

Yeah, it really is. And I think, you know, it's one of these things that marketers grapple with all the time is understanding and knowing that your target audience, and you really do need to know who it is that you want to be listening to your Flash Briefing. And once you've got that idea of that person, then you should be able to understand their likes and their needs and the questions that they might have around the topic that you're going to be Flash Briefing about. And that's the kind of added value content certainly social media mark....]]>672alexa,amazon,audio,dot,echo,february,flashbriefing,production,smartspeaker,technology,voice,voicefirst,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH IN YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/BU0NHwWPyQ4 Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello, hello, welcome to day five of Flash Briefing February. I'm Peter steward. And together with Susan Cooper, we are your hosts for the month of February for Flash Briefing, February. It's a day by day step by step guide for the skill set, the mindset and the marketing, for building a better briefing. Already, we've been talking about what a Flash Briefing is, how it's used, how it works. Also, yesterday, we talked a little bit of kind of tech tips, you can still see all of that information on the page, which hopefully is going to be really, really useful. And tomorrow we're going to be talking more about naming your show because that's really important. And a few days after that, we're going to be talking about coming up with a logo for your show as well. And it's not just about audio. It's not just about sound is about the whole package. That's what we're going to be bringing you over the course of these 28 Days really, really important stuff, the whole package. But today tell you a little bit about content and Suze's both of us know more than a little bit about content for audio productions don't wait because my background in presentation and production for big media firms. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, I've worked with in commercial radio building kind of news packages and different things. And also at the moment I'm working with the Evening Standard, where we're creating news package is the can be have UC system. So as an alum that I'm hoping I can share with people who want to create Flash Briefings to ensure that their briefing it sounds as good as it possibly can. All the kind of production stuff, the creative ideas, stuff, all kinds of things that I'm sure you know, people can kind of come to us and ask their questions of us really. Absolutely. So we're going to be drilling down a bit more into how you come up with 300 and 65 days of content little bit later on in the course in a few days time. But first of all, let's just give you kind of a a nice overview of the kind of content, that kind of why you should be thinking about what you're going to be talking about. Now, first of all, it shouldn't be advertising. I mean, apart from anything else, because all of this is opt in audio, who's going to be opting in to listen to an advert every day? Yeah, it's pretty unlikely, isn't it? So what you've got to be doing is be giving content of value. Maybe you're solving a problem or answering a question, maybe you're entertaining, you're certainly informing, perhaps you're coming over as a thought leader, things like that stuff, which is useful, and content, which is engaging as well. But I suppose really soon as the key thing is coming up with your target audience, who will be interested in what it is that you want to that the information you want to impart to them. And the question They could be asking amongst themselves what they want the answers to coming up with that target demo is really important. Yeah, it really is. And I think, you know, it's one of these things that marketers grapple with all the time is understanding and knowing that your target audience, and you really do need to know who it is that you want to be listening to your Flash Briefing. And once you've got that idea of that person, then you should be able to understand their likes and their needs and the questions that they might have around the topic that you're going to be Flash Briefing about. And that's the kind of added value content certainly social media mark. Anyone that's that's kind of touched on that kind of thing before creating the adds value to people rather than just giving them a real salesy, knock them over the head by my stuff...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-004https://youtu.be/HSLWwbnTUOs

**Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

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Hello, and welcome back to day four of Flash Briefing February with Suze Cooper. And with Peter Stewart as well, we are bringing you everything that you need to know to set up and create your own Flash Briefing that can be heard by Amazon's Alexa smart speakers. So here is the place where you can find out your creative ideas, the mindset, the skill set and the marketing behind it creating your very own Flash Briefing today is day four. And we will be covering some basic tech tips. So the kind of stuff that you might need equipment wise to create your Flash Briefing, and it really doesn't have to be very expensive. We're not talking about having really deep pockets to have to make these audio Flash Briefings at all, are we Peter, there are certainly things that you probably already have, that you could use to create your Flash Briefing.


Absolutely. We're To help you on the road to producing really good content, but you know what, you don't have to spend a huge amount of money. As Suze says, you probably got some of these things already, however, do remember, the good sound will make people stick around. However, if you've got a microphone that's maybe £50 or $50, and you've got a choice of buying one, which is 250, or 300 pounds or dollars, you're not necessarily going to get four or five times better quality out of that more expensive mic. So we're going to, we've been in and around audio presentation and production for more years that we care to remember, and at my age, frankly, is difficult to remember anything. However, what we would say is you don't have to spend an absolute fortune. Now what I would say also is don't buy a whole load of gear because sometimes it can be all the gear but no idea. It's the content that counts. And I've got a little way that I think about these, the simpler your content production and tech system is, the easier that he's going to use. Yeah it is, the easier it's going to be for you to use. And the easier it is to use, the more often you're actually going to be using it. And the more often that you actually use it, the better you'll become at presentation. And the better you come a presentation, the faster your audience will grow. So don't throw a whole load of time, and a whole load of money and getting all sorts of fancy things and creating a whole kind of home studio. Because you'll spend too much time doing that, and not enough time actually creating the content that people are after. And in fact, our good friends who are Scot and Susan Westwater, recently, the back end of last year, produced an audio book. How did that They record their audio book, in their closet in their walk in wardrobe, just surrounded by clothes and coats to deaden the sound. And we're going to be talking about sound deadening soundproofing a little bit later on in the course. But let's go back to what we're talking about specifically, today. Now the easiest way that you can actually record your Flash Briefing. Before Suze kind of steps it up with the semi pro gear in a few moments time is just on a mobile phone. We talked yesterday briefly about podcast hosts. We're going to be talking a little bit more about choosing a podcast host a little bit later on this month. But so once you've got a podcast host, that you can upload content from your phone straight to it, or maybe it's got an app or a really good website or something like that. Record your audio in your phone, and even have your notes or your script in your phone as well. How's that going to work? Well, let me give you a couple of examples. You could for example, use the app the positive Cost platform Spreaker, okay, so it's an app, you can record straight into the spreaker app. And as soon as you finish, it's made available as a Flash Briefing, and Alexa can go straight there and complete immediately after you finished. Now, you want some really good quality sound for the cheapest possible price. So what you do is you get one of those little lapel mics. Yeah, like they have that like the newsreaders were on the telly. So you can clip it to yourself kind of just about here, okay, just just under your chin just on the top of your shirt or top of your blouse or wherever, like the other end into the phone, and then that's going to do two things. Number one, it will mean that you've got a better quality than just talking straight into a phone. These are called lava Leah or lav mics or clip on mics. reasonably good quality, but cheap ones you probably talking about 20-30 pounds Euros. But the other advantage is that you can actually then hold your phone away from you so that you can look at the screen so you can see where the buttons are to stop and start recording. You can play in sound effects, for example, your theme tune, and we're going to become two audio logos a little bit later on in our Flash Briefing February course. And also what it means is if you've made any notes or if you're reading some kind of script, off your phone, frankly, you're able to see it because you're holding it at arm's length. Normally, if you held your phone at arm's length and you'd be recording, then your voice will be too far away. It wouldn't come over clearly enough. But of course, if you've got your microphone plugged in to your phone, and the other end clipped on to the top of your shirt, you can sound good, quality wise and you'll get a sound good because of your professionalism and the whole package. For your Flash briefing is going to sound so much better. So that's the really cheap way of doing it. All you've shelled out for is you got to have a podcast host anyway 20 or 30 pounds dollars euros on your microphone, and you've probably got a mobile phone or a cell phone anyway, so it's hardly any money at all. Okay, maybe you want to do it at home and of course you could be using that mobile phone system at home anyway. Maybe you want to step it up a gear in a kind of back office, you know, your bedroom studio, something like that. You got a computer. You want to know how all that works, Susie's here to give you the lowdown.

Yeah, that's right. So the next kind of step away from using your phone might be to use a USB mic that will plug directly into your computer so that you can enhance the audio that's being sent directly to whatever software it is that you're going to be recording into. So obviously on the phone you're recording directly into perhaps with spreaker that the The podcast host if you're using your laptop, you're going to need a piece of software that is recording the audio on the other end now, we will look at that in more depth. As we go through this this Flash Briefing for every month we will look at different audio software providers but just off the off the top of my head, it's or perhaps garriage band and moving further on perhaps even audition or Reaper. And so there are a few that are out there that you can use. What you will need is a USB mic as I say this kind of in enhances the audio going into your your laptop or your computer. Most of them have an internal microphone built in. But by using a USB mic, it kind of gives you a little bit more direction perhaps and you're able to kind of get just a clearer sound quality. So there are various ones on the market that aren't particularly expensive. The Blue Yeti is out there Samson do quite a good range and sure do as well. And what I would suggest if you're going to use the USB mic and a lot of these handheld mics if you like, which gives you the impression that you might be actually holding it in front of you. And certainly broadcast tip would be that what can sometimes happen when you're holding a microphone is that the casing on the mic can move around, and perhaps the cable talk about a bit and it creates what's known in the business as Mike rattle, and which is terribly difficult to well impossible really to take away from your audio recording. And actually can really affect the sound quality. When someone's listening. They can hear this horrible kind of echoey rattling noise. So to avoid that, something I would suggest that you invest in if you're going for USB mic is to get a tripod of some sort. And again, they sell those fairly cheaply alongside the microphones generally, generally, another thing that you might want to invest in is a pop shield of some sort. They are generally Kind of bits of plastic that have got a piece of netting over the top that stop those plosive sounds, those peas, these tees from really popping on your mic. And they can make a big difference to the sound quality as well. So yeah, USB mics are a great way of recording the audio into your computer. And onto one of those pieces of software that I've meant to before fastenal Flash Briefing and tomorrow Peter, what will we be chatting about?

So tomorrow we're going to be talking about perhaps some of the most important stuff and that is about content about where you're going to be finding these ideas from and what you're going to be talking about. So don't forget you can come back tomorrow as Flash Briefing February continues day five tomorrow basic tech tech tips today. Basic content ideas coming up tomorrow. And in the meantime, if you're suffering from a bit of FOMO in between time over the next 24 hours. Don't forget to sign up for our Friday Flash Briefing Briefing which gives you some more links and some ideas of all sorts of ideas about tech about content about marketing the skill set the mindset of the marketing for building a better briefing, go to voice works dot info, and we're back tomorrow. Bye bye for now.

We'll see you then.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450418Tue, 04 Feb 2020 00:00:19 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/HSLWwbnTUOs **Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter...https://youtu.be/HSLWwbnTUOs

**Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Hello, and welcome back to day four of Flash Briefing February with Suze Cooper. And with Peter Stewart as well, we are bringing you everything that you need to know to set up and create your own Flash Briefing that can be heard by Amazon's Alexa smart speakers. So here is the place where you can find out your creative ideas, the mindset, the skill set and the marketing behind it creating your very own Flash Briefing today is day four. And we will be covering some basic tech tips. So the kind of stuff that you might need equipment wise to create your Flash Briefing, and it really doesn't have to be very expensive. We're not talking about having really deep pockets to have to make these audio Flash Briefings at all, are we Peter, there are certainly things that you probably already have, that you could use to create your Flash Briefing.


Absolutely. We're To help you on the road to producing really good content, but you know what, you don't have to spend a huge amount of money. As Suze says, you probably got some of these things already, however, do remember, the good sound will make people stick around. However, if you've got a microphone that's maybe £50 or $50, and you've got a choice of buying one, which is 250, or 300 pounds or dollars, you're not necessarily going to get four or five times better quality out of that more expensive mic. So we're going to, we've been in and around audio presentation and production for more years that we care to remember, and at my age, frankly, is difficult to remember anything. However, what we would say is you don't have to spend an absolute fortune. Now what I would say also is don't buy a whole load of gear because sometimes it can be all the gear but no idea. It's the content that counts. And I've got a little way that I think about these, the simpler your content production and tech system is, the easier that he's going to use. Yeah it is, the easier it's going to be for you to use. And the easier it is to use, the more often you're actually going to be using it. And the more often that you actually use it, the better you'll become at presentation. And the better you come a presentation, the faster your audience will grow. So don't throw a whole load of time, and a whole load of money and getting all sorts of fancy things and creating a whole kind of home studio. Because you'll spend too much time doing that, and not enough time actually creating the content that people are after. And in fact, our good friends who are Scot and Susan Westwater, recently, the back end of last year, produced an audio book. How did that They record their audio book, in their closet in their walk in wardrobe, just surrounded by clothes and coats to deaden the sound. And we're going to be talking about sound deadening soundproofing a little bit later on in the course. But let's go back to what we're talking about specifically, today. Now the easiest way that you can actually record your Flash Briefing. Before Suze kind of steps it up with the semi pro gear in a few moments time is just on a mobile phone. We talked yesterday briefly about podcast hosts. We're going to be talking a little bit more about choosing a podcast host a little bit later on this month. But so once you've got a podcast host, that you can upload content from your phone straight to it, or maybe it's got an app or a really good website or something like that. Record your audio in your phone, and even have your notes or your script in your phone as well. How's that going to...]]>621alexa,amazon,audio,dot,echo,february,flashbriefing,production,smartspeaker,technology,voice,voicefirst,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/HSLWwbnTUOs **Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello, and welcome back to day four of Flash Briefing February with Suze Cooper. And with Peter Stewart as well, we are bringing you everything that you need to know to set up and create your own Flash Briefing that can be heard by Amazon's Alexa smart speakers. So here is the place where you can find out your creative ideas, the mindset, the skill set and the marketing behind it creating your very own Flash Briefing today is day four. And we will be covering some basic tech tips. So the kind of stuff that you might need equipment wise to create your Flash Briefing, and it really doesn't have to be very expensive. We're not talking about having really deep pockets to have to make these audio Flash Briefings at all, are we Peter, there are certainly things that you probably already have, that you could use to create your Flash Briefing. Absolutely. We're To help you on the road to producing really good content, but you know what, you don't have to spend a huge amount of money. As Suze says, you probably got some of these things already, however, do remember, the good sound will make people stick around. However, if you've got a microphone that's maybe £50 or $50, and you've got a choice of buying one, which is 250, or 300 pounds or dollars, you're not necessarily going to get four or five times better quality out of that more expensive mic. So we're going to, we've been in and around audio presentation and production for more years that we care to remember, and at my age, frankly, is difficult to remember anything. However, what we would say is you don't have to spend an absolute fortune. Now what I would say also is don't buy a whole load of gear because sometimes it can be all the gear but no idea. It's the content that counts. And I've got a little way that I think about these, the simpler your content production and tech system is, the easier that he's going to use. Yeah it is, the easier it's going to be for you to use. And the easier it is to use, the more often you're actually going to be using it. And the more often that you actually use it, the better you'll become at presentation. And the better you come a presentation, the faster your audience will grow. So don't throw a whole load of time, and a whole load of money and getting all sorts of fancy things and creating a whole kind of home studio. Because you'll spend too much time doing that, and not enough time actually creating the content that people are after. And in fact, our good friends who are Scot and Susan Westwater, recently, the back end of last year, produced an audio book. How did that They record their audio book, in their closet in their walk in wardrobe, just surrounded by clothes and coats to deaden the sound. And we're going to be talking about sound deadening soundproofing a little bit later on in the course. But let's go back to what we're talking about specifically, today. Now the easiest way that you can actually record your Flash Briefing. Before Suze kind of steps it up with the semi pro gear in a few moments time is just on a mobile phone. We talked yesterday briefly about podcast hosts. We're going to be talking a little bit more about choosing a podcast host a little bit later on this month. But so once you've got a podcast host, that you can upload content from your phone straight to it, or maybe it's got an app or a really good website or something like that. Record your audio in your phone, and even have your notes or your script in your phone as well. How's that going to work? Well, let me give you a couple of examples. You could for example, use the app the positive Cost platform Spreaker, okay, so it's an app, you can record...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-03https://youtu.be/b9NPPADoHNk

**Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Welcome back to Flash Briefing February. It is day three and today we're going to be speaking about how Flash Briefings work. My name is Cooper I am analyst and broker technology for for various companies including standard who provide news for Google Assistant over in the US and also vixen labs which is a company over in Shoreditch, which works with brands and businesses to create voice experiences. And I'm here today again with my partner invoice. Peter Stewart.


Absolutely. So I do. I'm a broadcast journalist been working in and around radio for a while more years, frankly, than I care to remember but not enough to give me a nice enough pension to leave at the moment. And as well as working in radio and a little bit of TV as well. I've also written extensively several books on radio and TV production. So when smart speakers came along and skills And Flash Briefings, I thought to myself, there's an idea here to get into because this is joining several of my passions, about radio, about content about production, about creativity, and also a little bit of tech as well. And Suze's will come to the tech about how Flash Briefings work in a few moments time. But tech also is something that you're interested in is that you are a bit of a self proclaimed kind of a techie geek yourself you're, you're really interested in voice and skills and always.

Exactly, and that's actually what got me into this as well. It was the techie side of it. I wasn't Can I just wasn't satisfied with owning a smart speaker. As a broadcaster. I had to work out how I could get my voice coming out of it. And that's what started me on the journey of Flash Briefings really, you know, and Flash Briefings are these mp3 files. You know, everybody knows about these audio files, little compressed mp3 files that basically, you record yourself, and then upload to a podcast host. And that is how you get your Flash Briefing to work on to the smart speaker. So it all sounds a little bit technical, but it really isn't is it pizza is just about choosing a provider so that you've got somewhere for the Alexa dashboard to all your content from. Absolutely. Now,

you could actually put all of your audio for Flash Briefings on your own website, a lot of people have got their own website at the moment. You know what actually, to be quite honest, that's more trouble than it's worth because it does take a bit of tech and a bit of know how I know quite a bit of time to make sure that your audio is going to be in the right place that Alexa can retrieve it. You've also got to check things like bandwidth as well. And you know what, for the small price of a podcast host is much easier just to upload it to a system which is already being worked out is tried and tested. And if there is a problem, you don't have to sweat it out yourself and go on to Mr. Google to work out what it is you've gone wrong. You just send an instant message to somebody at the podcast host company and they'll sort it out for you or tell you where you are going wrong. So we're not talking about much money for these podcasts, maybe a maximum of 10 pounds and dollars kind of equivalent really. And you know, it's really not a massive investment to be doing this. And a lot of the podcast hosts will have these deals whereby if you sign up for a year, you get a certain amount of discount off them as well. Certainly there are others that are giving discounts for people that are setting up Flash Briefings because it's a new thing. And these podcast host wants to get in there and they want people to be uploading this daily content using their platform. So you know, it is worth looking about at the different pockets. Cos hosts that are available. I Know podcast is agonise over who to go with because there seemed to be so many of them online. But you know, it is kind of as simple as kind of picking one of them. And what you're essentially doing is uploading your audio files to that podcast host and that they're then giving you basically a URL to an RSS feed. And that URL is just copied and pasted across into the Alexa dashboard. It says easy copy and paste, you point Amazon in the right direction of where you're uploading your files. It takes care of the rest, you schedule them to go out each day. And it basically pulls the latest file from that podcast host address each day. So it really does take the hard work and the legwork of getting your audio out there and onto the speaker. And as Peter says, while you could put it onto your own website that's also very memory heavy, something that might slow down your site which wouldn't help you in Google terms being searched for and all that stuff. Anything. So it really is worth just having a little look out there and seeing what the podcast hosts are offering, and, and signing up and getting going.

And we're going to be talking about how to choose the best podcast host a little bit later on this month. As Flash Briefing February continues because we're here to give you the skill set the mindset and the marketing, so you can build a better briefing. And amongst those features, if you're thinking to yourself, Well, I'd much I really would like the idea of all this content, being somewhere that I can kind of access it and so it is on my page. Yeah, what you can do is you can upload the content to your podcast hosts, and then have it all on a page there so you can have people pointed to hear all of your Flash Briefings going back the last week, month, year, whatever, all in one place. It's still available for you something else which is interesting, which is worth mentioning, just before we finish today. We've talked several times about a podcast host So just to say get we've said a couple of times over the last couple of three days, your Flash Briefing audio is essentially a short podcast, it's only up to 10 minutes. Sweet Spot, as Suze said a couple of days ago, is probably going to be what I would say, you know, 90 seconds, two minutes, three minutes, kind of absolute tops. And where else would you be hosting this than a podcast host? So there is no such thing as a kind of Flash Briefing host. They go by the generic name of a podcast host. So, you know, sometimes the terms Flash Briefing and podcast are a little bit interchangeable. A Flash Briefing can be a podcast, but a podcast can't be a Flash Briefing necessarily. Because if a podcast is more than 10 minutes, it just can't exist as a Flash Briefing in the Alexa platform. So hopefully you've kind of got your head around that. And tomorrow, we're going to be back with day for a Flash Briefing February and we're going to be talking a few tech tips for you. However, I would say and I'm sure Susie is going to back me up on this just before we go, you don't need to shell out a whole stack of cash is not too much money. We're talking about only a small amount of money, maybe 1015 quid or dollars or euro, a month for your podcast host. And, frankly, not too much more than that for a bit of kit that you're going to be using time and time again for the next few days, weeks, months and years, as your Flash Briefing becomes a success, but we'll talk about tech tomorrow. As Flash Briefing February continues. Until then, bye bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450416Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:10 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/b9NPPADoHNk **Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter...https://youtu.be/b9NPPADoHNk

**Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Welcome back to Flash Briefing February. It is day three and today we're going to be speaking about how Flash Briefings work. My name is Cooper I am analyst and broker technology for for various companies including standard who provide news for Google Assistant over in the US and also vixen labs which is a company over in Shoreditch, which works with brands and businesses to create voice experiences. And I'm here today again with my partner invoice. Peter Stewart.


Absolutely. So I do. I'm a broadcast journalist been working in and around radio for a while more years, frankly, than I care to remember but not enough to give me a nice enough pension to leave at the moment. And as well as working in radio and a little bit of TV as well. I've also written extensively several books on radio and TV production. So when smart speakers came along and skills And Flash Briefings, I thought to myself, there's an idea here to get into because this is joining several of my passions, about radio, about content about production, about creativity, and also a little bit of tech as well. And Suze's will come to the tech about how Flash Briefings work in a few moments time. But tech also is something that you're interested in is that you are a bit of a self proclaimed kind of a techie geek yourself you're, you're really interested in voice and skills and always.

Exactly, and that's actually what got me into this as well. It was the techie side of it. I wasn't Can I just wasn't satisfied with owning a smart speaker. As a broadcaster. I had to work out how I could get my voice coming out of it. And that's what started me on the journey of Flash Briefings really, you know, and Flash Briefings are these mp3 files. You know, everybody knows about these audio files, little compressed mp3 files that basically, you record yourself, and then upload to a podcast host. And that is how you get your Flash Briefing to work on to the smart speaker. So it all sounds a little bit technical, but it really isn't is it pizza is just about choosing a provider so that you've got somewhere for the Alexa dashboard to all your content from. Absolutely. Now,

you could actually put all of your audio for Flash Briefings on your own website, a lot of people have got their own website at the moment. You know what actually, to be quite honest, that's more trouble than it's worth because it does take a bit of tech and a bit of know how I know quite a bit of time to make sure that your audio is going to be in the right place that Alexa can retrieve it. You've also got to check things like bandwidth as well. And you know what, for the small price of a podcast host is much easier just to upload it to a system which is already being worked out is tried and tested. And if there is a problem, you don't have to sweat it out yourself and go on to Mr. Google to work out what it is you've gone wrong. You just send an instant message to somebody at the podcast host company and they'll sort it out for you or tell you where you are going wrong. So we're not talking about much money for these podcasts, maybe a maximum of 10 pounds and dollars kind of equivalent really. And you know, it's really not a massive investment to be doing this. And a lot of the podcast hosts will have these deals whereby if you sign up for a year, you get a certain amount of discount off them as well. Certainly there are others that are giving discounts for people that are setting up Flash Briefings because it's a new thing. And...]]>466alexa,amazon,audio,february,flashbriefing,production,smartspeaker,technology,voice,voicefirst,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/b9NPPADoHNk **Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Welcome back to Flash Briefing February. It is day three and today we're going to be speaking about how Flash Briefings work. My name is Cooper I am analyst and broker technology for for various companies including standard who provide news for Google Assistant over in the US and also vixen labs which is a company over in Shoreditch, which works with brands and businesses to create voice experiences. And I'm here today again with my partner invoice. Peter Stewart. Absolutely. So I do. I'm a broadcast journalist been working in and around radio for a while more years, frankly, than I care to remember but not enough to give me a nice enough pension to leave at the moment. And as well as working in radio and a little bit of TV as well. I've also written extensively several books on radio and TV production. So when smart speakers came along and skills And Flash Briefings, I thought to myself, there's an idea here to get into because this is joining several of my passions, about radio, about content about production, about creativity, and also a little bit of tech as well. And Suze's will come to the tech about how Flash Briefings work in a few moments time. But tech also is something that you're interested in is that you are a bit of a self proclaimed kind of a techie geek yourself you're, you're really interested in voice and skills and always. Exactly, and that's actually what got me into this as well. It was the techie side of it. I wasn't Can I just wasn't satisfied with owning a smart speaker. As a broadcaster. I had to work out how I could get my voice coming out of it. And that's what started me on the journey of Flash Briefings really, you know, and Flash Briefings are these mp3 files. You know, everybody knows about these audio files, little compressed mp3 files that basically, you record yourself, and then upload to a podcast host. And that is how you get your Flash Briefing to work on to the smart speaker. So it all sounds a little bit technical, but it really isn't is it pizza is just about choosing a provider so that you've got somewhere for the Alexa dashboard to all your content from. Absolutely. Now, you could actually put all of your audio for Flash Briefings on your own website, a lot of people have got their own website at the moment. You know what actually, to be quite honest, that's more trouble than it's worth because it does take a bit of tech and a bit of know how I know quite a bit of time to make sure that your audio is going to be in the right place that Alexa can retrieve it. You've also got to check things like bandwidth as well. And you know what, for the small price of a podcast host is much easier just to upload it to a system which is already being worked out is tried and tested. And if there is a problem, you don't have to sweat it out yourself and go on to Mr. Google to work out what it is you've gone wrong. You just send an instant message to somebody at the podcast host company and they'll sort it out for you or tell you where you are going wrong. So we're not talking about much money for these podcasts, maybe a maximum of 10 pounds and dollars kind of equivalent really. And you know, it's really not a massive investment to be doing this. And a lot of the podcast hosts will have these deals whereby if you sign up for a year, you get a certain amount of discount off them as well. Certainly there are others that are giving discounts for people that are setting up Flash Briefings because it's a new thing. And these podcast host wants to get in there and they want people to be uploading this daily content using their platform. So you know, it is worth looking about at the different pockets....Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-002https://youtu.be/mYecp4D6BDk

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Hello, hello, welcome to day two of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, what we're doing over the course of the month of February, is giving you a day by day step by step guide to the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. So today, we're going to be talking with you about what Flash Briefings are and why you may want to have one for your business, your brand, your company, your hobby, your society, your group, your charity, or nonprofit, or even just feel yourself gosh, there's a whole load of reasons that you may want to Flash Briefing. So Sue's let's, let's start off with you with one of those. Why should people want a Flash Briefing?

Wow. Now as you've just said these are really really so versatile and can be used for so many different things. So Flash Briefing is essentially a really audio file that plays out on an Alexa smart speaker is very specific to the Amazon Alexa devices. And there are ways you can hear them by the Google Home and the Google Assistant, which I'm sure we'll talk about later on in the month. But they asked a specific skill that is available to the Amazon Alexa devices. Now, it's a bit like a short podcast, basically. And we kind of believe that the sweet spot for creating these things is kind of somewhere between three and four minutes and four minutes is probably way too long. We're talking in a flash information you can get to people in a really, really quick, flashy, smart, zipped up audio file that they then add to their playlist basically, and listen to and it's something that people listen to every single day, isn't it, Peter?

Absolutely. That really is the important thing because if people are going to be subscribing to your Flash Briefing, they're going to be hearing the rundown of your Flash Briefing and other people's Flash Briefings every single day. And the last thing you want is for them to go. I've heard this one already skip. And to do that every single day, they're just going to get fed up with hearing the same thing and having to say the same thing to go to the next item every single day. And you know what, I've done it before. And I'm sure as soon as as as well, after a while, after three or four days of this, you think, oh, blow this regain my soldiers, what I'm actually going to do is deleted because I would prefer not to hear an updated episode once a week, then to have to say, skip six times a week, you know, it's not worth the bother. It's not worth the ROI. So you've really got to be there seven days a week, I'm okay. I may give you five days a week because the weekends could be a little bit different. But even I think that's a bit of a cop out. But we'll come to content and the duration and how often you should be uploading a little bit later on our 28 day course. But why it? Might you want a Flash Briefing? I think a lot of it Susie's down to visibility, because it's a way to kind of interact with your audience, isn't it? If you're a brand or a business, to be able to offer them some content, where they are already living and working and occupying to have some content of yours that's kind of drip fed into their ear, day by day, these are two good opportunities.

Absolutely. I mean, and these are people that have opted in to hearing from you, you know, you do have to physically go and enable these things. And whether that be by voice or via the Alexa app on your phone, so people are choosing to hear from you every single day, which is just a marketer's dream, really, that you can get your message out there and listen to in such a kind of consistent way. And of course, in terms of visibility, you're also in the Amazon search engine. You know, we're talking about the massive Amazon kind of ecosystem once you create a flashpoint thing, if someone is searching for something on the topic that you have last chance that your Flash Briefing might appear in their search results. So, you know, you're actually putting yourself out there in front of a massive, massive audience. And actually, there are very few Flash Briefing creators and you know, in context at the moment to the amount of speakers that are out there. So it is a really good time to be picking up on that and to give yourself that visibility, and to be seen in a place where perhaps your competitor isn't being seen.

And it doesn't take much time to do it doesn't take much take to do it doesn't take much money to do takes a little bit of foresight, a little bit of planning. Yeah, you've got it. But then anything that's worthwhile is going to take a little bit of time. And after all, that's what we're here for to lead you through the month of February with our 20 a guide of Flash Briefing February. Of what to do and how to do it and all of these episodes are really short, the maximum time for a Flash Briefing. Is 10 minutes. So none of these daily episodes will be longer than 10 minutes either. And of course, another great thing about Flash Briefings is that if you're doing it for, well, maybe you're cycling group, there's a cycling group in the UK that does a Flash Briefing about the care and the maintenance of people's bicycles and also routes that people can go on to their cycling club. And then, once a week on a Friday, what they do is they upload a Flash Briefing, which tells people where the cycling club is going to be meeting on the Saturday morning, where what time or the terrain is likely to be where the weather is likely to be, how far the distance is going to be, where the pub lunch stop is going to be all of these little bits of information. And you know what is delivered to them via smart speaker rather than a takes rather than a WhatsApp message rather than an email, which is maybe not going to be opened at all because frankly, we all get far too many emails very often. Don't So this is another way to distribute and disseminate and pass on the information. And your information could be sitting alongside some really, really big brands. They could be sitting alongside a brand such as well, the BBC does Flash Briefings, for example, PBS does Flash Briefings, for example. Also, a lot of the National Quality newspapers in the UK will do Flash Briefings as well. Some of the other broadcasters are doing Flash Briefings. So imagine if people are listening to your content alongside maybe their favourite sports team like an arsenal or a Manchester United or Mr. Manchester City or something like that, next to a newspaper doing some latest stocks and shares information. And nestled in between rather snuggly is your information. So the quality of everyone else's content is kind of rubbing off on you. So it kind of gives you an extra perceived value which is really, really Important. And also Sue's you know, you kind of touched on it a few moments ago, there's a fast there's a first mover advantage isn't there for getting in fast and actually making a name for yourself. Both Susan, I Incidentally, have been doing Flash Briefings for well over a year. So we were already kind of solidifying our place in the Flash Briefing listings.

That's right, you know, I think it is showing that you're future thinking and forward thinking and using this new technology. And it's also quite exciting and fun to do. And to kind of have to sit there and think about how you could pull apart an idea and and chunk it into these kind of very short little slices and pieces of information for people. And on the other side of it, it's quite interesting to be able to really personalise the information that you're getting from your smart speaker. So as a Flash Briefing listener, you know, thinking about the experience from the other side, the information that you're getting is Exactly what you're interested in. And as you say, you might be hearing news from your favourite news provider, then something from your football team and then something from, you know, a creator like us, he's kind of giving you that extra piece of information on something that you might not get somewhere else without kind of googling or having to kind of put in an awful lot of effort. And this is all done by voice through your smart speaker, probably while you're doing 300 other things in the kitchen or sorting out things in the living room, and you know, wherever your device might be. So it's a super way of kind of really putting your business and brand out there and being really first on top of what is still a really new technology. Lots of people have got the speakers. Now the creators are coming through and really building and making useful stuff for them. So now is the time if you're thinking of getting in on this new tech to really get your thinking cap on and work out how your brand and business can benefit from it.

We are going to help you with that. Susan I are broadcasting professionals here in the United Kingdom have been for for several years. I'm a little bit older than Suze, that does have to be said, but between us we've got a whole wealth of experience that we're going to be passing on to you through the month of February and tomorrow we're going to be back as a day three of Flash Briefing February continues. And we're going to be explaining a little bit just to put everything into context how Flash Briefings actually work and told you a little bit today about what they are but how they work not going to get too techie was just so you can see kind of what you need to do to make them available for other people to listen to. That's as Flash Briefing February continues tomorrow, right here. Bye bye for now.

We'll see you then.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

**Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450413Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:13 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/mYecp4D6BDk Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello, hello, welcome to day two of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, what...https://youtu.be/mYecp4D6BDk

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

Hello, hello, welcome to day two of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, what we're doing over the course of the month of February, is giving you a day by day step by step guide to the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. So today, we're going to be talking with you about what Flash Briefings are and why you may want to have one for your business, your brand, your company, your hobby, your society, your group, your charity, or nonprofit, or even just feel yourself gosh, there's a whole load of reasons that you may want to Flash Briefing. So Sue's let's, let's start off with you with one of those. Why should people want a Flash Briefing?

Wow. Now as you've just said these are really really so versatile and can be used for so many different things. So Flash Briefing is essentially a really audio file that plays out on an Alexa smart speaker is very specific to the Amazon Alexa devices. And there are ways you can hear them by the Google Home and the Google Assistant, which I'm sure we'll talk about later on in the month. But they asked a specific skill that is available to the Amazon Alexa devices. Now, it's a bit like a short podcast, basically. And we kind of believe that the sweet spot for creating these things is kind of somewhere between three and four minutes and four minutes is probably way too long. We're talking in a flash information you can get to people in a really, really quick, flashy, smart, zipped up audio file that they then add to their playlist basically, and listen to and it's something that people listen to every single day, isn't it, Peter?

Absolutely. That really is the important thing because if people are going to be subscribing to your Flash Briefing, they're going to be hearing the rundown of your Flash Briefing and other people's Flash Briefings every single day. And the last thing you want is for them to go. I've heard this one already skip. And to do that every single day, they're just going to get fed up with hearing the same thing and having to say the same thing to go to the next item every single day. And you know what, I've done it before. And I'm sure as soon as as as well, after a while, after three or four days of this, you think, oh, blow this regain my soldiers, what I'm actually going to do is deleted because I would prefer not to hear an updated episode once a week, then to have to say, skip six times a week, you know, it's not worth the bother. It's not worth the ROI. So you've really got to be there seven days a week, I'm okay. I may give you five days a week because the weekends could be a little bit different. But even I think that's a bit of a cop out. But we'll come to content and the duration and how often you should be uploading a little bit later on our 28 day course. But why it? Might you want a Flash Briefing? I think a lot of it Susie's down to visibility, because it's a way to kind of interact with your audience, isn't it? If you're a brand or a business, to be able to offer them some content, where they are already living and working and occupying to have some content of yours that's kind of drip fed into their ear, day by day, these are two good opportunities.

Absolutely. I mean, and these are people that have opted in to hearing from you, you know, you do have to physically go and enable these things. And whether that be by voice or via the Alexa app on your phone, so people are choosing to hear from you every single day, which is just a marketer's dream, really, that you can get your message out there and listen to in such a kind of consistent way. And of course, in terms of visibility, you're also in the Amazon search engine. You know, we're talking...]]>588alexa,dot,echo,flashbriefing,smart,smartspeaker,speaker,technoloy,voice,voicefirst,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/mYecp4D6BDk Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial Hello, hello, welcome to day two of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart and together with Susan Cooper, what we're doing over the course of the month of February, is giving you a day by day step by step guide to the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. So today, we're going to be talking with you about what Flash Briefings are and why you may want to have one for your business, your brand, your company, your hobby, your society, your group, your charity, or nonprofit, or even just feel yourself gosh, there's a whole load of reasons that you may want to Flash Briefing. So Sue's let's, let's start off with you with one of those. Why should people want a Flash Briefing? Wow. Now as you've just said these are really really so versatile and can be used for so many different things. So Flash Briefing is essentially a really audio file that plays out on an Alexa smart speaker is very specific to the Amazon Alexa devices. And there are ways you can hear them by the Google Home and the Google Assistant, which I'm sure we'll talk about later on in the month. But they asked a specific skill that is available to the Amazon Alexa devices. Now, it's a bit like a short podcast, basically. And we kind of believe that the sweet spot for creating these things is kind of somewhere between three and four minutes and four minutes is probably way too long. We're talking in a flash information you can get to people in a really, really quick, flashy, smart, zipped up audio file that they then add to their playlist basically, and listen to and it's something that people listen to every single day, isn't it, Peter? Absolutely. That really is the important thing because if people are going to be subscribing to your Flash Briefing, they're going to be hearing the rundown of your Flash Briefing and other people's Flash Briefings every single day. And the last thing you want is for them to go. I've heard this one already skip. And to do that every single day, they're just going to get fed up with hearing the same thing and having to say the same thing to go to the next item every single day. And you know what, I've done it before. And I'm sure as soon as as as well, after a while, after three or four days of this, you think, oh, blow this regain my soldiers, what I'm actually going to do is deleted because I would prefer not to hear an updated episode once a week, then to have to say, skip six times a week, you know, it's not worth the bother. It's not worth the ROI. So you've really got to be there seven days a week, I'm okay. I may give you five days a week because the weekends could be a little bit different. But even I think that's a bit of a cop out. But we'll come to content and the duration and how often you should be uploading a little bit later on our 28 day course. But why it? Might you want a Flash Briefing? I think a lot of it Susie's down to visibility, because it's a way to kind of interact with your audience, isn't it? If you're a brand or a business, to be able to offer them some content, where they are already living and working and occupying to have some content of yours that's kind of drip fed into their ear, day by day, these are two good opportunities. Absolutely. I mean, and these are people that have opted in to hearing from you, you know, you do have to physically go and enable these things. And whether that be by voice or via the Alexa app on your phone, so people are choosing to hear from you every single day, which is just a marketer's dream, really, that you can get your message out there and listen to in such a kind of consistent way. And of course, in terms of visibility, you're also in the Amazon search engine. You know, we're talking about the massive Amazon kind of ecosystem once you create a flashpoint thing, if someone is searching for something...Nohttps://www.spreaker.com/user/11401949/fbf-01https://youtu.be/F0F4fx_C7f0

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

**Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart. And together with Susan Cooper, we're going to be presenting a pretty unique course here, right here every single day throughout the course of February. So for the next 28 days, so bear with us in the next couple of minutes, we're going to be telling you all about what's going to be in the course that you'll be able to follow all the way through this fantastic month. I'll introduce myself properly in a few moments time, but first of all, ladies first, here's Suze. Hi Suze.

SUZE: I'm Suze Cooper and you may well have already signed up to our voiceworks.info, email sheet that goes out every single week. So you might already be aware that we are both flash briefing creators were both journalists with broadcast backgrounds. And basically we just love creating Flash Briefings. And we're really interested in how people can use Flash Briefings to get their voice out there for various different purposes, whether it be marketing or just getting your message out there. And that's what February is going to be all about for us bringing those kind of creative ideas, those sort of sparks of ideas, perhaps, to you to see whether or not creating a flash briefing might be something that you want to do. So who am I? Well, I'm Suze Cooper, and I work for the Evening Standard in London creating news for their Google Assistant and which could be heard over in the US. I also work for Vixen Labs, which is a company based in Shoreditch making voice experiences for various brands and businesses says and I have a broadcasting background and that's your background too, isn't it, Peter?

PETER: Absolutely. So I'm a journalist, working for a well known British Broadcasting Company that I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but how you can work it out from the clues I've already given. You. Can you I've written several books about TV and radio presentation. And I first started doing well podcasts, gosh, about seven or eight years ago. And together with flash briefings, I must have done a couple of several several hundred flash briefings and podcasts over the course of the past several years. In fact, just trying to work that out, it must be nearly 2000 of them in total. So all sorts of different audio productions and usually you'll find me making social media videos for the company. And sometimes what I like to say reading out loud on the radio, in other words, news, reading and presentation and things like that. So what is 28 day flash briefing February all about? Well, it's going to be giving you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to building a better flash briefing. We're going to be talking a little bit about the tech and the tips and the tricks from our background in audio production. So yes, from a radio background, but also soon as you've got a background in more kind of music production as well, and putting things together kind of Sonic logos, and also, as you mentioned there a few moments ago, about about skills and the widest skill set of skill writing for Amazon Echo products.

SUZE: Yeah, that's right. So one of the things that I'm really passionate about is creating things that sound really, really great. And so what we're going to be giving you some tips and tricks as to how you can make your flash briefing sound great. You don't have to go out and spend an absolute fortune. And we will certainly be telling you about budget ways to do to do that. But yeah, it's all about what it sounds like, you know, smart speakers, particularly the Echo Dot which doesn't have any screen added to it. Everybody's experience of using that is via listening so we have to make way for people and has the right sound to it and Sonic branding and marketing is certainly something that has got bigger and bigger in the last half of 2019 and moving into this new year that we're in now. And you know, people are really thinking about that sound experience that their brand or their business can portray and give. So it is about thinking about what your brand or business sounds like, and the sort of sounds that you might want to use within your Flash Briefing to highlight to people that are listening to you.

PETER: But not just the sound, not just the voice. We're going to be also talking about designing your logos, we're talking about the hosting because where do you put the audio so that it can be played on Amazon Alexa devices, little bit about the tech and about the content as well. And all of this is going to be over the next 28 days here. As flash briefing February gets underway. So tomorrow, we're actually going to be starting off talking about well what flash briefings are they kind of podcasts but also explaining to you why they are unique to Amazon Echo devices and how you can make the most of then. And then as I say, day by day, step by step will take you by the hand and lead you through our unique 28 day course, which we are calling flash briefing in February. So I'll be back again tomorrow for Well, kind of day one proper, but day two, section two on the second of February, as flash briefing February continues. You're going to be back then. Yeah, sure. I will be Sue's you'll be back here tomorrow. We'll be back.

SUZE:Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai]]>https://api.spreaker.com/episode/21450408Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:20 +0000Suze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/F0F4fx_C7f0 Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial **Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and...https://youtu.be/F0F4fx_C7f0

Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial

**Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters.

Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart. And together with Susan Cooper, we're going to be presenting a pretty unique course here, right here every single day throughout the course of February. So for the next 28 days, so bear with us in the next couple of minutes, we're going to be telling you all about what's going to be in the course that you'll be able to follow all the way through this fantastic month. I'll introduce myself properly in a few moments time, but first of all, ladies first, here's Suze. Hi Suze.

SUZE: I'm Suze Cooper and you may well have already signed up to our voiceworks.info, email sheet that goes out every single week. So you might already be aware that we are both flash briefing creators were both journalists with broadcast backgrounds. And basically we just love creating Flash Briefings. And we're really interested in how people can use Flash Briefings to get their voice out there for various different purposes, whether it be marketing or just getting your message out there. And that's what February is going to be all about for us bringing those kind of creative ideas, those sort of sparks of ideas, perhaps, to you to see whether or not creating a flash briefing might be something that you want to do. So who am I? Well, I'm Suze Cooper, and I work for the Evening Standard in London creating news for their Google Assistant and which could be heard over in the US. I also work for Vixen Labs, which is a company based in Shoreditch making voice experiences for various brands and businesses says and I have a broadcasting background and that's your background too, isn't it, Peter?

PETER: Absolutely. So I'm a journalist, working for a well known British Broadcasting Company that I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but how you can work it out from the clues I've already given. You. Can you I've written several books about TV and radio presentation. And I first started doing well podcasts, gosh, about seven or eight years ago. And together with flash briefings, I must have done a couple of several several hundred flash briefings and podcasts over the course of the past several years. In fact, just trying to work that out, it must be nearly 2000 of them in total. So all sorts of different audio productions and usually you'll find me making social media videos for the company. And sometimes what I like to say reading out loud on the radio, in other words, news, reading and presentation and things like that. So what is 28 day flash briefing February all about? Well, it's going to be giving you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to building a better flash briefing. We're going to be talking a little bit about the tech and the tips and the tricks from our background in audio production. So yes, from a radio background, but also soon as you've got a background in more kind of music production as well, and putting things together kind of Sonic logos, and also, as you mentioned there a few moments ago, about about skills and the widest skill set of skill writing for Amazon Echo products.

SUZE: Yeah, that's right. So one of the things that I'm really passionate about is creating things that sound really, really great. And so what we're going to be giving you some tips and tricks as to how you can make your flash briefing sound great. You don't have to go out and spend an absolute fortune. And we will certainly be telling you about budget ways to do to do that. But...]]>350alexa,amazon,february,flashbriefing,skills,tech,technology,voice,voicefirst,voicetechcleanfullSuze CooperWATCH ON YOUTUBE - https://youtu.be/F0F4fx_C7f0 Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial **Sign up for our weekly email newsletter, the Friday Flash Briefing Briefing at www.voiceworks.info Full of links and information for Flash Briefing creators and podcasters. Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of Flash Briefing February. My name is Peter Stewart. And together with Susan Cooper, we're going to be presenting a pretty unique course here, right here every single day throughout the course of February. So for the next 28 days, so bear with us in the next couple of minutes, we're going to be telling you all about what's going to be in the course that you'll be able to follow all the way through this fantastic month. I'll introduce myself properly in a few moments time, but first of all, ladies first, here's Suze. Hi Suze. SUZE: I'm Suze Cooper and you may well have already signed up to our voiceworks.info, email sheet that goes out every single week. So you might already be aware that we are both flash briefing creators were both journalists with broadcast backgrounds. And basically we just love creating Flash Briefings. And we're really interested in how people can use Flash Briefings to get their voice out there for various different purposes, whether it be marketing or just getting your message out there. And that's what February is going to be all about for us bringing those kind of creative ideas, those sort of sparks of ideas, perhaps, to you to see whether or not creating a flash briefing might be something that you want to do. So who am I? Well, I'm Suze Cooper, and I work for the Evening Standard in London creating news for their Google Assistant and which could be heard over in the US. I also work for Vixen Labs, which is a company based in Shoreditch making voice experiences for various brands and businesses says and I have a broadcasting background and that's your background too, isn't it, Peter? PETER: Absolutely. So I'm a journalist, working for a well known British Broadcasting Company that I'm not allowed to tell you what it is, but how you can work it out from the clues I've already given. You. Can you I've written several books about TV and radio presentation. And I first started doing well podcasts, gosh, about seven or eight years ago. And together with flash briefings, I must have done a couple of several several hundred flash briefings and podcasts over the course of the past several years. In fact, just trying to work that out, it must be nearly 2000 of them in total. So all sorts of different audio productions and usually you'll find me making social media videos for the company. And sometimes what I like to say reading out loud on the radio, in other words, news, reading and presentation and things like that. So what is 28 day flash briefing February all about? Well, it's going to be giving you the skill set the mindset and the marketing to building a better flash briefing. We're going to be talking a little bit about the tech and the tips and the tricks from our background in audio production. So yes, from a radio background, but also soon as you've got a background in more kind of music production as well, and putting things together kind of Sonic logos, and also, as you mentioned there a few moments ago, about about skills and the widest skill set of skill writing for Amazon Echo products. SUZE: Yeah, that's right. So one of the things that I'm really passionate about is creating things that sound really, really great. And so what we're going to be giving you some tips and tricks as to how you can make your flash briefing sound great. You don't have to go out and spend an absolute fortune. And we will certainly be telling you about budget ways to do to do that. But yeah, it's all about what it sounds like, you know, smart speakers, particularly the Echo Dot which doesn't have any screen added to it. Everybody's experience of using that is via...No