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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....

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