Hello, 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 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.