This week's episode of Automation Unplugged we will make a special announcement about the show from founder and host, Ron Callis.

SEE ALSO: Show #269: Founder of CharBett Strategies Discusses Why AV Manufacturers Need a Marketing Strategy

Transcript

Ron:

Hello, hello, Ron Callis here with another episode, a special episode of Automation Unplugged. This is show 270, and I am recording this on Thursday, July 25th, 2024. And you all should be receiving this in a few days. We'll be releasing this out through all of our normal channels. And there is no special guest today, so it is only yours truly talking to you. My goal here is to spend a few minutes and look back at Automation Unplugged, this podcast, and help you understand where we've been, and then to give you a great idea of where we're going, what our vision is for Automation Unplugged as we move forward. So I'm going to add some graphics here to the screen. So for those of you that are watching, there are some supporting slides. For those of you that are listening, I promise I'll just talk through everything that's on the screen so you don't need to worry about it. But this is a special announcement and the special announcement is going to cover what is going to be the new format of Automation Unplugged moving forward. So where did the show start? Well, you have to go back to April 5th, 2017. In 2016, Facebook had started this new technology of streaming live. And so I knew we at One Firefly wanted to figure out what this was and how to leverage this platform, because it might have a role for our client work. And that led to ultimately getting the camera and the mic and getting the setup and coming up with a format to stream live initially into Facebook. And Paul Starkey was our very first guest. And there was a lot, as you can imagine, if any of you have tried to do a podcast, there's just a lot of logistics involved. Getting guests scheduled, getting all the artwork, getting all the audio editing or video editing, just all the stuff. There's a lot to it, but we're never afraid of doing hard things. And so we said, let's just jump in and figure it out. And well, the rest is history. We've been at the show now for more than seven years. This past April would have been seven years. We've done 269 shows before this show, this special announcement. We've had 32,000 audio podcast downloads. So if you are like me and you like to (or you prefer to) consume your educational content or podcast through audio, I know for me, and for those that are listening, I'm holding up my phone now to the camera and I'm scanning my Apple podcast app with all the many shows that I love to listen to, whether I'm out on a walk or I'm traveling somewhere and listening on the airplane. We have also had over 200,000 video streams. So this is people consuming these interviews via Facebook, via LinkedIn, and now via YouTube. YouTube is the newest addition for us. So all the shows are up there as well. And so pretty cool stats. I know for many years now, I'll walk through a trade show or some event and people will come up to me and say they've listened to the show or they really enjoy learning from our guests. And the guest interviews and that knowledge sharing are the reason we do Automation Unplugged. It's very much about trying to extract useful information, educational, fun information from our guests so that all of you can learn from them as you're going about your business lives and trying to get things done. A few more stats. We've interviewed 151 integrators. We've had seven returning guests. So a few folks have been asked to come back for a follow-up. And our team at One Firefly has spent over 1,600 hours producing this show. So that's 1,600 plus hours. So if you want to think about investment, we are investing that money and that time to produce content that you all would find valuable. And one thing that we desire or want to do moving forward is we want this content to be reliable and consistently landing in your podcast download software if you listen to it via audio, or the stream environments if you like to watch on Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube. We want you to know that content's always going to hit on the same day at the same time. So thus, we are recalibrating how we go about shooting the show. And the new format is that we're going to pre-record our interviews. So rather than trying to coordinate myself and our guests to shoot live, which is always a bit of a logistics challenge, and then hoping that our guests' audio is going to work and their internet is going to work, and that their environment is conducive to a good live stream. Sometimes it's great and sometimes it's challenging. We're going to move to more of a controlled environment. This is also going to enable us to batch produce the output, meaning all of the audio editing, video editing, as well as any artwork for promotion, both before the show release and post-show release. It’s just going to allow us to more effectively and consistently get that work done. It's going to take a bit of a burden off our team and allow them to put out a higher quality product for all of you. And that is the name of the game here. It's not about streaming live for the sake of streaming live. It's about putting out great interviews and content that you all would find valuable. And ideally, we'll find more of an audience with that consistent output of quality content. So the new format, here we go. I'm going to go through those details. The audio show will be released every Wednesday morning. So early in the morning, we're going to release the new show. And the reason we're going to be able to do a weekly show, and I'll get into this in a moment, is we're going to start to mix in different types of content and formats so that we know we always have valuable content. But the audio will be weekly. The video stream will be twice a month. We're going to be bi-monthly, just as we are today. The difference is today, it doesn't always happen every other week. Today, depending on scheduling, mine or the guests, we might do two shows in a week, or we might do the first two weeks of the month. And then the second two weeks of the month, there isn't an interview. We just want to get this on a regular cadence. So every two weeks, there'll be a new show and interview released. So that way you can, if you're looking forward to it, you know exactly when it's going to be coming out. Now, in terms of the content, we're also going to mix up the types of content. So we're going to certainly continue to have guests. We're going to focus on having integrators, but we'll also on occasion have other types of industry players, people from rep firms or manufacturers or consultants or associations. We'll have those folks in, but we're also going to move to two additional types of content. One for the audio format. We are also going to mix in some of our educational webinar content that we produce at One Firefly that we believe our podcast audience would find interesting or valuable. So often we're going deeper into topic areas that are related to One Firefly or Amplify People. So it's either marketing related topics or HR or talent solution related topics. But that content is going to be edited and cut and put out into the audio podcast so that you can consume it. And we're going to always be thinking about that content through the lens. Does it work without visual aids? And would you likely find value in consuming that audio content? Additionally, there's a third type of content, and that is we are going to bring in experts from throughout the organization here at One Firefly to cover, again, a whole portfolio of topics. Many of those topics will be marketing related, but there also will be people and talent solutions tied to our Amplify People business. But those are going to be one-on-one interviews where I'm interviewing a member of our team. And in many cases, we're going to look at case studies and real life applications where there's a problem presented, and then the solution, and then kind of what the data and response from that solution has been. So a bit more tactical, so that you can understand a situation that you might relate to personally or in your business. And you can understand from the experts here at One Firefly how they approached it and how they were ultimately able to help one of our clients. So we are mixing things up. We are stepping a little bit into the land of the uncomfortable because we're changing everything that we've been doing for seven years. But our goal is to relaunch in mid-September. So we're actually going to use the month of August and into CEDIA, we're batching and getting all of our content edited and produced and interviews conducted. And starting mid-September and beyond, we should be on this new sequence. So very excited to bring this update to all of you. Lastly, I just want to close by thanking anyone that's watching this video. You're 10 minutes in now and you've listened to me present this information and perhaps listened to me on many of our past shows. It's been a long, fun journey. I've learned a lot. I've learned so much from our guests and I've thoroughly enjoyed interacting with them and then sharing all of that knowledge and learnings with all of you, our listeners. So on that note, I'm going to sign off. I want to thank you all. We're going to take a little summer hiatus while we retool and hopefully I'll see many of you at CEDIA, and if not, at one of the group events in the fall. Take care, everybody. Be well.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and links from the interview:

• CharBett Strategies LinkedIn Page
• Erica Carroll LinkedIn Page
• CharBett Web Page