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The Benefits of Daily Stand Ups

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Welcome back to 🎙The 4am Report🎙. We have a Mara Svenne back on the show to talk about the benefits of Stand Ups🧍‍♀️🧍️. Not the funny ones (usually).

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Disclaimer: We love funny at c+p digital, so don’t be scared to use a little bit of humour to make Stand Ups fun. Some of our Stand Ups have featured onesies and terrible puns(ies)🤣🤣🤣. 

With our shifting workforce and the likelihood that we’ll continue to be virtual or hybrid for a while still, team Stand Ups (aka short, focused, and productive meetings) are incredibly useful right now.

Let’s face it, it’s so easy to miss emails or forget to respond to something. A Stand Up is a collaboration tool that reduces emails in your inbox, and helps teams work better and more efficiently. We use Stand Ups as a productivity tool for our team at c+p digital.

Mara is an agile coach and facilitator, who works with many software and management leadership teams. We worked with her on a large content audit a few years ago, where she introduced us to the value of virtual daily Stand Ups to help manage the multiple moving pieces of the project. Here’s some of the key benefits of Stand Ups:

Short, sweet, and focused

According to Mara, a Stand Up is a daily 15-minute planning meeting of what’s going to happen and how to help each other. “It’s not a status report, it’s, ‘here’s what I’m working on, I’m making good progress’. ‘Or here’s where I’m struggling’. ‘Or I might need somebody to help me with this, because I don’t understand this area of the work’. ‘Or I’m missing something, can you help me get that information so I can continue’. The idea is that you’re continually checking in with each other to see how the work is going.”

Keeping things moving

“Ideally, you actually stand up. because it forces the time box to be 15 minutes because nobody wants to stand up for an hour. And it gives the energy in the virtual room because you’re all standing up.” As Mara relates, key decision makers and executives are present to move things forward. And if somebody has an idea, you park that for after the stand up. “So right after the stand up, you say, Will and Susan need to meet with Mary, the rest of you can go to finish your work. And you guys stay behind to talk about the question or challenge or ideation in depth.”

Getting your priorities right

“What’s important about today that you want to accomplish today. This is about going through a whole project plan for the next six months and when this is happening.”

Multitasking is a myth. 

“Even women cannot multitask, no matter what they say! Your brain can only do one thing at a time. So, finish that and get to the next most important thing. It’s worth saying, ‘I’ve got two things. I can’t get both done today. What’s the priority?’”

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In this episode you’ll find out why you need to lay the groundwork and establish team norms to build that trust within the team – so that you have each other’s back.
You’ll also learn some key time management tips used in Agile, like Scrum and Combat (for more on Combat listen to Getting Sh!t Done with Mara Svenne). 

Tune in to learn more about how to support your team, build relationships and prevent burnout by making extra time to talk and be there for each other (often before or after the Stand Up). 

And if you need more convincing before you hit play, Mara talks about how focusing on the things that are closest to being done, gets things done. Along with the value of retrospective Stand Ups, so you can “inspect and adapt as you go along”.

Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!

Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!

And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!

The 12 Formats of Podcast Episodes You Should Be Using

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Surprise! The good kind…because we’re talking about podcasting again. Susan has put together a framework for how to come up with endless amounts of episodes and formats to keep things interesting. 12 formats that will help you hook your audience, cut the clutter, and may even make your work a little easier. 

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We’re going to talk about a few and hopefully, get you so curious and eager to hear the rest that you’ll feel like you have no choice but to listen to the podcast! 

  1. First up is strategic teaching. This revamps the tired and bored podcasting format of interviewing a guest or just sharing your thoughts, because you get to showcase your expertise. For example, on The 4AM Report we might share a particular way of operating or a system we use, or even something we know, like audio and how it’s going to impact people’s business.
  2. Then there’s tactical teaching, which is another format that mixes things up a bit because you can provide a bunch of tools or tactics for your listeners to use or download. “I think people really love that, they’re like tell me what to do. Give me the blueprint, and I’ll run with that.”
  3. Another cool way to change up your podcast format is to create an episode arc. This can really make your production more efficient. We could record a 30-minute episode for The 4Am Report, but why not break it up into three parts and create a three-series arc? It’s more digestible, goes deeper over a shorter time span, and gives you a bit of breathing room if you are tight on time and bandwidth. Instead of drowning your audience with information and scaring the sh!t out of them, you’re giving them one piece of info. at a time and letting them run with it.

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This very podcast is a great example of a potential episode arc. We could do a separate podcast on every one of these points. So that’d be a 12-parter! Long live long-winded content✨! 

5 and 4. Another way to really turn the traditional podcast upside down is the podcast cohort, basically getting a panel of experts together to weigh in on something and how this amplifies your audience (we spoke about this here). There’s show & tell which is profiling a case study or use case on your show. This can also feature two or three people talking about something you’ve achieved and how you did it.  

  1. This one is fun because you can draw from your internal team and tactical processes. It’s a way to showcase your team on the inside or a process you use again and again. You could have a  team member come on or a client who uses that process and just beak it up and bring in different perspectives. For example, we did an episode on The 4AM Report where our writers came on to chat about their process and share some tips on how they approach different tasks, like social media or researching long-form copy. 
  2. You’re in touch right? Maybe your business wants to be inclusive or get known as a thought leader. To establish credibility, you can bring together industry analysts or workplace commentators to talk about things that are impacting our times and start making wider social commentary on more than just your business. 
  3. Every week, we newsjack with pride. If you don’t know what this is, read more here. We have Thirsty Thursday, which is a roundup of the hits and misses in the world of marketing, pop culture, entertainment, social injustice and more. We pick our top five to seven favourite stories, and we chat them out on video. But then we also release this as a podcast episode.

So, that’s a sneak peek into newsjacking. For more on why newsjacking needs to be agile and quick, you need to listen to the episode. And you’ll also find out why this helps you jump on the topics that people are searching for (aka more traffic) and can even show you care🤗🤗🤗.

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9-12

Let us summarize points 9-12. Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose, and repurpose again! From combining podcast episodes or repurposing and clustering them together, to rolling out episode highlights or bringing together themes, repurposing can be as easy or involved as you want it to be. You can also repurpose events, like your mastermind / live event or zoom recordings and make these into podcast episodes… And guess what? This is when the podcast flywheel starts to work for you because it just gets easier and easier to get that volume and promote the hell out of yourself👏👏👏. Plus, nobody gets bored with it because they haven’t heard it yet. 

We ♥ that so many people love podcasting. So, let’s all pick it up a notch by 🎧listening to this episode🎧 and learning how to entertain and engage your audience with a bunch of great formats.

Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!

Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!

And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!

What do The View and The 4Am Report have in common? Introducing Podcast Cohorts

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Welcome to The 4AM Report. To start, we’d like to share a quote:

“I’ve always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds and views. A working mother; a professional in her 30s; a young woman just starting out; and then somebody who’s done almost everything and will say almost anything.”

-Barbara Walters

If you haven’t watched The View, which kicked off in the late 90s, each episode started with Barbara reading this. The show, which was revolutionary for its time, featured 5 different women who joined this panel on daytime TV to talk about politics, social justice and share their expertise.

We keep talking about The View because this show is what we’re trying to do with podcasting. We’re replicating the idea of people coming in and sharing different perspectives with a wider audience. And we’re doing it by creating podcast cohorts of five people.  Here’s a sneak peek into the five key reasons you should consider a podcast panel:

  1. More accountability

When you’re in a mastermind or in a cohort, you tend to get things done purely because you don’t want to be the person that shows up and says, ‘I didn’t get it done’. 

  1. Reduced Bandwidth 

The first resistance we hear when it comes to creating a podcast is ‘I don’t have the time to do this’. Especially if you’re working solo. But if you’re working with podcast cohorts, you’re cutting your bandwidth by creating syndicated content. You’re releasing similar material that’s now going out through four or five different feeds, which are going to be cross-linked. It’s going to give you good Google juju. That’s how you can do the same amount of work for an incremental amount of output.

  1. Amplify your network

Creating a podcast cohort is a really meaningful way to amplify your networks, especially when you’re not necessarily doing as much in-person face time on stages and panels. For us, creating a podcast cohort has resulted in a minimum of five times our regular traffic. Then there’s the mastermind side of it, as some of the guests on the panel form relationships and end up working together. It’s also a way to collate information, bringing together different perspectives or expertise so that your audience doesn’t have to sift through five or six podcasts from different specialists to get the information they want. 

  1. Up the entertainment quotient

Just like The View brought women together, a podcast cohort brings people together, often to discuss serious topics, but also to bring some fun and levity to the show. We’re big fans of the entertainment quotient and it’s why we use metaphors like ‘what Barbara Walters did for daytime TV back in the 90s, we want try to do for podcasting in 2021’. And it’s easier to people to get (and resonate with).

  1. Get better together 

‘We are better together’ is a value that came from the pandemic, it became a hashtag and people use it to tell their stories. But when it comes to podcasts, it means that if you use a cohort or a panel you can feed off each other, amplify each other and just create better content than you might flying solo.

If you’re even a little bit intrigued by the above, 🎧listen to the episode for more🎧.

Want to chat more about your marketing concerns (or any of your content!)? Give us a shout at C+P Digital – we would love to help!

Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem or if you would like to suggest a guest on the 4AM Report, let us know.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!

And as always, sweet dreams😴…well, hopefully!

Fostering an online community and doing business on Facebook with Lara Wellman

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⚡New episode alert ⚡ The 4 am Report is back with another episode  📣  

Facebook…🤔 Despite everything you’ve heard, for certain audiences, this is still the place that matters most.  In this episode of our wonderfully concise and informative micro podcast, The 4 am Report, we talk to someone who runs her successful business entirely through Facebook Groups.

Learn how Lara Wellman, certified business coach and owner of  the coaching practice, The Biz Studio, rules the Facebook algorithms.

Season 3 of the The 4 am Report is diving deep into the marketing things that keep business owners and communications departments wide awake at night.  We’re calling the season ‘The Dark Webbing of Marketing.’ Think Black Mirror meets Years and Years meets our middle-of-the-night insomnia.

Here’s an excerpt from the transcript:

Will: Lara, for small business owners looking to make Facebook great again for them, tell us why a group and not just a page. Maybe run down some of the benefits you’ve experienced from using Facebook groups.

Lara: Facebook in general is a really great tool. I like to use Facebook because most people, not all people, but most people are hanging out there in some capacity. Facebook pages are a great tool. I think most businesses should have one, but a group is the place where I get to connect with people. It’s where, as me, a person, I get to know other people. I get to engage with them. I get to build community. I get to feel like I’m having real connection, not just sort of blasting at them. I think that that’s the primary difference with a group is the people in the community have just as much of an opportunity to reach out and share, connect, offer value as I do. Whereas the page is always just me pushing forward. I think that’s the big difference, and that’s why it works so well.

Susan: Yeah, it’s that two way conversation. And beyond two way. It’s not just two dimensional anymore. It’s multidimensional, like you were saying, with people. It’s not just you opening a conversation, it’s other people coming in and asking questions. It’s a crowd sourcing of ideas. I think that community aspect of it is a big part. It’s certainly one of the reasons that I participate in groups is obviously the first layer of perhaps being a member of a group from someone’s perspective is the fact that there’s an insight scoop kind of idea. You do get some special content when you’re a part of groups and that’s certainly worthwhile. 

Then there’s the community aspect of it. But also market research, like often if a group is in some way part of your customer set, it’s useful to see what their pain points are, what people are talking about, what is taking their attention, who are they buying from? That kind of thing is good information that you can get out of these. Talk to us a little bit about what you’re seeing in terms of how people are using groups.

Lara: Well I think lots of people are using it in different ways, and it’s about making sure that you know why you’re using it. You have to have a sense for what it is that you’re trying to create and where you’re trying to take people. For me, my Facebook group is my first place to take them beyond they’ve heard of me to really getting to know me. Then just like you said, there’s like the VIP experience, the extras they get, the way that I get to get information from them is also the market research. They get to help me figure out what videos I’m going to do, what my next training’s going to be, what workshops I’m going to do, all of that kind of stuff. But that also makes them feel like they’re getting a VIP thing because they’re getting to have input in all of this stuff. But at the same time I’m like, “What do you guys actually want to know about?”

Susan: Exactly. I think going back to that two way where you’re benefiting in both ways. As well, you know from a user’s perspective, I often wonder how do you fit all of this in? I know we wanted to talk about that with you a little bit is that when people are using social media, we get asked a lot. It’s like, so how do I do this? How do I fit it all in, and how do I get the conversations and no one’s saying anything to the stuff I posted? We’re like, what are you saying to other people, is often our question. Are you hopping on there and having conversations? Are you only just popping one comment in and then not acknowledging any of the responses or not really even seeing what other people had to say? That’s not a conversation. That’s just a drop. So let’s talk through that a little bit. How do we engage? I mean obviously we’re talking about it from the perspective of a group, but whether group or otherwise, what can engagement bring to the Facebook algorithm?

Lara: There’s a few things there. One is a Facebook group is a lot of work, but the question is, is that worth it for you? So just like a podcast for example, it’s also a fair amount of work. But if that’s the thing that you want to do, if that’s the thing that’s fun for you to create, then maybe that’s the good use of your time. When people ask me about Facebook groups, I’m not like, everybody needs one. Because especially in the beginning – I’ve had mine for over four years now – In the very beginning, I spent so much time in there. I would do weekly group chats. I would be in there every day multiple times a day. I would answer every single comment and question. I was in there full on. I don’t need to be there at the same capacity anymore, but I really did need to nurture the group in a strong way in the beginning so that people felt like it was a place that conversation happened.

I’m not saying that this doesn’t ever work, but you’ll see groups and they just have the same weekly prompts every day all the time. That’s good, but you also need to make sure that people feel like it’s a real place where people are actively connecting.

About Lara

Lara Wellman

Lara is a Certified Business Coach who believes small business owners can make more money, love the work they do, and still have time to enjoy their lives!

Through coaching, group programs, workshops and events, she helps business owners get the clarity they need to take the right action for them and their business. 

Connect:

Website

Facebook

Twitter: @larawellman

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