Thank you to book launch team plus sample of narration from audiobook

Welcome to Episode 20 of Agile Digital Business.

Recorded on the move with my Insignia Lavalier mic, my iPhone and the BossJock app. You may hear a bit of air handling noise and construction work in the background. I'll be back in our music studio in a future weekend for the recording and editing of the next episode.

I am Vickie Maris, author, speaker and digital marketer focused on helping businesses prepare for the voice platform.

Today, I'm at the CMED Conference - Conference on Management and Executive Development - and wanted to spend a few minutes reflecting on topics in the sessions I've been attending. I just finished speaking on a panel in a concurrent session where I shared background about one of the executive education programs that represent for the university. We had some very fun conversation about relationship marketing. During the Q and A, I recommended Mark Schaefer's new book, Marketing Rebellion: May the Most Human Company Win. I was also excited to learn that a few of the universities represented in the room have podcasts - I know I'm biased, but I'm such a believer in a podcast being a fantastic way to provide content for clients and prospects of your programs.

It's a way for me to share the content with you as well as to get it to stick in my own mind better. As a lifelong learner who loves to teach others, it's important to me that I not let the nuggets of wisdom and insight drift away in to the pages of a notebook or iPad, never to be viewed again.

I often will create a short video for my YouTube channel, LinkedIn profile, Twitter handle or Facebook page to reflect on key takaways, but I also want to share a few takeaways here with you in the podcast.

I have a longer interview scheduled with Ali El-Ammori whom you heard in Episode 19 after he had participated in an executive education program where led a session about leadership in a digital era and the topic of preparing for the voice platform in particular. Another program participant, Bobby Kovey, also spoke with me on the mic. His episode is on the agenda for the next few weeks of the show. Kane Simms, podcast host of VUX World, will be talking with me next week, and I'm getting a conversation scheduled with my colleagues Scot and Susan Westwater who run the agency, Pragmatic Digital. Oh my goodness, I'm so excited about this topic and about all of the interesting guests who have agreed to chat with me on the show!

It's exciting to me to be at this milestone of Episode 20 for the podcast. I started out the show a couple years ago talking about online courses and learning experience design, which was my focus at the university at the time. But after a slight career shift, I put the podcast on hold for about a year as I got my feet on the ground and a new topic of interest began to unfold.

It was when I was putting the marketing plan together to let people know about the audiobook of my latest book, that I started asking questions of our Amazon Alexa about my book, and found out that I needed to learn how to put that information at Alexa's virtual fingertips.

Season 2 of the podcast is my journey of learning about the voice platform and sharing that information with you, so that you can be preparing to meet your customers at their point of inquiry. learn more about how our customers are using their voices first in search.

OK, let me take a few minutes to share with you several of the interesting takeaways from the CMED sessions.

The opening keynote with David Cooperrider was fantastic. David is co-author, along with Diana Whitney, of the book, Appreciative Inquiry. He's an author of other books as well. I mention the Appreciative Inquiry book here as it is one I've used for the foundation of session I've taught on the subject. The concepts have helped me keep a positive focus in the way I interact with colleagues at work, in the podcasting space and students I work with on our farm with the llamas. I was inspired yesterday to re-read the book.

He spoke of the work of Barbara Frederickson, University of North Carolina. In my notes, I captured the following quote, "as people cultivate more hope and joy, we become more intelligent and we get more creative."

Another quote I wrote down is "the more we touch hope, it changes the actual structure of the neuron patterns and can even change bio patterns that [otherwise] lead to heart disease."

He shared statistics about the world population growth and how trends are showing that more are moving in to the middle class group. It's expected that there will by 9.7 billion on the planet by 2050.

In data from Brookings, David told us that 1 person escapes extreme poverty every second; 5 people per second are entering the moddle class; the rich are growing too but at a slower rate of 1 person every 2 seconds.

A quote from David Cooperrider, "Middle class drive demand in a glo...