Ryan Alford [00:00:01] Hey guys, wrapping up a Tuesday afternoon here in G-Vegas, Greenville, South Carolina. I'm at the ad agency. We have several brands. We have DOM360, which is our automotive marketing agency, digitally-focused. While we do a little bit of traditional, primarily we are into digital. We started it about 10 years ago. And then we have Ann Donovan, which is our non-automotive sub-brand, which is digital as well. So we're a digital conglomerate here. But, it's interesting, this little segment I wanted to do and I'm going to title it, practice what you preach. I'm on the floor in a lot of dealerships, we do a lot of automotive business. And you'll see a lot of my content is in the auto space. I am a car guy at heart. I’m a marketer first and a car guy in a close second. I've owned a couple of Pre-Owned dealerships and got the scars to prove it. 

I started this podcast and this thing on anchor. I think it's a Podcast, I don't know all these terminologies.  I'm collecting audio content here on anchor and whether or not it's a podcast or not, because it may or may not ever hit iTunes, I'm not sure the delineation of the terminology, but long story short, I wanted to put it into practice what I'm talking to my clients about, whether that's fast-casual automotive, real estate, we're talking to them about the content that they need to be doing and how they need to be engaging with their customers. 

 So if I'm going to talk the talk, I need to walk the walk. My Instagram and Twitter feed and my LinkedIn profiles are pretty cluttered. So I'm walking it there. But one of the biggest trends in proliferation and something that's just going to change the game that is voice. Back to the future here, radio has been around forever, at least forever in my terms. I was born in 1977. Radio was most certainly around then and so my forever radio has been around.  And so voice has always been a captive medium for customers. I think we're back to that with all the distractions and all of the screens available now. The ambient sound and the lack of friction that's there with engaging with audio content is just untapped. 

I think you've started to see podcasts go mainstream, but you've just started to scratch the surface of how much impact audio is going to have from search. We do a ton of search marketing here at the agency as a Google premier partner and just the impact alone on search and Alexa and the home and how fast you can do things with just your voice. I think there was always this promise. 

I think it's not your voice, but it's in the sound realm of the clapper when it came out and the lights came on, we are at DefCon 27, level who knows what for where this is going, so I want to really get out there with perspectives in a lot of different areas. But this podcast is a representation of, again, putting to practice what I'm talking to my clients in specific about in areas they need to be focused on, and having a voice strategy, whether that's an Alexa strategy or a home strategy, really depends on the product or the service or if it's a content strategy with voice, with being a thought leader. 

I think some of us and a lot of my followers online and others are Gary Vaynerchuk followers, and they think some of this space has been carved out.  It hasn’t. We're just in the early phases. And it's really about vying for attention one way or another. And customers with so many other distractions, that frictionless experience of audio is going to be huge. So I encourage you to take advantage of that and I'll be talking more about this. 

Talk to you guys soon!