Hey peeps!! Just following on @JanVanHaver 's post celebrating LetsGuide podcast’s 5th anniversary. Hilariously, his post reminded me that I haven’t posted on Connect about Go Loco turning 5 as well! Oops 
In my defence, all of this happened whilst I was getting ready to travel from UK to Malaysia, being a tour guide for the past 2 weeks to UK friends visiting Singapore/Malaysia (I finally said cheerio to them today), coordinating with @PeteMHW and local businesses in Manchester to bring you an amazing #EuroMeetup2024 (which if you know nothing about, check out this post here!) and also working on the #ExploreJapan and #MoreOfManchester series of Connect posts! Phew!
Anyway, if you’re active on the FB Local Guides community groups, you’ll have seen this already as I posted about it when the video was first published. Like I said, I just never got around to preparing this post. 
So, how did I celebrate Go Loco’s 5th anniversary? Well, with a little help from @MortenCopenhagen , Jan and Peter as my guests, I recorded an episode of Local Guides Panel (this is a project that falls under the Go Loco brand just like Local Guides Kitchen, Quiz Connect and Community Live), which you can view below:
I used my time slot in the Panel group to talk about Go Loco turning 5 whilst Jan talked about LetsGuide, Morten covered his hopes and dreams for Connect and Peter talked about the upcoming EuroMeetup event in June!
As mentioned in the show above, there are some changes to Go Loco! I’ll try and summarise them below:
- Go Loco Guides is the new name (I quietly made the name change a few months back). As it’s now a YouTube channel and video centric, the name podcast didn’t quite fit in. I also use Go Loco as a short form and fun fact, Guides is used as a verb…i.e. Go Loco guides you on how to use Google Maps… that’s the idea behind it anyway!
- Local Guides Panel is going audio friendly. Although they are published on YouTube as videos, from the latest episode onwards, you can listen to them as podcasts (audio only) and not worry about missing out i.e. I will try to ensure we don’t have any image based references or do screenshares etc.
- I’m going to try to publish more content that is directly related to the Local Guides program… simple how-to guides when it comes to using Google Maps and using Connect. The target audience would be those new to Google Maps and new to the program so that the videos will hopefully help them to produce high quality contributions on Maps and also to be active in the Connect forum.
- In the past, I’ve been quite casual in my content strategy since I’m constantly on the move but I’m hoping to be more focused going forward. I will still publish travel related videos since I like sharing the places that I’ve been to and highlighting local businesses, but that will be less now.
Also, some stats for the past 5 years…the channel has published 293 videos, 157 shorts and 10 live streams. And hopefully, I’ll eventually get a hang of video editing and edit faster! Well, a better computer would certainly help speed things up! 
One day…
By the way, LetsGuide podcast and Go Loco Guides just happen to happily coexist with each other, and will continue to do so! Jan does a great job talking about new features, guidelines, program updates and issues, whilst Go Loco tends to be more casual and I generally use the platform to highlight other Local Guides and the community. 
Lastly, I leave you with a link to the very first post announcing Go Loco and you can listen to the podcast here… enjoy! 
It will always be perfect. I hope you will be able to make guiding easier especially for newbie.