Accessibility (continued), Electric Cars, and Facebook Page Updates

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, July 5th, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Hi everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc., and you can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting online at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Cool. You know, we're both American-based and we both celebrated the 4th of July yesterday and our country's independence. Jeff, how was your weather? How was your 4th? How was your holiday?

It was wonderful. I had a group of 8 people over for dinner last night, and the only, the only thing I could use a solution for is figuring out how to keep the the flies a little under control.

But we instead of—

Instead of the yard sprayed for mosquitoes. We have the yard treated for mosquitoes. So that's actually worked really well. But, and we use fans to keep other flying insects down. But apparently we have super strong flies that can fly right into the fan, right into the fan.

Curse, curse you, hurricane winds. I will continue to do what I need to do to be a pest and a bother.

So—

Oh, too funny. Well, we had a, uh, a relatively decent weekend on the lake. It was a little windier than what I would have liked, so I didn't really get out to do any sort of stand-up paddleboarding. Um, If I was adventurous and decided I wanted to fall in the water a couple of times, I probably could have gone out. But on a stand-up paddleboard, you're much better served when it's nice and calm and smooth. So that apparently needs to be an early morning activity because once the wind kicks up and the boat traffic starts, it's just not an enjoyable experience. So it is what it is. So anywho, well, For today's show, I guess housekeeping items. As a reminder, today's show and all shows are recorded. If you've got questions or comments, please feel free to use the chat functionality, but you can get access to all of our recordings at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Last time we were together before the 4th, we talked about web accessibility and ADA compliance, and that actually generated A good number of questions from folks, and I wanted to go through just to make sure. And I know, Jeff, you and I spend a lot of time in the banking space, and that seems to be the biggest area where people have paid attention to it thus far, because at least for us, we've got clients that have received demand letters and questions around accessibility. And one of the questions wanted to know why the banking sector was getting more attention than others. And I guess the first response to that is, I don't know if that's truly the case. I don't know if it's— that's just more apparent for us because we tend to deal more in the banking space and we're not hearing it from other sectors. I do know that education, I do know that service businesses are also receiving these settlement demand letters, but for us, because we deal primarily In the banking and financial services space, we see it more so. So if I said that the banking space is getting hit more than others, that may not be exactly a correct statement. It's just from us here within our WSI business, we're seeing it more often. One of the reasons why I think maybe that may be the case is a lot of the law firms that are sending these demand letters are doing it After or in conjunction with the list that they had created several years ago when ADA compliance became a big issue for ATM machines. And when that hit the industry, a lot of these law firms would go out and they would send demand letters to banks and credit unions who were operating ATMs that did not have Braille keyboards or the headphone jacks to be able to plug in and have audio. So somebody could read back to you the instructions for using the ATM machine. So the law firms that are going after financial institutions, I think, had an easier way of going after banks because they already had a list of banks that they had been, I guess, created and approached a while ago.

Right.

Doesn't mean that any business can't be impacted. And one of the things that hopefully came through as part of the discussion last week was the fact that with Winn-Dixie now being the first business that has really kind of been served judgment from a court down in Florida, the excuse, or I guess the defense, that a lot of businesses have been able to make to say that there's, there's not been a formal judgment in the courts is no longer a valid argument. And that was the argument that I think was, was the basis for the Domino's Pizza incident out of California. And so now that there's been a formal judgment out of Florida as it relates to Winn-Dixie versus an individual, that's, I think, where when I say the winds of change are blowing, I think that's really where The winds of change have blown and all businesses need to start paying attention. So just this morning, actually, I had a conversation with another colleague within the WSI network and we were talking about this and, you know, wanted to say, is this really something that other businesses need to be worrying about and do they need to use a solution? Because I did a demo of the AudioEye platform.

Mm-hmm.

And how that can automatically, through its JavaScript technology, remediate a site and make it accessible. The answer is no, you don't have to use AudioEye. You don't have to use a third-party tool at all, but you need to take a look at the code that's on your website and ensure that individuals with disabilities using assistive technology are able to get access to your site and to be able to consume or read or hear Or somehow get that information in an absence of them being able to consume it like a normally sighted or a normally enabled individual. So I just wanted to, I guess, start off with that kind of blurb. Jeff, I don't know if you've had any other time to think about this ADA issue and if you've had any other questions on that, but I guess—

No.

So I figured that's kind of the big thing that I wanted to at least start with kind of from a public service perspective.

I would just add the comment. It's knowing several people that specifically are sight challenged. And being among the group of people that kind of helps him navigate the world. It is an awfully good thing to do, even if you don't feel compelled to do so for legal reasons.

Yeah.

To really make an effort to make your business available to folks that have challenges in sight and other types of disabilities. Other types of functions that many of us take for granted. Right.

Cool. Okay. Well, not that I've got a real formal agenda today, but one of the things that I think has hopped on my radar screen that I thought would be interesting to discuss today on the show is, and I heard it, we typically watch Good Morning America. I don't know if you are a Today Show or a CBS Morning news guy, but we we watched the Good Morning America on ABC, and and there was a review or I guess a news story about the Tesla Model 3, which Tesla, as you probably well know, is the electronic car company or the electric car company owned by Elon Musk, and the Model 3 is their. Entry into what they purport to be the affordable car market for electric vehicles. And what they're talking about— and the individual that actually did the review had an opportunity to drive one of the Teslas with the driver assist and the autopilot, and she made the statement that she thought it was a game changer. And thought that, at least for her, she would not give consideration to purchasing another vehicle that didn't have that Autopilot capability. Now, that, I believe, was a $5,000 add-on in addition to the advanced navigation system, which was like another $3,000. So it could very easily tack on several thousands of dollars to the $30,000 base price that this kind of entry-level Tesla is bringing. I've not had an opportunity to be in a Tesla other than an Uber, if you can believe that, in Colorado. And I don't think he had, but if he did, he didn't turn it on, the driverless option. But the comment was made that navigating city traffic and getting from point A to B and just the ease of use that automated driving provided her. Was something that she realized she didn't want or didn't need until she experienced it. So I thought we could chat a little bit because I'm interested in your take on this. You know, because I I kind of like to drive. I kind of like the control, although I can tell you at times it would be nice just to sit back and let the car do the work for me. But Any experience with the Tesla? Any friends that have one? Thoughts on the statement around driverless technology really being as commonplace? And, you know, I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Well, I'm a huge advocate of driverless technology. And I'll tell you why specifically. My Prius V, God rest its soul, as the result of someone talking on a cell phone taking the back end of it off of me about a year ago. It had features built into the car to To help it avoid front-end collisions. And I was hit at a pretty high rate of speed. The guy was accelerating when he hit the back of my car. And, you know, even being hit at such a high rate of speed, being pushed toward a vehicle in front of me, the automated systems in that vehicle caused my car to have very, very limited front-end damage. And And the airbags didn't even deploy. I say that tying it in with being an advocate for driverless technology. It's technology that is well-designed, well-tested, and ready for real time, for, for the real world, can do so much more than a driver can do. I mean, a driver just can't be aware of everything that's Around every area of the vehicle. And yeah, I, I find myself pretty often when I'm in city driving becoming concerned because of people tailgating and the things that, that humans just do. And I think driverless technology would Certainly go a long way in reducing the number of accidents as a result of bad driving habits that humans have. I'm kind of interested in hearing your thoughts on that as well.

Well, it— I mean, it ties into— and we've talked quite a bit on artificial intelligence and augmented reality and virtual reality as it relates to, like, mobile devices. And I think what this is starting to do is blur the lines And bringing that technology into something that we all are very accustomed to, which is the automobile. Because you have to have— I'm sure there's some sort of augmentation layer that goes, even if you're not directly able to take advantage or to see it, the car has to make some sort of an augmented layer on top of the driving environment where it understands where the lines are, it understands where pedestrians are. I've read articles where bicycle traffic tends to be a little difficult. for these automated driving cars to be able to understand, because a cyclist is not as predictable maybe as a typical vehicle, although I don't know how that really is the case. But the interesting thing when I start looking at it is I've read some stories where people have started kind of deploying The whole philosophical challenge. And if a driverless car is going down the road and you have an opportunity to either avoid an accident that would cause damage to multiple people, but it would cause you as the driver injury, like a school bus or whatever the case, where, where does the responsibility lie? Within the vehicle, within the technology, within the manufacturer to maximize the preservation of the greatest good. So it would drive you into the tree and save the school bus full of children, or is the responsibility to the driver because it's your vehicle and the company that you bought the vehicle from? Is responsible for you, and so it protects you but then puts the school bus full of children at risk of an injury. And that's, that's really not a technological issue. That's one that we wouldn't ever have to necessarily debate or have a discussion about or worry about litigation Because that's not something that's actually feasible in today's world. And maybe it is to a lesser extent in some of the vehicles that are already out there. But as this becomes more pervasive and more and more individuals are using this type of technology, it'll be interesting to think about the philosophical implications of driverless technology. Beyond just, OK, what does the technology allow us to do versus what should it do? And that's an area that I'm not really seeing a lot of deep discussion around. Maybe I'm not looking in the right spot, but that's where my thought process kind of goes. And maybe I'm just being overly paranoid, but— No, no, no. In an instance, you know, where it's an individual that makes the conscious decision, you know, that can be litigated, it can be debated, but ultimately, you know, there are certain, I guess, expectations or precedents been set in a variety of those areas. And that's just an area that hasn't really been examined. Yet, because I don't think it has to, or it has to have been examined at this point.

Right.

So, so I kind of answered your question with a question. I love it when I do that, precipitate the conversation that way. So, I mean, from a philosophical perspective, is this— I mean, what are the— you know, let's say the gentleman that did rear-end you, I know he was checking his You know, he was checking his text messages, so that obviously was not the case. But if his car made the decision because it recognized your vehicle had 1 occupant and then there was another vehicle that had 6 occupants, and the vehicle made the decision that yours was the least impactful course of action because he lost control or, you know, one of his tires went flat or— Whatever the case is, and you were selected to be the lucky recipient of that rear-end collision, knowing that it would impact 2 individuals as opposed to, you know, 7 or 10 individuals. I mean, how would you take that? And what would, you know, what would your thought be? You're still injured, your car's still toast.

The collision never would have happened if it— if the vehicle had been driving itself, because it would have— the sensors would have recognized traffic was slowing down, appropriate following distances, and things like that.

Yeah.

So, you know, this is the same but different. One of the things that I think doesn't get introduced into the conversation often when we talk about driverless technology for cars is that all of us that fly commercial airlines have been, been being flown for a very, very long time, a significant part of the time. By autopilots. Commercial flights, I've, I've read— I'm not a commercial pilot, but I have read from credible sources that more often than not on commercial flights, they're being run on autopilot as opposed to the people in the cockpit doing the flying.

Yeah, I've heard, uh, maybe takeoff and landing, a couple of the, the critical areas where maybe a human needs to be involved, or Kind of where that happens. So, you know, the flip side to that, like you said, is, is this technology is already very pervasive, or maybe not very, but it's at least out there in use, and we don't really think of it maybe as much, and we know that it works. So it just seems, you know, from an automotive perspective, because that is maybe more directly visible or experienced by an individual. Um, maybe that's gonna get a little bit more attention. I don't know, but it'll be interesting to see how it evolves and, uh, and continues. Um, you know, there's another article that also kind of cropped up right around the same time that talked about— and I've got a buddy of mine that Is an automotive engineer and has already talked to me about some of the reductions in traditional combustion engines in Europe and how here in the Americas we tend to overbuild. I mean, there's no such thing as a V6 or a V8 over in Europe. They're all 2-cylinder, 3-cylinder. They run at much, much higher RPMs. They're much more efficient from a fuel perspective. They're getting rid of diesel altogether in many instances because it doesn't burn clean and it's bad for the environment. But Volvo has kind of come out and I'm sure that they made this announcement similar to when Tesla made its announcement about the release of their Model 3. Volvo's predicting that the gas-only vehicle is going to be dead within just a matter of, you know, 2 or 3 years, that any new vehicle is going to come out and it's going to just always have hybrid technology. You always will have at least some sort of an electronic option where you've got a battery in conjunction with the traditional combustion engine. And You can see that they're kind of going all in on the electric car concept. And, you know, Chevy's got the Bolt, Nissan's got the Leaf. So electric, electric, electric. Charge it with a solar panel on your roof. Everybody's gonna have windmills in their backyard.

So Yeah.

It'll be interesting to see what happens from an automotive perspective within the next 3 to 5 years and what that's going to do. You know, as the owner of a little diesel-driven RV, I don't know how that would become a hybrid. Maybe they'll figure out a way to do that. So, it'll be interesting to watch that evolve if that ended up being the case, but who knows.

I had the Prius for about 4 years, and I rented one for about a year before I ever decided to make the purchase. And I got to say, it's not a luxury car. It's not a comfortable car. I think, you know, if you stepped up to something like a Tesla, it would be a huge difference in comfort and things like that. But it's a car that I always felt good about driving.

Yeah. From a safety perspective or from an environmental or from both? What do you mean by felt good about driving?

Well, I didn't— I honestly didn't think about the safety aspect of it until I needed it. So afterwards, yes, from a safety standpoint, but always from just an environmental standpoint. You know, I put 10 gallons of gas in the car and went 400 miles typically, and I was running on the electric engine in the car the majority of the time when I was not on a highway. So those cars actually run more efficiently and cleaner when you're doing around-town driving. So that's my answer to your question.

Excellent. Well, I've never had an electronic vehicle or even a hybrid. So I don't have, I guess, a lot of experience, although our godson and his girlfriend have 2 Priuses. Priuses? Prii? I don't know what the plural for Prius is. They have 2 Prii. One is the bigger version, which has— because they looked at the Toyota RAV4 and it actually has a little bit more storage capacity than even their Kind of smaller little SUV. And they both swear by them. So, kind of an interesting thing to watch. So, I don't think we'll be in the market for a new vehicle for a while yet. But when that time does come, it'll be interesting to see what sort of impact the hybrid or electronic options play into our— Vehicle purchase decision, so we will see. Any other thoughts on the whole electronic? I'm going to take us in a totally different direction now and chat a little bit about some some Facebook stuff. I'm going to work in a little digital marketing FYI just to kind of bring it back. At least to a WSI business focus, but I didn't want to jump off this topic if there was anything else that you were interested in sharing.

No, let's go ahead and move over to Facebook. Cool.

So one of the things that happened, and Facebook is known for doing things and making updates without necessarily telling you or even releasing it to everybody. And if we take a look at— let me show you. I think it was doing this. So last week I was facilitating a discussion with a bunch of marketers for the Indiana Bankers Association, and we talked a little bit about one of the new functions. There's a couple of things. One is on a business's Facebook page, you have the option to leverage some, I guess, advanced Messenger functionality that provide you with the ability to create autoresponders, proactive notifications, away responder texts. So based off of your hours of operation, if you're not open and somebody tries to originate a Messenger conversation with you as your business, you can have it come back and say, You know, we're not currently open. If this is urgent, please call. And so from a banking perspective, for example, we can, you know, have a phone number that they can report a lost or stolen debit card or 24-hour emergency number. But when we take a look, and you can see that the conversation that I started with the IBA is still present, but you may start noticing when you visit some Facebook pages, you're now getting a proactive message greeting for, for businesses that have enabled that Messenger functionality. Or if you have enabled this Messenger functionality on your business page, you may not realize that it is sending out a proactive notification that says, hey, we're here, we're available to chat. And maybe you want to promote that, maybe you don't, but you at least need to know that that's being presented as an option for people. So if you're noticing that an increasing number of chat requests have started to come in through your Facebook page, there's a reason for that, because Facebook is kind of pushing that out there. I think one of the things that they're trying to do as part of their Messenger functionality is to turn that into a client services kind of a support portal. And with the addition of the different options with autoresponders and reply text and disclaimer notices notifications, giving businesses like a bank or anybody else for that matter that wants to provide some cautionary instructional material to say, you know, don't post confidential account numbers, don't share sensitive information. If this is a— if you need bank balance information, call us at— but the first element is this proactive notification that's showing up. So So I wanted to kind of bring that to everybody's attention. Jeff, I don't know if you've actually seen that or not, but if you visit the Indiana Bankers, you'll notice that that comes up. Now, Lori, who manages the IBA's Facebook page, was in the middle of kind of facilitating a move. The offices are changing locations. So I caught her kind of in between the process. So you can see we— Had a fun little dialogue there that's gone back and forth, but that's one that I know for certain was was presenting a chat engagement when you visited it. So, have you noticed this on any pages that you've taken a peek at, Jeff?

Not that I can recall. Okay. Facebook, as you have. Pointed out, they do tend to throw stuff at you. And the thing I've noticed is when someone comments on a post that I put on my page, the dialog box pops up at the bottom of the screen, which I wish they would give me the option of turning off.

Yeah, well, and that's another element. And, uh, you know, if you've not seen that before, and I don't know if there's A specific threshold where that happens. Had the unfortunate circumstance of a friend of mine was struck and killed by a vehicle last week, and I posted a little note kind of in memory of Michael, and it got a lot of comments. And it seemed like every time I was getting on Facebook, I was getting that proactive notification that. You know, obviously people were sharing their thoughts and condolences, which was much appreciated, but it was popping up whenever there was engagement. So I think the Messenger feature, the notifications for comments— I mean, Facebook looks like it's trying really hard to, I guess, ensure that there's ongoing communication and making it much more of a conversational platform so that you know when people are engaging with you and you kind of bring that in. So one of the other items, and we've since removed it, but I just wanted to draw attention to it, is— and you may have seen when this loaded, this is Heartland Bank. We provide assistance in managing their page as well. And I'll bring over another one that you can actually take a look at, which is Citizens National Bank up in Cheboygan, Michigan. And Citizens is very much more of the traditional where it was probably, I don't know how many months ago. If you recall, the profile image actually sat kind of over the top of your cover photo or your hero photo. And there was some text that showed up that then allowed you to kind of describe your product or service. And that text was over the top of the image, so you needed to be very careful of what that text was over the top of and ensure that the text wasn't on top of something else that was very important, like a branding message. For example, this ask for CASASA, or maybe you were posting some sort of a regulatory requirement, whether it's an FDIC or a housing lender logo. That's where you were going to put it. And then they moved the buttons off of the actual image and dropped them down below so that you could go ahead and you could have a contact us, call now. Learn More. If you were an e-commerce business, you could have Shop Now or Buy Now that would take you to your store, but they kept the actual image itself very clean and uncluttered. They appear to be rolling out some updates, and you'll notice with this one from Heartland Bank, the Contact Us, when the page loaded, had it here, and it's since been moved up into this area. So now it's on top of the page. And you've got the ability to click on this edit, which is different from the change cover. So if we wanted to swap out the COVID photo, we could go ahead and modify that, and that would give us the ability to swap the COVID out. However, the edit now gives us the ability where we can go in, and you can see that we've got 100 characters of information. And when this gets turned on at your business, It will default in some of the basic information. So this kind of went in and said, you know, financial services, banking since 1911. It was, it was the default text that was in the description for Heartland Bank that Facebook just went ahead and dumped directly in here. We've gone through because we don't necessarily want that and made the bank aware of it and said, you know what, if you want to take that off, you can delete it. But now that element is one, and you can see from a management perspective, we're not seeing this information on the Citizens National Bank. So— And it's kind of interesting because, like you said, there was no notification. There was no, hey, page administrator, did you realize we just dumped a bunch of text on your cover photo? It just all of a sudden appeared and we found it and caught notice and shot an update and kind of had some discussion around it. So, so keep an eye on your pages. Moral of the story there, I guess. So thoughts on that, Jeffrey?

No, I— you covered that one thoroughly. No additional thoughts from here. Yep.

So, you know, other than those couple of things, there really wasn't a tremendous amount of additional information that I really needed to get into and to share. You know, one of the things that I am working on getting arranged. We did a webinar presentation during the marketing session that I facilitated for the ABA last week down in Indianapolis, and the company that I had do the presentation was also doing a webinar last Wednesday at the time for Food Webinar Wednesdays when I was doing the ABA discussion with the topic around what's referred to as the dark web. And Experian, which is one of the companies out there that's doing identity theft monitoring very similar to the LifeLock solution, has started specifically promoting their service monitors the dark web, which is kind of this underbelly of the internet where information on you, your credit cards, your Social Security number, any of that information Can be bought and sold by bad guys. It's not something that Google indexes. It's not something that you can go out and actually find. You kind of have to know where you're looking in that area. But I thought that would make for a really interesting conversation. And, and so I'm in the process of actually trying to work that into a Free Webinar Wednesday presentation because I don't know about you, Jeff, but I don't know a whole lot about the dark web. Part of me thinks that that is probably a good thing, not to know a whole lot about the dark web. But maybe something that we all should at least have some ideas about. So we will hopefully be able to bring that to a Free Webinar Wednesday here very shortly.

Sounds good.

Cool. With that, we'll make today's show somewhat of an abbreviated version of Free Webinar Wednesdays. We'll give you an extra 20 minutes back in your day so you can kick off and maybe go for a little walk, or you can hop back over to the Free Webinar Wednesday site if you didn't get an opportunity to listen to last week's show on accessibility. Or you can hop over to Tesla and drop down $1,000 and put your reservation in for a Model 3 and get your name on the list. One of those is going to cost you $1,000. The other ones won't. So I'll let you determine which one you'd like to take advantage of. But yeah, so that about does it. So without further ado, we'll go ahead and we'll wrap today's show. Thanks for joining us, and keep your eyes peeled for future episodes. And hopefully we'll be able to get a dark web webinar here scheduled very shortly. So, but until then, have an awesome week everybody, and we'll see you next week here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Take care.