Curating Content and Monitoring Your Online Footprint

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, February 22nd, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I'm with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations and help them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the cool stuff we get to do here at WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. This week, my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, is unavailable, and we've taken a couple of weeks off. So I will admit I'm having a little bit of Jeff Simpkins withdrawal, but hopefully he'll be back next week and joining us for the show. But in his absence, I do want to encourage those of you that might be coming out of the community banking or financial services sector, if you're interested in all the cool stuff that Jeff does over at Community Bank Consulting, Inc. You can hop online and visit him at communitybankconsulting.com. So today's session, I've got a couple of things that I just wanted to chat about. I don't know if we'll go the full hour, so you might reclaim half an hour's worth of time in your workday. But I did have a couple of weeks off, a little bit of vacation, and as well as a conference. So So I've actually been at a couple of events within the last couple of weeks. Yesterday, I was down in Indianapolis, Indiana. I serve as the facilitator for their Marketing Directors Forum. We meet 3 times a year, and I get to basically be in a room with, we had close to 30 bank marketing directors from around the state of Indiana, talking about some stuff. And so we'll work a couple of those things in here. And then the week prior to that, actually in Kansas kicking off an operations and technology conference for the Kansas bankers, and we talked a little bit about privacy and confidentiality. There's some things that— and I know I talk a lot about banks because that's kind of the industry that I'm in or the industry that I focus on, but I think any business, it's probably good to have a reminder about privacy and confidentiality. In what you're doing yourself as an individual, what your employees or staff are doing, but then also think about how you can go about sharing maybe some of that information with your customers or prospects. Because I think as any business is coming to realize, if all that you do is talk about your business, your products, your services, You know, that can get a little boring, a little tiresome. And so if you can bring some additional value to the conversation and start talking about some things that people might not necessarily be thinking about, that, that can maybe help differentiate you from the competition a little bit. So that's kind of what is on my plate for today. I'll do my perfunctory housekeeping items here. So those of you that are joining live, welcome. Thank you for sitting in. And if you do have a question, comment, feedback or anything you'd like to share, please feel free to use the chat function for the GoToWebinar system, likely located in your control panel floating on the right-hand side of your computer screen there. So just go ahead and toss that in and I'll keep an eye on that. And today's show and all shows are being recorded, so you'll have full access to them at freeWebinarWednesdays.com. If you are new, and I am looking at the live attendees, it looks like we've got a couple of people that are joining us for the first time. You can certainly hit freewebinarwednesdays.com, and as you kind of scroll through, you'll notice that there's a variety of other posts and other sorts of things that we've got out there that you might be interested in checking out. So feel free to spend some time looking around and share it with a friend or a colleague if you would like to. So the first thing, I didn't put it in the write-up, but I honestly think it's just pretty darn cool. If you haven't caught it yet, and Mark, my colleague here at WSI, actually shared this with me this morning. SpaceX, which is Elon Musk's reusable spaceship that carries satellites into orbit, and who knows, someday might end up carrying us to Mars, successfully completed a round-trip mission and was able to land back on its launch pad. Or I guess this is the landing pad because the launch pad looks a little different. And if you haven't had a chance to check this out, I just wanted to kind of play this to you or for you because I just think it's, it's pretty darn amazing that we live in the times that can do this. So here's the rocket coming down and finds its spot on the landing pad. And just basically sits right down. So, you know, when you start thinking about what's possible, this is, you know, footage taken from a drone that is stationary. So you've got a drone taking the camera pictures using a stabilized, probably some sort of a GoPro or other sorts of, you know, high video, high-res camera. And you've got a rocket ship that just went out into space, delivered some satellites. And now it's basically come back to Earth and allowing us to use it again. And what people had estimated was going to take 10, 20 years' worth of time, I think from soup to nuts, this is all done within a 5-year period. So Elon Musk, as you probably well know, is the gentleman that's also responsible for the Tesla automobile and battery-powered transportation. He's working on developing the Hyperloop. Transportation system that you can see linked over there. So those of you that have children— we don't, and our dogs unfortunately are not going to last longer than us— but those of you that do have children, just imagine what kind of a world might be waiting for them 10, 20, 30 years down the road, given what we're seeing today. So if you haven't had a chance to check this out, certainly go around, take a little peek at YouTube. Um, but it's really pretty cool. Uh, so the first thing that I want to chat a little bit about is, uh, content curation. That's where you're essentially going out and finding content to share out to the rest of the world that can either be used to just share natively. So you find some cool articles, you want to post that up that are related to either your business or your industry or your passion to help reinforce the fact that maybe you're positioning yourself as a well-connected person, a well-read person, or maybe what you're looking to do is find some really cool content that can inspire you to maybe create a blog post or write an article or maybe build a white paper and you use it more as a research tool. And so there's a couple of tools that I'm now using on a pretty regular basis that I just wanted to share with everybody. And if you'd like to take advantage of them, all the better. This is one we covered probably 4 or 5 shows ago when it was still in beta, and I got invited to it, and I believe it's been now released to the wild. So you can go in. It's called Zest. Z-E-S-T. zest.is is the actual URL for it. But the way that Zest works is if you have— and it's essentially a Chrome extension. But if you install it into your Chrome browser, you can see I've got the little Zest extension enabled here. Anytime you open up a brand new tab, what's going to happen is it's going to load Zest. It still gives you access to your kind of default. So normally when you open up a new tab in Chrome, you can hop directly into mail, or you can jump into your calendar, get into Drive, whatever the case is. So you still have full access to that. But now what happens is when you open up a new tab, you can see it automatically configures it as a Zest window. And it basically gives you the ability to kind of see your news. You can kind of change the layout. So if you want to see more or less, gives you the ability to change light or dark. So you can change some configurations around here, but you pick the different tags that you are interested in following. And Zest goes out and it finds content, but you also have the ability— and this is one of the cool things that I like about it— is if you happen to stumble upon an article that you really like, maybe you're browsing around or research or some sort of an industry blog that you typically look at, and you find something that you feel is somewhat newsworthy and might relate to the people that are using this platform, you have the ability to go up here and click on this little suggest a link. And I've reached out to the founder of Zest. And when things slow down for him a little bit, I think we'll be able to get him on the show to talk in a little bit more depth about how this platform works, some of his inspiration around it, maybe some of the things that are gonna happen. But this gives you the ability to suggest a link. You can connect it directly with LinkedIn. You can, you know, so there's a lot of really cool interactivity. I've suggested a couple of articles that have been accepted. And you can see as the community grows, you can actually see who's, suggesting the article, what resource it came from. So, a website's there, and then it gives you a summary. And then there's even a little bit of, you know, collaborative kind of community that shows you how many clicks there are. Almost kind of reminds me of like a Digg instance or something along those lines where you've got kind of group-curated content. But this has been a pretty cool little platform. Has brought to my attention some articles that otherwise maybe would have slipped through the cracks. I've talked about Nuzzle and a couple of others, Flipboard, for example. I still rely on those as well, and those are great, but they're reliant on kind of the articles that I've chosen or the people that I'm following or the platforms that I've selected. The cool part about Zest is, as new people start using the platform and adding content, this one I found kind of helps break me out of the— I don't wanna say mold, but it kind of breaks me out of what I've typically gotten in other areas. Like when I get into my Nuzzle feed, for example, I follow a lot of people in fintech and technology and social media. When there's a cool article that hits, quite often, you know, several people that I'm kind of connected to at Nuzzle are posting the exact same thing. talks about, you know, so-and-so shared this article. Well, you know, 6 other people also shared that exact same article because it was really cool. So it's good to give you an idea of what's kind of gaining in popularity. I don't find as much duplicate content with this platform. So give it a try, see if you can sign up for it. Like I said, I think it did come out of private beta, and if you cross your fingers, hopefully we'll be able to get the founder of Zest on a future show, and he can kind of walk us through a little bit more detail about how it looks. You know, I was part of the beta, and I've seen it go through probably 3 or 4 different incarnations, and still really happy with the progress that I've seen in it. So the first one is Zest. The next one on my list is Q. This was also another item that showed up in that same show where I think it was ultimately a Buffer blog post that talked about some really cool content curation tools. And these are the 2 that have stuck with me, and I've been using them now for a couple of months. So I just want to share my experience. So when I go into Queue, this is actually a platform where you can create— and I'm using the free plan here— you can connect profiles. So you can see I've got my Twitter, my personal Facebook, and my LinkedIn. configured, and I can go in and manage my profile. So if I just walk through the process, you can see I can add one more profile here, but I've chosen not to add my, my WSI Google profile. But when you set up your Queue account, it ties in with Buffer. So I'm using the free version of Buffer, and I'm using the free version of Queue. So there's no cost involved, and the Zest platform is also free. So for those of you out there that are budget conscious, You'll appreciate the price point on those. You can go through and actually search for relevant categories. Now, with your paid plan, if you decide to, you know, spend some money, you can actually pick more than 5. But in my instance, I've gone ahead and just been limited with the 5. And these are things that I follow. Obviously, social media relates directly back to my business, as does SEO and marketing automation. I've selected fintech as a category because I do a lot of work in the banking space, but I'm interested in positioning the banking and the financial knowledge that I'm sharing more along the lines of what's cutting edge. So in financial technology, the fintech category is giving some of that. And then the last item that I've selected is known as life hacks. And so what life hacks is, different productivity tips and tools and other sorts of things that don't necessarily, you know, generate any, I guess, professional reputation for me from a digital marketer perspective or from somebody in the financial services industry. But the people that I engage or I'm interested in influencing likely are interested in figuring out how to do things better, faster, more efficiently, less extensively, basically hacking their life and figuring out a way they can optimize it. And so life hacks produces some pretty interesting content for me. So I've selected life hacks as another one. I don't know exactly how many categories there are. I would say probably close to maybe 100. So there's a lot of different categories that you can select from. And if you decide to use the paid plan, you can certainly go beyond that. So, as I continue on through the setup process, you can see that with the free plan, I'm limited to 2 posts or 2 suggestions per day. If I decided that I wanted to pay for it, I could go all the way up to 6. But right now I'm just doing the 2. So what, what's going to happen is the platform is going to find articles and other sorts of information. And there's a little bit of trust that you have to have in the system because The automation around this is going to take articles that match the categories, and it's going to put that information into your Buffer account. And so if you're not familiar with Buffer, it's a social sharing platform that connects to multiple systems. And you can see when I went through the setup, I've got my Twitter and my Facebook and my LinkedIn configured. So it's going to find articles in those areas, and it's going to automatically toss them into Buffer, and then Buffer is going to automatically schedule them. So that they'll go out and basically populate my social feed. So I keep an eye on it, make sure that it's not posting anything inappropriate. I've picked some pretty innocent yet relevant content categories. So I'm not kind of on the verge of anything risky or anything like that. And then you can kind of go through and you can see, you know, here's what's going to happen. Content from these categories 2 times per day, we're going to go ahead and toss them over into your buffer, and the buffer is then going to take responsibility of sharing that information out. I will tell you, based off of some of the feedback that I've seen, particularly on my LinkedIn profile, LinkedIn will sometimes give you a notification that, hey, your post such and such has now been seen, you know, 50 times. It's now been seen 100 times. These posts tend to get some really good visibility, and I frequently will get these notifications from LinkedIn that these posts that are being sent through the queue system into Buffer and then onto LinkedIn are actually resonating pretty well with my LinkedIn audience. So it's providing some really good information that's there. I don't just leave this as the only source of information, so I make sure that I'm still posting my own content and my own observations of things. But if you're interested in figuring out a way that you can produce some more content, do more updates, share more tweets, do more Facebook statuses, this is going to give you the opportunity to kind of do that and share content that's relevant to you. So if I hop into my Buffer account, here's an example of one where you can see at 5 o'clock, almost 6 o'clock PM Eastern, the Q app is going to actually post this post. And if you go back here, this financial startups are reaching low-income Americans with American— America Saves Week coming up next week here in the States. This is a pretty timely item. And if I wanted to, I could actually hop in and I could edit this once it's in my buffer. So I could go through and I could actually make some changes and tweak it and modify it. So, so if you're looking for a couple of cool ideas that will give you some inspiration, if you decided you didn't want anything to post for you, if you wanted to just use this as inspiration, here's probably not the app for you. This is more of an automated solution. But I'd go back into the Zest, and if you find an article, you know, transformations and brain-busting steps, This kind of goes into the whole— maybe this is more of a life hack optimization item, but you can go through. Here's an ultimate guide to Instagram. So maybe I'm in the process of writing an article related to Instagram or a blog post. You can also do some searching. Oops, hit the caps lock. I-N-S-T-A-G-R-A-M. I'm having problems typing today, but if I wanted to, I could go in and I could actually start doing some proactive searching for Instagram, and that would give me the ability to go ahead and sort some things down. Let's see if it's going to go ahead and do it. So let's do Instagram and see if we got Instagram and Snapchat. And if we do Instagram and Snapchat together, that doesn't work, but if we just do Instagram, So now with Instagram as a keyword, this is going to give me the ability to see just the posts that came through related to Instagram. And now I can kind of do some deeper dives. So I can either put together a series of tweets around that, or I can take these articles, read a little bit more about them, and then use that content to basically inspire me or maybe our content team into writing some articles around this and see what other people are talking about. So, A couple of cool tools. Hope you use them. If you do, let me know what you think. I'll be very curious on your results. The next item that I had in my list of things to talk about was kind of taking a look at your digital footprint, understanding what it is that the internet sees about you or what you, you know, what the internet thinks about you. There is, and it's kind of a funny name, StockScan, but there's a website out there now, a service. As I understand it, a programmer has tapped into the Facebook, I guess the Facebook grid, not breaking any rules, only getting access to the information that you are publicly sharing with the rest of the world. So there's not really a risk that this is going to kind of get shut down or is kind of sneaking behind the scenes or hacked into Facebook. But the way that the system works is you get yourself logged into Facebook because you have to have a Facebook connection in order to use the service because it relies on your Facebook connection to pull your data. But As part of your maybe employee training, because all of us have obviously staff members that may be out there participating in social networking sites. One of the things that sometimes is a challenge when you start getting into privacy and social media policies is, on one hand, as an employer, you may want to encourage, or maybe even think that you can require staff to behave a certain way on social media because you want them to kind of convey a positive image because their image is going to reflect back on you as the employer. Unfortunately, you really can't do that, and you get yourself into some issues as it relates to HR law and privacy and freedom of speech. But what you can do is you can show your employees how they're being perceived online, and if what comes up is okay with them, Then there's really not a whole lot you can do. But if you put kind of some tools in front of them and show them kind of, hey, the internet thinks that you're a partygoing, beer-drinking, you know, spring break junkie because they just graduated from college and that just happens to be all the material that's showing for them on social media. And that's not the persona that they want to kind of project. Then at least they know and they can take a proactive stance at getting that fixed. And so one of the things that that I found just recently was mentioned actually in a podcast I was listening to is this this platform called Stock Scan. I don't think it's as bad as maybe what the name sounds, but if I get logged into Facebook and I go to somebody that I know, I can pull up Jeff and I'm going to talk about him since he's not here. But it's all innocuous because as you can see. Jeff just recently ran one of the little tools that said he's apparently a very sexy, charming, smart, funny Brazilian. So we'll have to maybe make mention of this next week when we've got Jeff live and see what he thinks. But if you go over to somebody that you know, or maybe even pull up your own profile, you can go ahead and grab this information. And then you go into this Stock Scan system and you just essentially Paste their URL in there. Now, I believe you need to keep in mind, I'm seeing this and I'm telling StockScan to look at Jeff's profile as Eric Cook because I'm logged in as Eric Cook. So I'm giving it permission to be able to use my Facebook login as Eric Cook. So because Jeff and I are friends and Jeff probably has content on his Facebook profile that he is sharing with friends, I may see some information that you may not necessarily see if you're not friends with Jeff Simpkins, but you wanted to put in his Facebook/Jeff Simpkins. You can grab anybody's profile and put it in here. And then depending on whether you're connected with them and depending on what their privacy settings are, that's going to kind of drive the results of the information that is provided below. So, as one of Jeff's friends, I've pulled up his profile and I can go in and I can actually see— I can click on everything. For example, I can see what his profile pictures have been. I can see what pictures he's been tagged in that as a friend I have access to. I can see all this other information. So I just kind of give a little scroll down the page so you can get an idea of all the different things that are available here. But if I go into the profile and I just want to take a look at what pictures Jeff has posted or what posts he's made that I have access to, I can click on that. And what it does is it just opens up a new window and it automatically performs the search that you could put in yourself. But this is pulling up Jeff's profile ID and it's doing a search and it's just looking for any stories. So you can see Jeff recently published something out to John wishing him a happy birthday. You can see here's the little post that talks about Jeff's Brazilian passport. Here's a picture of behaviors you don't see from successful people. A few other things. Jeff's always a really good one for some pretty cool quotes from folks as well. So this just kind of gives you an idea. So you can close that tab and you can go back and you can say, well, I wonder if Jeff's got any events that he's going to, any games, any videos. But this is probably a good one you might want to do with family members, with relatives. Kind of spend some time here and see, is there anything that's showing up in any of these posts that maybe the person that's in this URL might not necessarily want to, to have out there? A couple of other sites that oftentimes I'll go to just to see what the internet thinks it knows about you. Is there's a site out there called Klout, and you can sign in with your social media profiles, and this goes out and it takes a look at the type of content that you're sharing, the keywords that you've been talking about, the people that you're connected to, the information that's there. This gives you kind of an example of, hey, Klout thinks, based off of the information that I've shared, that I'm an expert in banking, which is good. It thinks that I'm an expert in consulting, which is good. It's pulled in credit unions because Because that's part of the banking area. So you can get an idea of some of the things that it thinks that I'm an expert in. Far from being a professional cyclist, but I do like to talk a lot about cycling. If this came back and it had something like underwater basket weaving or something that was completely off base, or maybe it's ranking golden retrievers, because if you've been on Free Webinar Wednesdays before, you probably have heard me talk about our 2 golden retrievers. If it starts kind of ranking that, hey, we think that you're an expert in golden retrievers, if I were a dog breeder, that probably would be a bad idea because, you know, that's what I do for a living. But I'm not a dog breeder. And so while I certainly love my dogs and I'm happy to talk about them and share pictures at any given opportunity, If something like Klout or some of the other platforms start kind of seeing that I'm positioning myself at being an expert in golden retrievers, I may want to second-guess my content sharing strategy and say, is that really the persona that I want to convey to the rest of the world? Do I really want everybody that's out there, you know, maybe it's one of those, you know, hold the mirror up. Wow, you really do share a lot of golden retriever stuff. Maybe you need to tone it down a little bit, talk about some of the other things that you actually do for a living. So there's no right or wrong answer here, but the important part is you take some time to take a look and see what the internet thinks it is that you are kind of well known for. There's another platform out here which is called Cred, which is kind of a little bit similar in the sense they've gone through some changes. So I was pulling this up to kind of look at my Cred score. To me, it looks like CRED is kind of moving more in the direction of what About Me has done. And so I'm going to flip back over here and just click on this little link. About Me is a little service that I've used where you can go in and you can actually provide a link to your website. You can provide a little bit of description about who you are, and then this also gives you an opportunity to share all the different social channels that you are a part of. So you can see I just clicked on this. It's recognizing me as kind of a non-registered, non-signed-in user. So this is what the general public is going to see if they go and I include this as part of my Twitter profile because you can click on it and you can quickly get to my Powered by WSI business site. You can see there's some hashtags in here I've included. Talk about where I work. So it's almost a mini version. I don't want to say even a mini version of LinkedIn, but it's like a mini resume version that just gives you a quick and easy summary. And if somebody wants to see all my social channels, they can quickly hop here. It looks to me like Creds is in process of trying to do something similar to that. So I'm really not going to run through this. I think it's one that you can probably take a peek at. This will give you an idea of what the internet thinks you're all about. It gives you a ranking score, which is, which is kind of cool. And then the other thing is, if we go to linkedin.com/sales/ssi for the Social Selling Index, talked about this before as well, but when you start thinking about how the internet is perceiving you either as an expert in certain areas. Um, LinkedIn provides social selling capabilities through premium services that some of you may be using, but even if you're not using their social selling platform, you still have the ability to get your Social Selling Index score. And this is out of a 100 scale, and this will take a look at your LinkedIn profile and give you some insight on where you're maybe doing well and where you might be able to spend a little bit more time if you wanted to get this closer to 100. So when I pull up my LinkedIn social selling score, you can see I'm doing a pretty good job of establishing my professional brand, and I really can't get any better at building relationships. So LinkedIn seems to think I'm doing a pretty good job of building relationships. But when you look at the engagement with insights and using the search functionality to find different people to connect with, if I'm going to improve my score, I may be able to nudge my professional brand a little bit. But I'd be much better off showing LinkedIn that I'm spending time using their search functionality and trying to actually, you know, data mine the LinkedIn network to find people to connect to. To me, that's not exactly the most important thing that I do in LinkedIn. I don't spend a lot of time doing searches for people. I primarily use it as a distribution network and a conversation medium. To establish and retain the relationships that I already have. But if I were really using social selling tools and really interested in growing my network and searching for people and looking for, you know, chief marketing officers that lived in a certain mile radius around a certain area, started doing more of that, that would send a signal out to LinkedIn that I'm doing those things and my score likely would be, you know, bumped up a little bit in the purple area there. If you're already doing that and you're not seeing the results, again, there's no right or wrong answers here, but it's having access to the information that will help you determine if what the internet is seeing you doing or recognizing your actions and if it's making an impact. So if I have been spending a lot of time doing searches and looking at the insights to find out who's looking at my profile and then going out and trying to proactively connect with them, If those 2 areas were areas that I've been spending a little bit of time on and I'm not seeing any movement, I'm going to need to figure out what it is that I'm doing that doesn't seem to be working very well. So if you haven't done your social selling index, probably something you want to check. When you start embracing more of a formal structure, you'll be able to see what your index is going to do kind of over time. So you see mine's remained relatively flat. Maybe dipped a little bit, and admittedly, I probably have not been a very good custodian of my LinkedIn profile as of late with all the travel. But it'll give you some rankings, and it'll show you kind of where you stand as it relates to your industry and some others in your network. So it's kind of cool. And if you want to brag about it, you can go ahead and share your index and create a post around it. Kind of go ahead and do it that way. While I'm on the topic of LinkedIn, the other thing that I want to mention is I've been seeing more and more people talking about the updated look and feel. I've seen some blog posts come out. Some of the premium paid individual members or users of LinkedIn are starting to get their profiles updated. So I thought it would be a good idea to come back and offer reminders. You kind of think about, okay, how are we building our brand and, you know, the reputation for the organization and what sort of message the organization is putting forth. And a lot of what's going to be going into these, these business profile pages are going to have bearing on or be influenced by the pages, uh, or the profiles of the employees. So what I mean by that, uh, is I've got the IBM page up, and this has been in the beta for a while. You can see that It's listed as a company beta. This is ultimately, unless LinkedIn changes it or tweaks it, this is ultimately going to be the profile that we're going to see for businesses kind of moving forward. And if you've got a business page or you've looked at a business page, you can see this is pretty drastic. There's a pretty significant change here. It's a little bit more of a friendly look. You can see we've got some, some headings across the top. It automatically recognizes that I'm logged in and says, well, here's some jobs that you might be interested in. And then this is a new section that's just kind of come around where it's focused on, you know, the life of working at or being part of or using IBM as a business provider. And so it's, it's almost saying taking a more soft kind of cultural approach at, you know, what it's like from an IBM perspective. So as you kind of scroll down, you can see there's still the About Us section, which has been reorganized a little bit. It's a little more user-friendly. You've got the ability— the recent update shows here, so it's pulling some of that information in. And so, you know, quite a bit of information can be included there. Scroll back up just a little bit. Of course, LinkedIn's trying to throw in their own little cross-sell here, trying to get you to use premium and pay them $30 or $40 a month. But over on the right-hand side, you can start seeing a glimpse at some of the data that it's now starting to make available to visitors. based off of information from the employees that have identified themselves as, as part of that organization. So this is just giving you a quick little snapshot of what the employees support. You can jump over into Company Life. That will give you some more information. But individual profiles now provide you with the ability to indicate what causes you believe in, what volunteer projects or volunteer work that you do, What industries you support, those sorts of things. So you can kind of get an idea of how this is starting to feed into the actual corporate profile. And so the, I guess, the message or the reason I'm bringing this out is now is the time to start making sure that your employees are going out into their profiles and providing this information. And we'll click on You know, the, the Grover or the Elmo box here in just a little bit, so you can see how even more of that data is being fed into the corporate profile at the page level. You can see I've got 2 individuals that I'm connected to that are actually part of the IBM family. So if I wanted— No. Oh, that's right, I remember Christoph. I could go ahead and message him directly. Some of their showcase pages, and it's not until you get down You know, about halfway down the page, almost a full page or page and a half screen view where we're jumping in and we're actually seeing the updates from the company. So a big majority of what the page is focused on isn't updates. It isn't, hey, look at us, this is what we're talking about. It's really setting the tone for the organization and kind of sharing some of that. So similar companies always referenced over here. And then you can kind of scroll down and everything loads up. But if we hop over to the life, this is one of the areas where we're now seeing some, some different info that's certainly not present on the existing business pages. So what we discover, IBM, of course they're huge, so they're providing all sorts of different areas. My suspicion is we'll be able to break these down maybe by different departments or different areas or different regions. Most of the folks that we work with probably are not going to have all of that, but it gives you that capability if you need to. Now you can see we've got, you know, the video is up there. You've got some other promotional areas where we talk about working here, what the culture is like. And then as we continue to scroll down, you've got a photo gallery. Which didn't exist on the prior. So you've got the ability to take a look at some pictures, sharing more of the feeling and the culture. You've got some employee perspective testimonial items where you kind of share some of that information. And then this is the element that I referred to earlier. We start getting into some of the demographic and psychographic data of the employees that work at the organization. So you can kind of see based off of the profiles what language they speak. I'm still waiting for Pig Latin to be added as an official language because that's the only other— the only other language that I speak, but it's not an official language, so it doesn't do me a whole lot of good. The causes that employees actually care about, the organizations that they support and volunteer at. And so these are things that, again, if your employees don't have that information updated on their profile, that's not going to flow into your company profile. And so these areas are going to be blank or not shown at all. And, and so getting your staff to go back and just review their profile and make sure that that information is complete and current is certainly an important thing to do. So, so this is kind of a way, very similar to like a clout, but how an organization's perception of who works there and what they do Is really going to be dependent, not necessarily on what the organization is posting and sharing like it is with the clout influencing or being influenced by what you're posting and sharing. But your business is going to be influenced by what your employees have in their profile and have told LinkedIn that they care about. So make sure that you go back and revisit that with your staff. Um, One of the things with regards to kind of the, the main social networking platforms, in case you're not familiar with it, and I do have a blog post over on my website, I believe, but Facebook was one of the first ones to start doing this. Twitter now offers it, as does LinkedIn. I would strongly encourage you, if you don't have what's known as multi-factor or 2-factor authentication turned on, I would strongly encourage you to go and take a look at that and make sure that you at least get that set up or look at setting that up. And, um, yeah, so on my LinkedIn profile, I, I did an update back in December, but I kind of walked through how to protect your LinkedIn account with 2-step authentication. And if you're not familiar with this in the banking industry, we've had this for a while. with a lot of sensitive network systems and banking systems where it's not just a username and a password, you have to have something else. So it's not just who you are and what you know, it's almost what you have as a 3rd factor in that. And so 2-step authentication, it kind of walks through this, but basically if you log into a new computer or you clear your cache and you log back into LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, and a prior authorization, or it's not sure that it's really you, you can set your phone up to be an authenticating device where you'll actually get a text message delivered to your phone that will give you a code that you'll have to plug in. And if you don't have your phone, or if you get one of those messages and you're not trying to log in, now you know somebody's knocking at the door trying to maybe hop in and steal your identity, take over your account. And if you are the manager of your business's LinkedIn page, or your business's Facebook profile, or you've got access to your business's Twitter account, and somebody ends up getting control of your account and then hopping in, they could do a tremendous amount of damage. They could do defacement, they could do reputation, they could just sit and lurk and pay attention to everything that you're posting. They could embed malware. Keystroke loggers, other sorts of malicious, you know, programs. So it's pretty important in today's day and age that you know when your account is trying to be accessed. You can do 2-step authentication even with Gmail now within Google so that if somebody takes over your account— and just last week while I was in Kansas City, or in Topeka actually, I had a good friend of mine who had their Gmail account compromised and was sending email out on their behalf with an attachment that had likely some malware or a virus. And, and, you know, spent probably 45 minutes on the phone with her and her husband walking through how to change their password and, you know, different sorts of things that, that she should do. If they had multi-factor authentication or 2-step authentication enabled on their Gmail account, When somebody got access to that, they would have had to also put in a PIN code. They would have gotten a text message and said, I wonder what's going on. That would quickly prompt them to know that they're going to go in and actually, you know, maybe make a change to their password so that the bad guy goes, goes away. So double-check your accounts if you don't have set up. So we've got some links in here that kind of go off to the different areas. And then I also mentioned a service that I am— it's probably the best $12 a year I ever spent for a little site called LastPass that gives me really easy password management and automatically generates complex scrambled up passwords. And so that's a pretty cool little service. And for a buck a month, it's certainly well worth it. So double-check your accounts, 2-step authentication. The last thing that I'll talk about, because it came up yesterday in our meeting, is wouldn't suggest kind of jumping in and doing anything if you've got customer-related content, because there's certainly some privacy there. But the next time you've got a task that might involve a little bit of research, maybe some, you know, online digital grunt work that, yeah, you could do it, but You maybe say to yourself, I'd be really cool if I just had an assistant that could just go bang this out or enter all this information or just do this research. There's a site out there called Fiverr, and as the name implies, 5, it starts with, you know, can you get people to do things for $5? And the answer is yes. So if you wanted to do like online research, you could go in to Fiverr and you could say, well, you know, maybe I want to go and I've got a list of, you know, 15 competitors that have a website and these are our main competitors in the industry and I would really like to know how many Facebook fans they have, how many tweets they're doing, what their LinkedIn looks like. You can create the structure in like a Google Sheet or even an Excel document and you can kind of build the structure of what you want want. And then you can hop into a site like Fiverr and you can find somebody here. Here's someone that will charge $10, somebody that will charge $5. But you can go in and you can click on these individuals. And it's essentially leveraging the international community, the global economy, if you will. Many of these people are outside of the United States. They have a different economic structure. Some of these individuals, you know, live in countries where $10, $15, $20 is a lot of money. So you can go in, you can see what other people have said. Here's an individual that's willing to do some stuff located in Bangladesh, the languages that she speaks, and any of the feedback that other people that have hired her in the past have said. So if you want to do a little research, what you can do is you can order something, put the $10 in there. You pay the Fiverr system, Fiverr pays her. And, you know, we've actually used this a couple of times for just some generic internet research where it's not anything that I couldn't have done, but it was just a whole lot easier to find somebody for $10 or $15 and, and get some of that data done for you. So if you come across the task or any sort of activity down the road that you're just thinking, boy, it'd be really cool if I had an intern or somebody that could just bang that out for me, hop on over to Fiverr and check it out. Create an account, um, toss a few bucks in there. And, uh, you know, I think the biggest thing that's going to help ensure your success and your happiness is making sure that you kind of structure it so that you give them clear direction. Because realize, while they may speak English, English might not necessarily be their native language. So you just want to be really clear about what it is that you hope to get out of the project and give them good direction, and then just kind of sit back and, you know, within the next 2 or 3 days, you might be really surprised at the type of content that you're going to be able to get back from those folks. So, so a little bit of a life hack for you there, just as a little tip. So I didn't meet the 30-minute deadline. Like I had thought. Apparently a couple of things ended up going a little longer than I anticipated. So I'm not giving you a whole half an hour, but I think I will be able to wrap probably about 10 minutes early unless there's comments or thoughts or questions from the audience. But I think what I'll do is we'll kind of wrap this up and put a bow on it. And hopefully some of the information, you know, that I shared today will be helpful to you. So give it a try. Zest a try. If you've got Buffer, Queue is a really great little tool. You know, hop on out to StockScan and see what it's saying about you or your friends. Check your reputation and what you, you know, your digital footprint there at Klout. Some of those social media things with regards to the pending changes with LinkedIn profiles and multi-factor. And then the next time you've got something that needs to be done and maybe you'd like somebody else to do it for you, give Fiverr a try. So that will conclude this week's episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thank you so much for everybody that joined us live, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week. And I guess any other week that I'm not off traveling or at a conference or with a prior commitment. But we'll, we'll see you back here next week here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, take care. Thank you. Have a great week, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.