LinkedIn Events Making a Comeback, Modern Day Marketing, and Productivity Apps

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, November 14th, 2018 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI, 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 all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI online at poweredbywsi.com. I think I mentioned this last week, but if I didn't, the Powered by WSI website is in the process of getting a little bit of a makeover. We're going to kind of refresh the blog area, organize some information a little differently. Our corporate site over in Toronto got a facelift, and we're going to match the branding for consistency. And so we're working on some of that behind the scenes. And look forward to hopefully being able to get that pushed out by the end of the year. So keep your fingers crossed, and when that's ready to roll, we'll be sure to make a formal announcement here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. But we're pretty excited about that. Today's show and all shows are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So feel free to stop by the website and check out today's conversation if you'd like to share it with a friend or a colleague, or maybe browse some of the past shows. On the actual website itself, if you wanted to scroll around a little bit, you'll see there's some categories over here on the left-hand side that you can jump to. And boy, we've been doing this for many, many moons, so there's lots of webinars out there if you'd like to pick around and take a look. Pretty much if there's a topic you're looking for, there's a good chance we've got a webinar for it. And if you are attending today's webinar live, which we still get quite a few live attendees, which is awesome, and you've got a comment, question, or just want to say hey, feel free to use the chat functionality there in your control panel, which is probably hovering on the right side of your screen, and get in touch. Would love to hear from you. And one of the blessings and the curses of this being a live show— the blessing is we get to interact with the audience and it makes kind of fun. The curse is sometimes I'm on a plane or not available and it doesn't happen, or my tongue gets tied and those little missteps and fumbles on my part get recorded for posterity's sake in the recording. But hey, what the heck, that makes us human, right? So today's show, we're gonna chat about a couple Couple of things that have come across my radar screen over the last week, things that you might be interested in checking out and giving a try for yourself, and also kind of explaining a little bit about what's going on. Been talking quite a bit about the concept of video, live video, recorded video, short video, videos being rolled out into practically every platform that's out there. And there are some platforms that are embracing video. There's some platforms that could potentially be penalizing you for video, which we'll talk about with our friends over at Social Media Examiner. But wanted to make sure to put that on your radar screen as well. Before I officially jump into the show today, just wanted to provide a little public service announcement. I know that Free Webinar Wednesdays isn't just bankers. We've got people from all sorts of industries that have subscribed and join us every week. So we certainly appreciate that. But those of you that are of the banker variety, if you are interested in sitting in on a webinar coming up in December, I'm gonna have Sam Kilmer from an organization called Cornerstone Advisors. They're the organization that puts out the blog called the Gonzo Banker. One of my claim to fames is when I was a banker many, many years ago, I subscribed— I've been a subscriber, but I subscribed to the Gonzo Banker newsletter in its infancy. And they had a contest of submit your story as a banker and prove that you're gonzo and we'll send you a Gonzo Banker t-shirt. So I fired up an email and told them about how I was a banker. that liked to mountain bike, and I was into heavy metal, and I actually broke a finger at a Rob Zombie concert in a mosh pit. I know some of you are probably just totally shocked right now hearing me say all that, but that typically was not the behavior that a banker exhibited. And while I didn't put on my concert tour shirt or any of that stuff when I was in the bank, I looked very much like a banker with a suit and tie. Did have a little bit of a Gonzo streak to me, so I did actually get one of the Gonzo t-shirts and wore it enough where it eventually wore out, and I think it turned into a rag, or my wife said, you can't wear this anymore, and pitched it. But Sam's gonna join on the show. We're gonna talk about bank tech, fintech, and really what's going on in the world of banking and technology. And even if you're not a banker, there's probably a good chance that you interact with a bank because most people have bank accounts. And the whole concept of banking technology and financial technology known as fintech is starting to, I guess, weave its way into everybody's life with person-to-person payments and remote deposit check scanning and personal financial management tools and budgeting and all sorts of other things that are going on with the intent of making our banking lives easier. easier and more convenient. So if you are a banker, you might be interested in sitting in on this webinar just to hear what's going on in the competition and how your bank may stack up or may not. And if you're a consumer and you're using banking products and services like loans and deposits and online banking and personal payments, this might be a good, a good one for you to listen to as well. So you can hop over to our website, go to the blog, you'll find this listed here. You can also go to poweredbywsi.com/BES. For Banker Education Series, and that'll take you to the BES page. But here you can go and just click on the register for the webinar link, and that will go ahead and take you right to our GoToMeeting page. You can register, reserve your spot. You can join us on December 13th, 2018 at 2 PM Eastern. We try to get those back on the schedule and do those every single month, but November just— we ran out of time. I'm traveling and— We've got Thanksgiving in there and all sorts of other stuff. So speaking of traveling, I'm joining you today from Hershey, Pennsylvania. I have downed my first of what I suspect will be many Hershey bars. If you follow me on Twitter, you've seen the picture of my Hershey bar posted out there. I am on site for the Pennsylvania Bankers Association. And they're having a lending conference this week, and I got to come out and talk to their loan staff about how to leverage LinkedIn as a tool to be able to connect and engage with small businesses. So anybody that's in the sales arena, and certainly commercial lenders can be seen as a salesperson, figuring out ways that you can connect and engage with your clients and prospects is an important thing. So I've talked a lot about LinkedIn on the show. I think last week I even talked about Vimeo's integration with the paid Vimeo accounts, being able to feed video directly into a business LinkedIn page and how that can provide you with some metrics and some reporting and some information as to how your videos are being watched, the percentage of completion, and, you know, people are interacting or commenting on those. So if you didn't catch that episode, you can go over to Free Webinar Wednesdays and pop in here and you can take a look at some of that information with regards to the Vimeo. But one of the other things that made the news recently that I wanted to draw your attention to is LinkedIn is in the process. Now, this is only available if you live in New York City or in San Francisco. So if you don't live in one of those 2 areas and you don't see LinkedIn events showing up, don't freak out because it's being rolled out gradually. But LinkedIn had a feature called events a few years ago, and it— I don't think I really even used it a whole lot, to be honest with you. I know on Facebook, we're starting to use Facebook events. We've got a couple of private groups. Our cycling team will put together an event when there's, you know, some sort of a race that we want to get people to. Businesses are using events on Facebook, and I think people are becoming a little bit more accustomed to events. And so I think that's probably one of the reasons why LinkedIn has decided to come back and say, hey, maybe we need to give that a little bit of a facelift and consider maybe revisiting this and bringing it back. So here's an article that I found on Mashable that I wanted to share with you. And IRL stands for in real life, so getting out of the virtual world and into the real world. I think the events platform is really intended for the actual physical events that you would go to. So for example, the Pennsylvania Bankers Association, the event that they're doing here in Hershey, Pennsylvania, at some point down the road when this is released. They could publicize that event on LinkedIn and you could join the event and people that are part of that event on LinkedIn can then have conversations with one another. Some of the questions that will be interesting to see how LinkedIn addresses those is if it's a private event and it's for invites only. For example, at the event that I'm at right now, or many conferences. You know, you have to pay a registration fee and that allows you to get access to the event and then you get access to the speakers and the educational material. I don't see where LinkedIn has really talked about the ability to restrict event access and maybe compare it to a registration list. So I would suspect the Pennsylvania bankers would probably only want individuals that are actually registered for the event to be able to participate. In the event that would be publicized through LinkedIn because you've got conversations going on. Although maybe there's an advantage to opening it up so that you could have as many people virtually participate in the event and have conversation and ask questions, but the actual material that's being provided at the event itself, which you pay for as part of your registration process, is restricted to only those that have actually gone through and registered The other question that I had one of my other friends on LinkedIn ask me, who also does a lot of webinars, is it looks like this is really designed to focus on physical events. So when it says the location, it's asking for an actual physical location. So you can see it's got the geo pin there and it's giving you the 100 West Lake Street in Chicago. If I'm doing an event like Free Webinar Wednesdays or the Banker Education Series, or maybe a special LinkedIn or accessibility training webinar, I may want to put the location as the registration link for the GoToWebinar page or my blog post that's promoting the actual event. So you can go there to learn more about it and then submit the registration process. So because we haven't had a chance to play with this yet, I'm not sure how that's gonna support, or maybe there's options in there. But this is something to keep in mind. And as a business, if you are doing events, we're trying to bring people into your place of business. Maybe you're doing an open house, you're doing a lunch and learn, you're doing a 501 after-hours, or you're participating with the local chamber or a business networking function. If you can leverage the digital side of networking through LinkedIn to be able to bring people into either your place of business or a venue or someplace where you can physically get together, then there's a really, I think, powerful combination. And when you bring individuals together, and I'm going to be talking about this in my session tomorrow, one of the tools, I guess the features that I've chatted about here on the show in the past, has been LinkedIn's Find Nearby feature. And so if you're not familiar with that, the Find Nearby functionality provides you the ability in LinkedIn to go to your network and then enable the Find Nearby feature, which broadcasts a beacon-like signal using your phone's proximity and Bluetooth services to anybody that's in a roughly 30 to 40-yard, I think, area around you. And other people that have that also enabled now can find each other. On the Find Nearby functionality. So in, in a past show, I likened that functionality to the show Romper Room that I used to watch when I was a kid growing up, and how at the end of the show the host would look into the magic mirror and she would look out into the television, which of course was all fake, but I didn't know it at the time. And she would say that she would see all these kids' names and she would just rattle off random names. And if you were a kid watching Romper Room, You were just hoping that she would actually see you, sometimes even waving in front of the television, hoping to draw her attention so that she would say, I see Eric, and you'd be all excited because you thought she really saw you. But the reality is, with the Find Nearby functionality, that actually really works. So when I'm at an event, I'll kind of walk people through how to do that process, get everybody to open up their LinkedIn app, turn on Find Nearby, and then you'll literally see the people that are in the room using the app. And then When they show up, if you're already connected with them, you can send them a message and go, hey, it's good to see you here. Or if they're not connected with you yet, you've got the option to go ahead and press the little people with the plus, and that'll send them an invitation. It's important to note that normally when you send invitations to people, it's usually best practice to personalize those invitations. So you send a note to somebody and say, hey, it was great to meet you in Hershey, Pennsylvania, or it was great to meet you at the conference, or I really enjoyed chatting with you at the networking function. last night, would love to keep connected. So you personalize it. When you do it through the Find Nearby functionality, you don't have that capability. So you just punch the button and it sends a generic, I would like to connect with you on LinkedIn. And, but that's okay because it's kind of like a speed dating round. So that's one of probably the only ways that I think the Find Nearby functionality really works is if you're at an event, you're physically together with a bunch of people, and everybody is encouraged to turn that app on. So almost like, hey, for the next 5 minutes, we're going to make sure we all get connected here and we're going to, you know, open up the Find Nearby feature and make sure that we're all connected on LinkedIn. And the event app, to go back to why I kind of got on my Find Nearby tangent, but the event app that— the event functionality that's coming out of LinkedIn is going to help make that a little bit more possible where people are going to actually come together and be face-to-face. So hop over to Mashable, take a look at it. I think LinkedIn's got some additional information on its— and it's just checking the— look like I had a question, but I don't. So sorry for the distraction there, folks. But LinkedIn probably has a couple of articles over on its site as well. But this is one of the first ones that I caught that actually broke the news. So there's your LinkedIn little nugget of goodness for the day. Found a couple of other articles that I thought might be kind of interesting just to chat a little bit about. So this one isn't the, the actual article that I saw, although there was an article that posted that referenced this that ended up getting me here. But this infographic kind of intrigued me, talking about marketing in a modern-day society. And it's relatively new, so June of '18, but it got circulated and came across my social channel. So if we scroll down and just kind of take a look at this, it talks about, you know, how much do companies invest in marketing, looking at growth trends, some interesting statistics on video, which is You know, we're gonna kind of wrap up talking a little bit about video, but certainly it's, it's no surprise that video is, is growing like a weed, being used more and more on mobile devices. The number of marketers that plan to add a, add a YouTube content strategy over the next year is increasing significantly, and we'll talk about why putting long-form video on Facebook might not be the best idea and, and how YouTube is probably a better platform for that. So there's a little teaser there. You can stick around, figure out what the heck I'm talking about there. So video certainly is a big deal. Then it talks a little bit about social media. So adding social media being part of an important mix of the organization There's also talking about kind of integrating social media and getting your employees. And then we get into content marketing where I did a webinar with Chris Nichols from CenterState Bank. Again, a little banking related, but it was all about content and different ideas of where you can gather content and share it and come up with it from an SEO perspective. So search engine optimization, from a brand credibility perspective. We're seeing a lot more businesses now paying attention at a content strategy and realizing that, okay, we may not necessarily be the best bloggers, but we've got a story to tell. And there are a number of places online that you can get creative writers to help you put your story together, whether that's through blog posts, whether that's through infographics like what NCC has done here. Whether that's through video, I mean, you name it, podcasts and audio, but basically figuring out a way that you can either gather your story, your message, life lessons, examples, education, whatever you want to call it, and put that into some sort of a content strategy and publish that information out. So HubSpot is, is very well cited in this section because they're kind of content experts, but talking about, you know, businesses that are publishing blog traffic or blogs on a regular basis and they get more traffic. Just basically making sure that you're putting information out there for people to read, to listen to, to watch that helps teach and educate, not just sell, because people don't like to be sold to. People like to be educated and informed. Let me make the decision that you are as smart as you think you are. And then when I achieve that decision on my own, it's going to help your business because now I've basically came to that conclusion based off of the information that you've shared instead of you basically trying to convince me of that through all of your sales material. And we get into search engine optimization, which is essentially evolving into more of a web presence optimization, really. Page speed is very critical. Content is very critical. And when I say web presence optimization, it's not always going to be your website that's going to show up first in the Google search results. And I say Google because they occupy a vast majority of search traffic. It's not to say that others don't matter, but it is the world in which we live. But thinking about other areas where you can actually dominate your web presence. So putting great information out into LinkedIn or sharing relevant tweets or putting stuff in, in other areas so that when somebody goes into Google and they do a search for you, it might be your YouTube video or a LinkedIn profile for one of your employees that shows up. Your, your, your business's website might still be there. It might be further down on the page. So it's not just, hey, we want our website to be number one. It's Can we get product information? Can we get social media information? Can we get testimonials and reviews and other sorts of things? So the web presence is being optimized, not just the actual website itself. Then we get into email marketing, and despite what everybody says about email being a pain in their you know what, and I'll bear you, or I guess I'll save you the burden of having to look at my inbox. And how many thousands of messages I have in my inbox. But email still is very much a viable option for you to connect and engage with your customers if you do it correctly. And when I say do it correctly, I'm really talking about making sure that you are doing things like list segmentation, making sure that you're providing opt-out capability. But when somebody goes to opt out, rather than it being an all-or-one-shot, Why not provide them the ability to go to a profile page? Maybe they just don't want to hear about that particular topic, but your business might do 4 or 5 different things, and one of those 4 or 5 different things might be very much of interest to that individual. But if all that you do is give them the option to either get the email or opt out of the email, you could potentially be losing some valuable connections. Because even though the one product or service or feature or topic that, that they're interested in, you may not talk a lot about, when you do, that's going to be very targeted and very relevant to those individuals. So making sure that you've got the capability of targeting and segmenting your folks. So personalization is also very important. So kind of get an idea, open rates for emails, if it's personalized, it's going to be a little bit higher. So, you know, even putting the person's name in the subject, if you can even do that, and making sure that that information gets to them and they see that it's relevant. We've seen actually a good deal of success with email campaigns that really don't look like promotions or offers. They're low graphics, if anything, maybe just pure text. And they are really designed to look just like an email that would come right out of your inbox. And, you know, like you just hopped into Gmail or Outlook or whatever email platform you're using and just type something up. So it just seems more like a one-on-one connection, even though it's really a one-to-many. We get into lead generation strategies and how you're actually driving leads back to your business, making sure When you do that, whether that's through advertising, content, SEO, social media, bringing them back into a landing page, making sure you can collect their information, follow up with them quickly. Then it kind of dives into some of the advertising-related areas to generate awareness. So pay-per-click advertising, you can see a lot of people are starting to spend money over on Facebook. Google still is up there considerably. Almost half of the people that were part of this survey are using Google Ads. And then people are starting to break in and do a little bit more on LinkedIn for more business-to-business technology. And then we get into some marketing tech and then spending by the industries. So just wanted to point that out. So some interesting things here. You can go to nchomelearning.co.uk. And every once in a while we run across some interesting information that comes from on the other side of the pond. So they do a good job of gathering some great data. And as long as you can get past maybe them spelling some words a little differently than what we're used to here in the United States, like, oh, organization and behavior and a couple other things, but I've got a very close friend that we do a lot of development work with who is UK-based, and I tease him all the time, and he teases me right back. So it's a mutual love there. The next article that I found, and this was pretty exciting because one of the very first things that it actually brought out was a project management platform that we've been using for a number of years. I've been telling a lot of my colleagues and customers about it. Our customers are used to it because the majority of them, we actually set them up directly into the project management platform. It's called Asana, and they work with it. And we've had a couple of our clients take their Asana platform because you can use it internally for free. Yes, you heard me correct. And you can use it internally for free to be able to do some pretty cool things. And it's only if you decide to open it up outside of your organization, like what we've done here, within our WSI office that you actually have to pay for the service. But here's some productivity apps for 2018. And if you're looking at ways to get better organized and be more productive, first off, realize— and this has taken me a while to accept— you cannot get more time in the day. Time management. And a good friend of mine who unfortunately hasn't been on the show for a really long time, but any of our long-term Free Webinar Wednesday folks may remember Bea Fields. But she, she used to say there's no such thing as time management. You can't manage time because it's unmanageable. You have so many hours in the day, so many minutes in the hour, so many seconds in the minute, and there's really no managing that. You basically accept the fact and You manage your behavior, but you can't manage time. So if you're looking to squeeze more juice out of that time orange and be more productive with the time that you're given, productivity apps might actually be a good way for you to bring some electronification to your world and help you simplify some things. So I'm going to just scroll through here, pick out some of the ones that we've worked with in the past. But again, I can't say enough good things about Asana. This is one of the platforms that we've been very, very impressed with. They've rolled out calendar, Gantt charting, different labels that you can use so you can, you know, add a priority label or who's responsible. They've got a really good app that works well if you're on the road or out of the office and you need to create a task or modify some stuff. They've recently introduced a little sidebar functionality. Our office is a G Suite Google shop, so we all use the corporate version of Gmail. And if I get an email, I can click on a little Asana button on the right-hand side of my Gmail screen that will allow me to create a task in Asana, take all the content from the email and put it in the task, assign it to somebody internal, give it a due date, put it on a project. So it has really made things a pretty simple process for us. So asana.com is actually created by a couple of guys that were part of Facebook back in the day, and they continue to invest and innovate, and it's been super good. So don't really have any experience with Teams. We did play with Podio or Podio a while back, and I do know a handful of folks that seem to like that platform. I've not gotten on the Slack train. I know a lot of people really like Slack. I think it's good for larger organizations that have really deep teams and cross-functional behavior. You know, its goal is really to eliminate the whole email process from conversations and turn your business communication really into more of a messaging chat thread. Than necessarily emails back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The Asana platform has a similar chat functionality. I don't know as if it's really an apples-to-apples comparison to that, but I do know that there's a lot of pretty large organizations— doesn't mean that you have to be a large organization, but I do know that there's a lot of organizations that really enjoy a Slack type of experience and to be able to communicate and, you know, keep anything that's internal out of email. So the only emails that you're actually getting are ones from customers and prospects. All of your internal conversations go on. Teamwork is one that also seems to be a favorite of a lot of WSI consultants. I've got a good friend of mine that runs a WSI office over in Dublin, and teamwork is actually Ireland's based organization. So he knows some of the folks there that helped create this program. And this is also, I think, a pretty powerful program. Because we're so vested into Asana, I've really not played around with Teamwork much, but I do know that this is one. And the good news is all of these platforms that I'm talking about have a free trial account that you can use. You can get in and kick the tires. And then Trello is another one that a lot of our social media training information We've got a master LinkedIn trainer here within WSI that uses Trello boards, and the Asana platform can be organized in a board layout as well. But as you look at this screenshot from Trello, you can see you've got different boards. So before the first day, on the first day, and when it's done. So, you know, when they filled out their paperwork and that's taken care of, What you do in a board-based layout like Trello is you just basically grab that fill-in paperwork item and you drag it over to the done and drop it, and that allows you to just basically move those cards. So before the first day, you want those all to be basically done. So when they get their forms all signed, boom, drag it to done. When they get the enrollment process done, when you set them up with the support team, drag them over to the done. So what you want is these boards basically are empty when they're completed and done gets populated by everything. So that's kind of a more of a visual slash interactive way of organizing things. And then Wrike is another platform that we're pretty familiar with. My friend and colleague from the UK is a big Wrike shop and he really loves it, and they've gone through a couple of iterations and upgrades since We've partnered with him. So we'll typically interact with Wrike and Asana. There's also Basecamp out there, which I don't believe got mentioned here, but that's another platform that a lot of consultants will use. And then I'll be honest, they don't have a whole lot of experience with Zoho Projects, but again, you can probably sign up for a free trial and check that out. Then you get into some of the productivity apps for creation. So I've not really played with this ABBYY FineReader, so I can't really comment on that. Although we do do a lot with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. We've started actually building slide presentations in Google Slides. It's essentially a free cloud-based version of the Microsoft suite, probably not as sophisticated as a full-blown Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but it is very, very close and does some pretty cool things. Grammarly is a tool that I used to use religiously. I, I loved it, and until it got to the point where I was able to determine it was actually causing me and my computer to slow down and have some performance issues. I don't know if it was conflicting with another plugin or extension. That could have very well been the case, and I just didn't take enough time to actually troubleshoot it. So I've unfortunately disabled Grammarly and would love to go back to it. It is a tool that I found very helpful with regards to spelling and grammar and punctuation, but it is one that I unfortunately am no longer using. So Lucidchart is another, I guess, visual organization platform that allows you to kind of design things. You can see they've got a couple of examples here with a Venn diagram and an office floor plan. You can do flowcharts and other sorts of things to help visually explain what's going on. Of course, good old-fashioned Microsoft Office had to make their appearance. And then you've got the, the Apple versions of Pages, which was Word, Numbers, which is Excel, and Keynote, which is PowerPoint. So those are available. And if you're an Apple user, you can go ahead and just download those directly from the App Store. Prezi is an interesting presentation tool. This is very much an interactive experience. And if you've ever played with Prezi, you know that there's a lot to it, and you can, you can do some stuff that's really cool. You can also do some stuff that looks just really stupid. So I'll be honest, you just got to be really careful when you're using Prezi. But if you've ever seen somebody do a Prezi presentation and they really are on their game, it's a way more enjoyable experience to engage And take in a presentation than just the good old-fashioned PowerPoint. Click here for slide, click here for slide. So I would strongly encourage you to check that out. Network diagrams. We used to use Visio back in the day when I was at the bank designing networks and organizing things. But the SmartDraw Cloud is a web-based cloud solution, gives you the ability to do a lot of what the Visio platform did. Kind of a cool way of doing that. This one's kind of interesting, distraction-free writing. So it gives you almost like a DOS prompt. This kind of brings back my early days of computer experience. So I don't know if that's necessarily a good or a bad thing. I kind of like knowing that there's a mouse. right there instead of this makes me feel like I gotta do a dir command to do a directory or whatnot. FreshBooks from an accounting perspective. We are a QuickBooks shop. We're not using the web platform though. We're still using the actual PC installed version, but FreshBooks and a couple of other billing platforms, Harvest for time tracking. Being able to manage and track time. Toggl is a great tool to keep track of time as well. Maybe not necessarily for larger organizations, but from a freelancer perspective, or if there's some things that you want to track on your own. And then getting into some of the mobile apps. So Any.do kind of task management process, Easily.do, A lot of these look like they've got some iOS functionality. So Microsoft Outlook, I've actually heard a lot of people have been very impressed with using the Microsoft Outlook app even if they are a Gmail user. I've not switched myself. I still use the native Gmail functionality, but I've heard a lot of good things about the Outlook app. Pushbullet is kind of a nifty way of being able to interact with your mobile device and desktop and kind of cross-device sharing whether you're on an Android or an iOS device. I love— and I don't use the Swift Keyboard itself, but being able to actually kind of move my finger and use the Google Keyboard to be able to type and enter in content, particularly with one hand, makes it super duper easy, which is pretty cool. I've heard good things about Todoist, have not used it myself. Um, and then one of the others that I use on a pretty regular basis is called Doodle. Other than the fact that it kind of sounds weird when you tell somebody to doodle you when you're talking to them on the phone, Doodle is an online calendaring and scheduling service that you can use. So if anybody's interested in ever scheduling an appointment with me, Um, I just say go to doodle.com/ericcook, and that allows you to see my calendar availability. Makes it really easy because oftentimes if I'm trying to schedule an appointment with somebody within a bank, for example, I might be talking to the marketing director, but she might want the head of IT, might want the compliance person, maybe the head of retail, maybe business banking. So she's got access to all their calendars, but I certainly don't. So I can just provide her with my Doodle link. She can pull that up, get access to my calendar, and then while she coordinates with everybody internal, she very easily can see what dates I'm available. So if everybody's available on Wednesday and I've got some time on Wednesday, she can pick the time, send me the invitation directly through the Doodle platform. I can accept it. It goes directly into my calendar. Super duper easy. I'm also a big fan of Evernote. You'll notice I've got the little Evernote clipper here added. So for example, If I thought this article is really awesome, which I think that it is, and I wanted to save it for future reference, I can go in and using my Evernote, which is essentially a notebook that I can synchronize with all of my devices. It gives me a place to type. A lot of times if I go to a conference or event, I might fire up Evernote and actually take notes and go directly into Evernote typing. I've talked about the Everlast Rocketbook that I use, which is a water-erasable pen and, and, and paper solution that gives you the ability to scan and save documents directly into Evernote. So there's a lot of things that I'm doing in Evernote, but if I found that this article was one that I wanted to remember, I can click on this little Evernote Web Clipper and it gives me a couple of different ways. I can either grab the entire article, or what I like to do is just get the simplified article. Where it scales everything down, takes all the advertisements out, makes it really nice if I wanted to PDF this or print it off. And then I can go in, you can see I, I've got a variety of notebooks that I can add it to, and then I can just basically add some tags. So I think this would be appropriate for apps, I would say, or productivity tools. Project. And if I don't have— so project management, I can add that. So you can see I can add a bunch of things, and then I can even add a remark here. So talked about this on the 11/14/18 Free Webinar Wednesday show. Cool article. And all this information that I save is also available to me. So I could even add Free Webinar Wednesdays as a tag. But if I said there was something that I did on the 14th, or if I wanted to just do a search for cool article, I could go into my Evernote and actually do a search for that and it would save it for me. I'm saving it now, but it would actually do a search for that and it would find it for me. With the paid version, you can synchronize and have offline access. So if you're hopping on a plane or you're going to be someplace where you don't have internet connectivity to get to your account, you'll be able to push all that stuff down. OneNote is Microsoft's version of that, but not really being full-blown Microsoft, Evernote was a better solution. So now you can see this is good, and then it'll even give you some other related notes that you've saved in the past. So, you know, there's a 20-hour work week and how to be more productive. So you can go in and kind of refresh yourself on some of those. You can set a reminder. I could even send a link directly to that cleaned-out version of this article and send it to somebody so they could get direct access to it as well. Pocket's a cool little app where you can use it. So if you're online reading some stuff, you can push it to your pocket, and then this gives you a reader to check things out down the road. SaneBox, this is probably something that I should take a look at given the magnitude and size of my email accounts. If I can get from 13,000 down to 5, that would just be awesome. Don't know if that actually can really happen in my world, but you never know. And then let's just see if there's any others. So Dropbox and Google Drive are ones that we use. We've got paid accounts for both of those, make it really nice to be able to store documents, share things. The Microsoft OneDrive comes with all the Microsoft products and services. Hootsuite's a pretty cool platform if you've not heard of that. Hootsuite and Buffer both give you the ability to share content and distribute information across multiple platforms. So you can post directly to a Facebook page. You can post directly to a LinkedIn page or a profile, to a Twitter account. So they give you really nice ways to, to share as well as consume that information. Hootsuite gives you almost your own little private social media dashboard, so you can log in and create different sorts of columns to be able to review information and see, you know, what's being talked about. So Mention is kind of a monitoring tool that allows you to put in different keywords and search terms. It's similar to Google Alerts, but much, much more powerful. And you can see, you know, there's a cost associated with that. Sprout Social is another similar tool to like a Hootsuite, a little bit more powerful with regards to app scheduling. It's got some image editing capabilities. And then let's see if there's any others on here that I want to particularly mention. Snagit, we use that on almost a daily basis from TechSmith. So this is a great way to— it's kind of the service that replaced Jing. Back in the day, we used to be a big fan of the Jing platform. Snagit's kind of taken care of that. But this gives you the ability to grab screenshots, you can grab video, be able to share that information, edit that information. So I think we're getting into— let's see, Rev is one that I'll also mention. Last week I talked about web accessibility being a pretty big deal, and we're going to talk about video here just in a second and wrap things up. If you're doing video, you really need to make sure that the video is made accessible. So for a buck a minute, you can send your video to the folks at Rev.com and they'll actually do the transcripts for you and give you the file that you can add to YouTube or to Vimeo or to whatever platform you're using, and it'll give you the transcription and the kind of the talk-along also gives you a pretty easy way if you wanted to have a transcription of something that you've done. This is probably something I should eat my own dog food here and start doing that on a more regular basis. But Rev is a pretty cool tool that we've used for a lot of our customers. I'm seeing a lot of references to foreign languages. I think when I retire, that's one of the things I really want to do is to be able to dive into a foreign language and do some traveling. It'd be kind of cool. I've talked about If This Then That in past Free Webinar Wednesday shows. This is a great tool that allows you to create little snippets, and I think they call them recipes now, or I can't remember exactly what they call them, but you can create different things that will automate tasks for you. One of the ones that I like is I have it set up so if I share anything on Instagram, it automatically shares that photo out to my Twitter account. And while you might say, well, you know, you can just flip the switch for Twitter and Instagram will push it to your Twitter account, not really, because if you've done that on Instagram and you've taken a really cool photo, the only thing that that does is it sends a tweet with a link to the Instagram post. But the people that are following you on Twitter don't have the ability to actually see the image. Whereas if you create an If This Then That process, what it does is it actually takes the native photo out of your Instagram and it attaches it to the tweet and sends it along with your tweet so that those people that are on Twitter don't have to click on an Instagram link to get to your photo. They can see the actual photo, which is— you can Probably suspect is way better because people can actually see the photo without having to click, and very few people actually click on those links to go back to your Instagram. They want to see it right there in Twitter. So that's one of the, one of the cool little platforms that you can use as part of IFTTT, and there's a lot of other ones that you can do there. So I'm gonna kind of look just last if there's anything else. Yeah, that looks like that's about it. So if there's any tools out there that you like to use, by all means feel free to, you know, post up and share. I'd love to check those out. I'm always looking for tools and little gadgets to add to my phone and my desktop. And you can see I've got quite a few extensions here added to my Chrome browser. So the last thing that I want to do is just a brief moment talking about video and Social Media Examiner. Social Media Examiner is also the creator of the Social Media Marketing World. I got to go to Social Media Marketing World last year for the first time, and it was awesome. Bought my ticket there for, for 2019. So Ellie from our office and myself, as well as a handful of other WSI consultants and even our corporate marketing director from Toronto, is going to be joining us in San Diego for Social Media Marketing World 2019. So we're pretty excited about getting out there. But Social Media Examiner has a really good stream of content that they provide, and there's a couple of podcasts that I'll also catch on YouTube, and I'll watch videos when I'm riding my bike in the basement maybe. But a couple, 3 or 4 weeks ago, Michael Stelzner, the founder of Social Media Examiner, talked about his somewhat difficult, but I think good decision or right decision, to take their long-form video off of Facebook. And one of the things Facebook made the announcement of earlier this year is changing its algorithm to reward businesses that are doing a good job of bringing people together and building relationships and fostering conversation and connections between people, not necessarily getting somebody to show up and just sit there and watch a video on your page, because that's really not building interaction, it's not building relationships. I heard somebody give the analogy of it used to be inviting everybody to an auditorium and watching you on stage present or perform. Now what you're really trying to do, according to Facebook, is bring a bunch of people into a coffee shop in a smaller setting, and you are the catalyst to getting all of those people to talk to one another. And if you do that really well, Facebook will reward you by giving you greater visibility in the newsfeed and share your information. And when they started looking at their long-term form video. In particular, Michael Stelzner started last year a long-form video series that's pretty popular on YouTube called The Journey, where he documented their goal of being the world's largest social media conference and really went behind the scenes and, you know, was very transparent in their successes and their failures. I strongly suggest you take a look at it because I think it's a, it's a real lesson in video storytelling, and on LinkedIn it was very popular. They were posting those very same videos because he started the Journey Season 2 out to their Facebook, and a vast majority of the followers on their Facebook page were never seeing that video content. And in fact, the metrics that they were pulling out of— and I mean, they've got hundreds of thousands of followers— the metrics that they were finding in their Facebook Insights were causing other issues with other posts being seen. Because what was happening is Facebook was measuring the effectiveness of Social Media Examiner's page based off of its interaction from all of its different types of content. Because long-form content was just that— long-form. It was seen as a big majority of content. With low interaction and low involvement, and that's really not what Facebook wants. Even if they were getting views, they weren't getting interaction and interactivity because you're just gonna watch a, you know, 18-minute video. There's really not a whole lot of interactivity there. They were finding that that lack of action or interactivity was actually hurting their, their page at a higher level. And I'm probably paraphrasing this a little bit, so I would suggest you go out to Social Media Examiner and just do a search for long-form video, or, or look at their podcast, and you'll be able to dig into that. But it really tells the story about where long-form video really should go. And in their opinion, it's gonna stay on, on YouTube because that's where they're getting the best readership— or viewership, I should say. But they're taking it off of Facebook. They're using Facebook for things like short live video, maybe promoting promoting different sorts of things to be able to pull people in. But certainly long-form video, if you're doing a lot of that, that may not necessarily be the best place to be putting it because it might be doing your business more damage than good. So it's important to take a peek at some of your metrics and, and see maybe if that long-form video, prerecorded type stuff, really is going to be better served to go someplace else on the web. So with that, I'm looking at the clock and it's just about top of the hour. So I have managed to burn through almost a full 60 minutes of hopefully what has been helpful social media and some digital stuff. And certainly appreciate those of you that were able to join me live. I believe we are going to be on For next week, and we'll put in one more show before we get to Thanksgiving. So I will kind of hold off on wishing everybody a great Thanksgiving until next week because it's going to be just one day away at that point. But those of you that attended live, thank you so much for being here. And if you'd like to share the show, remember today's and all shows are recorded and available out at Free Webinar Wednesday. So with that, I will sign off. I hope— whoops, looks like we have a question. Hold on one moment. Ah, it's just a— it's a many thanks and many welcomes. So glad that you were able to make it. Thank you, Daniel. So with that, we'll go ahead and wrap the show. Enjoy the rest of your week, and we'll look forward to seeing you online at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.