LinkedIn Updates Coming Soon - Plus Google Allo, IFTTT, Twitter, Facebook and More!

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, September 28th, 2016 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I'm joining you from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I'm with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool You can learn more about me and WSI and all the wonderful things that we do online at www.poweredbywsi.com. So I am in Detroit. I'm at the airport, and honestly, I wasn't exactly sure if I was going to make it back from my trip to Colorado in time to be able to host the show, but I did. So if you hear any announcements or people talking or background clutter, that will explain it. My apologies for that, but you know, being the mobile mover that I am, I decided that I would still do the webinar but take the risk of having a little bit of background noise. Unfortunately, my good buddy and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins over at Community Bank Consulting, Inc., is not available to join me today, so I'm going to fly solo here. But there are a few things that I wanted to Go over with everybody that have hit the, I guess, the internet news feeds, if you will, and provide an update on some things that you may or may not be interested in. Primarily, I want to chat about LinkedIn and some of the things that are rolling for not just business pages, but also they made an announcement recently with regards to individual profiles. So I'm going to share a couple websites with you and give you some links and some things to take a look at and might be able to give you at least some resources to dig a little bit deeper. So before we jump into the wonderful world of LinkedIn, I wanted to go ahead and kind of bang on my Google drum a little bit. I think I talked a couple of episodes ago about their new video chat service called Duo, D-U-O. The design around that is to make it possible for people that are on Android devices or iPhone devices to be able to do FaceTime-like talking back and forth with one another. I've been using that now for probably the last couple, 3 weeks, and when I get it to work, it works great. But unfortunately, and I would really like to say otherwise, that it's an awesome app and it works super slick, it just seems to hang a lot for me. So I don't know if it's because it's a brand new app and it just doesn't want to work the way that it should, or it needs to get some updates. But I've not seen Duo do for me what I thought it would. My wife and I are on a Verizon plan, and through our Android devices, we have the capability of using enhanced call features. So we can actually do voice chatting directly over the Verizon network on our phones, which is kind of cool. But we do have relatives, and I've got friends, and if Jeff were here, he would tell you he's an iPhone user. I don't have FaceTime chat capabilities with those folks that are on iPhone. So I was really hoping the Duo was going to do something there and give me the ability to have voice chat or video chat, but it doesn't seem like that's quite there yet. The second app that they announced at— when they came out with the announcement of Duo was Allo. And this is designed to be their universal messaging app, and this recently came out, and I've downloaded this. This seems— I've not used it a ton, but the times that I have launched it and actually used it, it has not frozen for me. And I'll be honest with you, I had some reservations about using this because my fear was it was going to be as buggy and freeze on me like what the Duo app was. But this seems to be a lot more stable. I started using it for text messaging and sending some messages back and forth. It has some other intelligent agent capabilities built within it. You can see some things related to smart replies. You should be able to tie in some other elements. You can do some drawings. They've got stickers. The whole thought around this is to make the communication process a little bit more feature-rich, but then also bring in this Google Assistant. My suspicion is it's going to be very similar to what Facebook has in the works with this Project M, formerly referred to as Moneypenny, where you will be able to go into Facebook Messenger and ask it to book you reservations reservations at a restaurant on Saturday night at 10 o'clock, or to be able to get tickets to a movie, something along those lines. So the Google Assistant, it'll be interesting to see how that evolves and develops. And then my suspicion, when they come out with the Google Home, I believe that's what it's called, which is their device that's going to be very similar in nature to what the Amazon Echo is with the Alexa and the voice-based assistant. My suspicion is they're going to figure out a way to tie this into that. So you'll have a Chromecast for media streaming, audio, music. You'll have Allo for communication. You'll have this little home device which will be your voice-activated hub that will give you the ability to control everything. So it should be kind of interesting. If you're interested in checking it out, feel free to take a peek. It does also offer the incognito mode. Facebook announced— actually WhatsApp announced that last year, I believe, or earlier this year, the WhatsApp Messenger capability was going to be totally encrypted. And I think Facebook Messenger is headed that direction as well. You have an incognito mode with Chats and Allo that are also encrypted using the Transport Layer Security methodology. So some interesting things. There's a video here, of course, you can check out, and, you know, let me know what your thoughts are on that. The next item that I wanted to mention, which is kind of cool because I've started getting back into Twitter a little bit more, and I think I mentioned during one of the previous shows my experience at the Pacific Coast Banking School in running a group of bankers against one another, my 2 classes, on a hashtag contest. But Twitter announced that they were going to be rolling out the capability of excluding things like the animated GIF image, the URL, anything that's not really part of the text that you're typing. Hashtag still is going to count against your 140 characters, but you'll be able to see that some of the enhanced elements that are part of a tweet that normally would count against your 140 characters are now going to be excluded. So that just gives us more room to talk and communicate and to be able to add some cool things to your tweets to enrich your communication and interaction there. So that's kind of cool. If you're a Twitter user, you're probably pretty excited about this. If you're not a Twitter user, you probably don't care, or maybe you should be. And if you're not using Twitter because you think it's confusing or frustrating, A good little tip for you, I strongly suggest that you give consideration to using lists. And a list, for example, is if you go up here and take a look at my profile, I've got a variety of lists created. I'm following 2,700 people, 2,500 people, so my Twitter stream is very, very clogged. Not a whole lot of ability for me to catch information there, although sometimes I'll pop in just to view. But when I, for example, was at the Pacific Coast Banking School, I created a list with just the 28 individuals that were interacting with the hashtag. And I can very easily pop in here even though school is over and I'm no longer in Seattle. I can jump right in here, hit this list, and see exactly what's going on. So this makes it much more bearable to take a look at what is happening. The other thing that I think is really cool is making sure that you understand the power of the hashtag. So if you take a look, for example, ABA Bank Marketing, we're having the American Bankers Association— me being a recovering banker and having somewhat of a passion for marketing— was going on this week in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was not able to be there because I had to be in Colorado for a planning session with another client. But you can very easily hop in, and they did a great job of promoting their hashtag #ABABankMKTG for marketing. And if you are a banker in the arena of marketing, or even if you're a marketer or just interested in how you can data mine a hashtag, you can take a look at this. And then this gives you a list of all the tweets that were going on. And I've got a good friend of mine, Donna, who Bless her heart, she has been tagging me in almost every single tweet that she's been sending. So even though I'm not at the conference, she brought me with her electronically, which has been really cool. And I know when she has an opportunity, she sits in on these Free Webinar Wednesdays. So if you happen to be listening to the replay when you get back from the marketing conference, Donna, big shout out and thanks for keeping me in the loop on all this stuff. But here you can see a full-blown list of everything that people have been talking about, some great quotes. Slide presentations, resources, hyperlinks. People were even doing some Snapchat— not Snapchat, Periscopes. So some live streaming video directly from the event. Even got a dancing banana. So all that and a bag of chips. Very, very cool stuff. So don't forget the power of the hashtag. Don't forget the power of lists. And now that they have extended the capability of your communication options, all good stuff. The second-to-last item I'm going to talk about as it relates to social media, Instagram recently made the announcement that they were going to allow people to now save posts in draft mode. So if you take that perfect picture, you apply a really cool filter, but you're not sure exactly what you want to say, or you need to save it, jump back into your feed to figure out which tag you want to associate with it, or any other reason you don't want to post it right then and there, you now have the ability to save it in draft mode and then it dumps those into your library so that you can actually take a look at your drafts. This is pretty cool in my opinion because sometimes you just get a really good picture but you don't necessarily have time to complete it. Or maybe you start with something and something comes up and rather than just shut the phone down and hope that it's still there when you turn it back on, you can officially save it in draft mode. Then if you say something and you want to be able to come back and double-check that later before you actually post it, you can go ahead and do that as well. Cool little feature on Instagram. If you are an Instagram user, feel free to go ahead and use that. Tying Instagram and Twitter back together, one of the things that you may also want to take a look at, You're witnessing in real time Eric chasing squirrels here. But if you go to the service If This Then That, ifttt.com, this is a service that you can use to create what's known as recipes that will automate things for you and do different activities. So if something happens, then do something else. I found a really cool recipe, which is basically a little program that will say, if I do something on Instagram, then share the picture on Twitter. And the reason that this is cool is even though if you're an Instagram user, you probably know that you can take an Instagram post and you can check the little Facebook box and you can check the little Twitter box and it will send them out. But what happens when Instagram sends a photo to Twitter is it just sends a hyperlink. It doesn't actually send the image itself. So if somebody wants to actually see your image and they're following you on Twitter and they don't happen to catch it on Instagram, they have to click on the link to be able to view it, which is a little bit of a pain. Don't really get a lot of engagement from that because it's much better to have the actual picture show up like if you were directly in Twitter and you posted it. The cool thing about this little If This Then That recipe is it gives you the ability to tell Instagram every time I post something, I always want it to go to Twitter. So you have to be comfortable with the fact that it's always going to send it to Twitter. And if you click the little box, it's going to send the picture and it's going to send it to Twitter with a hyperlink. So typically when you turn this on, you're going to not check the share with Twitter on Instagram and let If This Then That take care of it. But when you do this, you then will have the ability to say, you know what, I now have my picture actually showing up in Instagram or in Twitter as opposed to Just a hyperlink. I think, if I'm not mistaken, I'm going to scroll down and see, I believe, yeah. Here's an example. This is me at 4:30, 5 o'clock in the morning in Denver getting ready to come to the airport. You can see that there's an If This Then That link here, but I actually called an Uber and a Tesla. Oh, nice. Model S picked me up, if you can believe that, for Uber. It was awesome. First time I've ever been in a Tesla. So naturally I had to get Sean, my Uber driver, and my little carry-on bag there, but I had to get a picture of the Tesla that took me to the airport. And of course he gave me the tour, showed me the giant humongous screen that was in it, bragged about how fast and snappy it was and the torque. So pretty cool stuff. But the reason I brought this up is you can see that it actually posted the picture directly to Twitter. And I got 5 little hearts as a result of it. Now if I had just said share this, it would have said roll to the airport via Uber, Tesla, blah blah, but you would have had to have clicked on the link in order to see this really cool picture of Shawn and his Tesla Model S. So hop over to If This Then That, create a free account, doesn't cost you anything. There's a boatload of other really cool recipes that you can use. I've got a recipe where if I tweet something, if I like something, if I share something on Twitter, It is populating a Google Sheet for me, so I've got an ongoing record of every tweet that I've tweeted, shared, liked. So there is a running history of that. Many of my clients are in the banking space obviously. They like to have records and retention of everything. This is a great free way where you can go ahead and set it up so anytime your organization tweets, or interacts, or engages, you are capturing a record of it and a running history, and you can do it all for free. So you can create recipes on on the fly, ad hoc, or you can go out, you can check some of the existing recipes that are out there. That's how I found a really cool Instagram post to Twitter recipe. Give those a shot, they're really pretty cool. Alright, done chasing that little squirrel. The last element that I wanted to chat about before I jump into some LinkedIn stuff, video seems to be the hot, hot topic these days, and I mentioned Periscope already and the ABA Bank Marketing Conference and the fact that they were live streaming video from there, which is really cool. But Paul Gillen, who is a pretty well-known LinkedIn expert, he's actually been on Free Webinar Wednesdays before and done some shows for us, but he found this article and shared it out, and so I wanted to make sure that you all had access. So what social media marketers need to know about Facebook Live. So this is a kind of cool little summary of, if you've not tried it yet, it works for businesses, Or individuals. Got some best practices as far as setting yourself up, making sure that you mention the right sorts of things. They also have a little call to action here that says, hey, sign up for my email address. So I'm going to go ahead and close that. I've also heard rumors that they are in the process of rolling out dual video. You may be familiar with the service that was formerly known as, although it sounds like they're coming back with a different service, but Blab, which was more of a desktop computer-based video kind of conferencing screen sharing type service that gave you the ability to do live video, but you could have 3 other people join you. So it essentially divided your screen up into 4 quadrants, and then you could host the show and bring in 3 other guests And you could talk and other people could then sit in and watch the 4 of you chat. Facebook, I believe, has announced that one, they are bringing their live video service to desktop, so it will work on a computer, not just a mobile device. But they are also going to be announcing or releasing the ability for dual presenters. So if I wanted to do a co-host show, or Jeff and I wanted to do a live So if we wanted to set up a streaming Facebook video of Free Webinar Wednesdays, we'd be able to do that and then simulcast that either at the same time as doing the actual GoToWebinar, or we could host it directly within Facebook. So there's some cool things going on with video. It's probably the best way to convey personality and build relationships because You eliminate all the stumbles that exist with nonverbal communication. And as good as emoticons and emojis are with winky face and smiley face and upset face, it still doesn't take the place for being able to see somebody talk, interact, facial cues. You can detect sarcasm. So video has got some really cool benefits. And bandwidth is just getting faster and faster. And connectivity is getting more and more pervasive. So keep an eye on video, and if you've not played around with Facebook yet, by all means give it a shot. And if you're on a mobile device, if you check at the top of your news feed, you may notice that there's a new kind of little feature there that looks like a little play button. And you can hit that, and then that will give you a list of anybody that you're connected with or Facebook thinks you might be interested in watching live video. So you can catch some of your friends doing live video and be part of that and just kind of have conversations and send them comments and the like buttons and all that fun stuff. So video, kind of cool, check it out. Alright, now we're going to hop right into LinkedIn. And so I've got a video here that I actually found over at the LinkedIn channel where it talks about accelerating their vision through innovation. And this is one that I would suggest you take a look at. Not real long. I guess 46 minutes depends on what your opinion is of not real long. It goes through and talks about the main areas that they're in the process of changing. I've talked already, and let me just as a refresher in case we've got folks that didn't happen to catch the episode when I jumped in and shared the updated version of a LinkedIn business page. Okay. But if you hop into LinkedIn and you go over to IBM, IBM right now, and one of my colleagues in WSI actually stumbled upon this, so let's take a look here. IBM, come on, the joys of a live show here. IBM, here we go. So if you go over to the IBM page, and then what I'm also going to do is I'm going to hop over, copy this tab, and I'm just going to open up Oracle. I did my presentation yesterday for a bunch of bank associations on LinkedIn and social selling. Of course, I had to preface the presentation with the fact that pretty much everything that I was going to show them with regards to personal pages and profile settings is probably going to be changing in the next 30 to 60 days. If you watch the video from LinkedIn, you'll see that they've announced that the personal profiles are going to get an update as well. The reason for that is if anybody on the line or listening has used the LinkedIn mobile app, you may have seen some changes to that over the last year. I used to be a big fan of LinkedIn Connected, which was a separate app that they offered that gave you the ability to connect your address book, connect your calendar, and then it gave you proactive notifications if you were going to have a meeting with somebody. So if Jeff and I were scheduled to have a conversation tomorrow and I had Jeff in my calendar, LinkedIn would be able to see that, be able to know that Jeff has a LinkedIn profile, and it would send me a push notification to say, hey, you're meeting Jeff Simpkins tomorrow. Why don't you catch up and see what he's been up to? And so it would give me the ability to pop right to Jeff's profile and check things out. And so it had a lot of really cool engagement and communication features baked into it because it was called Connected. It was really focused on connecting you with the people that you are connected with and fostering conversation and relationship building. They've since sunsetted that app and they rolled in those functionality features into the LinkedIn native app and beef that up. So you can now get those very same notifications directly through the mobile app. So the mobile app has a much cleaner interface, it's got a more modern feel to it, it's focused more on relationship building and communication as opposed to just being more of a kind of a news feed, if you will. And so they've said in the video, if you check it out on YouTube, you'll see that They really want the desktop experience to be much more similar and in line with the mobile experience that they've created. So they've been spending a great deal of time. I also can't help but think that the acquisition by Microsoft and some of the things that potentially lie down the road after the $26 billion purchase has been approved by the powers that be. But you know, they didn't talk a lot about what Microsoft would bring to the table, other than the fact that within Microsoft and the Office 365 and the Windows 10 ecosystem bringing roughly a billion-plus users, and then LinkedIn has over almost close to 500 million users now. So they, once they're combined from a size perspective and a user perspective, are going to be very close to what Facebook has at just a little over 1.5 billion users around the planet. So it'll be kind of interesting to see how that rolls out. And the personal profiles, unfortunately I don't have an example to show you because I've not caught one yet, and it appears to be rolling out to premium users of LinkedIn. I've chosen to keep mine at a free account. I do a lot of demonstrating and training, and it's always nice for me to be able to show everybody what I'm doing but not make them feel like they have to pay $30, $40, $50 a month in order to get the features that I'm showing now. At some point I may upgrade, who knows, but for right now the free version seems to work for me. So I'm probably a little bit lower on the list. I did find a page within LinkedIn where you can actually say I want to sign up and request early access. But if you take a look at the IBM page, you'll notice, and if we just kind of jump over and compare Oracle, and this is probably what your business page looks like. You can see that the COVID image or the hero shot, whatever it's called, is much smaller. You have to click to reveal the information. You've got a small link here. We can click the follow button if we want to do that. So it just looks like old school, kind of ho-hum, doesn't really look like it's new and innovative. Hasn't been updated in a while, really focuses on, you know, a little bit of information here. You've got home, careers, not real, I guess, you know, in your face, but, you know, you could pop over and you can take a look at some career information. But even from a career perspective, you know, it shows a little bit about what's going on, but not a ton. So this is what we're all pretty accustomed to and used to. If we take a look at the IBM, you can see new opportunity for a big old background image, cleaner interface. So you've got, you know, kind of the following/unfollow here, but now you've got 3 boxes across the top, and jobs is kind of front and center right there in the middle, although you're dumped at the overview. The overview is going to come through, give you a little bit of information. So this is the About Us section, much more information about what you offer and who you are as a business, opportunities for insertion of photos where, if you recall from the Oracle instance, you know, there's no photos in here. I think we're probably limited by the amount of text that we can put in, where this gives us a much more robust opportunity. So you can go in, any affiliated companies or featured groups. But if we go ahead and we close that out, Scroll back up to the top. You've got a section for company photos. One of the things that I think LinkedIn is going after, whether it's on the app, personal page or profile, or the business pages, is really trying to convey personality, culture, things that will help foster and encourage networking and relationship building, not necessarily, you know, just pure corporate information. So company photos, you can post whatever you want there. There's an opportunity if you click on that just takes you to a little photo gallery. You'll see now the indicator has brought me over into the life section. So this is where they're really providing a new section to talk about the culture of an organization. And one of the things that has been released on individual profiles, although I don't know if a lot of people— if you haven't gone in and updated your profile recently, you may have missed this, because we talked to a lot of people that have updated their profile or created their account you know, 2 or 3 years ago and they really don't post, they really don't go in, but it's just kind of there, their static resume. But they've announced some and released some features within personal profiles about some non-business things, so the causes that you care about, the organizations that you support, the organizations that you volunteer for, those are all part of personal profiles now, and if you've not added those Be a good idea to go back and do that. And if you're part of the organization that controls or maybe has some oversight over your staff, you want to encourage your staff to go back in and do that on their LinkedIn profiles. Because what's happening here, and you can see IBM, is that data is then being aggregated all the way up to the mothership. And you can see that employees now at IBM, you can see that they care about science and technology, education, the environment. You can see what nonprofits and organizations the employees support. If your employees don't have that information populated in their profiles, this section is going to look pretty sparse when somebody looks at your business page. They're not going to— either they'll get the impression that your organization is filled with a bunch of people that don't really care about anything else other than themselves, which might be a little bit of an aggressive statement. You want to be able to say, hey, if you have, you know, if you guys put together a team for the American Cancer Society Relay for Life, or if you support the local Humane Society, or whatever the case is, it just gives you the ability as people are looking at you and determining, is this a business that I want to do business with, or is this a business that I want to work for? These are just other areas that you can help convey the culture of an organization. So you can see this is much more feature-rich, and you can see we've even got a little carousel. So you've got multiple sets of pictures, different images. So before this gets released to you and your organization, we recommend thinking about what sorts of pictures you would put in here, what sorts of stories you would want to have listed. Make sure that your employees are going out and updating their profiles and making sure that the information is current and you're taking advantage of the new fields So that when your page gets rolled out and made available, you don't have— this isn't the barren wasteland and somebody comes here and they hear crickets in the background because the information is not there. So use the IBM page almost as inspiration, and then think back in your own organization and say, do we have a video that we would be interested in showing? Do we have photos of our employees engaged in the community or helping our customers, those sorts of things? The last element that I want to mention here really goes after jobs. And LinkedIn knows based off of its own statistics, I use this in my slides quite often, that if an organization conveys the whole concept of operationalizing social within its culture and empowering its employees to use it, LinkedIn has proven and has seen from its own statistics that employers are 58% more likely to attract top talent and 20% more likely to retain them long-term. And so many of us will use LinkedIn as a recruiting tool. Some of us are using the formal LinkedIn Jobs functionality or the recruiter tool itself, which is a paid service. Some of us are just going ahead and having our employees reshare options or the postings maybe from our website and using networking more to grow an interest. Of who would maybe want to work for us. But you can see here from a jobs perspective, if you look at the Oracle jobs, you take a look at careers. Careers, it says we're global, driven by passion, subscribe, what our people say, recent updates. So here are the jobs at Oracle. And so it just kind of gives you a listing of them. So not bad, but I'd have to kind of dig around and see what sorts of stuff maybe would be of interest to me. What you'll see with IBM and what they're starting to do with big data is they've gone in and they've done more of a proactive job of saying, hey, here's the jobs that we think that might be of interest to you. And it's looked at my profile, it's looked at my skills and endorsements, it's looked at the type of information that I'm sharing and my education and where I work, and it's coming back and you can see a lot of these are directly related to my life in the world of digital marketing and social media. So you can click on this to see all jobs, which spawns a new tab, and then you go over and you can kind of see a lot of stuff that's there. So some of that stuff may not be relevant to me, but what they're doing is they're trying to leverage this big data from an employment perspective and make intelligent recommendations to me so that I can see what might be appropriate. It's also doing a little bit deeper dive within the employee profile, so it kind of gives you an idea of, to say, you know, on the About Our Culture, it shows you what charities and organizations you support, what causes you believe in. Here you're going in and taking a look at some of the insights with regards to the employees themselves. So where do people mostly work? What offices are they located in? What their seniority level is? You know, if I've got a bachelor's degree and I'm thinking, well, I better have a master's in order to be able to get in, Or maybe I've got an MBA, and that's a pretty rare occurrence within IBM. That could be either a positive or negative. But now I've got some of that data at my fingertips. And then the skills that are present— these are the top 5 skills. It doesn't surprise me that project management, and management, and business analysis— those are kind of ranking up there at the top. So spend some time at IBM. Take a look at the different sections. Navigate around. Figure out what you are saying about your company in your update page, and can you blow that out and make it bigger? Make sure that your employees' profiles are updated. Take a look at pictures and photography that you might be able to share that helps convey the culture. The showcase pages, at least for the clients that we work with, we have not really seen Many showcase pages being used. This is when LinkedIn did away with products and services, they created showcase pages, which gives you the ability to do a deep dive into a particular product or service that you offer that might be warranted to have maybe some dedicated conversation or content. So you can see that the general IBM page has got over 3 million followers. And so if I follow IBM generically, I'm going to get a lot of information about IBM But just at an IBM kind of high level. If I'm really interested in what Watson is doing in the healthcare industry, or the Internet of Things and how IBM is helping to make my refrigerator a smart device to remind me to get milk on the way home from work, I can go in and you can see a much, much smaller audience, but the content that's going to be available in these different showcase pages is going to be much more relevant. If I'm interested in Internet of things and I follow just IBM generically, it's going to be difficult for me to decipher that. And IBM generically may not really post a whole lot, but I can dive in here. If we take a look— oops— and we go over to the old school page, if we go back to our home, the showcase pages are kind of stuck over here on the right-hand side. They are still available, and you can still dive in and you can take a look. So if I'm interested in Oracle Big Data or their cloud computing services, you can see I can drill down and I can follow them as well, but it's just located in a different spot. They've got 1.8 million followers. Drill that down to, you know, 6,000 or 7,000 or 8,000, much more on target. So anyway, so popping back over to the blog post. So this can kind of give you an idea. If you go into LinkedIn, go to their official blog, you can take a look. This will give you a recorded livestream of the actual video here, or if you just go into YouTube and fire up LinkedIn, you'll be able to get to their channel, and this will probably be one of the ones that's pinned to the top. But it's a pretty good listen. They've got some pretty interesting things that are going on. They talk a little bit about fostering knowledge improvement and education and training and how they want LinkedIn to actually be a resource to help people be better at their job or to prepare themselves for their next job or their next promotion. They acquired a company called Lynda.com about a year ago, I think they said, and Lynda.com is Lynda.com. I'll pop over and show that to you real quick. Y-N-D-A, Lynda.com. But it's a subscription-based service where you can get online video training and educational material that will teach you pretty much anything you'd want to know. If you want to be a better photographer, if you want to learn how to program HTML, if you want to be able to understand design, or you want to get better at employee reviews even, there's a ton of different courses that are available here. You can go ahead and sign up for a free trial and test a few of those out, which is pretty cool. LinkedIn has also had its own learning center, and a lot of the videos that LinkedIn provides are related to using LinkedIn better and more efficient networking and social selling. So you can go in, and I've already kind of set a few of the things that I'm interested in maybe taking some classes on down the road. But you can go in and you can actually kind of tell LinkedIn what you're interested in learning more about, and it will come back and it will make recommendations for you. And some of these are going to be courses that are available through LinkedIn, and it'll be a LinkedIn course. Some of these are going to be courses that are pulled out of the Lynda.com directory. And so you'll see it is a paid service. You can go ahead— now if I want to start the free trial, it's probably close to $30 a month. And if you're part of an organization that would like to provide this service to multiple employees, you know, you can see you've got the ability to click on a link. This will give you a form to fill out, and you can submit a request to LinkedIn to say, hey, I've got 3 or 4 people in my office that I'd like to get access to training. I suppose that they're going to provide some sort of a bulk discount if you've got more than 5 individuals that are going to need to get some training done. But as you look at learning, you know, they say knowledge is power, and one of the things that you will see if you take the time to watch this video is they mention that the average— I'll see if I can jump right to it. I don't know if I'll be able to get as lucky, but one of the slides they presented was the value of the knowledge that you acquire— and I'm probably butchering this, but paraphrasing— the value or the length of relevancy to knowledge that you learn now is about 5 years. So if you think about what you maybe learn when you're in college, by the time you graduate and get into the workforce, within the first year or 2, pretty much everything that you learned at the beginning of college is no longer relevant. It's gone. So that obviously is one of the big reasons why they're focusing on the learning experience and trying to figure out ways that people can go and improve themselves. When you complete a course, you have the option of broadcasting that to your network, much like when you do a job change or announce a promotion. You can say Eric has completed completed the pay-per-click advertising course. But then it also gets added to your profile as formal curriculum that you've actually taken. So if you jump into about 36 minutes, you'll see them talking about the LinkedIn and the Lynda.com partnership and how they're going to be baking that into this kind of economic graph that they're creating. So I think you will enjoy this. That concludes really what I wanted to talk about today. I know we are going to end a little bit short, and I don't think I did my perfunctory at the beginning. All Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Although I am looking through the list of attendees and it looks like the majority of you have been here before, So you probably know that, but if anybody's joining for the first time, you can visit the site and this show and any past shows are made available there. But if anybody's got a comment or a thought, you can use the chat function and you can toss something in, or, you know, as I bounce around to Google and Instagram and Twitter and— It was, so I kind of threw an awful lot at you, so hopefully you were able to keep up. But the good news is the session is recorded, and if you missed it, you can go ahead and— here it is. There's the quote I was looking for. So the useful shelf life of skills has shrunk to less than 5 years. So that's the powerful statement there, and doesn't necessarily mean that you have to use LinkedIn or Lynda.com. To educate yourself. There's certainly no shortage of places out on the internet where you can go learn. I mean, even just spending a day banging around YouTube and looking for tutorials and how-tos and other sorts of things can give you a wealth of information. But the cool part about a system like what I think LinkedIn is putting together is it organizes things, it makes part of your actual LinkedIn quote-unquote resume. It gives you the ability to broadcast that skill set to your connections. So if you are looking to maybe better your career position or, you know, buck for that promotion or maybe get a new job, you don't like what you're doing now, you want to make a job change, all that stuff populates directly into your LinkedIn profile and gives you an opportunity to show the world that You're taking steps to make yourself a better, more intelligent worker. So with that, doesn't look like I've got any questions. I think I'm going to go ahead and we'll just wrap it up early. So you've got an extra 15 minutes today. Actually, if I shut my mouth now, it looks like you're going to have 16 minutes. But I appreciate everybody joining me for this week's episode. It's good to be back. Bummed that Jeff wasn't able to join us. Again, I apologize for any of the background noise and the little tram that's been going back and forth here, but hopefully you got some good value out of this, got some new ideas. Give this and that a try. Check out some of the cool ones. As always, if you've got any questions, comments, feedback, feel free to drop me a note. eric@poweredbywfi.com or eric@ericcook.com. Thanks, Eric. Either way, you'll be able to get me and find me, and would love to hear from you. So until next week, have a great week, and we'll we'll see you online. Talk to you later, everybody. Bye bye.