Some of Our Favorite Digital Tools to Make Your Life Easier
Eric Cook walks through digital tools for marketers: Evernote for capturing and organizing content, Google Docs for collaboration, Buffer for scheduling social posts, and Talkwalker for monitoring industry conversations. The workflow moves from listening and collecting to refining and publishing, with the principle that content is king but engagement is queen.
Chapters
Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, July 26th, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesday. This is Eric Cook, and I am 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 all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI Online at poweredbywsi.com. My good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, may be joining us. We had a little bit of scheduling confusion, and I think he's going to dial in, so he might show up a little bit tardy. And when he does, we'll have him officially greet everybody and say hello. But in the off chance that he's not able to join us, you can learn more about Jeff and his business, Community Bank Consulting, Inc., online at communitybankconsulting.com. Today's show, uh, and all shows that we have here at Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So if you want to stop back and check out some of our past shows, you're welcome to do that. Um, you can see some of the recent posts, and then we've also got some tags that you can use to sort down through And look for specific shows on specific topics. I don't know if I've ever really mentioned that before. And you can see we've had quite a few of them. So dig in and check some of those out. Today's show, what I wanted to do, and maybe you have some that you would like to share. Mm-hmm. And if you'd like to share, you can use the chat functionality for your GoToMeeting or GoToWebinar control panel, which is likely floating in the right-hand side of your screen. Just go ahead and type your comments in there, and we can pull that up and take a look at it. it. But I just wanted to spend a little bit of time today talking over some of the tools that I like to use from a social digital perspective and how those kind of play a role in my daily life. And so I can see based off of those that are attending live, looks like there's some familiar, or maybe a couple of familiar faces, but it looks like we've got quite a few new folks that may not have sat in on a webinar in the past that talked about social tools and digital tools. Plus, there may be some new ones in here to kind of think about as well. And so, yeah, so let's go ahead and we'll just kind of get started. If you've got a tool that you use as part of your social media activities or anything that you do in your digital life that you would like to have take a look at as well, just go ahead and toss it in there. I'll keep an eye on the chat box and we'll, we'll take a look at those. One of the tools that I use quite often is Evernote, and I'm not going to log into my own Evernote account just because I've got some stuff in there that I probably don't want out on a public webinar. But if you're not familiar with Evernote, very similar to OneNote from Microsoft. But the thing that I like about Evernote is it's a— it provides a platform for you to be able to take notes very quickly. You can share information. It's almost like a digital scrapbook, if you will. And it has a variety of different ways that you can interact with it. And so I have the Evernote program installed on my computer. So it first has a program that you can download and you can take notes directly into that. So instead of using Word or any sort of a, you know, a text editor, if you're taking notes at a conference or having a client meeting, you can actually create notebooks and notes in those notebooks to get you organized. You can even nest notebooks. You can create a master notebook for maybe clients, and then you can have a notebook inside of that for Client A, Client B, Client C. And then within those clients, you can have additional notebooks that allow you to talk about specific projects. So different sorts of, you know, topics that you're talking about, or maybe you've got a notebook for conferences and then you can create a subnote for maybe a digital marketing conference that you've gone to, or maybe your company's annual convention, something along those lines. And so it works very similar to any other sort of a text editor. You can add content to it, you can drag pictures, you can create audio snippets. So if you wanted to record something or make yourself maybe spoken notes, you don't have time to jot something down, but you can use the app on your phone, for example. It includes the ability to download either iPhone or Android-based apps. I'm sure it probably even has a Microsoft-based app. So you can use that to record audio notes, and then those can then be saved directly into your notebooks, which is kind of cool. The thing that I use Evernote, probably more so than anything else. As you can see up here, I've got a little Evernote Web Clipper. And so using the Chrome browser, I've installed the Chrome extension for the Evernote Clipper. And if I happen to be browsing around the web and I find an article or a news story or just a website that maybe I want to remember or be able to retrieve down the road— I do a lot of conferences and public speaking, so I'm always looking for information that's new and relevant that I can save, I can click on that little elephant head and I can save that to my Evernote. And then when I save items and clip them, one of the other things that I haven't talked about that you can use is it gives you the ability to actually create a tag, um, or multiple tags, just like a blog tag or a categorization. So when I create a clipped item, I can go ahead and say, well, You know, this is relevant for presentation material. This is relevant for social media. This is relevant for banking, or maybe this is a how-to article or an instructional article. So I can mark all that up and then I can hop back in. So when I get ready to do a presentation, I can go back into Evernote and I can say, okay, Evernote, show me all of the articles or the clips or the notes that I've taken that are related to search engine optimization. Or that are related to remarketing and digital advertising. And any of the items that I've clipped in my little digital scrapbook on Evernote will magically reappear and give me access to all of that information. So then moving forward, I can go back and I can visit that. I do pay, and they've got a free version that you can use that you can download. It won't cost you a penny. That has some limitations on synchronization and offline availability and a few other things. So I've actually pulled the trigger, and I've been a paying customer of Evernote now for at least a couple, 3 years. I think it's like $45 a year, but the convenience that it provides me— so for example, if I hop on an airplane and I'm flying someplace and I don't want to get on the in-flight Wi-Fi, but I want to get access to maybe some of my notes, I can set Evernote to synchronize with the tablet or my phone, and I can hop in and I can actually take a look at those notes and get access to all those articles. So it makes it a really handy and convenient way of browsing through and getting access to information. So Evernote is one that I would strongly suggest take a look at. Again, if you're a Microsoft-focused individual, and the OneNote app works pretty well, I've heard. I don't use it, but very similar in nature. But having some way to organize and create You know, some, some opportunities for you to remember stuff. There are some sharing capabilities within Evernote. So for example, let's say Jeff has an Evernote account and I have an Evernote account. We can create a shared workbook, and then all I need to know is what his email address is for his Evernote account, and we can share those workbooks together, and that gives us some collaboration. I don't have pulled up in a specific tab here. The Google Docs or the Google Suite, but I will mention it because that's another area that we're using quite a bit more from a collaborative perspective where we're starting to build a lot more of the checklists and the master tracking documents in things like Google Sheets, or when we either are writing content for a customer or we're collecting content from customers to use as part of their website, we're using Google Docs. And it's very similar to Microsoft Word, but it gives you that online collaborative capability. I suspect that there's probably that capability within Office 365, and you can invite people to collaborate. But in a Google environment, being completely web-enabled, it makes it really nice to collaborate. And even though I've been using Google for a number of years and it seems somewhat old hat, I'm constantly surprised by the clients that we invite in to collaborate through a Google Doc environment That had never actually worked with it before. They've never gone in, they've never, you know, they'll pull it up and they'll see it and then they'll see my cursor on their screen while I'm actually typing. So we're not necessarily doing a GoToMeeting webinar screen sharing session. But I'll send them the link to the Google Doc and I'll say, well, you know, here's the little blurb that we wrote for the introduction to your checking account page or your About Us page. And here's where I'm thinking maybe we're going to want to make some changes. And so I hop in and I start typing, and then the person on the other end of the phone can actually see me typing, and it's a whole lot easier to collaborate that way. So I know that was one of the ones that I pulled up here, but certainly Google Docs is, is a great tool to be able to use. I do know that there are an awful lot of resources online particularly in YouTube. So if you were to go into YouTube and just start typing in Evernote tutorials or how to use Evernote within your daily life, there's a lot of stuff in there that will give you some kind of online training to help you see exactly how Evernote might be able to be a nice little addition to your lineup of social and digital tools to help keep yourself Keep yourself organized. The next one that I use just about on a daily basis as well is a social media management tool, posting and distribution tool called Buffer. And I've talked about Buffer a number of times on the webinar. I've interacted with them a number of times because not only do they provide a great tool that you can use for your own social media use, but they're just really good at social media themselves. They pay attention, they post great articles, they've got an awesome blog. I mean, there's a ton of really good stuff that the Buffer folks are putting out. If you're not familiar with Buffer, they've got a little video they can kind of show you. But essentially Buffer, and a lot of times people will liken them to Hootsuite, and I'll also show you TweetDeck, which is a kind of a Twitter-specific promotion or a platform. But Buffer and Hootsuite to a certain extent provide you the ability to add multiple social media profiles and give you the ability to post to various social media networks from one spot. So if I have an article that I find and I want to go ahead and send that to Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter, I can go in and again you can see here's the little Chrome plugin that I'm using for the extension for the Buffer. So if I like this site, and I want to share it with Buffer, I can just click on it. It gives me what my options are. It will allow me to go ahead and put the article directly into Buffer. Buffer and Hootsuite both, and I don't really say one is way better than another. It's just more force of habit that I tend to use Buffer. But both platforms also allow you to control when that information actually hits your social networks. So, what I mean by that is, if you are having a hard time sleeping and you grab your phone, which, by the way, there's a Buffer app, no surprise, and you grab your phone and you start reading through articles, and there's a couple of articles that you happen to stumble upon that you feel, well, maybe my audience, my connections, my network might be interested in reading this. And so, as part of a social engagement content strategy, one of the things we recommend is try not to just post information about you and your business because that tends to get a little bit boring. Your customers, or I guess your followers, some of them may be customers, some of them might be prospects, might disengage because they might feel that the only information that you're sharing with them is promotional material and that's not really what they're on and interested in getting access to. But as part of your social media strategy, You really wanna share content that's gonna be helpful and relevant and trustworthy to your connections and your audience that helps build your credibility. So they'll say things like, wow, that, you know, Eric or that Jeff, they always share helpful articles. That's good information. It helps me with my business. And it may not be about bank consulting, or it may not be just about digital marketing. It may be other stuff that's relevant to business owners or entrepreneurs or community bankers or financial service professionals. So there's a certain demographic that you're probably wanting to influence as part of your social media process. And so you want to take some time to try to get into the head, get into the head, if you will, of what that person would be interested in. Where are their pain points? Where are their challenges? Where do they want to learn? And then share that info. So back to the scheduling advantages of both Buffer and even Hootsuite. Is once you find an article, you have the ability to either click the little magic button and say, I want to post this and share it now. Something's urgent, you can send it, boom, it goes and gets updated immediately. You can also schedule it for the future, so you can pick a specific time. So if you are, um, if you know you— so sometimes, for example, I know when I'm going to be presenting at a conference I know that I'm going to be going on stage at 2 PM Eastern time, and if I want to have something go out at, you know, 1:45 that says getting ready to take the stage at and promote the events or the organizers' Twitter, I can go ahead and I can schedule it so I can pick a specific time and say on this date at this time. I want this post to go out and it hits Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, any of the networks that Buffer supports, it allows me to send that through. The third option, and I will have to admit this is probably the option that I use the most, is their auto schedule. And like the name implies, you know, from a Buffer perspective, it builds up a buffer of posts and you just tell Buffer to send it out when it feels based off of its kind of platform intelligence, your social media interaction, kind of some trends that they have noticed and paid attention to. You can go ahead and just say, just add it to my buffer. And what'll happen is if it's 2 in the morning and I can't sleep and I grab my phone or my tablet and I'm reading some articles and I find one and I say, this would be really interested, I don't really care what time it goes out as long as it doesn't go out at like 2:30 in the morning because I know very few of the people that I want to be able to see that or influence are not going to be on at the same time I am. So I can hit Buffer, and what happens then is Buffer goes in and it says, okay, I'm going to post this article to Facebook at 8:30 in the morning. I'm going to post it to Twitter at maybe 9:15. I'm going to send it to your LinkedIn account at maybe 9:25. So it grabs some dates based off of its network intelligence of when it feels might be the most appropriate times for those posts to go, and then it just does it, you know, kind of like the Ron Popeil, you know, the infomercial, set it and forget it, only you're not roasting chicken, um, with a wave conduction, whatever his oven is called, is you're posting information directly into your social media profiles. And so as you find relevant articles, you can go through and, I mean, literally within probably 15 or so minutes if you've got a good stream of article content that you can choose from, you can use a service like Buffer or Hootsuite to be able to fill up your content stream and create the next 4 or 5 days' worth of social media posts in order to get that information out there. And you still have the ability to post directly if something happens during the week that you, you know, you miss or that comes up. So it depends on how far out in advance you want to post or schedule things, because social media does have a certain air of recency to it. So you want to be careful not to, you know, you don't want to get into the buffer and schedule your next 2 weeks worth of posts and then just sit back and not do anything for 2 weeks, because at about a week and a half into it, there may be some things going on in the world that you would like to, or you should also be adding to your social stream and to be communicating to your followers or your fans or, you know, your connections. But once that information goes out, you can then sit back. And one of the things that we like to say, and oftentimes, and everybody's pretty familiar with this saying, even if you're not in banking or in real estate, but the question is, what are the 3 most important things in real estate? And most people know the answer to that is location, location, location. If you're going to buy something, making sure that it's in the right location is really important because that's one of the things that you can't change once you've bought that property. Well, in the world of digital, when you say, what are the 3 most important things from a social or an engagement perspective, it's content, content, content. It's making sure that you have the right type of content going out to the right audience. Again, It's not about advertising and promoting your business, but it's understanding who's on the other end of the receiving end of your content and what information they're going to want to know. So a lot of people will say content is king, content, content, content. But the second part of that, and I've heard a couple people kind of phrase it differently, but it goes along the lines of, yeah, content is king, but engagement is queen and she rules the kingdom. And so those of you that are joining that might be married, that might have one of those queens in your household, can maybe attest to the fact that that maybe rings more true than what you maybe would like to admit. And here I'm saying that on today, which happens to be my 20th wedding anniversary. So I all too well know that The, the queen rules the castle, if you will. But when we think about that from a social media and a digital marketing perspective, we're finding great content, which is king, and we're distributing that through tools like Buffer or Hootsuite, or maybe just scheduling them directly through Facebook Native or Twitter. We'll show you TweetDeck here in a second. But what you want to do then, once that goes out, is you want to pay attention To any sort of engagement. So if I get a retweet, or if somebody comments on that, or if somebody shares that on LinkedIn, the engagement opportunity is really where you can separate, you know, the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, or whatever kind of, you know, analogy you want to use there, euphemism. But that's where, from an engagement perspective, it's going to be beneficial for you. To pay attention because I may schedule 3 or 4 days worth of posts and maybe not have time to get back in or post anything else. But there's going to be engagement and people are going to be interacting with that content. And you want to be able to recognize those folks so that they know that you're not just basically phoning it in, post, post, post, and there's nothing on the back end where you're actually paying attention, thanking people for the retweet, or when somebody makes a comment on it on LinkedIn. that you chime in and say, yeah, that's a really great point. I also thought this, this, this. And so the engagement portion of your social posting is one of the best ways that you can validate that there's an actual human behind the scenes. And it's pretty obvious if you're doing it from a personal strategy perspective, because if I'm posting as @EricCook, then that's my personal Twitter account, or Eric Cook MBA on LinkedIn, that's my personal LinkedIn account. But if I'm posting something and I schedule that to go out and I'm posting it and it rolls through our WSI Facebook page, or one of our clients posts something through one of their bank pages, when it goes out as a company post, I think there's oftentimes the thought that the company is just posting information. And you want to make sure that that interaction or that engagement happens, even if it's not coming through as @EricCook. You want to make sure that as an organization, you're responding back to those folks, both good and bad. Hopefully going to be getting more good comments and feedback and interaction than negative, but you want to make sure that you can go back in and, and let them know that you're paying attention and invite the conversation. And those aren't always, and in fact they probably rarely will ever result in, you know, a sale or somebody wanting to do business with you right away, but what you're really trying to do here as part of this you know, post and engage and pay attention is you're trying to go through the know me, like me, trust me, building credibility process. So over time, they're going to appreciate the fact that you're paying attention, that you interact with them, that you're personable. And then when the time comes and they have a need that your business can fulfill, there's no guarantee that they're just going to go with you right out of the gate. But if you've not ever been invited to participate in that bid process, or they've never thought of approaching you for your services, they're going to allow you in the door. They're going to bring you into the room. They're going to introduce you to the decision makers, whatever the case is, so that you'll have an opportunity to at least present what you have to offer. And hopefully the engagement and the interactivity that you've, you know, I guess exhibited over the last several weeks, months, sometimes even longer, depending on how long of a buying cycle that is, It's an expensive purchase. For example, I go back to community banking, but if you're thinking about buying a house or any other sort of big purchase, or maybe a big commercial loan, those aren't necessarily snap decisions. You're going to take your time. You're going to investigate your options. You might have a 2 or 3 month process that you go through in order to make the final decision that this is the company or the organization that I want to trust. With that transaction. And so you have to be comfortable with the fact that it's not going to happen overnight. You have to put faith in the process and know that at some point down the road, your efforts are going to be able to reap rewards. And so just kind of on an over-time basis, building that credibility by sharing information. Now, every once in a while, you can toss in maybe a promotional item, because if you do a good job of building credibility and sharing helpful info, it's not going to be seen as an unusual thing that, you know, you toss in a little promo or something that's product or service related of things that you do. And then just be careful that that doesn't happen a lot, and then you jump back into really focusing on what the end recipient really wants to see, what they are really interested in paying attention to, and what sorts of pain points they have. So hopefully Buffer is one that you can take a look at I am still using the free version of Buffer. I know that the paid version provides me with a little bit more functionality. And, you know, every time I do this, I kind of feel guilty that I'm not at least paying them the $9 a month or whatever it is. It's not a lot. But I continue to use the free version. And it's almost sometimes comforting in the fact that I'm still using the free version of LinkedIn, even though there's probably a good reason for me to upgrade to one of the paid versions of LinkedIn. When I talk with clients and do webinars like this, I'm very cognizant of the fact that, you know, not everybody wants to jump in and start paying, even if it is only $9 a month, paying for tools when there's so much free information out there that you can use just to kind of get started. And so you can use Buffer, you can use Hootsuite as another example. You'll have some limitations on the number of accounts that you can connect, you'll have some limitations on the number of posts that you can schedule or put in your feed or buffer or get ready to go. But getting started, that might work for you for the next several months while you kind of develop or refine your strategy, particularly if it's a brand-new tool that you've never really played with before. The last thing that a service like Buffer or Hootsuite provides is some metrics. And again, the paid versions are going to give you a little bit better metrics, than the free versions. But when you're posting information out, you can certainly go to each of the individual platforms and you can see, well, how many times did this get retweeted if I posted it directly on Twitter? But now within Buffer, you have the ability to get somewhat of a dashboard where you post that article and that article goes out through Buffer, and then it gives Buffer the ability to see how many people interacting with that post. And so if there's a post that you share about, you know, the 5 secrets of time management for small business owners, and that seems to get a lot of activity, the link that goes back to the actual article, maybe at entrepreneur.com or Businessweek, whatever the case is, is going to be a link that Buffer is going to create. So it's going to run that link kind of through the Buffer system so that they can track some metrics on it. And then eventually the follower or the fan or your connection will get to the appropriate article. But now what happens is Buffer captures that and it comes back and it can report how many times those links are getting clicked on. So as you start building some history within these types of platforms, it gives you the ability to see, well, what kinds of posts seem to be getting more clicks? Is it the time management? Is it the cool new technology stuff? Is it feel-good stories? Or, you know, maybe when I post something that has something to do with bicycling, which is a passion of mine, or golden retrievers, which is also a passion of mine, maybe those actually are getting the most clicks and the most activity. And I need to focus in those areas because those are helping to build Eric Cook as a person, and you get to know a little bit more about me as an individual. And kind of enhance the relationship so you get the feeling like you, you know a little bit more about me and what I like to do as opposed to business-related information. So a few strategies there. I know I just dropped a ton of stuff on you. Hopefully, you know, if you weren't taking fast notes, you can always visit freewebinarwednesdays.com and check the replay of this and go back and forth a little bit. The item that I also wanted to talk about that's obviously more Twitter-specific is TweetDeck. TweetDeck used to be a standalone program. If you get into Buffer, if you get into Hootsuite, it's going to look very similar to this with the ability for it to, I guess, bring in posts from other networks. So you're going to see Facebook and LinkedIn. Some of them even are starting to actually support Instagram. But you can go through TweetDeck and you can see that this is actually just a subdomain of Twitter. So if you're on Twitter, you can activate TweetDeck and you can go ahead and you can, you know, start using it. This gives you more of a dashboard approach of managing your Twitter feed. So instead of going to Twitter by itself, if you've got lists, if you've got specific things where, you know, I want to follow and see anybody mentioning me on Twitter. So I've got my mentions listed here. So you can see 22 hours ago, somebody from Ticketbox said, Eric, you know, forget Netflix, Ticketbox is taking over. Well, obviously Ticketbox. So, you know, I posted something that talked a little bit about Netflix and some of the success that they've been experiencing. Somebody's paying attention. Somebody recognized Netflix as a keyword. So if I wanted to interact and engage with the Ticketbox folks, I could actually do that directly from here. And you can see I've got an actual Buffer icon. So this is where you've got a little cross-platform interactivity going on. So TweetDeck recognizes that I've got Buffer installed. So if I wanted to take this, I could click the Buffer link and I can actually send that directly into Buffer and I could push that out into Facebook or LinkedIn if I wanted to and take it completely out. I could quote it, I could retweet it, I could comment it, I could favorite it, like it. So you can see there's, there's other ways that you can interact. And as you kind of roll through, you can kind of get an idea of how you can use this platform to interact with Twitter. You can kind of create a brand new tweet right here if you wanted to. And so being able to use a dashboard, if you will, like a TweetDeck, might give you a little bit better way of managing your Twitter. Because I know a lot of times when I talk to people about Twitter, they get frustrated with the fact that when they go to Twitter, it seems like a fire hose and there's so much information that rolls through. It's really difficult for them to really make heads or tails of what's going on in Twitter. Now, one of the ways that you can work around that by using Twitter natively Let me go ahead and open up a new tab. And by the way, when I open a new tab in Chrome, you'll notice that I've got a little tool here called Zest. This is kind of a nice little content. We talk about what sort of information should we post. This has actually changed the settings of my new tab options within Chrome. So anytime I open up a new tab, Zest is actually curating information for me from its community on things that I have told it that I like. So this is very digital focused, so I can go through, and before I go in and I jump in and start doing something else, I can always open up a new tab, and this gives me a nice little reading area where I can find some cool stuff that might also be interested in sharing it with people. And you can see how many times it's actually been clicked on and interacted with. So there's a lot of really neat things there. But anyway, let's go to Twitter, and I'm going to just go natively to Twitter. The function that I'm talking about in Twitter that will help you sort things down is, uh, is a function called lists. And so, for example, if I take Emily here, um, she's a banker that I met. We follow each other. She always has some really great posts, and she works for a community bank. If I want to go here, I can see I can unfollow or follow her directly here, but If I pull her up, I can pull up her account and I can go over and I can click on the little dropdown links here and I can add or remove her from a list. And a list just simply provides me with the ability to categorize people into similar themes. So I can see Emily is part of the banking industry list. If I wanted to put her— maybe I met her in Madison, Wisconsin at the Graduate School of Banking. I could go in and I could, you know, assign her to the Madison, Wisconsin Twitter list. But now with her part of that banking list, if I go back to my homepage, what I can do here is I can go in and I can actually pull up my lists. And I can go into my list and I can go to my banking list and I can scroll down to the bottom and here's my banking industry. You can see I've got 800 149 individuals that are part of that. And so now here's Casasa, here's Jamie, who I know from a bank. So if I keep scrolling down, I'll eventually get to hers, but there's a lot of other people that I've added to that list. So if I want to hop onto Twitter and I just want to get updated on some cool banking information, I can jump into my banking list and that immediately comes to me. Very similar to my strategy And how I kind of use these together is I might find this. This might be a really great article. I might click on it. I might go to the article. I might say, yeah, that's something that I want to keep for future reference. So then I can clip it into Evernote. So now it's in an Evernote notebook. And then when I get ready to develop a presentation, I can hop back into my Evernote, which got me information based off of a Twitter list for a business or an individual that I put in. That was related to banking. That was a mouthful, so I'm gonna just stop right there. But hopefully that whole kind of crazy process made a little bit of sense. So the last little tool that I just wanted to mention is a platform called Talkwalker, and somewhat similar in a sense of Google Alerts, and search, but Talkwalker gives you a different perspective on things. It's just a different way of grabbing information. It looks at information similar to what Google does, but you can use it as a search engine. You can use it as a Google Alert site service. So if you go in and you do like a free social, social search, you can go in here And if I wanted to type in a hashtag, so let's say Bank Social, which is a conference. Let's say I want to see what people are talking about in the world of Bank Social. I can go in and type in Bank Social. I can type in search. Well, it's going to ask me to log in, so I'm not logged into my account, but it's going to roll through. You can kind of see some of the sneaky shaded information down here below. And honestly, I can't remember what my username and my password is to get back in, but you can see the BankSocial. It gives you kind of an activity and it shows you when people are talking about it, what sorts of information is there. So you can go in, you can sign up for that. There's also a DocWalker Alerts, which is very similar to Google Alerts. So you can plug in— Again, maybe go back to BankSocial. Maybe I want to be notified Anytime somebody says something related to bank social, or I can put in my own business, or I can put in a competitor or an industry term or a hot topic. I can put that information into a Talkwalker alert, and it will email me anytime Talkwalker stumbles upon that information on the web and social so that I can be alerted of what's going on. So we've got a handful of Talkwalker alerts that we've also created. You know, that are just monitoring things that would like to hit our radar screen. And of course, you take that information, determine if it's content worthy. You can push it into one of your social distribution channels like Buffer or Hootsuite, maybe add it to a list. And so now you can see how this whole process— it may seem somewhat convoluted if you're not doing this yet, but for me, it's— and for a lot of people that use social on a regular basis, It's, it's, it's something that you can work towards optimizing because once you get familiar with the tools and develop somewhat of a process or a procedure to run through, it gives you a really quick and easy way of doing this. So you don't feel like, even though maybe the rest of the world looks like you're on social media quite a bit, sharing information and engaging and interacting, and you always seem to know what's going on, this gives you the ability to use technology more efficiently and claim back your, your regular day. And I hesitate saying your productive day because I do think if you use social media effectively or the right way, it can be a very productive tool. There's certainly the risk that if you dive into social media and you start going off on tangents and chasing squirrels, it can turn into an unproductive day at the office very, very quickly. But if you remain focused and have a strategy around it, social media, I think, can be a very productive way of getting information, sharing content, building trust and credibility, and using it as an engagement platform for those that are interested in learning more about you, about your business, about what you do. So that kind of, I guess, ends the stuff that I wanted to talk about today. I just figured I would share a handful of the helpful tools that I use on a regular basis and some of the ways that I'm using them. So again, just a little recap. We started with the Evernote tool, so check that out, sign up for a free account, maybe install the plugin, do some snips and see what you think. Big fan of Buffer and also Hootsuite. TweetDeck, a great way if you're looking at just diving in specifically to Twitter as a tool. I didn't mention this when we were on the TweetDeck conversation, but one of the things that we also recommend, if, if an organization or an individual really isn't ready to start posting on Twitter and they don't know what they want to say, Twitter and all social networking platforms are a great way of listening and building a listening strategy. So identify who your top clients are, who your top prospects are. And just make sure that you're paying attention to them so that you can go and, uh, and figure out what they're saying, what they're talking about, who's interacting with them. And you will find out very quickly if you're following one of your better customers and you see your competition retweeting or commenting or sharing and you're not doing it, you have to say to yourself, at what point will my competition start wondering why I as their current provider of services, I'm not doing the same thing. It's almost like letting somebody else take your girlfriend to the prom. You really don't want that to happen. So you want to make sure that you're paying attention. And the listening strategy around social media just in general, I think, gets not enough importance paid to it or attention paid to it. So developing a good listening strategy Particularly as it relates to your individual customers and making sure that you're paying attention to them is probably a great way to start. If you're still somewhat on the fence about how to use social media as an effective tool, just pay attention and recognize the folks that you really, really care about. So, and then lastly, wrapped it up with talkwalker.com. So create an account and that will give you an opportunity to go through and you can give some of these free tools a try, see what you think. So just doing a quick little check in the chat box area to see if there are any other comments or questions from the audience. If there's anything that somebody is using that they would like to share, or if you've got a question, or if there's another platform that you've heard of in the past, but you're not exactly sure what it does. I'll give it another couple minutes. So if you'd like to type that in. Otherwise, we will start the wind-down process. Cue the Jeopardy music. Yep. So it looks like we're good for today. So those of you that joined live, thank you for joining us and being part of today's Free Webinar Wednesdays. We'll get the recording up at freewebinarwednesdays.com here very shortly, and we look forward to having you join us for future episodes here at Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thank you. Until then, have a great week, everybody, and thanks for joining us. Bye-bye.
