 I guess we're going to get started. Welcome. We're getting to the end of word camp, right? So I'm going to try to make this presentation as exciting as possible, OK? So that you guys are not bored. I know you've been sitting a lot. We're probably really tired because everyone was at all these parties all weekend, right? So first welcome. If there are those of you who do not know me yet, my name is Dr. Nancy Richmond. I'm a faculty here at FIU. I teach marketing. I actually teach for our social media certificate and social media minor in the marketing department here at FIU, as well as our new master's program, which has a social media component. So I know we've been talking a lot about WordPress, right? So we're going to talk today about social media. So I have used WordPress a lot myself. I have three different WordPress websites. But the one thing about WordPress is what? It's for content, right? But what drives content to WordPress, social media? They live together, guys. They live together. And we need to understand both how to develop websites, but also how are we actually going to deal with social media? So today we're going to be talking about a road trip, OK? But first, who are you? I don't know who you are, but I will look you up on LinkedIn and I will find you. I actually just put this up for my students in their class this week because they're learning how to use LinkedIn, OK? I put this up on their Facebook group. They probably think I'm crazy, all right? They may. I don't know. But why is this important? How many of you guys use LinkedIn? You're all on LinkedIn. How many people use it every week? OK. So LinkedIn is often one of the most underutilized resources. And many of my students think that it's dead, OK? They think it's dead. But I assure them it is not dead. LinkedIn is not dead. And it's a super useful resource, a super useful resource. So I actually went on this road trip this summer. I went on this road trip and I traveled from LA up to Seattle. And I wanted to meet with companies along the way who are using social media and understand how are they using social media? So how did I find companies? Through LinkedIn, right? So I've been using LinkedIn for a very long time. Did I just suddenly reach out to them? No. I've been connecting with them for years, OK? I've been connecting with people on LinkedIn for a very long time. Why when I see companies that I'm interested in and they're talking about useful things on LinkedIn, I connect with them, OK? There are a few companies I did connect with right before I went on my road trip. But a lot of people were people that I had things in common with. For example, I went to a similar university as them. I went to Northeastern University. I worked at MIT. I tried to use something that we had in common. What do we have in common? And to connect them with that and say, hey, I'm going out to California. I'm going out to Oregon. I'd like to meet up with you. Do you have any time? So LinkedIn's a really powerful tool for doing business. So for creating a professional brand, do you know how to communicate to the world why it is special to do business with you? Why is it special to do business with you? It's a really, really important question. So I want you guys to think about that. I want to talk about theory. Only on this slide. You're in luck, OK? Grandaveter. Grandaveter. This is really super important, OK? Grandaveter. He actually was a researcher in Boston. And when I learned about this, I understood networking so much better. He actually studied people who were searching for jobs. And he thought that the people searching for jobs would actually be more likely to get jobs from their strong tie connections. But what he actually found out is that their weak tie connections were actually more important than the strong tie connections. Why is that? Why? They're outside of your immediate network, right? So if you actually look, the people that are connected to you, your closest friends and family, typically know all the same people that you know. I'm also going to give an example at Word Camp, OK? All of you guys are WordPress developers for the most part, right? A lot of you are working in WordPress. You all are building websites. But you know what's more important than that? Meeting people who aren't doing that. Why? Because they know things that you do not know that can help bring a new light to what you're actually doing. It's great that we have Word Camp and we get to join and use ideas together. But I wouldn't just connect with people that are Word developers, right? Wordpress developers. You need to be connecting with people who are also outside your circle. And this is how social media can be very, very helpful for your career and also for doing business. So defining you on social media. What is your goal or your mission? What are your strengths? What makes you unique? Why do clients or colleagues already think? What do they already think about you? What qualities do you want them to associate you with? I kind of think about it when Alice in Wonderland, right? You guys ever saw this movie or read this book when she fell into the hole? Who are you, right? Who are you? Do you remember that? Yeah, so that's kind of like you. When people are looking at you, wondering, who are you at this moment? And what do you actually want to be represented on social media as? It's a hard question. Who do you want to be known as? OK, a very, very hard question. So what I want you guys to actually do right now is, what makes you unique? I want you to think about that for one minute. What makes you unique? Think of one word that actually makes you unique. And I want you to write it down on your phones. Write it down on your phones. And think about this later on, because how are you actually going to brand yourself? What are some things that you guys came up with? What makes you unique? Is anyone willing to share? Yeah. I'm funny. Funny. What else? Experience. Yes? I care. You care. Excellent. What else? One more. Your perspective. Someone just said? Curious. Curious. OK. So whatever makes you unique, that's what you have to brand yourself with and try to sell yourself as. It's very important. So the power of social capital. Social capital. Why does social capital matter? This really, when we're talking about social media, we come back to social capital. Social capital is about rewarding partnerships, leadership opportunities, sharing of information, higher perceived value, greater credibility, and recognition and prestige. That's why social capital matters. And social capital is really what you're building with social media. So should you connect with people online that you do not know? Yes. Based on this? Yes. OK. Social capital is key. Not just for your own career, but also when you're doing business. Why? Because when you need information, people online can help you. People online can help you. It can help with leadership opportunities. It can also help give you recognition and prestige. So if you're a website developer and you want people to know who you are, if other people are saying you are good at what you do online, they're going to be more likely to use you for business. So I actually changed these numbers. I was like, wow, I went up. OK. So 84,000 followers on Instagram. I have 7,000 followers. And on Facebook, I just found out I am up to 5,000, because all of these people are trying to connect with me at this event. And actually, you can only have 5,000. After you get to 5,000, I have to now start dumping people on my Facebooks. If that's you, I'm sorry. All right? If that's you, I'm sorry. You need to create a fan page. I do have a fan page as well. Actually, I have a public profile page. Yeah, but this is actually, I find that my personal profile, I actually get a lot more engagement. So I use that mostly. But I do have a public profile page as well. I have a hard time figuring out what you're going to post on one versus what you're going to post on the other. What are you going to post? Because I try to combine my worlds, right? So who you know and who they know can be a powerful thing. So let's talk about this West Coast road trip. So what did I do? I actually, so I started in LA. And I drove all the way up to Seattle. And these are some of the companies that I met with. Starbucks, Nike. I met with Behringer, Wine in San Francisco. Twitter. I'm Vintank, which is actually a social media company that is used in the wine industry. I went to headquarters at Instagram, Pinterest, Google. I was at Hootsuite, as well as Facebook. I also visited the National Park Services, LinkedIn, and Tribune Broadcasting, and Dick Clark Productions. So how did I do that? Through LinkedIn, as well as my other social media connections. So what did I learn on this trip? That's what I'm actually going to be talking about now. So what did I actually learn on this trip? First, how to engage with your community. And actively, you need to seek out your connections. People aren't just going to find you. People just don't find you. You can put out excellent content. You can have the great, the best WordPress website out there. But if you're not actively engaging with people, people aren't going to find you. They're not. They're not going to easily find you. SEO, of course, is important. But it's also important to be actively seeking out connections. You need to go find people online. So I'm going to tell you a little story about Scott Eddie. Scott Eddie is actually a very famous travel and foodie online. On Twitter, he has over 865,000 followers. And I've been trying to meet up with him for a very long time. And while I was in San Francisco, I looked down on my phone. And we had tried to actually meet up in Sri Lanka when I was traveling. And then we had tried to meet up in Miami when he was here. And it didn't work. And I was actually at Pinterest headquarters. And I looked down at my phone. And I said, wow, look, Scott Eddie's at Twitter. He's across the street when I'm at Pinterest. Maybe we can meet up. And then he wrote back to me on Twitter. And then we were writing on Facebook, because I'm that nerdy. I'm on two different platforms at a time. And then I said, Scott, we can finally meet in person. So he said, yeah, come to this event directly after this. So we ended up meeting up with him. And then I talked to him about some secrets. He really is one of the, I think, the most influential people on Twitter that I know personally. And you know what he does? He responds. He responds to everyone. I don't know how he does that. He has so much energy. He's amazing. He's originally from Florida. He's very good at responding back. So one of the things I learned from him on this trip was the power of responding. The other thing is crowdfire. Crowdfire is an excellent tool. I highly recommend it. Where you can actually seek out people who are using social media in a way that could be useful for your business. So for example, you could actually follow a hashtag. So if a certain hashtag's being used on Twitter, you can actively seek out and start following people who are using that hashtag. You do have to pay for it. It's not that expensive, highly worth it. I think it's like $25 a month or something like that. So I definitely would recommend it. Crowdfire is a very useful tool for you, for your social media. The second person that I met up with was Neil Schaefer. And he talked about every connection matters. Social media replaces nothing, but complements everything. And I thought that this was really important. Neil Schaefer is a social media expert. He lives in LA. And when I met up with him, he said, Nancy, things haven't really changed that much. We just used to use the yellow pages. And now we used to make phone calls all the time. But now with the power of social media, now you could maybe send an email. You can send an email. How many people is that going to go to? Two, three people. You send out one post with social media. You could be hitting 10,000 people at a time. So the power is huge. So it really hasn't changed what we need to do. Networking is still the same, right? We still need to meet in person sometimes, like at this conference. But how we do it has changed. So leaders are interesting and relevant. That's another thing that I found. People who are leaders in the social media industry, they haven't understood what's going on right now. Right now. What's going on in the world right now? They're posting stuff that is interesting to what's going on currently. So this is when I was in Hollywood. And when I was there, I actually met with Dick Clark Productions. And that is amazing because they actually do the Golden Globe Awards. They do the American Music Awards. And I really was talking to them about how they were using their social media at these award ceremonies. Now one of the things that I found amazing is do you know what they use to coordinate what they're going to send out? And you know, you think an editorial calendar. You think Dick Clark Productions, they run these big massive events. They must do something really, really, they must have a great software, right? No, they use Excel. Yeah, they use Excel. Like how can we still be using Excel to send out tweets and stuff like this, especially there has to be something better, right? So one of the things that I actually found out was the same things that I'm trying to figure out right now, industry leaders are trying to figure out too. They're trying to figure this out because it's changing so quickly. Everything's changing so quickly that we're still using some of the old ways of doing things, but there has to be an easier way. So balanced, personal, and professional. So this is actually one of my friends that I went to high school with her. I had not seen her since I was 18, OK? And I wrote on Facebook that I am going to California on a road trip. And she saw that and she said, well, you know what? I actually work in the National Park, for the Sequoia National Park, as a ranger. And I'd love to have you come visit me. Do you think you can stop on by? So I ended up taking a live. I wasn't planning on going there, but I ended up going to visit her. And she has her own business. So she does this business on the side. And she actually creates these pillows. These pillows, she has her own business. You can heat them up in the microwave. And so if you have any aches or pains or anything, you can use those. She actually developed them because her mom was very sick. She had an illness. And she started developing her own home business. So it was really interesting trying to understand how she was using social media and how she was actually trying to market her own business with social media. So what we were talking about is, how do you actually balance professional and personal? That was a big topic. Like, I still want to be who I am, but how do I balance that? And I think that's something we all have to figure out. So ask questions and listen. This is Shell Israel. He is a very well-known author. And I spoke to him about how he's using social media to sell books, okay? And he said, goodbye broadcast, hello conversations. Shell is amazing. Shell told me, Nancy, I don't know. I might have like one, two books left to write. I was like, why Shell? He said, Nancy, I'm 73. I'm not gonna write more books than that. I'm like, wow, you write about the future of social media and technology. And you know more than I do about this in your 73. So anytime anyone says to me that they're too old to learn about social media, it's not true, okay? Because he knows more about social media and technology than probably most of us in this room. But one of the things he was talking about is broadcasting. You know, social media has changed. We can't do marketing the way we used to do it. We have to change the way we do marketing. And one of my frustrations is often when people take photographs, we have the professional photographers who come in and they take pictures and they're so excited because they're gonna take my photograph, right? And I get them four weeks, two weeks later. And then I'm on to like five other events at that point and no one cares, right? Am I gonna post that now? No, because no one cares, right? So we can't do that. We can't have photographs showing up. We can't have videos showing up even a week later, a day later, like I need it now, right? So social media has to be now. That's the way it is. It's live. There's no waiting. It's here and it's gone. Like everything's happening at WordCamp. It's happening right now. And no one cares tomorrow, okay? So you better get out there and post, right? Cause no one's gonna care tomorrow. And you can't, and the other thing is we saw the big digital boards, right? You can't, something could pop up. You guys could say that you hate FIU. I don't know. You could say anything, right? You could say anything you want on that board. But that's the danger of social media, right? That's the danger of social media is that you don't know what people are gonna say. You can't limit their voice. So the power of it is that they could be saying great things. The danger of it is they could be saying terrible things, right? But we have to take that risk. Why? Cause it's change, marketing's change. Our customers, that's their voice. That's their, we have to listen to them. If they, something went wrong when they were here at WordCamp, we need to listen to them. And say, you know what, I'm sorry that happened. Let's see how we can do it better next time. So we can't actually control the conversation, right? But we can be part of the conversation. We can be part of the conversation. So this was the other thing. I was actually at Facebook headquarters. And I was really moved by this sign. Has anyone been to Facebook before? Headquarters, so you know what this sign is? So this sign is about making sure that you stay motivated and you stay ahead of the curve. You always have to be constantly thinking about what's next. My job is never boring because every day I'm teaching something new. I never know what's gonna happen in the world. Something is gonna be happening differently tomorrow with social media. And that's great, right? But if you don't stay up to date with what's happening, what's actually gonna happen is what happened here. This is actually the back of the sign. And Mark Zuckerberg did this because he wanted his employees to remember at Facebook that we may not always be on top. Don't forget that they used to own this building. So he turned the sign around and he said, Sun Microsoft System, they used to exist but they no longer do. And that could be us, okay? So we need to continue to innovate. And that's the same thing with all of us is in this room. We constantly have to be innovating. Ah, so remember I told you, small business owners. So this woman who I met that was my friend and I was out in the Sequoia National Park. She said, you know what? I'd love it if you did presentations for a group of small business owners who are in this area. So I actually met, because I said, you know what, I've been hearing what big businesses are doing with social media. But what are small business owners doing and what are their challenges with social media? Are they different? And probably the biggest thing that I learned from them was make sure you have fun, okay? Make sure you have a lot of fun with social media. But the other thing that I learned from them was how hard it is when you are a small business owner and you're doing everything. When you're doing everything. Social media is a full-time job. Anyone who thinks that it's easy, it is not easy. All day yesterday, I was posting with SMA, right? We're posting. You guys probably were doing it some too. And after the day was over, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so tired. Photos, all day, quotes, right? It's a lot of fun, but it's a real job. Social media is a real job. It takes a lot of time. And so you can't just hire an intern to do your social media, right? You can't. It's a full-time job and they're gonna need guidance. Why? Because they need your expertise to help guide them. They may know a lot about social media, but they don't necessarily know about your industry, right? And so it takes a lot of work. And so don't underestimate how much time social media takes. Dress the part, smile and pose, okay? So think about that when you're taking photographs, all right? I went to all these different places. I was at LinkedIn. I was at Facebook. And then I went to Nike, okay? Nike was pretty awesome. But I was like, what the heck am I gonna wear to Nike? I didn't have any running shoes with me and I certainly was gonna wear their competitors. I was like, oh man, what am I gonna wear? So I went out and I bought this Nike shirt. I did, I actually bought a shirt. I did not have shoes on. I still think I should have the shoes on, but wherever you are, you have to think about how you look and how you're actually gonna dress the part. Do you look like you fit in? Do you look like you belong? And make sure to smile and pose, all right? Look good in pictures, all right? It's important. Create interesting visuals in video. This picture was at Twitter headquarters. This is the what? This is the most tweeted and retweeted picture selfie ever, right? On Twitter. So this is actually at Twitter headquarters and they have a painting of this there. And the woman I met with said, you know what, we should take a picture with it and put our heads in it. And I was like, oh, that's so fun. It was totally her idea. It was not my idea. And it's probably one of my favorite pictures of all times, actually. So trying to think about creative visuals and video. So let me talk about this first. So next week on February 24th, we have a event that's happening. It's from six until nine in Brickle. And we're actually raising funds for Syrian refugees. I'm working with a woman who was on CNN. She was on CBS recently. And what she's actually doing is she's giving light to Syrian refugees. Light meaning these power lights, okay? These solar power lights. And she's bringing them to Greece. So my students this week were thinking about how they were going to create a photo. So we actually went outside. We sat on those steps. And we tried to come up with an idea. How are we going to actually come up with some content? How are we actually going to come up with some content with these lights? So what I say is be creative. And don't throw any idea out. Everyone was like, let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. And we tried seriously like 10, 20 different things. And this ended up being, I think, one of our best photos. And it was just with a camera. We did some fun videos. We did some boomerangs. Do you guys know what boomerangs are? But the image goes back and forth. It's an app that you can put on your phone. It's pretty fun. So we did a bunch of fun stuff. But I always say be creative. And visuals matter. Anytime you send anything out on social media, you need to have a visual. You need to have some kind of video. Because if you don't, no one's going to look at it. Nobody's going to look at your tweet if it doesn't have any kind of image with it. It's just going to get lost. All right. So finally, go big or go home. Analytics matter. So things that you can look at, Sprout Social, HootSuite, Sprinkler, Tint, those are all really important. And one thing I did find with some of the large companies is that they haven't really figured out analytics either yet. So if you're still trying to figure it out, these tools can help you. But honestly, Facebook analytics and Twitter analytics themselves are very powerful. They're very powerful tools. Don't underestimate the tools themselves. What kind of analytics they have with them. So this is actually WordCamp Miami. So I took this last night. It's actually gone up since then. So let's see if I can pull this up. Oh, a tweet. Okay, we've gone up to 18. So 18.1 million impressions. We had over 2.82 thousand posts. This is huge. You guys have been busy. Wow, did you know we had that many? It's crazy, right? So we can really track what is going on. And these are actually the most influential contributors, the most outspoken contributors as of today. I will be putting these final numbers up on Twitter as the conference ends, probably after like three or four hours after the conference ends tonight. But it's really, you need to track. You need to have a really understanding what's going on with your hashtags. I'm using the software Tint. Tint is what's running those boards. So those boards that you see outside, that's actually Tint. And it's looking at all of our social media. So Starbucks, you would think they had it all figured out. They couldn't find anything that worked for them, so they built their own. Okay, so that's what they're using is their own. They actually have developers who created their own software to specifically figure out how they're doing with analytics. They have computer programmers figuring that out. It's amazing. So finally, Miami gets social, all right? So this is our event for next week. And again, it's February 24th, six to nine. We're gonna, it's gonna be an amazing event. We actually have networking. Then we have speed round table sessions. And then we have comedy, all right? All in one night from six to nine. So if you can come, you need to actually register on that link. There are tickets. We have 200 people registered so far. If you need help registering, Val is actually here in the front. And she can help you register on her tablet, okay? So if you need help registering and you wanna go to see her and she can help you. These are some of our awesome speakers. We do have someone from Facebook, from Sony, from the Royal Caribbean cruise lines, Channel 7 News who's gonna be there. And these are all different topics that we're gonna be talking about. Yeah, the link's here too. Miami gets social, right there. Right there. Miami gets social, comedy.eventbright.com, all right? And these are all different topics that are gonna be talked about at the tables. We have both a speaker and a moderator who are experts in business and social media who are gonna be answering your questions. You can go to three different tables during the event. It's speed networking. So we get up three times and we do it three times, okay? Very quickly. And if you don't learn enough at this event, we're going to have another conference this summer here at FIU. It's going to be called Social Tech Live. It's July 17th, okay? July 17th. I don't know if you guys know who Carla Campos is, but she's actually running this event and FIU is going to be co-sponsoring it. So mark that in your calendars. And if 15 minutes isn't enough time, we'll be doing longer workshops related to these same typical topics this summer. So I wanna do one last thing here, which is play a song for you guys. All right? This is actually, oh is it not working? Hold on. The ball keeps off. All right, so this was actually my anthem song during my road trip. So I feel like we did this at Word Camp Miami with all of our posts, our social media posts. So what I'm gonna ask you guys is all to tweet, continue tweeting so that we can actually trend again today and we can actually break the internet, okay? So that's our goal. So thanks for coming guys.