 Mike, you may be real regret. It may be not the platform we're using, but your speaker here who tells everybody, no, we want to go back to real life. But anyway, we're going to talk about social media in 15 minutes a week. As Mike said, I work with small businesses. Basically, I take that whole long title and say I just work with small businesses. And I've gotten it fairly heavily involved with them. And with this whole idea of social media, because we're encouraging small businesses that they also need to be out there, they need to be participating in it. Even if they don't have a website, they certainly need to be thinking about what are reviews being said about them. Are they accurately positioned in the Google Maps or some of the other mapping systems? I was down in Ellendale and told one of the restaurants that when I look for your pin, you're in the middle of the Chevy parking lot or Chevy used car parking lot. So it is possible. It needs to be done. We as extension need to be there. We need to encourage our clients to be there. Clients of all types, not just small businesses and stuff. But there's just one big fear of it takes so much time. And admittedly, it can take a lot of time. But you need to just sort of chunk it up and you can start at a very small level. And that's sort of what we're going to talk about today is that sort of small level. So now these are some of the headlines I just pulled in the last week about social media. Web users, 109 minutes a day on social media. That's a lot of time. You know, equate that out and you see we're at, you know, pushing two hours. And social network, this says we eat up three plus hours a day for the average American user. Found another one that says on electronic media and now we're really going much broader that Americans are using 11 plus hours a day and recently for 2015 it is now at 12 or just slightly over. But look at what it includes. It includes certainly more items than what I might think about. But they are out there and it's a scary process that we have that. And then, of course, today, we're talking about online education and the possibility of us reaching out to clients, be it one-on-one. And I would suspect all of you are doing that simply via email or Twitter or, you know, some other platform that you're doing and stuff. And again, we come back to the fear. It's just one more thing. One more thing we have to add to our plate and when will we get it done and what do we take out to put this in and stuff. And hopefully, by the time we get done today, we will have alleviated a few of those fears and come to recognize that, oh, it's just another way of doing business and it really won't need not add a lot to your to workloads and stuff. It is possible to do fairly simply and stuff. So we have a couple questions today. Mike and I tried to set up some other ones here and stuff, but the questioning service, the polling service here in Skype only allows sort of a multiple choice. So what you're going to have to do here is, for this one, just jot down in the chat box all of the activities you currently use in your educational program. So just put a one if you use a website, three if you email, six if you're logging. So go ahead and start typing. I see. So e newsletters, if you do your newsletter, send it out that way, email. All sorts of ones. Somebody's doing three and four, email and texting, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, two, three, five, seven, you know. Okay, one, two, three, seven. And we're going to sort of stick these all together and stuff and see what we really have out here. A lot of twos and threes, a lot of newsletter, e newsletters, a lot of emails, one being fairly popular, and thanks for the other, the radio and newspaper. And we can't forget the traditional means that we reach out to our audiences and stuff. And you're going to hear me talk about that later on. They are as important. 13474 is texting, some radio again, seven social media, just all of the potential audience that are out there and stuff. So I don't see anybody typing. So we're going to end as Mike said, if you got a question, you want to make a comment on any of this at any time, get in the chat box or open up your mic and feel free to shout out there because that's the way we learn is through each other. Talk about examples that you're using. I know what I'm doing. But through the look here, all of you are doing really active and we can all learn from the things you've got going on too. So now, second question. What would you like to include in your educational work? And here it's not 1234. It's ABCD and so forth. So that when we come to put these together, Mike and I can distinguish which was question one and which was question two. So pretty much the same possible answers. Maybe you're happy with where you're at right now. You don't want to add anything more. Video YouTube. Yes. Yes. Website. I would encourage all of you and you will hear that over my talk today. Probably this whole idea of websites. Visual media. A large way that we're talking today is visual. It's be it video, be it photography or just photos you're taking via just the different ways that we send media out. Pinterest and everything else. So EH, video podcast, more of that. Some websites. Yeah. So you're sort of spread across the board. I see a lot of E here in this and stuff. Looking here real quickly. So yeah, and all of those, you know, are possible for you to to use. Certainly one of the ways I would encourage you if you want to take on anything is find somebody who's doing it. And because we have all these tools, Skype or whatever you want to use, just pair up with them. Most of my education through this process has been what last name is a stamper. I believe he wrote a book called Working Out Loud. We just work together online. And that's how I've, I've, you know, picked up some of the tips and ideas and hints that that we're going to talk about today. So let's go to online work in 15 minutes a week. Slowly. So these are the three things that that hold most people back from even getting online or certainly if they're online from doing or moving very far in it or changing very quickly. And it's one is just that that fear we have inside of something new, something new, something different. We hear all of the things that can go wrong. And then obviously time. It you know, it's it's a time suck. I mean, that's the word that it's referenced all the time is is and if you're online right now, and you've got a Facebook personal profile, you may know the hours that you can spend and I have dear friends who refuse to get on because they're just afraid that once they go down that path, they'll never come out of the dark again. So and also support. You know, we don't have or we feel we may not have support to do it. We feel we may not have the time to do it or you know, other people. And that's where you find your own. You find that network network of people who become your best friend to make it happen to help you through to answer questions. All of us are at different points in the learning curve. Mike came up here and said, Hey, Glenn, would you do something on your online presence? And I'm going like you're not asking the right person, but I probably can say, Well, I know a little bit, but I know people who know more. But then I also know people who probably aren't at my level of experience at this point in time, and haven't tried some of the things that that we have tried. And I guess as I talk about it, just to give you an idea, I do Facebook, I do Twitter, I tinker with Pinterest once in a while. We blog, we have web pages, and we're doing all of this as a lot of the learning process. So how do you eliminate these fears? You lurk. If you're afraid of getting out there and doing anything, it is perfectly acceptable in the world of online presence to just sit and watch, just sit back there, just start and open an account, don't do anything, and just watch. That's the way you learn what the protocol is, how people are using it, how people are responding to it. And you can do that for, excuse me, develop a tickle in the throat here. You can do that for as long as you want. I spent lots of time, and I still lurk some days. Tweetchats, if you're into tweetchats, I'm much of a lurker on tweetchats, just trying to learn what goes on in those. Learn the lingo. That little sign there, as you know, it once meant a pound sign. Today it's a hashtag. It's referencing, if you put a hashtag on something, especially Twitter, that's where hashtags develop from, I have Twitter small biz. So I can quickly use that hashtag and find all the references to small business that are out there really quickly, because you can search by those. And you practice. We're all practicing on social media, so don't be afraid. If you mess up, of course, proofread and do all those things, but you're going to hit the button once, twice, several times, and it's going to be wrong, and we just live with it, and we go on. I've several times, you can schedule blogs out in advance, and I forget to do the scheduling, and I hit the button, and the next thing I know there it is, and oh no, I wanted that a week ago, or a week from today, that's okay. And the last thing you can do, and the slide isn't working here, is just do it. Throw all the fear away, just dive into the water. We don't care how deep the water is, just dive in and start trying to play with some social media. So here are some steps in getting started. Know who your audience is and where they can be found. Are they on Twitter? Are they on Pinterest? Are they reading your website? And we really don't care where they're at, in the sense that at this point in time, you find them first and then you go where they're at. It's going to be very hard to bring them to you. You need to put them where they're at and stuff. Glenn, this is Mike. So do you want to talk a little bit about how do you find where they're at? You lurk. The number one place is you find some of the leaders and the movers and the shakers, and you ask them, do you use social media? What social media do you use? Go out and look at their, if you know they're online, do a Google search. Check out their LinkedIn page. If they're professional, business professional, there's good chance they may have a LinkedIn page. You can go out there and look where they're at. But look at their website. You know, if they're serious about this, they probably have a website, as I said, and that's a great place to see. Because they should have listed, and you should have listed what social media platforms you play in and how to find you in the social media platforms. So you find the movers and shakers, because pretty much everybody, well, that's what we typically find is that we're going to follow the movers and shakers in our industry. And so find them first and then that'll give you a pretty good heads up. And just always ask, you know, quick raise of hands. You've got a bunch of producers in the room. What are you using? And have them raise their hands. Then you, you know, set some goals for yourself. Remember, Dan, you're out there. We were talking about building a house. So it's the same thing here. It's going to take a lot longer, at least twice as long as you plan on. And so recognize that and sort of put a plan together. Understanding it's going to take a long time. Get a following. And that is much harder to do. We have come to find out then than what it sounds like. It's it's tough to get people to follow you. There are so many people out in this world today. But you're a local resource. Certainly your local people won't know you. It'll be easier for you to get them to connect to you and stuff. And then we'll talk later on but make the most of your existing resources. Now this diagram that I have up here begins this conversation that I will, as I said, I will mention over and over. You see a number of the potential ways you can be online. And notice though they all connect to the middle. And that middle, when we say home, that's your web page. We don't call it web page. I mean, that should be the key part that you first start out with if you're going to have an online presence. Because that's where you have the opportunity to control everything. All of the other ones on the outside, to some degree, are controlled by an outside entity. Facebook hasn't had a change in their algorithm for that feed that you see if you're a Facebook user. They just, you know, I think it's been five days now since they last changed their algorithm. You have to follow what they're doing. And so go to the middle square and start there. Your website isn't an option. And I don't count your website as part of your 15 minutes. It is so crucial that you have a website in today's world. Again, I apologize for this throat here that just decided to act up at the last minute. You only control three things on the web. Your website or online, your email list and your text list. Content, you control that. Yes, but how it's how it's sent out there, who gets it? Unless you were able to send it to them directly. And that's why e-newsletters and email and even, you know, are so important because you can directly send to who your target market is. And that's back to your question, Mike. It's great when you know that and you can directly send to them. I get a, you know, much higher response rate off my e-newsletters than I do putting out lots of tweets and Facebook posts and stuff. And I just put that sort of the three things you control came from that quote and all these slides are going to be available later on. I'll put them out in slide share, which pushes it over to LinkedIn and you'll see how all that works here. And so use the tools that are out there, but the website isn't an option. You have to have it. It's your base. Everything that you produce should be put on your website and because that's your home. That's where your content stays. You control it. You use it. And here's a picture of my website. All the areas in red are, a lot of those come from social media, blogs, newsletters, articles that I write for the paper. If you see on the right, my Facebook feed automatically comes back into my page and stuff. So my page is largely a bucket. A bucket of everything that I've gathered. And you got blog posts in the middle. You got more blog posts mentioned on the outside. If clients are watching this, they're actually going to see first the blog pop up on that lower left and then later on the blog post is going to be in the middle with a picture and later on it goes to an archive. Again, the importance of your web page. And like I said, I'm cheating here a little bit because a lot of this, you probably have a county web page. I think all of you do. That's a key part of this. So I said I've cheated. So I'm also cheating somewhat. My confession here is that in that 15 minutes, I'm not counting the things you already are doing. You're reading. You're writing. You're listening. You're taking pictures. You're taking videos. You're answering questions online. You're already probably skimming various sources of news. You may be using social media for personal interest. Reading, posting, emailing, creating newsletters. All of those items that you are doing there, you're going to do otherwise or do already and you're already doing them. So now is your chance to just move them and do something else with them. So how to keep your time under control? Have a plan. We mentioned that. And that plan should probably start slow and small. You only got 15 minutes a week for the first month. If you're not doing anything, lurk for the first month. Don't do a thing. Pick a website or a platform or two, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and just watch. Just see what people are doing. See what the movers and shakers of the industry are doing. See who's referencing who. And then get your website up and running. Like I said, I don't count that as part of it because now we're going to use social media to push people to your website. That's the goal. And then finally get to one post a week. Now you'll probably respond to me and say, well, I hear that one post a week doesn't do it and do it as a team. You've got your county team. You've got other professionals who are in the same area as you. You can do that as a team. You don't have to put all the posts up there. As a matter of fact, it's best if you don't. Get some other people to help you out in this whole thing. And develop a personality for who you are online. What's your personal side? Part of social media is the social part. And that's a very important part of social media, is you don't have to be all informational. You can talk about your pet cat. Just don't do it all the time. It's not a sales job. But we're instead bringing information that people can use, that people will find interesting, etc. And Dan, I'm sorry to pick on you again here. But, you know, I liked watching Dan's comments as he was building a house, you know, and, and, you know, occasionally on his Facebook page. Oh, here's where we're at today and stuff. That gives me a brand and it gives something to connect with Dan at a whole nother level. You know, if I wouldn't know Dan, at least I would say, you know, here's guy who's just, you know, he's doing what I'd like to do and stuff or he's doing something I've done. I can relate to that. And that's so important as we're deciding who we can trust online. These are your biggies. You know, if you're going to go online, I'd pick one of these. The big W is WordPress. That's for blogging. Email is the envelope down here in the corner. And then Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest. It's out there. It's at Pete. It's not really growing much right now, but there's a ton of other ones that are that I can't keep up with. These are just some of the ones that I know. The last one at the bottom, I just added since in the last day, it's called Facebook Live. You can now do live streaming on Facebook. And if you've done went down to Facebook, you get your newsfeed and you might see something now that says live across the top of it. Well, somebody's streaming it right then and there. Fantastic what you can do. I mean, it's just amazing. I played with Periscope, another live streaming capacity to shoot video. So just ways that you can do these. Facebook, obviously the big dog that everybody started chasing, but it's not right for everybody. Blogging, a lot of people do blogging. And then some people even just with the blogging sites, it's just WordPress. You can also create your web page, although we don't really need to do that because we have the campus system that we can do that instead. So but it's just these are your major options that you probably want to think about first. So how do you find the ideas for the posts? I mean, that scares everybody silly as I can't write. Even if I want to do one a week, I'll run out of stories in a month. Listen, we love stories, real world issues. I'm going to be doing one here real soon. I walked into my car dealership, got a brand new one, and they were showing or they have a coffee bar in there. And so I'm thinking, is this customer service or is this an income source for them? And we'll discuss how it can be either it can be both. But the company has to think about this real hard what they want out of it. Key experts, existing resources, use them over and over and over. One piece of content can be used multiple times. Although be cautious that as you put them out the same thing, you will lose some of the ranking that you would love to have for it and stuff. They don't perform as well. Test, engage, that word engagement. I mean, that's really what we want is get people involved. Pushing out information is great, but you really want them to respond back to you and you want to get that conversation going. And I just happen to see, I mean, this is this is the. Charleston, North Carolina Airport and they have all the rocking chairs and look at all these people are doing. They're all probably on social media doing something. Be visual, you know, that picture tells a thousand words right there. It's also a pretty cool airport. So Mike talked about and I got to keep moving here. I see my time is quickly going as it usually does. If I took the material from today's thing, these are all the things I could do with it. Well, I can, you know, I've got this prep material. I could do blog posts from that. I could put it on my newsletter. I could, you know, that I'm going to do today's presentation. It's just going to be PowerPoint slides. I could push those to LinkedIn and from LinkedIn, then I didn't even draw the arrows, but they could go different ways and stuff. Today's presentation is going to be recorded and shared. I could put that on my website. I could put it in LinkedIn. As you see, I can take this stuff. Not going to quite use it the same way all the time, but I'm going to tweak it and push it out, push it out, push it out if I wanted to. This is overkill. I would not do this with today's material. This would just be too much. People would get rather sick of it. There's the one, you see, off way out here in the, in the, in the upper sort of right here, this hashtag idea, we generate a paper, Lee newspaper. And all it is, it writes itself from the hashtags we use in the Twitter feed. So, you know, and there could be a chain of responsibility and stuff. And I just have an example. When you get to these, you'll be able to see an example from that is being used by extension. Sound easy? Be careful, though. Gotta stay fresh. I can overuse an item. We all can. And if you don't have an audience, it's not going to do any of us any good. So it's social media, engage with people, you know, finding the audience is probably just about more important than getting stuff up there and stuff. It's not a build it and they will come. That does not cut the mustard at all. That's truly a myth. It's the same as sort of marketing. People aren't going to find you unless you're working at it. One way to get people paid ads. They have a great click through rate. More people will click on paid ads surprisingly than they will on your other stuff. And all of these sources will allow paid ads. We took a page that had no followers, power of business. And in about just over four weeks, we had 2000 followers using paid ads. Why'd we do it? Because we wanted to get to it and it was something we just wanted to play with. And Glenn, would you go into what that cost to do that, to move it from virtually nothing to 2000? We spent, I don't have all the figures out in front of me and stuff. We spent from about 50 to $100 a week. The nice thing about Facebook is, is you can really hone in on who your audience is. You can literally get it down to zip code or very tiny areas, very defined very specifically as to, you know, we were looking for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and, you know, tightly controlled. We were looking for them in North Dakota, Nebraska, or Mississippi. And we could have even shrunk that down to, like I said, even a zip code area or stuff like that. And so 50 to $100 a week we were spending, we were also doing, we spent more than we had to, because we were, we were testing how people responded to different pictures. We tested whether people responded to different titles. So we've been playing with this, seeing what, what is, gives us the most bang for the, the thing about it is, is we tend to find that people don't respond the same. So what I, what we learned might not necessarily fit anybody else. It's also different whether they're on a mobile device or a desktop. Uh, we were doing a, it was a food-based, uh, no, what was the, it was a general post, one of them we had people on, and the other one we just had a scenic view on. On the desktop, they didn't want to see people. On the mobile, they wanted to see people. So it, it came up both ways. How do you do it all? Go ahead, Mike. I was just going to ask you, so what is the minimum amount you can spend on a per week ad? I mean, do they, is it $10, $20, or is it that $50? I mean, is it, you can take it down to five or 10 or a buck, you know, it's finding a source for it. Uh, I've done a number of them for 20. Uh, you know, and, uh, uh, you know, but it's also having that source of funds, you know, where you're going to get it and stuff. So, uh, you know, it's, I just say, think about it. You know, it's, it's a nice thing, but you're better off if you can get people to be coming in without, not better off. You can do it without paying, but paying can be an effective way to find an audience. Now, because we still have those people, but they're not engaging much anymore. We should be running contests and, and that's a whole another story. Uh, make it a priority. I have a time every day where I come in and that's how I start my morning. Uh, like I said, I'm heavily involved with it. Uh, here there are some tools. I just list three, you know, that regular time and then do it as a team. Uh, our Facebook or our social media doesn't run just with me. It runs with a team of us, uh, uh, and beside the states I already mentioned, we also have somebody in Vermont and somebody in New York are sort of the big drivers for, for our teamwork there. Just some resources where I got some of the information and let you ask questions. Or they all left us, Mike. No, I still see that there's 18 people here, Glenn. Well, there are 18 people who, who haven't clicked off yet. They're out doing something else. Let's be, we're just overwhelmed overwhelmed. Yeah. So are there any questions or comments or observations that you've had from using social media that you'd like to visit about at the moment? We know some of you are using it in your, in your programming, but it's been your response. Yeah, they're pretty reasonable and, and, you know, and, uh, you can get them fairly cheap. And, and of course, the tighter you can define it, the less, less you have to, uh, have to pay for, uh, for ads, the resources. Is that what you want, Yolanda? Well, like I said, these will be all, Mike will be sending out an email and I'll get these posted today, tomorrow on, on SlideShare. Yeah, it's, it's good, good point, Tricia, uh, have a topic. I mean, that really helps you. That should be part of your plan is, is, you know, where do you want to focus on today or what's going on that it's coming up and, and you got to be out ahead of it and stuff because it's amazing how quickly time passes and all of a sudden an event has gone by and there is just, uh, today, I'll try to look up a recent resource that just came out today, talking about social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter and using them effectively for an event to help push an event. And it talks about before, during and after. What does a paid ad look like? Are you a Facebook user, Emily? They're pretty much, uh, uh, if, if you go out there, they pretty well self-identify. This is a paid ad. Uh, let me see, I wonder if I have any here. I'm looking real quickly here. I always have some there. I'm not seeing any other chair of screen if I could catch one real quick, but, um, you know, it will flip up things saying, Hey, Glenn, do you want to send this, this is not performing or it is performing. And that's one of the things I skipped over real quickly is good. You can also resend out content you've used in the past. Now you may want to refresh it some, but if it was really good content and had really good hits, that's one of the things to send out. But the other one we find that is good to send out as content that didn't perform at all, but you rewrite it. It's a lot easier to rewrite than to write it that first time. So rewrite it and you may get something that performs very well. Are they the items? They are the items on the yes, they are the items sometimes on the edge of the page. You will also get them in your stream. There is some control you have used to be some control you have over where they where they showed up. Now Facebook has changed your algorithm again. And so once again, where they show up, I'm a little bit behind on that one. You don't see them as much. I don't think in your stream is what you used to. You're trying to get down so that your stream is to information from the people you want to really see it from and less from those who are paying for the ads. Okay, Glenn, there is a question earlier about how do you get started with the blog. Well, we just went out to WordPress, takes no time at all, opened it up, started an account. And start typing. Blog posts are can be anything from. Well, if you if you follow Seth Godin or Godin, G-O-D-I-N, he'll have a blog post that's maybe 20 words in length some days. And other times, you know, six, seven people go up to a thousand words in length. It could be just a picture. I know a lot of bloggers might just put a picture up. They might put a quote up. So how do you get started is I've used WordPress all the time for my blogging things. Now, Bob can talk to you about using your, they're sort of using the website as a possible blog option. But we had, and WordPress are two kinds. One of them is totally free. And the other one you have to, there is a paid version for it. And with the paid version, you can get more analytics from and stuff. But the free version works perfectly fine. I think that doesn't quite get you the numbers. There's also a question here from Nicole. Are there any programs out there that teach social media? Anyone tried to gain followers that way? That teach social media. I don't know any programs, do you mean online programs or do you mean people who are, you know, face to face educational extension programs? Yeah, you know, there are some folks out there who teach social media, get more into depth. We will start and how do you open an account, you know, how do you use an account, sort of take some of the fear out of it and then we'll maybe do a go to a level two on those things and stuff. So, yeah, yeah, we could find some. Oh, I did some about three years ago here in the state, the whole world. So one thing I can promise you about this world is everything I said today will be out of date within six months. A live feed on their page, I don't know. You know, that would be, now are you talking about Facebook live feed, Emily? Or just a, yeah. Yeah, that's the new big thing right now is that we're seeing take off like crazy and that's this Facebook live feed where you can just watch something going on and stuff. We could have, Mike and I could have set this up via Facebook live feed. It's sort of crazy and I've got somebody encouraging me to do it because on our, the big site we're working on and stuff, we were doing one Facebook post a day and we went to three a day based on and some, we wanted to try different hours instead of just a morning one. We now do a morning and afternoon and an evening. And what happened was when we went to three, we lost about half of the number of hits in total. So we're now doing three a day and getting about half the number of contacts or likes or even that even click on it. We're getting about half the number of clicks that we used to get just with one. Well, what we're thinking is going on, what we're thinking is driving this is that most of our, what we put out there is it's not original content. And people are accepting of that once a day, but three times a day, they want to hear from us. They want us to be ourselves, to build our brand. So we're getting pushed to do some, maybe Facebook live or something or more original content out there. But it's starting tough to three times a day, original content ain't going to happen. So we got to find what, what, what might the balance be and also find some more people to jump in and that's where it gets back to do it as a team. The team has to, we got to get more members on our team to step up and start working on this. So, hey, due to the questions that came across, we've gone an extra 15 minutes or so from the original plan, which is good because that means you have questions and you're curious about it and added some comments as well. So any final comments or questions for Glenn? Yeah, anytime anybody wants to play with any of this, I'd be, you know, I'll, I'll give you the expertise I have. And like I said, I feel some days it isn't very much, but or I can pass you along to somebody who knows the whole lot more. But probably your people right next to you probably know as much or more about some of this as they're just not talking about it. It's a great tool. Okay. Well, I guess with that, I just want to just remind people one, first off, thanks, Glenn. Thanks for everybody being on live today. The next Skype in the series for the district conference is August 30th. I'll be sending out that invite later this week. And just for everybody's FYI, we will be inviting all of the districts to participate in that half hour timeframe with Chris Barboom. As I mentioned previously, I'm still working on some other dates. I now do have September 9th and I'll send an email out for this for you folks. But September 9th at 10.05 to 10.45, Lynette will be representing the program leaders and will be talking about sharing your public value. I've also had conversations with Kelly Armbruster talking about marketing and branding because that was one of the things I heard quite a bit from agents this spring during performance reviews. And we're going to talk about that marketing branding, but the way it's looking right now is that session will actually be after fall conference. So, but with that, I do want to say thanks to everybody. Have a good rest of the week. And once again, thank you, Glenn.