 All right. Welcome. We'll just give people a minute to join the session. Oh, it's so cool to look at the participant list and see some familiar faces out there. I see people I haven't seen face to face since the pandemic started. You're seeing faces that's pretty impressive Paul. Maurice names. Maurice I am constantly seeing faces. The name sometimes go with them. The problem is hearing voices, right? That's another issue. We won't go into that in today's session. But if we do a follow up, it's the voice that we've all heard and look forward to hearing again. Go ahead and get started with my little introductory slides. So welcome to all of you for joining us for our panel discussion. On how to change the world using social media. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm going to start with author Paul Cegarelli. Jill Terzwell and Maurice Coleman. This program is brought to you by the business science and technology center. We're located on the fourth floor of the main library. 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You can also check out our website. SSPL to go. Not all of our locations are offering this service. So please do check our website first. To make sure that the location that you want to go to is offering this limited library service. And so welcome all of you. We will get started. Please use the chat box to say hi. Introduce yourself. I'm going to start with a question for the panelists. And if that I'll stop sharing my screen and turn it over to Paul. I think we'll have more risk go first. He had a couple of comments to make it. And we'll dive in with some stories for ease. You're muted. Both you and Jill is so muted, which is not much fun for any of us here. What am I supposed to be talking about? Paul, please tell me. You. Well, let's just skip that. We're just going to dive right into it then. And the, the fun that we've had in this project, more recent, Jill were people that I interviewed for this. The fun of doing a project like change the world using social media was to gather stories that were positive and inspirational. The stories that they tell her some of the stories we're going to talk about today. But where I want to start is with one that just floored me when I first came across this person. Nine year old. She's a girl named Hannah Alper, a LPR out of Canada. And I started blogging at the age of nine. She had a wonderful distinctive welcoming voice in her blog. It was always a theme of something that was concerning her, something she and her family were concerned about, something she thought she could make a difference by blogging about, and she established a level of writing and maturity in that blog that is far past what many of us achieve as adults. And I would talk about what she could do in her house to reduce the amount of garbage there and to do recycling. But the killer piece of every one of those pieces she posted was the idea that she would say, and here's what you can do too. And why don't you write back to me and she would start to engage people. I think that really goes to the heart of any activist who's trying to reach out to people and say, I'm doing this. I'd like you to be part of it too. Why don't you join the club rather than hitting people over the head with a stick and saying, you've got to do this. And it just turned 18. She's already got a book out that's called momentous and tells stories of her own. She's been very active in Canada as an activist, speaking at conferences. And she met a lot of the people we freed about the newspapers and see online and admire. These are the kind of people that inspire us to look at what we can do in our day to day lives to make the small, medium and large scale changes that we so crave to do, so crave to make to change the world. And with that, I want to turn it over to Jill who has been talking about an organization that she brought to my attention. And it did magnificent things in the pandemic, especially making the switch from face to face to online and using social media tremendously effectively to Jill. Paul, thank you. So I'm part of the poor people's campaign. It's a national call for a moral revival. It exists in most of the states in the United States, 40 plus states and goes back. Three years, I'm going to say maybe four years. In its current incantation, it's really a continuation of Martin Luther King's poor people's campaign. And so when I got involved going back to maybe 2018, what I found was a group that was using social media that was meeting locally all across the country, but was trying to connect people through social media. And so I would go to an event, maybe to a protest or just to a meeting, and we would be encouraged to take photos of the room or the event and to post them on social media or to tweet out information and to engage other people in our activities. And part of that was so that other people knew that we existed, that knew that this group existed. Last year, we were going to hold a march on Washington on June 20th, 2020. And as you can imagine, thinking through 2020, that march did not happen. Now that march would have been many thousands of people traveling to Washington, D.C. from across the country in whichever way they could get there, cars, buses, whatever. Some kind of going in for the day. So I live in Syracuse, New York. Someone could get up at midnight, drive down to Washington, D.C., go to a protest, drive back, you know, in one day. But now we're in a pandemic, so what do you do? But what they did was to flip to an online event. It was a three-hour online virtual march on Washington held on a Saturday morning with content from around the country broadcasted on what they call earned media, you know, TV stations, but also on 300-plus Facebook pages. So there's a way of doing that, which is very cool, that you can take something and broadcast it across Facebook pages. And so set that up in advance, broadcast across 300 Facebook pages, archived on YouTube, re-broadcast twice more that weekend. That first time it was on Facebook, it had over 2 million views. That's more than it would have had in person, right? Two million people likely were not going to travel to Washington, D.C. But two million-plus people were willing to sit in their living rooms or wherever they were to watch the virtual event. And along with the virtual event, there were tweets and other things, other social media aspects to get people involved. And so I'm really pleased to be part of this group. Really pleased to see how we've been using social media, that social media is something we think about all the time in order to engage our community in the aspects of the poor people's campaign and to push out our messaging. And with that, I'll pass it on to Maurice. So Jill's talking about something very macro, very large, millions of people. My social media story is small. It's me. I have a story about a particular state library conference. I'm not going to name the state, but perhaps you heard they had some snow and power issues recently. So I have a Google alert for my name. My podcast, he is for training. And lo and behold, one day I see my name in pop-up. Okay, let me take a look at this link. Oh, unnamed library association conference. I'm speaking there, really? Someone asked me to speak there. Someone proposed me as a speaker. And I was approved as a speaker, but no one contacted me as a speaker. So I had to contact the said unnamed library association that just recently had power outages and flooding. That association to say hi, my name is Maurice Coleman. I'm presenting at your conference. I'm going to talk a little bit about this. Perhaps you should talk about how you're going to get me there since you put me in your program without my knowledge. And that's part of why as business folk, you need to be involved in social media. You may or may not have it for yourself. You may not have it for your store, your company, privately, whatever thing you want to deal with, but you should at least have alerts set up, because you're not there to know what people are saying about you. Because even if you're not there, people are saying something about you. And sometimes your reputation can get smeared. Or you can be praised on social media and you never know it. So that's part of really being involved in changing the world to social media. Part of changing the world is changing your world. So as a business person, part of changing your world is outreach into your customers. And outreach into those customers that have a great experience, have a poor experience, that you had to do a complete 3,860 degree turn about a year ago today, because of the pandemic, you had to change everything. Social media became the way for businesses to, to retain client contact methods. Oh, my clients can't come to the store, but I can reach out to them in social media. I can do a demonstration here. I can talk about this thing or that thing or this resource, or, hey, this is what we're doing now. We're doing a lot more mail order these days, et cetera. Social media is a great way to keep that per, keep that touch very personal and professional. So Marie. Marie's in chat. Someone asked about setting up alerts to find yourself. And so I just want to point out that Google searches across lots of different content. You can set up a Google alert. I had in the past have had a Google alert. It don't anymore. But on Twitter, you can do a Twitter search. You can use tweet deck or Hootsuite or whatever that tool is that you're using to help facilitate your, your tweets. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can do that. You can set up a search that will look for a certain hashtag, certain. Word, certain names. And so, you know, there are ways of doing this. You may not catch every mention of yourself. But you will catch a good number of them. And, and if you're in business. Having. Alert setup. Search is set up to kind of catch some of that. But there was a story in the news recently. Of a store, it might have been local news to Syracuse, where someone said, gee, you know, I really wanted to get lunch at your place to take to my husband, my spouse, but your clothes and the person saw it. On Facebook and said, listen, I will be there. I will come back and I will make that lunch for you. And so, you know, that person saw an opportunity to make a customer happy. And found it through social media. Paul. Yeah, I can't emphasize enough what you were just saying about who tweets and tweet deck. I use that a lot for Twitter myself, but I understand you can set up different streams in that. And I think for everybody to understand, if you're not familiar with these tools as they are free, there are probably more expensive versions that you can get. We'll give you more tools. But a lot of this stuff offers you the basics that you need and can use quickly. And it does not take that long to learn. Nice thing also is that you can synchronize your accounts between a laptop and a cell phone and a tablet and whatever else you have. I haven't seen anybody synchronizing their carrier pigeons yet, but I think that's probably just around the corner in terms of, of how we do that. So thanks, Jill, for addressing the question we had there. What is anything else to add before we go on to another question that's in here? Nope. I think that, well, actually I always have something to say. So please, I think that a lot of folks, when I teach technology, people are scared of the unknown. I have no, I, people don't want to look like idiots. It's very simple. Well, I'm new. I'm going to stub my toe. Yeah, probably you're going to stub your toe. That's okay. Everyone stubbed their toe, but I'm going to mess up. Everyone messes up. That's really it. For those of you who are here and haven't done anything in social media, don't try to do everything in social media. Do one thing, figure out where your customers are. Where most of your customers are. Try that thing. Oh, my customers are here. Okay. Let me engage on that platform, that methodology. Oh, wait, so my customers are here. Let me engage that way. Wait, my other customers are doing some visual stuff. I'm really more of an artist. So I'm going to use this service. Well, you engage that way. Figure out the best place for you to place your resources. Like anything else, you have a finite bucket of time, energy and money. Figure out the most effective use of your time, energy and money with social media and do that. If you end up making them, if you end up becoming the country, the company that begins with a. That delivers things. You're going to pay someone to do it. So you don't have to worry about it. And you need to have the ability to do it yourself. That you can have staff to do it. So start small. And don't be scared. And so, you know, thinking about Paul's book, which talks about all these different types of social media. Not everything is for everyone. And I think Marie's would agree that, you know, you pick. What works for you. But you also, depending on your business, might have someone on staff already who likes Twitter. You might, depending on your organization, have volunteers who are willing to do this. And just know that you don't have to do it all the time. But if you put yourself on a schedule, or if you schedule things, like in Twitter, on these different tools, I can schedule tweets ahead of time. I do that frequently to promote myself, to promote something else. You know, I will schedule tweets going out, you know, multiple weeks. And that's easy to do. It makes sure that you're delivering a message when you want to deliver it. Certainly back to everything that's just been said, I learned from good experience from great mentors when I first started using social media about a decade ago. So I was not one of the early adapters. I learned that it does not have to be the overwhelming 24-7 thing that people make it out to be. One of the people I most admire out there who showed me use of Twitter that I never imagined was going to be the thing that would draw me into it, was, to my eyes, always on Twitter. And so I asked her, how can you do that? How can you set aside everything else and spend so much time on Twitter? She started to laugh, just I don't spend more than 15 or 30 minutes a day on Twitter. What I do is go in it in a concentrated fashion, respond to those things that I think need to be responded to, put out a couple of links that I think will be useful to people, and browse a little bit, see what else to do. And then I bag it and I'm off to something else. And that was an impressive, important lesson for me and for any of you that are thinking about this would feel overwhelmed. Go in at your own pace. Follow what Maurice and Jill just said about finding the tool that works for you. I always ask if I'm going to look at a new tool because people are always encouraging me to try something new. I was looking and say, what unfilled niche does that feel in my life? And if it doesn't, that tool sits off to decide. The result of that is, like I said, I'm not the early adapter on a lot of this stuff. Instagram, for me, was a tool that was out there at least three or four years before I even started looking at it. And what got me into it was a very creative instructor out of Canada who I admire a lot who decided to use Instagram as the platform for a book discussion group for a book he'd done. And he ran that over a few weeks. I thought, wow, that is so different than I thought Instagram could be used for as a writer that appeals to me. I would encourage you to do the same thing. Ask what that tool can do. If it can't do anything, set it aside until you're ready for it and make sure that whatever tool you have is the tool your audience is using. We so often make the mistake of thinking, oh, everybody's on Facebook, so I need to be on Facebook. If the people you want to reach are not there, don't waste time on it. Find out where they are. If they're on a telephone, go to a telephone. I don't cover that in this particular book, but still. In my contact with colleagues across the country, conferences, and many other things, if it's more expeditious to me to pick up a phone and call them on their cell phone while they're at a conference, I will do that. And I would encourage you to do it. Not to turn this into a big lecture. I want to look at something that Michael Spocko put in talking about some of the hateful things that go on with social media and what he's done to try to react to that and asking about the punchline there. Just let me read his last comment. What I'd like to suggest is that we talk about how to deal with people who attack you when you are out doing social justice work. One of the best lines I got on this was from one of the interviews I did with Maurice. He said, don't feed the trolls. Yep. The secondary comment comes from a colleague, Pat Wagner, who is on a lot in library land, working with library staff about conflict resolution. And Pat's always encouraging people, no matter how personal attack feels. They're talking about your skin color. They're talking about the way your face looks. They talk about the way you speak. Pat reminds of something very important. Angry, upset, irrational people are picking on something that they can try to tag on to you, but you're not the real thing that they're hitting. They're frustrated by something much bigger. And if you can somehow develop the ability to have a really tough skin, which is hard, nobody does this perfectly, but if you can develop that tough skin and think they're attacking something bigger and they happen to put my name on there or my Twitter account or my Facebook account, if you can take it back to there arguing with something bigger, it allows you to either just totally ignore and realize that's foolish, I'm not gonna deal with it or try to deal with it at some kind of reasonable level and then just let it go. There's no point in getting into a contest like that, trying to out yell somebody's yelling at you. It's not productive, it takes you down emotionally. I'm sure Jill and Maurice have a lot more to add to that. So this is a great segue into a story I wanna tell. It's a story that's in the book, but I wanna tell a full version of the story. I have a blog. I've been blogging since 2004. It's Digitization 101. I focused initially on digitizing materials in libraries. It was what I was doing as a consultant and then have transitioned to primarily blogging about copyright, but back when I was blogging about digitization, I saw something about a technique. I blogged about it and then heard that what this person, what this person had said was wrong. And so I kind of went back and said, oh, blah, blah, blah, it's wrong. That person contacted me and like, no, I'm not wrong. And so, first of all, let me continue the story and I'll tell you the lesson I learned. Of course, I went back into my blog, corrected myself, updated, apologized, and then got these two sides to talk to each other. This person who thought that this other person was wrong, could they talk with each other? And they talked with each other, maybe by phone, definitely by email, I was copied in on these technical emails, where this person says, this is what I do, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, oh, yeah, he's not wrong. He's right. And so when you get comments where people say you're wrong or whatever that thing is, stop for a minute and think about what they're saying. Maybe do a little bit of research depending on what it is and then see what can transpire out of that. And out of that one came two groups that suddenly realized that they should like each other. That this technology thing that they thought they were on opposite sides of, actually they were not on opposite sides of. Or you say anything else you wanna add before I jump into the Q&A window that I'm seeing here? I'm actually typing something in the Q&A. Someone asks about, and I can answer it in the full presentation. Let's do that. Molly asks, do you have to subscribe to create social media? How do you start it? Now I'm typing my formal answer to that, which is normally you have to sign up for social media whatever the platform is. You look for it, you have to go to them, sign up and that usually means some sort of draconian signing or all of your information away during the terms of service. Then you create an account, you create a username. Make sure the username is a professional username. Hot puppy 64 is not an appropriate username for a business. So make sure you create a username. Then there are most social media platforms have some form of first time user assistance, help frequently asked questions. You can look on the service. If that doesn't work for you, I know that San Francisco Public, I'm sure has XXX service for dummies, at least or using Facebook for efficient things. Or this fantastic book we're talking about here, changing the world using social media. Look at one of those tools on how to use it. If you want the nuts and bolts, if those two scare you, go to YouTube, type in how to I post on Twitter, period. Hit YouTube. You'll probably find 10, 15, 20,000 different videos and how do you post to Twitter. So it's a really, it's easy to do. It can be a rabbit hole. Trust me on this. You may want to set a timer. If you like to just browse around the web, set a timer and alarm. I'm only going to spend one half of an hour on this. Once you get onto whatever social media platform you're on, find people you know. Look for companies that you know, coworkers, colleagues, other, your competitors. Look for your allies, your suppliers. Look for people you admire. Follow those people and see what they do. Start small and don't get overwhelmed. That's why I'm suggesting using truly a timer. Set a timer. I'm spending a half of an hour on this. That's it. Because as the three of us all know, it can truly be a rabbit hole. And it's not a pleasant rabbit hole sometimes, especially if what you see is some of the harassment that we're talking about are going to continue to talk about these are some of the other questions we've got. Jill, you look like you've got something to add. Well, I just want to note that, you know, if you're new to social media, you might want to ask your friends or business colleagues, you know, are you using Twitter? Are you using Instagram? Oh, what's your ID? And then, you know, see who they're following. If you go to a conference or a business event, ask if they have a hashtag for that event, which is a way of signaling how to follow the conversation. And then follow that hashtag. If you don't know how to follow it, I'm sure that someone at the event will be happy to tell you. And those are great ways. If you see who else is following that hashtag or posting using that hashtag, you can then find people to follow it. You can join the conversation. And let me just jump, just about hashtags and say a year ago, the National Cowboy Museum, that's not the whole title, closed their doors and left the head of security in charge. And they gave him the Twitter account and said tweet. And Tim said, tweet? And so, you know, family or whomever started giving them tips and he started tweeting, just random things about the museum. And they said, use a hashtag, hashtag. And out of that came the hashtag, hashtag, the cowboy. The cowboy, the word hashtag, the symbol, and then the word hashtag, the cowboy. It grew in popularity. And here's this novice with his novice eyes looking at the museum and tweeting. So if Tim can do it without any upfront understanding of Twitter and grow their audience tremendously, you can do it too. And that sort of addresses something that is a third of the three questions I'm looking at so far in the Q and A section. Somebody's asking, do you have tips on how to go viral? Jill has just hit it with one of the ideas of be authentic, be yourself, get something that responds in your setting that makes sense for the audience you're trying to reach and make it user-centric. Focus on them rather than yourself. I think a lot of people think, especially if they're in a business, all my things have to be about buy this product or come in and I've got a sale on. But if you establish some sort of relationship to the same way you would face to face, we have an ongoing conversation with your customers. That's a good way to start doing it. And that thing that Jill talked about, hashtag the cowboy was the funniest thing because nobody would have thought to spell out the word hashtag instead of using it, but Tim turned it into shtick. And Jill and I have gone back and forth on this. I thought at the beginning he had used it as shtick and was continuing to do it. She goes, no, I think he still understands that's the way you need to do a hashtag. Other tips on going viral. Go ahead, Maurice. I'm sorry, I want to get this out. In terms of also identification, make sure your user names are as consistent as possible. There are a couple of different username finder thingies out there that you can look for your business username on various platforms and some of them will help you sort of park your business name on various social media platforms. You want people to find you having a Twitter account that just sits there, maybe fine. If you're just going to cyber stalk yourself, that's fine. If you're going to really use it for stuff and use it to identify yourself and then you want to move into Instagram and Facebook, Snapchat and Goddess knows what other things are out there, try to have a consistent username that way people see, oh, it's this, that it must be this person or this business, not a random name and then a series of numbers on various things because that doesn't look good. Also put it on your business, once you have your own social media presidency thing, put it on your business card, put it on your storefront, put it on your website, put it everywhere, put it in your email signature. If you ever saw Paul's email signature, he has approximately 50 different social media things on there and it's really effective because you always know where to reach him and how to reach him. So use it for all your communication, how to put it on everything that goes out. If your card's in the store, put it out there. Heck, you have a sales tag in your store, put it on the back of the sales tag, your hashtag or your Twitter handle or some way folks can get in contact with you if they see it. The only thing more recent I haven't done so far is put it on our foreheads and I think we'll probably do that after the session today and wear that for the rest of the week. Going back to that question about Jill. Oh, so are we doing the question about going viral? Going viral, Sam, just one more minute, yeah. Is there something else you wanted to add? So I have two things, two stories. One, many years ago, when I would, when thinking about conferences, I used to go to a lot of conferences and one of the things I would do is start tweeting in advance of the conference. I would tweet, I'm going to the conference. I would tweet tips about the city. Like, oh, near the convention center are these restaurants. And I started that with a conference that I knew well and locations I knew well. But then after a while, I'd use Google Maps or whatever to find things near the convention center. Oh, here's a restaurant. You're looking for coffee. Here's a place that you can go for coffee when you're at the conference. And I would just do a few, again, schedule them. And then the one that really I lucked in on and then continue to do was the weather. Start about two weeks out from the event. The weather for this event looks like it's going to be. Use weather.com or whatever to find the weather for that location. A week out, oh, it looks like the weather's going to be blah, blah, blah, a couple of days out. Gee, if you're packing, the weather's going to be. And I would find people at the conference who would thank me. Like, oh, you're the one who tweeted the weather. Thanks, I knew to bring an umbrella. So, you know, sometimes you just have to find your niche and stick with it. Jill, weren't you the person that at a conference was nicknamed the link fairy for being useful in putting out links? Yeah, during the session. She's at a conference. People are talking about a topic of interest to everybody in that room. And she's posting links physically from that room onto social media that then are coming back in and people are talking about it to the point where she got identified as the person that was the link person and got that wonderful nickname, link fairy. You want to go viral? Be useful, be concise. Don't be afraid to repeat your tweets or your Facebook posts or other things sporadically because not everybody's going to see everything you do and the way algorithms work, especially in Facebook. You think you've got a thousand followers or 500 friends there? Maybe two or three of them see that based on how the algorithms may feed your material out. So do not make the mistake of thinking upfront that just because you tweeted it or posted it on Facebook or LinkedIn that all your followers saw it. That is not the case. Paul, I'd like to talk about something in chat. Just to put up someone that I can't quite see the name of the person, but this is their comment. I think just putting yourself out there, sharing a story and being honest is the first step to engage followers. Don't be camera shy and don't worry about every post being perfect. That is true. Don't get paralyzed by perfection. Just get it out there. They started doing videos a few weeks ago and posted related content regularly and they've had dozens of people connect with me. It's awesome. That's going viral from zero to, let's see, 12, 15, 20 to 2,000% increase. That's viral. It's a small virus, but it's viral. And from small viruses, oh, we won't talk about that today. You know, going back in that same chat that you're looking at, Michael Spocko did a follow-up to his earlier comment. He's talking about the defunding right-wing media and how he did it through social media, got attention through the New York Times. Remember, this is part of a toolkit that is not limited solely to social media. If you are expecting social media to be the only way you're gonna change the world, you're gonna be terribly disappointed unless you're a D-Ray McKesson who goes into Ferguson at the right moment, tweets things out and becomes world-renowned because he's the person on the scene that used the right tool to reach people. That's not the standard story. You do what Michael's talking about. You get something out, then you get mainstream media to cover it and then maybe you end up on the evening news and it filters back on to all kinds of stuff on YouTube and that leads you there if that's what you're looking for. So I wanna point out a question about a friend of the person who posted the question who decided to drop off of Facebook, watch the movie, The Social Dilemma and decide that Facebook was not for them. And the question is, what do you think of her decision? It's a fine decision. I'm not gonna argue with it. Every tool has people who like it, the people who don't like it. Every tool has people who are mining the data, looking for trends, trying to figure out what's happening. All these tools are developed by for-profit companies and we all know that, but you should, and if that weirds you out and you wanna drop off the tool because you don't wanna your data use, that's fine. But there's conversations happening and there are good uses of the tools. And so in thinking about going viral, I wanna tell a story about last Memorial Day. We had a protest here in Syracuse, a Black Lives Matter protest. A friend of mine went, actually she went to the day after. So it was the day after the protest. She went to clean up. People showed up the next day to clean up. And she took a picture of a rubber bullet. And I will tell you that there are different forms of rubber bullets, different sizes. This one was large, it was probably about the size of my fist. And she posted to Facebook and I found this on the street and she had it in her hand and she took a photo of it. And I said, can I use that photo? She said, sure. And so I wrote this post on Facebook with the picture of the rubber bullet. Now pictures, people look at pictures, posts with pictures do better. Generally speaking on social media. So here's a lot of texts about rubber bullets, blah, blah, blah and the photo and a public post. So anyone could see it, anyone could read it. I don't remember how many comments it got. I know it was well over a hundred and it was shared more than 2000 times. I have never had a Facebook post shared that many times. It was luck. It was timely. It was something a lot of people could understand and it resonated with them and it was luck. It's hard. I think some people maybe have a formula in terms of how they get things to go viral. But I think lots of times it is luck. I would like to, let me jump in on just what Jill said and remind me that you wanna do a follow up comment there. It can be terribly frustrating to you when you put your heart and soul into posting things that you think are useful and should make a change, small, medium or large scale in your world and you get almost no feedback at all. That is the standard thing. And if you don't have a thick skin, you're gonna get frustrated very early. But the longest time it would frustrate the heck out of me that the things that got the most likes on my own post would be crazy stuff like if I wore a Viking helmet and put that up in celebration of something goofy for a day or two. I get all kinds of likes and you like that but you didn't like the article talking about the Poor People's Campaign and how it's making change in the world or you didn't like this resource to help me be a better trainer. And most of my friends on Facebook are trainers. I think, wow, I've really overestimated where we are in training, teaching, learning if a Viking hat is more appealing to them than other things. But part of it is a way Facebook feeds that out. The image is seen by more people. So you have to be ready for that Maurice. And it doesn't mean that people aren't looking at your article. It just means they did not click like. They could- So all of you start clicking like. It opens it up. They become so engaged with it because a photo is in the how people react to it. Oh, that's a cute photo. I like that photo. That's what you're doing. The article, they have to really digest. So they may bookmark it for later. They look at it right now because if you're scrolling through Facebook those of you who are not on Facebook, Facebook comes across as the, shall we say the most unique method of prioritizing what you see, when you see it and how you see it. And the moment you scroll and you're looking for something you can't find it ever again. You bookmark it, you look at it later. You don't necessarily, the Viking hat's easy. Bam, okay, I've done that engagement. They might also be engaged just up but not necessarily like it or comment on it. I wanted to, in the question to answer there's a question from very first time when we logged on where we started. Do you think it's good or bad that it's legal for social media companies to use web users data to target political ads? I have my own opinions on it. I would like Paul and Jill to take the floor in this because I always have opinions. And that is a really tough one because I don't think there's a right or wrong answer to it. Let's start with what social media isn't what it isn't. Social media is not an absolutely free tool. These companies are meeting to make money. It is a business for them. And so the business deal you make tacitly or overtly is they will give you a platform to reach friends and potential supporters via something like Facebook or Twitter. But in return, they need something or want something. And for Facebook, it's become the selling of data. And for a lot of other companies out there too. One of the more critical books that I really love. And if you're into this topic and you wanna read something that's very in depth, look for a book that I'm sure San Francisco Public has or any other library that you're close to. The author's name is Shoshana, S-H-O-S-H-A-N-A. Last name, Zubov, Z-U-B-O-F-F. And her book is The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Now she comes down very hard on tech companies and social media companies saying they are unfairly taking your data. You should be able to monetize that yourself. And we have to change that. That's the thesis of the book. And she makes a very good argument for that. But what we have to recognize is as much as we may be sympathetic to that and want that to be the world we live in, the world we currently live in is they're going to make money off it. So instead of saying it's good or bad, you need to have your eyes open big time to what's going on and say, if I don't want them to have certain data about me, I need to not be posting that. I've been seeing the same thing for 10 years now and I was very happy to see a colleague of mine say the same thing after we've been talking about social media and he went out on his own and put this out there. The rule of thumb is if you don't want that data used or if you don't want people to be seeing things, ask yourself up front, am I okay getting up tomorrow morning and seeing that on the front page of my hometown newspaper? For us, of course, it's a chronicle. I think, wow, if I'm about to post something on Facebook and I wouldn't want that on the front of the San Francisco Chronicle tomorrow, I'm going to think twice about posting that. And one more bit of guidance before I turn it back over to Maurice, people that immediately want to react to everything that's out there. And we all have that feeling, a politician we don't like does something and we want to make fun of them, we want to harass them, we want to call out their stupidity. A question I always ask myself is, if I do that, what am I accomplishing? The fun I'm accomplishing is giving myself a good feeling for appearing to be righteous on a cause I believe in, that's not enough to make me post. If I take something I think is ridiculous and I can get friends around and saying, yeah, this is ridiculous and here's a positive action we can take in response to it, I'm much more likely to post. So that's saying, breathe before you post, think about what you're doing and recognize that if you wait five or 10 minutes to post something, you're not going to hurt anybody and you're not going to hurt yourself, but you can save yourself a lot of embarrassment. Maurice? I call it the grandmother test. Will your, is it something that your grandmother would not come to you at either, whichever methodology she would use, pull your ear, ring your neck, smack you around, throw a shoe at you, whichever did it pass the grandma test? You, they can only share what you information give them. Facebook does not know my birthday. I lie about it, you don't need to know my birthday. You don't know how old I am. Nope, nope. So my birthday comes up a random day during the year on Facebook. So that's really you are what you share. If you don't share a whole lot, then you're not going to worry about sharing a whole lot. And I want to answer another one of the question answers things about Facebook accounts. Is it easier to have one Facebook account or each account talk about one specific topic? Facebook accounts are a pain in the backside to manage. Have one. You can have interest pages, multiple pages on a Facebook account that you control. You can give administrator rights too. So therefore you can share the burden of social media on Facebook. So just have one account, maybe for your business you have a business account that you have a personal account. Do not mix the two. You have a business account and a Facebook account, a business Twitter account and a private Twitter account. Do not confuse the two. And make sure that your business stuff is your business stuff. You're talking about business things, you're engaging your customers, et cetera. Keep your private stuff private. So I only have one account on Twitter and I am my business. So I think no matter what you do, if you have two accounts, one account, I'm repeating what Paul said, be mindful about what you share, especially if you're a business person. It's easier to keep your mouth shut than to have to apologize for something that you said that you shouldn't have said. Also be careful of the comments you make on Facebook posts if you're a business person. So because your account, they can check back and see who made that comment, who you really are, they can look you up. But Maurice's thing about, what would your grandmother say? What would whomever say? You don't have to comment on everything. You don't have to say everything you're thinking. You don't have to share everything you've eaten, all those different things. Really, in some ways, the more targeted you're sharing is, the better. So you don't have to share photos of everything in your store. You can share a photo of your St. Patrick's Day display or just be thoughtful. Here's a lovely question. One remaining in the Q and A part right now, how can you change the world using social media? Start small. Maurice, over dinner, when I was just first starting to write this, Jill, Maurice and I were actually together at a conference and we were talking about content for the book and they had already agreed that they were gonna be interviewed. And we start talking about what an activist is and how activists get started. Maurice said the line that I've always admired, which is nobody starts out to be an activist. They start out concerned with one thing that's bothering them and that they wanna work with and they work with that. And so that's your starting point. If you wanna change the world, find the one thing that's important to you. Second, most important step right behind that is reach out to your community and you can use social media. You can use face to face. You can use a phone, use everything at your disposal to get a group of supporters together because as my friends always hear me say, I believe it's all about collaboration and civility. If we apply those two things to social media as well as to our other efforts, we're on our way to starting to change the world and it doesn't happen overnight. We know that. We're involved right now in a broadband initiative. This is like 30 or 40 years old. People trying to get universal broadband in the United States. The way we got universal electrification, the way we got a postal service and so many other things. So how do you wanna change that? If you're gonna change it, you have to be collaborating with people that have been working there for 30 or 40 years, bring something new to the table and what we're bringing in with the initiative we're involved in is being a central point for people that have already been working and need to be talking to each other and then having the issue be in the forefront of people's minds. Broadband now is right there because we've been living a year where we've had to do much of our communication online. If we're not gonna get it now, when are we gonna get it? Is it one of the people I interviewed said? Jill and Maurice? Paul's right. What I did block, I used to be a community organizer and folks would come out and they would want to fix that pothole. I want to get that pothole fixed in front of my building. Why? Because four axles got broken in that pothole over the last year. How do I do that? Great. First thing you need to do is you need to organize. So organize your tenant association. You start small. You have six people in your building, start a tenant association. Politicians will listen to you as a tenant association because you have a number of people behind you. Even better, how about a block association? Politicians will listen to you because you have a bunch more people behind you. You want to call in New York City, we have community boards. You call your community board. Hi, I'm from the 10th Street Block Association. My name is Maurice Coleman. We have a pothole we'd like to deal with. Who do we talk to at which particular city agency to get this pothole fixed? Get the name of the person, click. You have started something big because that tenant association, that block association could become a larger community association or you eventually get drafted to do something. You become more and more involved. You start small. You start by rolling a little tiny pebble down a hill. It picks up stuff. It picks up. It may become just a softball size, a basketball, the bottom half of the snowman, but it will become what it is. Start small and start with what you can handle. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed. If you're overwhelmed, step back. It's not the right time or the right tool for you. Step back. It's okay, step back. People do it all the time. It's okay. You didn't fail. You learned. Step back and take care of yourself. That's probably the biggest thing about how change a world using social media as the gentleman talked about. People getting sued and all this other stuff. The most important thing is to be kind, be honest, and be real, and be compassionate. You know, really be compassionate. That's the biggest. In social media, be compassionate. There are so many jack bleeps on social media. If you are compassionate, people will be drawn to you. Oh, you're not an idiot. Great, and you have something to say. Great. Let me connect with this person. Because you don't know how suddenly you're in San Francisco, San Francisco International City. You don't know because social media is boundaryless. It's truly borderless. You may have someone comment on your stuff from Hong Kong or from Karen in Australia or from the Maldives. You just don't know. You could reach so many people. You may not reach the people right next door, but you might reach the people across the street. You might reach the people across the city. You might reach people down in LA. You might reach the people all the way up in my Crater Lake. You just don't know. The social media has created almost infinite reach of you and your message. You know, I'll go ahead, Jill. Oh, so instead of having a local business or a local nonprofit or whatever it is, suddenly your reach is much bigger. And you have people who might not be able to come through your door who will say, well, can I order online? Can you do ship? And suddenly, you know, you're doing something that you never would have thought of. I have a friend who ordered bagels. This person lives in Vancouver, Washington. She ordered bagels from a famous bakery because of a friendship that I have with her and a couple of other people. Ordered bagels from St. Vitur Baker in Montreal. Say, well, let me try this. Oh, wait, they do mail order? Wait, let me follow them on social media. Oh my God, wait, I've heard their bagels are really good. Let me order them. She ordered them. You don't know who you're going to reach. That's why you keep your message authentic, keep it clean, keep it real, keep it authentic, keep it compassionate. You just don't know who is going to pop into your DMs as it were. So as we're nearing the top of the hour, a couple of nice ways that we can sort of wind this up and then I want to make sure that Leah and Kirstie have a chance to tell us if we miss any questions we need to hit. But Michael just put something into the Q and A that I think is so beautiful. I want to read it in total to you because it helps wrap up what we're talking about. He says, and Michael's the guy that's been talking all the way through about how he's gotten coverage for the things he's doing. I talked to people about activism and I asked him, what is your goal? Then I developed a plan to reach that goal. Part of the plan involves convincing people to help you achieve it and dealing with the people who will resist it. I found that when you make a serious change, a charge, I'm sorry, when you make a serious change, the people who resist it will attack you, not your ideas. Hard be prepared, that's why I blog under a pseudonym. I also am very careful to always be polite, lawful and factual, but that doesn't mean that the people I'm challenging won't attack me. Luckily, I was prepared and I had help from the Electronic Freedom Foundation who defended me and that really encapsulates much of what we've been talking about today. I come back to what Maurice was saying about being the pebble out there. And he wrote a very sweet brief forward that ends with the words, the lessons in this book only live on if you have courage to become the pebble of change. Be the pebble, create waves, make a difference, make a difference, change the world. And that's where we're at. Any questions we missed Leah or Kirsty? And if not, then we'll just do a quick wrap here of final thoughts from the three of us. But first, any questions we missed that we really need to be addressing? One of them came up in chat, Paul, about the cost. So let's really reiterate. The cost isn't, it doesn't necessarily have to be financial. It can be time, time is a cost. You're in business, time is a cost. You value your work by the hour. How much you ever value your work, you value it by the hour. So that half of an hour, is it worth a half of an hour of your time to do social media? You can spend money on social media campaign things. Paul and Jill are right. They're free ones out there. Start with the free one. Again, if it works for you and you end up having 10 social media accounts that are hopping, you're gonna have staff anyway. You might as well invest in some sort of paid thing. Until then you can use the free tools. Yeah, I think the cost again is time, but also creativity. So when you get those ideas of something that you might wanna post, whether it's a photo idea, a text idea, a blog idea, write them down someplace so that you don't lose them. Yep, and then there's another thing from our organizers. What are we seeing in the arts and social change? I'm gonna take a look. Given that we've only got a couple of minutes here and I know that they've got a one hour limit on the whole thing. We can certainly stay around if there's a way to do off the recording Q&A and kind of have the post-show event. But in a nutshell, I'm seeing wonderful things, especially because of the pandemic on social media. People like Roy Zimmerman, who has been around for 10 or 20 years as a singer, songwriter, activist. He goes around the country singing for progressive causes. The pandemic hits, all of a sudden he's locked at home in his wife who had been songwriters together are trying to figure it all out. They go viral with a parody of the lion sleeps tonight called the Liar Tweets Tonight. I think we all know who he's talking about. And I think that millions of views and did so well that Roy did three other versions and he did collaborations where people would sing different parts, send it into them and he put them out there. Oh, Don Carone is another one of my big favorites. Don, again, with the parody project is somebody who has been doing work for years and years. And as an activist and as a musician, he's just fabulous. Jill, you've got some ideas on it too. Don't you? Some people do. So, and now my mind goes completely blank, sorry. Oh, so the one I want to point to is Captain Tom in England, Tom Moore, Captain Sir Tom Moore, who died recently, who, he was not the one doing social media, it was his family on behalf of him. But he did something simple, he did it well and his family started posting about it and it became this huge international thing. He raised money, that's how he changed the world. He was 99 and then turned 100 as he was doing this work and drawing attention to the National Health Services in the UK. He brought eyes onto what they were doing, onto the good work they were doing and eyes onto the fact that someone who's 99 and then 100 can be doing this work, can make a difference. So, anybody can do it, you start small, you plug away at it, the success does not happen overnight, but plug away at it, have a focus on what you're trying to do and just keep doing it. Dave's got another question there telling me that social media companies use more than just what you post on political target or more than you post to target political ads. So, he's reminding me, I sort of dodged the question there and he's asking me to please try it again. My direct answer, David, I'm sorry, I wasn't more clear before. I don't have strong feelings about is it good or is it bad? I think it's somewhat out of control and that there's room for us to rein it back in. But the way I look at it is that it's gonna be a tug of war here where they want as much data as they can get for whatever purposes they wanna use it for. And I'm going to try to take that antiquated idea and hold on to as much of my own privacy and control of my data as I can. I understand from my own point of view that I'm finding a losing battle. If somebody wants to get data about me, there's very little I can do other than simply not posting things, but good or bad, I don't know, I think it's something we need to be working on together to reach a consensus about what's good and what's not good. And that takes us back to the book I mentioned earlier by Zuboff where she lays out a strong case saying, let us reclaim some of that. And that's a great social media campaign in itself. Let us reclaim it. I hope there was a more direct and honest answer to you. And the thing is, we generate data all the time. I can't think of his name who talked about this. Our phones are generating data. There's data being generated all the time. If you don't want to generate data, don't use digital equipment. And that's the truth. Okay, so the one line summary from each of us. Maurice, what do you want people to take away from the session we did today? Be authentic, be smart, be compassionate, be real and be very friendly to those who are new because everyone was new once. If you have some experience, be nice to the noobs. Very simple, be nice. Jill? Be willing to experiment, photos, videos, whatever. You don't have to do wild experiments, but be willing to push a little bit out of your comfort zone. Don't overdo it, but plug away at it. One is follow your heart, be civil, be courteous, be, I don't want to use the word authentic again, but be collaborative. If you set yourself up to do those three things, a lot of the rest of it will fall into place. And at that awful moment, when? Not if, at that awful moment when somebody harasses you and trolls you, go back to Maurice's advice, do not feed the troll. Follow the advice that I've seen from some great people out there that are extremely visible. When they start getting harassed online, they actually turn their social media accounts over to a trusted friend. They say, will you screen the stuff for me so I don't have to look at all the garbage? That's a great way for you to stay focused on doing the positive work you need to do while somebody else can kind of blunt the garbage that's gonna come your way. Look for the positive in there. It's out there, it's hard to find, but we can do this. And I just want to thank SFPL again for making it possible for us to do this session today. I see fingers going, you guys. If you don't, go ahead, Jill. No, go ahead. If you don't like someone is saying about you on social media, stop following them. You have the power. You are in control of what you see. A lot of people sort of give themselves up to the holy power of Twitter or Facebook or Instagram that they can't control it. You are in control. You don't like what someone says, unfollow them. And I would say that at some points, if you're using social media, you're an active user of social media, someone's not gonna like something you said. It's just like family. When you're at Thanksgiving dinner and someone at the dinner doesn't like something you said, you just kind of ignore them and move on. Leah, is there a way for us to stay on after the recording stops? For anybody else that has questions or is this gonna stop or won't you stop the recording? You can continue as long as you would like up until 3pm. Okay, so if you need to cut it so that you've got an hour long program, feel free to do that and we'll thank everybody who's watching the archive version for participating. Reach out to us. If you didn't see it in the chat, if you're looking at the archive version, we're all pretty easy to find on social media. I make sure that most of my social media accounts include my name. So if you look out there on Twitter or Facebook or other things and find Paul Signorelli with maybe an SF or San Francisco tag onto it, that's probably gonna be me. Jill and Maurice, you wanna give your stuff again for the archive version? Sure. Oh, so I'm on Twitter, Jill underscore HW. Honestly, you search my name, I'm the only one with this name, so you can find me. And really- Excuse me, that was the infamous cough button. All right, you can follow me. My handle is Baldgeek in MD on Twitter. That's the best way to reach you. I don't use it a lot, but I do, I check it out every once or twice a day. I know I'm not on, I used to be on it all of the time, but once or twice a day, you can certainly follow me there. You can look up my podcast, T is for training, literally Google T is for training and you'll find us. That's also a way to reach us. I just want to say thank you to Paul and you all in the audience of the San Francisco Public Library. You have been a lovely audience. We wish we could take you home with us. We'd love to take you home, but we can't. And Jill, of course, obviously, Jill, we really, this is what we do. We love talking to people about different things. If you ever meet any of us at a conference or in the library, et cetera, you meet, this is who we are. We're this way on social media. We're this way in person. That's important. Always be your authentic self and don't be a jackass. If you're always your authentic self but not a jackass, you'll be fine. One final thing that Jill had prompted me on before we came on the air, I almost forgot. For those of you that do want to continue the conversation, we're experimenting with a book by having a Slack community built around it. So if you get your hands on a copy of the book, there's a way to contact us, get into that. And we continue this conversation until the cows come home and until we change the world the way we want to change the world. Thank you. Hang for Q&A at this point. Yep. Suddenly silence. And so anonymous attendee is asking if there will be a, how to find the recording. And if you registered with your email, I will send it to you. It's a PL, we haven't quite figured out how to get every recording available to every person. It's still a work in progress. But in any case, if you registered with your email, I have a way to reach you and I will send that out after the program is over. I'm sure this will not surprise you that once Leah gives us the link to the recording, we will be putting it on all our social media accounts. So it shouldn't be that hard to find. Leah, do you have a timeline for when it will be available? I can make it available as soon as Zoom completes the uploads. All right, well, you heard it there first. Just watch about an hour from now. Maurice, Jill and I will be in a race to be the first one to get it on Twitter. It's also Friday at five o'clock on the right coast here. So I would, I'd be honest, it's not happening probably until tomorrow for me or Monday. So, but we definitely will. Paul, those of you who are on the left coast, it's still the middle of your work day. So I'm sure you can have it happen. So I may win on this one because the two of them are gonna be smart enough to go out and get the drinks. We all have been craving it at the end of what's been a very interesting and busy week for everybody. So... Welcome to all of you, go ahead, Jill. No, I was just saying, I think we should make it a wrap. All right, well, thank you all three. Paul, Jill and Maurice, it's been a really interesting conversation. I'm sure our audience is thrilled with the dialogue and we will see you at the next program. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, San Francisco. Go Dubs. Thank you, Maryland.