I would say that, you know, most locators that are out there these days, you know, it's just a list of dealers, contractors, and, you know, at best the person's going to pick up the phone and call, but at that point, you know, are they going to say, hey, I, you know, got your number off of this website, or they're just going to say I'm looking for, you know, a roof, I'm looking for a deck, I'm looking for whatever. And there's, there's a disconnect there. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everybody, welcome to Smarter Building Materials Marketing, where we believe your online presence should be your best salesperson. I am Zach Williams, alongside my co-host, Beth Popnikolov, and today we're talking about the manufacturer and dealer relationship. It is a relationship that over the last, gosh what, 18, 20 months, almost 24 months has been strained because of supply chain, availability, pricing, et cetera. And so we want to tackle these problems head on. We want to talk about some things that we're seeing in the industry about how you can be more effective in your relationships, how you can build those bridges, and ultimately, how can you sell more through your dealer partnerships? I'm excited for our guests to join us today because they're going to be able to help us answer not just how do we build those relationships, but how can digital actually support it? Because often we come at it from the other angle where digital seems to hinder manufacturer-dealer relationships. So first, I want to welcome our guests. We have Joshua Rich. He is the president and CEO of Bullseye, and we're also happy to welcome Brian Baker. He's a digital strategist from Doe Decahedron. He's been working in the building materials industry for several decades. They both bring incredible experience and expertise to the table. And I'm excited for this conversation. So thank you both for joining us. Thank you, Brad. Thank you. Thank you, Zach. Excited to be here. Awesome. Thanks for joining us on the show today. For our listeners, give us the 30,000 foot view of what you both do. CEO of Bullseye, of course. And we've been building locator solutions for over 20 years. We started in 1998 and really worked in a variety of different industries, a lot of retail, a lot of franchise types of businesses. But recently, I'd say in the last four or five years, we've really started to focus on providing technology to support building materials manufacturers. And that's our focus right now. Brian, what about you? So I sort of help companies when you're dealing in the digital space and someone comes to you and says, I want, I deal with what happens between that and the outcome that they want. So that that can be designing a digital product or piece of software. That can be how do they reach their customers in a given channel? It could be how do they measure? How do they find the network and find customers that they want to reach? And really, we take a little bit of a holistic approach to realizing their sort of company's digital vision. That's great. And so I kind of teed up the show a little bit by talking about the relationship between manufacturers and dealers. And I'll just lob this question over there to both of you. But when you look at the relationship between dealers and manufacturers today, like we've had dealers on our show and like things have not been great recently for a lot of different reasons, like whether it's like I said, price hikes or things like that or price increases, excuse me. Or supply chain issues. I'd love to hear from the two of you because you've got a lot of experience, but a lot of touch points between both parties, both dealers and manufacturers. What are you seeing in relationship to the current state of the industry? And then secondly, what are you seeing that's working for manufacturers to improve those relationships as we look at 2022 and beyond? I know from the manufacturers side, a lot of people are trying to progress to e-commerce, right? And there's this huge fear of are we going to disrupt our channel? Are we going to disrupt these relationships that we have? And I think really a smarter thing for them to do is to take their dealer networks or their installer networks and bring those forward inside their own their own digital properties.  There's this sort of path, I think that they that they could ultimately take to e-commerce that is really about lining up those channel partners, right, rather than trying to replace them or supplant them with some, you know, online service or an Amazon or something like that. And I think that it really comes down to this to how visible they're going to make those partners in in their website, in their website. So for example, if I have a foreign company and I have a network of installers, it's, you know, really about marketing them, right? I know they're going to sell my products and install my products, but how can I support them? How can I advocate for them? I'm going to drive business through for them. So and I and I see it, you know, a lot from the perspective of the manufacturer and even sort of how digital strategies are shifting because I think they're looking at the opportunities to leverage the the the contractors or dealers and the locations and get them more engaged in selling their products. So, you know, if you're a manufacturer and and and you've got a program to train contractors on how to install your product and you're able to give them different certifications and leverage those certifications to to to give them exposure through your website to give them the ability to to market and promote themselves, then they're going to be more and more engaged in selling your product. And so so we're seeing that with a lot of manufacturers. And of course, you know, the challenge is, you know, how do you get all of your dealers to participate in great point? How do you we're very interested to hear the answer? Because, you know, some dealers are a different level of technological sophistication than others.  And so I think that as a manufacturer, you need to look at it as as, you know, there's there's a transition here and people are going to continue to adopt new technologies and laying investment into that now and encouraging those that are willing to participate in the technology. And of course, they benefit and they get the rewards of, you know, sending them new business and new opportunities. And I think that becomes a feedback loop, a positive feedback loop and and is over time going to to be sort of the future. You know, you're going to be conducting those relationships through through an online experience. So Joshua, that leads me perfectly into my next question, which, Brian, you mentioned something important, which is, you know, how are we furthering what dealers are doing and bringing that into, you know, the digital ecosystem of what manufacturers are able to control? There is a lot of concerns or pushback that I know manufacturers here when they start to be more forthcoming with who their dealers are and those dealer networks on their websites. Just as one example, is there a way that you've seen either results or a possible solution for concerns where dealers start to say, well, we don't want to be driving that traffic to your website, that traffic should be coming to our website. Are they going to see a dip in traffic? Are they going to potentially lose leads that they would otherwise get? How would you respond to that? You know, if you're talking about in the context of a manufacturer's site, right, when you when you move through that website experience, right, somebody has either in there's a content marketing strategy there or there's a product catalog there, somebody has looked that up on Google. They've come through your website. They've read through all the materials that you've provided and your sort of bottom of the funnel is a lot of cases going to be go to here's time to go to a dealer or it's time to go to an installer. And in that, you know, in that case, it's not you're not really replacing those guys function. Their websites tend to be much more general, right? Whereas the manufacturer has an obligation to create a bias towards their particular product or their particular service. One good thing about that is you can start to create a chain where you're moving somebody down the funnel and it's like, OK, now I can actually see amongst my dealer locations. You know, who might who might have a showroom? Where can I go see these things hand on hands on? Or even who specifically should I talk to at a given dealer or location? So I've done work before in the roofing space. I know that, you know, if a roofing contractor goes to a roofing distributor location, right, they sell all the brands there, right? So how do I make sure that who I'm connecting them with is going to sell my product or going to sell my brand, right? And that's really what you want to make sure that you're doing on the manufacturer's website is you're creating a bias for your brand through your marketing efforts or through your product capabilities. And you need to make sure that you pass them all the way down the chain. So maybe that's actually going to fulfill that. Can can you give me an example, Brian, how to do that? Well, like, because that's the one thing we hear a lot is like as a manufacturer, let's say you connect the dots for whether it's a contractor, a homeowner, a builder, whoever it might be.  What it what happens in the background to ensure that when that lead is handed off or that connection is made that the person ends up choosing that manufacturer versus going, well, I've got a better relationship with so and so. So I'm going to sell their product, even though that this other manufacturer brought me the lead. What are some of the things that you see that are working? Well, first of all, when somebody comes in and they they fill out a lead contact form or they they call a phone number that we're tracking, you want to sort of package that lead up that you're going to hand off to the distributor or dealer. And that means if you gather a little bit of information about their project and in some cases, things are less sophisticated in cases, things are more sophisticated. But you've got a little bit of information about their project, you know, where they came from, you know what they were looking at. Maybe you've attached an offer or some kind of a reward to them and you pass them off right now. You have an ability to follow up with that location once you've got that kind of person packaged. The other piece is you want to make sure that you're seeing them again to the right person at a given location, right? So you as a manufacturer, you've developed a relationship with a distributor or dealer. Who is the person that supports you at a given branch? You want to know who that person is. That's who you want the leads to be going to. And, you know, to someone that's going to be friendly. So, you know, you've completed a number of hands-offs here from, you know, we started out on a probably a Google Google search. They look at a few websites that came to your website. They went through, they picked a dealer distributor. They moved all the way down. You're always going to lose some, right? There's really nothing you can do to completely plug it. But I think you can create a high level of visibility in there and start to create just a little bit of accountability with partners. It's, you know, it's, hey, I'm dry. I drove all these people to you. I sent you 100 people and you sold one. So what's like what's going on here? And it gives you sort of a service area that you can go and work on your relationships with as well to improve them. I would say that, you know, most locators that are out there these days, you know, it's just a list of dealers, contractors and, you know, at best the person's going to pick up the phone and call.  I'm looking for a deck. I'm looking for whatever. And there's a disconnect there because then it becomes much easier for the dealer or whoever is selling the product to recommend somewhere where they might have a strong relationship or maybe they're, you know, incentivized in some form. But when you start to look at an opportunity to capture that lead and that opportunity and for the manufacturer to participate in the handoff itself and make sure that, you know, there's sort of branding in the communication and that that person gets a confirmation email that says, hey, you know, and we just, you know, sent your information to this dealer. They're going to be following up. But in the meantime, here's some literature on the product that you selected. Somehow the dealer, you know, gets that lead and they know that, yes, somebody is requesting a specific manufacturer's product. And by being more involved in that handoff in that relationship, I think there's an opportunity for the manufacturer to influence the purchase. And that's sort of the beginning of that. And then, of course, there's the follow up and the tracking that, you know, you want to try to do to really understand what happened with the final disposition of that opportunity. Who do you think is doing it well? Like, when you look at manufacturers, you both interface with what manufacturers do you think are handling that relationship of both connection and follow through? Well, if I can put you on the spot. I can say that LG is doing a really good job in the HVAC space. They have a network of premium, premier dealer installers and and they're they're getting leads on a regular basis. They're following up. There's there's an integration with Salesforce on the back end that is providing information back to sort of the, you know, our platform bullseye so that they've got the reporting and can really see what's going on and how those leads were converted. So I think that that LG is a really good example of someone who's doing a good job. As we're at the end of the year, I can imagine that a lot of manufacturers are assessing their marketing collateral, their marketing tech stack, whatever that is, website, social media presence and obviously dealer locator. And frankly, Zach mentioned at the beginning of the show, we're hearing dealer locators be something that comes up in conversations more and more partly because it's become more apparent how frequently the channel is switching where they buy based on availability. So all that being said, if I'm a manufacturer and I'm assessing my dealer locator or frankly lack thereof, can you give me a checklist of, you know, a dealer locator for really to perform in a way that's going to make a difference for both you and your dealer from a sales standpoint, it needs to have these, you know, three to five to seven pieces. Otherwise, to Joshua's point, it's just literally basically like a list, which is I imagine like that was like a dagger to the heart of some of our listeners being like, oh, gosh, mine is just a list. That's me. It's me. So if you want to move beyond the list, what would that checklist look like? I love that. I love this. Like I'm about to take notes. I'm like, let's hear it. I mean, I think the first transition is you want things to be sort of rich and visual, you know, nothing. I mean, if you talk about creating, it's like, here's a list of business names and addresses, but you really want to create trust. It's oh, here's actually a picture of the location. Here's a picture of their showroom. Here's a picture of the guy that I'm going to meet. And there they are. Right. It really lets you know that somebody's home there, right? And they're alive on the other end of this connection. It's like, oh, I know who I'm going to meet now or so I feel a lot safer about talking to them. So that's one thing that I would say. I would also say that, you know, the if you kind of look at talk about just sort of the list analogy, there doesn't tend to be a lot of options for filtering or connecting to people to the right dealer location for their situation. So if I'm, for example, if I'm looking for a roofing contractor, it's like, oh, well, I need somebody that can also do gutters or I need somebody that can't know how to do slate roofing. And do I have to call everyone on the list and ask them? Or can I kind of, you know, can I kind of get down to that and make sure I'm making a good solid connection? Yeah. And along the lines of, you know, rich content and getting a feel for who's on the other end, I'd say that the accuracy of the data is really critical. Oh, man, that's good. That's that like needs to be retweeted. Yeah. And the accuracy and the depth of the data, which I know is challenging.  So that's a that's a big one.  Does this particular dealer carry the products that I'm looking for? And the more the more you can provide accurate data and and accurate information back to the customer, the more they're going to trust those and feel like they're in a better relationship as well. You know, one thing I've seen in doing with manufacturers or some of this just has to do with the history of their kind of how their websites came to be, right? It's they they were product catalogs, right? So that's what they did. They took their product catalog, they put it on line, and then at some point somebody said, hey, we got to add a list of our dealers. But because they weren't e-commerce oriented businesses to begin with, they weren't really thinking about, you know, how do I actually take a visitor and move them down a path to conversion? So one thing that's actually kind of an easy fix for a lot of folks is do we have clear calls to action on our website? So for a manufacturer, that's where to buy or, you know, get it installed if they have if they have an installer network. You'd really be surprised at how often, you know, those things you find missing from from their websites like, OK, great. I just I looked at your product. Where do I get it? Right. But like I said, they came from a cat sort of a catalog mindset and they really need to make that transition. That's great. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on the show. If someone wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? You can contact me at JayRidge at the bullseyelocations.com or you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Yeah, I'd say find me on just to go Brian Baker on LinkedIn. I'll find you right away. Brian, we'll link to your email too. I will not attempt to spell the Odecahedron on the podcast. We'll try to link to that too. But for our listeners, you know, hope you enjoyed this show. If you I will say we are right around Thanksgiving. If you enjoy the show, go on to the podcast store on Apple iTunes. Give us a like. Give us a five star review when we welcome it. If you want more content like this, go to Venvio.com slash podcast to subscribe. Until next time, I'm Zach Williams, alongside Beth Popekalov. Thanks, everybody.


righty, so in honor of Mr. Beast doing team seas and bringing attention to litter and trash and just our seas being in complete disarray and completely littered and it's destroying our environment, I'm gonna try and give a little bit of inspiration to you guys to help us live better well at Canada's Wonderland, that was the best way I could incorporate it, so I've noticed a lot this season that a lot of people just kind of throw their trash or leave their trash on the ground and with Wonderland being located so close to a river and stream and it being actually our protected land, it's really important to make sure that we're not leaving our litter that could end up in the river or in the stream which then could in turn end up in our oceans, so I'm just asking my audience and all of us including myself to live better and be better and throw out our trash and recycle anything that is recyclable and just a huge shout out and kudos to Wonderland for doing their part as well, a lot of people don't know but Wonderland's been reducing their plastic use, there's no plastic lids on any of the cups, they're trying to get rid of plastic cutlery as best as possible and including plastic straws, so huge kudos to Wonderland on improving each year it seems they announced a little bit that improves their impact on the environment, so let's do our part and not litter especially with a theme park that is connected to protected wasteland or water, so just wanted to do that really quickly, I know it sounds super cheesy but I wanted to do some sort of little thing, thanks so much here's the video. Alrighty, if you couldn't tell I'm a little excited, I'm giddy with Winterfest, I'm giddy with a bunch of information, I'm giddy with just everything happening at Canada's Wonderland and I couldn't be more excited for both Winterfest and the future of Canada's Wonderland, I'm gonna go over a few things in today's video, there is a lot happening, I'm gonna go over it, if you look closely you'll be able to see some of the details all over, so as you can see Wonderland is full force prepping for Winterfest, I'm so excited, remember 99% of the park is gonna be open, so that's a huge portion of Canada's Wonderland that's gonna be open for Winterfest, they have Cherry Pickers galore setting up Christmas lights everywhere and I'm truly looking forward to potentially Windseeker being set up to those really Cedar Fair famous Christmas tree light displays, so here's to hoping Windseeker will have its little Christmas tree display, I can't guarantee that but I do hope fingers crossed that that's gonna happen because that pathway that's gonna be open is a little bit of a dead zone and having the Windseeker tree would be really nice, so yeah super excited about that, Kingswood has had its electrical completely removed, the electrical is disconnected from Kingswood, the speakers are down, the lights are down, it is completely vacant in there, so definitely some more exciting news, there should be a company potentially arriving you know in the next couple weeks, it could be months, I don't know the timeframe, it's a completely removed Kingswood as a structure, so we'll be keeping an eye on that, hopefully that happens sooner than later and yeah so it does bring up a lot of questions and answers that we had, so that little white tent there I did think was gonna be for floats for Season 2 of Winterfest, for anyone that follows Cedar Fair in Winterfest, a little Christmas parade is launched in Season 2 of Winterfest and Wonderland would be entering at Season 2, so I predicted that this little tent would be housing the floats to Winterfest like other tents at Carowinds, that is not the case, it looks like Cedar Fair actually has had plans to remove Kingswood for quite some time, they built that white tent as Kingswood was being used for Winterfest storage and it no longer is being used for Winterfest storage, a lot of those Christmas trees and nutcrackers and candy canes and stuff that were being stored in there are now in that white tent, so that answers my question and that also answers the question of is Kingswood a last minute removal, it doesn't seem that way, it seems that Kingswood was actually planned to be removed, there is action over on Vortex Hill, the location of the new Harmony Hall-styled restaurant coming to Vortex Hill, there are a bunch of Wonderland workers and non-Wonderland workers there, they were casing the hill and trucks parked there, so I'm guessing that there'll be construction markings there when we go or even a construction fence, I do know and can confirm based off of the Cedar Fair conference calls that construction at Canada's Wonderland and other Cedar Fair parks will commence immediately after Halloween on their projects, so I'm going to assume that applies to the restaurant as well and Kingswood as well, so I don't know if they mean exactly on November 1st or just after Halloween sometime in the week or two timeframe after that, there was a crane on International Street lifting something heavy, I couldn't fly long enough to make out what it was, honestly I'm going to make a giant assumption right now that I think is very likely, I think Wonderland's just setting up the ice rink, I think Wonderland's getting the ice rink ready for Winterfest, maybe when we go there that it'll already be going and getting ready, that was a very large project in 2019 and I think that may require more than the 13 days or 12 days that Wonderland has from Halloween hot to Winterfest, so they might just completely be covering up the fountain on International Street even with this last weekend to save them some time, that's going to be my guess, we'll find out tomorrow when we're in Wonderland if they did that, but there were giant white blocks of stuff at front gate as well, looked like the same thing that covered the fountain in 2019 for Winterfest, so that's going to be my assumption, they're just getting the ice rink ready and I couldn't be more excited about that, if you're looking closely there are cherry pickers all over the park, super excited, I need to calm down, I'm sorry I love Winterfest, I literally eat, breathe, dream, sleep, listen, film, talk, anything Winterfest, I love the live performances, I love the performers, I love the lights, I love the food, I just love the park, it reminds me of Disneyland, honestly it really does for Winterfest, so I'm super excited about that, did I cover everything? I'm trying not to rant, I am ranting in this video, I apologize, I promised I would work on it and I will keen to pin you to keep working on that, we got the white tent there in Winterfest storage, we got Kingswoods going to be coming down, we got the restaurant construction over on Vortex Hill, they are working on disassembling splash works as well, and there was someone working at the little tolls as you enter the parking lot and I think that's it, I think that's everything, if there's anything else I'll update you guys, I think that's it, I know I missed something, you should see I take these HDR pics and I overanalyze them beyond belief, and then I come record the video, so all these shots are seeing me film, I literally take the same thing in an HDR mode on the DJI drone, so I can zoom in really close and make out things, that's how I can tell that there were two people standing on Vortex Hill there, with the trucks parked by the Cookie Witch building, but some guy disassembling, but yeah, super cool, nothing exciting, there's no signs of a coaster yet, but I can promise you with the removal of Kingswood, that something really big is going to be happening over the next three years, and I think that you're going to see Wonderland go full force in development, they need some investments and I think that it's not going to all be roller coasters and rides, I think we're going to be really excited about some of the investments coming, but I think we are truly going to be a bam bam boom park over the next three to five years, you're going to see some heavy investments coming, and I'm definitely willing to put my money behind it, and for those of you that have been watching my channel, especially recently, we have been knocking it out of the park with our predictions, and I think that I can slowly say that I hopefully I'm earning your guys' trust with our predictions and our assumptions and stuff like that, that I think I know what Wonderland's doing now, I think I fullheartedly see the picture that Wonderland is going to be doing, and a lot of it's going to be infrastructure, which is super exciting, a lot of it's going to be food and beverage, super exciting, and then you're going to see a really cool roller coaster come to Canada's Wonderland, now is that going to be in Whitewater Canyon or Kingswood's location? That's the question, and then don't forget the plan for some of those Vaughn attractions and that there is still a hotel up in the air for Canada's Wonderland as well, so a lot of cool things happening for Canada's Wonderland over the coming years, so stay tuned to our channel because I promise you we will keep you guys updated on construction updates on whatever Wonderland's working on and try and provide you some inside information without providing inside information, if that makes sense, we don't want to cross any lines, but yeah, I have some really cool predictions that I have whipped up that you guys are going to start seeing on the channel coming soon, hopefully there's a really cool prediction that you'll see coming out very shortly that I think you guys are really going to enjoy and a lot of money was poured into this video that should be coming out over the next two weeks max, so stay tuned for that, super excited about it, thanks so much for watching this video and supporting the channel, don't forget to hit that subscribe button, and hopefully you have an amazing last weekend at Canada's Wonderland for a regular operation, see you guys at How We Haunt this weekend and Winterfest in two weeks, bye guys.


Now, what the users see about your website, there is a lot of things which are underneath it, which they are not aware of. And what are those things which you are aware of, you are managing, is that how your website is distributed, and what servers it reside, are those servers physically at the same place or they are different place, and how the linkage is there, how the static pages are being worked with, how their dynamic pages are being processed, how the mirroring is done, what is happening in the product. So there are many, many things, which of course, you have to take care of because it is your web application. So in this module, I will be covering all those things. So let's look at the module coverage. So there are different environments we are talking about over here. This we are talking about the production environment. We are about talking about the mirror, about the backup, about the test environments. And of course, the environments and the archives, and why all of this matters? Why? That is the question you should always be asking yourself, that why this, and then trying to get the answers to those why's. That is the way to learn. So production server and the environment, web server, you don't have any control of which in which directory you are going to place your material. Okay, your ISP of course will provide you a directory. And of course, you can create directory structure within that directory, but beyond that you don't have any control to web server directory contents are important that way you place them. And you have to backup, backing up your web server files. Now it is your responsibility because you are the admin, you are the administrator. It is your responsibility to take a backup of all your files. Now this is the mirror copy of the production environment mirror copy is that you have your, your data, you have your application. Okay, that is replicated across other servers also. And there are many advantages and which will be covered also of mirroring your website. Most of all is fault tolerance. And then this performance is also there. So it is your responsibility to take a backup and mirror your website. And multiple mirror environments are cheaper. They are cheaper. Why because it because instead of getting one powerful server or one which is going to be very expensive, it is much cheaper and economical to have multiple servers which are cheap and using their performance that that is the benefit of multiple mirrors. Multiplicity increases redundancy also because when you are you have mirroring your website across multiple servers across the end servers. So if if one server fails, you have n minus one servers working n minus one are working. But if there is only one server, if that fails, then everything is gone. So this is what you call as graceful degradation. So that is the benefit of mirroring your website. Then is the production backup complete copy of a website on a separate computer separate means that you are you make a complete copy of the backup. Whatever is on your main server, you make a copy and that copy is not on that server. That copy is on a separate server or on a separate computer. So that if there is a problem with the main server, you have a you have a backup and you can restore from your that backup. And you this is your backup. This is your responsibility. Don't don't ask and don't expect the ISP or the database service provided to take a backup. You this is your web application. You take the backup and you are responsible for it. And the thing is that keep the two sides identical. Whatever is at the so-called master website that should be copied or backup on a computer and they should be identical. The file names, the hierarchy, the structure, everything should be identical. And if for some reason there are certain files which are which which are not matching or which have been created, but that have not been duplicated. It is prudent. It is better to delete those files and they should be identical, not similar identical. Test on backup move to production. Now your your backup is the copy of your actual system. It is actual system. Now if you have to make any changes, you don't make those changes at the production. You make the changes in the backup. Okay. And as a matter of fact, you don't make the changes in the backup. You load the changes in the backup and run them there. And when they're okay, then you load into your production. Test environments to for experiments, few files, text environment is not a backup. There are only few files over there and you are experimenting those files and no modifications, no modifications in the production, no modifications. Even no motivations in in the backup. You do the experiments in the in the experiment environment. And then you load them into the production and you test them over there. Because remember in the test environment, you don't have all the files. Okay. And if there are multiple servers in the production environment, your test environment should also have multiple servers. And and you know something. The thing is that if you are trying to cut corners to making shortcuts and you had multiple servers in your production, but in the test environment, you don't have multiple servers and you make the name changes rest assured. The things will work perfectly in your scaled on test environment, but they are not going to work. They will fail in your production environment. Remember that. And finally is the this is this development environment. Freedom to develop the ideas. You can develop your ideas over there. You can test them. You can experiment them and you can you can you can develop your ideas and change them make experiments. Okay. But you are not allowed to do this in the production environment or the test environment. Okay. And take a regular backup of mirror of the changes. Whatever changes are there, you should make a take a backup of those changes so that you have their record of the changes. Why it matters standard way to control large systems. If you are new to such an environment and not accustomed to it, get used to it. If you think it's a lot of work after a while, you will see the benefits of this and you will be following this cutting corners can lead to disaster. People might not you you or maybe you are not very convinced, but the same goes for the backup. When the system crashes, then the people remember then the people somebody told them something good advice. So you should have these different types of environments in which this thing your application is being developed and your website is a very public area. Keep it clean. You would not like your boss to ask you why this mess up in your public website. And of course, web database applications cost quickly. The cost quickly add up. Okay. Because now because it's a complex problem. You have your web database application. You have your web server. You have your application server. You have your database server. You need a licenses. You need patches. You need upgrades. You need servers hardware to the cost add up quickly. So look at what you need and what you can afford. That is the message. Thank you for your time.


How did you start? What is our motivation for this work? I'll give you just a couple of examples to show. This is from Ingrida's work, and it's from something that she presented a few years ago in CAA. And it is a listing, after a content analysis she did, from 20 Facebook sites, archaeological Facebook sites in Lithuania, in which she tried to elicit the kinds of reactions, emotive reactions, psychological emotive reactions that people have with archaeological material and sort of to identify ones that relate, that are based on artifacts, on replicas, on archaeological places, and this could be positive like, you know, sort of statements of admiration, amazement, insistence, or contentment. Others are negative, in a sense, because they talk about the loss of archaeological monuments, neglect the black archaeology and its problems, and the notions of identity and how identity can be appropriated. So this is something that she feels very strongly is important, if we are to have a notion of archaeology that relates in openness and in communication with society, a reciprocal archaeology, if I may say, in which archaeologists and communities talk to each other. Same thing with my work on the other side, which is based on some analysis of Facebook sites in Greece. So what I tried there is to understand what is happening again with an analysis of, conceptual analysis of the interactions there. What we see here is tents in front of an ancient temple, a temple of Hephaestaeon, the center of Athens, from the movement of the populations when immigrants were forced back to Greece after the Greek-Turkish War in 1922. And you get interactions such as, for instance, somebody saying, well, there's a description there, and that's an interesting thing while this Facebook group is a community group. You have a language that resembles very, very much the language of an institution in a way. So it's like a musicalization of the languages. It takes an institutional voice like that, as you see here. And then somebody says, well, we became a sacrifice this year in front of the Teseon, which is a wordplay of words, but people know that Hephaestaeon is Teseon in Greece these days. What do these tents remind you? And on rooting then and now, history repeats itself. So this notion of antiquity, this notion of tents in front of a monument, and this being sort of imbued with significance that is contemporary is something that is there. Gareth Meele, commenting to Lorna Richardson's paper, a microblogging online community, says that in order to better understand the value of social media to heritage, we need to observe existing communities that are directly or indirectly involved with archaeology, something that we flow to sort of inspired us. And also something that I found by looking at sites, I'm not the first one to find that, is that Facebook, followed by Twitter and YouTube statistically is the most widely used platform around cultural heritage institutions surveyed, that both in Greece, but also from the literature survey that I did for a paper, that it's under publication in volume due early next year. So what is the context of scope of our work? First of all, we want to accommodate different discourses, different ways of trying to sort of understand what is happening with archaeology and social media, including collaborative archaeology, open archaeology, emancipatory archaeology, DIY archaeology, participatory museum, the notion of participatory museum that is also has an impact on archaeological public communication practices, participatory archival practice, marketing, inclusivity and collaborative frames from Jenny Kidd's work, the notion of indigenous curation, agency-oriented research, some notions that we want to have in the picture as interpretive lenses. And what we don't have today, we don't have the data in order to be able to do any of the analysis that would allow us to employ these principles. So in order to sort of do our project, we started with a literature survey, and for this, we scope the project. You might say that there's plenty of work and very, very important work on social media, having sort of Sarah here, having Isto and other colleagues. I mean, it's obvious that, you know, there's been really, really important and seminal work. However, a lot of that work is on different areas. It's not really, really on social networking sites. It is on blogging. It is on crowdsourcing. It's on other aspects, on content sharing or different areas. So if you look at sort of social media in general, it can include many different things, you know, it can include different kinds of digital communication, having to do with networking, collaboration, sharing and commenting. And if you see practically what people do, for instance, in the panel that was organized in 2012 in Helsinki in EAA, well, in the panel on social media, I said, we define these technologies, including online excavation blogs, email discussion lists, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Skype communications, interactive websites, online magazines, online events, contributory photographic archives, and handheld device software for insight and interpretation. So you get a very broad range and you didn't want to go into that wine. As you have noticed, the title of our presentation is something about Facebook. Now, Facebook is too small. I mean, there's no publications. There are three publications. What's the point of doing a literature survey to sort of survey three publications or something like that? So we took this classification that is a standard classic, a very, very popular classification by Kaplan and Henlein of social media, by social presence and self-presentation in which they divide things between blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, virtual social worlds like social life, and also in low self-presentation, low self-disclosure, collaborative projects such as Wikipedia, content communities such as YouTube and Flickr, and virtual game worlds. So from this, we sort of isolated and hone down to social networking sites. So social networking sites, one definition, a network communication platform which participants have uniquely identified profiles that consist of user-supplied content, content provided by other users, and system-provided data, can publicly articulate connections that can be viewed and traversed by others, and can consume, produce, or interact with streams of user-generated content provided by their connections. Social networking sites, as some call them, and we call them that, we prefer to call them social networking sites, other social network sites, have been thought by others to be a stage for performing an interpretive identity, interpretive identity. Another scholar, Jeanne Kidd, using frame analysis from Goffman suggests that there are three mark frames in which communication on social networking sites works for museums. The one is a marketing frame, which she also sees as a predominant almost, you know, this predominant way in which museums interact with audiences, the inclusivity frame related to notions of real and online community, and the collaborative frame, perhaps the most problematic. You will recognize that the last is the most problematic for archaeology as well in terms of practice. And these are ideas that are inspired, of course, by Goffman's, the drama truth given, the drama truthical theory of the surf, and the frame analysis. So what we did is we did a literature review, we started with an initial informal survey, and we sort of extended the scope to cover social networking sites, covering the generic class of SNS and online communities, and major distinct social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, but also ones that are professional, such as LinkedIn and some academic ones. And we created a broader dataset of this analysis on social media more generally. So we used queries, like these are the queries that we use, I'm not going to stay here if you want to come back later if you want to inspect them, in which we created our primary and secondary datasets, and we used three databases, Scopus, Web of Science, and also Google Scholar, limiting ourselves to title-only queries on Google Scholar, because if you search text, it gives you a lot, a real lot of rubbish. Our workload was to look at everything, we put it in Sotero, we duplicated the data, we sort of normalized it, corrected, did all these kinds of things, in order to be able to consolidate our bibliographic results according to their source, and then select from those. So what did we do? We found out that we needed to exclude many, many of the of the citations that we found. Why? Because archaeology and social media, for one thing, recalls a number of approaches in media studies and in cultural studies, including Yusiparica's media archaeology, the archaeology of knowledge of Michel Foucault and others. So those are excluded. Broad reviews on a general topic, archaeozoology, and this is like one paragraph, that there is some work on social media, that people adopt Facebook. This is excluded as well. Works where social network media are really mentioned. Works focused on computer science aspects, how to build a better software for SNS. Works presented in archaeological journals or conferences that do not address SNS within archaeology, but it's about museums, for instance, unpublished sources, such as dissertations, and sometimes very, very wildly irrelevant results, such as a group of statues from Aphrodisias, for instance. Imagine why Google scholar thought that this is, why Scopus thought that this is a relevant source for social networking sites. So our results were like this. We concluded to cut a long story short after combining and sort of selecting and reselecting to 21 specific references on this, and this confirms the fact that Sebastian Walker talks about one says that currently there is only a small body of formal publications about the use of social networking sites in archaeology in museums. In museums there are some more actually, which is surprising given that the apparent ubiquity of use among individual academics and academics and professionals, as well as organizations and institutions. So here's a list of the results. I mean if we sort of circulate the publication, sort of we're happy to share with you. And what did we find? We found things that relate very, very much to questions that there are in the field about social media in general, like this set of questions that was asked in the EAA 2012 session. What are the audiences? What do archaeologists do? What do they want to project? Who uses these network sites? Does it empower or does it undermine traditional structures? How representative are people who use that, the broader population, etc. So this is one actually of the sources that we found, which gives a set of questions like that, and this illustrates the different kinds of content that we found among these 2021 results. Another one is a case study of one particular sort of archaeological site, Conjunto Archeologico de Carmona in Seville, Spain, in which the people who sort of are responsible for that particular sort of initiative indicate how they use social media now, especially Facebook, in order to be able to understand their audiences, understand who visits the Conjunto, it's an acropolis, and improve that. And they get some information that is the demographic information about who is interested and who is using this social media. But also this is their opportunity to launch an initiative, which is a constructivist learning initiative through hidden treasures posts, as they call them. For instance, like they started with a poster like this, why would the dead need a mirror? And then people would have to fill the gaps, so there's a dialogue on Facebook on that. And this is a sort of good case of a case study that we discovered. Others are, like Isto Huvila's engagement has its consequences, is a more systematic approach that is evidence-based. It looks beyond one single case. It tries sort of to tally the situation across different media. Actually, that's the only one I know in archaeology that sort of has this nature. There's a few in museums that try to do the same thing compared across media. And see, first of all, what are the affordances of specific different media? What are they good for? It sort of tackles this question of multiplex communication that sometimes you see when people have multiple identities, as Jose van Dijk was talking about on Facebook and on LinkedIn, that they're very different to one another, but also where media themselves through their affordances allow for different things and for multiple identities. And Isto's work looks at Facebook, Twitter, Second Life and Pinterest, and sort of compares across those. Lorna Richardson is a prolific writer in the field, actually probably the most prolific writer and one of the most theoretical writers in the field as well. Together with Isto and a couple more, very, very small group of people that are of us inclined, looks at notions of community. She says, for instance, this is a passage that indicates the kind of ideas that she has, the kind of questions that she wants to ask. Are one topic groups, communities, and can share the identity situated in the subject of archaeology via catalyst or community formation? The idea is, I mean, can we sort of be on a single issue, sort of be the community of ice cream lovers or something? This is really the substance of it. And it really goes very, very much into central questions in identity politics, the notions of identity and identity politics today, you know, whether it's Singlishes can lead us somewhere. Since the location of this community is in a new space, online, where discussion and interaction take place in varying formats, time zones, so that a different place, although a synchronous nature of communications, do these differences matter any longer than the formation of a sense of connection and belonging to a network? What conditions is this usually allowed? Otherwise need to exist to support the development of online networks and communities. It's a very pragmatic and almost action research kind of approach. So more or less, because we don't have time to sort of discuss all the various publications that we sort of examined, the 21 results, the initial findings is that the majority of works report on SNS initiatives of authors themselves. So it's self-reporting in many ways. People have a problem. Typically they are archaeologists, so they're working in cultural resource management, archaeological management, the different kinds of public archaeology, either the public oriented or the preservation oriented, and this is what sort of puts them there as authors. There are several advocacy pieces or best practice recommendations. People will say, this is what you should be looking at if you want to somehow sort of adopt the use of social networking sites. Only a few empirical studies that are based on single multiple case studies, surveys or interviewing, and only a handful of authors engaging with theory, bringing up notions such as social social capital, networks communities, web marketing, social inclusion, and also tool agency from the SDS field. So using SNS for either marketing or crowdsourcing and social open publishing through microblogging in particular is a widely shared view among authors that we sampled. And there is consensus on the need for further research. So there's a clear need to understand the ways in which technologies can be used to facilitate better and more rewarding relationships between individual and communities. This seems to drive a lot of the opinion, and in order for this to occur it may be necessary to consider, Gareth Beale says here, the processes that work in the development and marketing of technology, but also it's eventual appropriation by users. That means what users do actually, what those people who are active, the actors of these social networking sites do. So a framework for analysis that we try to develop traces some contemporary shifts, and this is from background paper that Ingrid had prepared a couple of years ago, in which she saw that, for instance, we have institutional and professional trends towards community inclusion, openness, and reciprocity, such as, for instance, the case of the participatory museum and ideas about the participation. You have a shift from institutional to social and participatory archives and ways of recording the past. Like Isto has been sort of experimenting, writing about the decade ago. Social networking sites can be seen as communities of practice connecting archaeologists with amateurs, and this is an idea also that Ingrid does work is very, very much based on that, but others as well in the field have been sort of warming up to the notion of communities of practice. And finally, SNS and archaeological heritage can be factors for generating and regulating social capital. They don't always create social capital. Sometimes they consume it. It's an interesting relationship. So this idea, and this is an idea by Ingrid who's her supervisor knows, this is an idea that really is sort of interesting to consider in a way. I've been sort of working on a different dimension, looking at issues of civic engagement and human creativity, the notion of participation, how can participation is participation really? And if we say we open up and invite the public, we'll have our volunteers come and sort of write and interact with us, how much of this is really participation? And for this, I mean, one needs to take heed of the warnings mostly of these two people, the notion of civic engagement and how Nico Carpentier has been criticizing how this is happening at all really under this sort of wonderful world of participation, but also how much human creativity and this sort of empowerment and creativity does happen. It happens sometimes, but not always. The other question that I also wanted to look at is, and I'm sort of putting that in my own sort of perspective, is the notion of institutional voices on social networking sites. How, for instance, archaeological and heritage institutions adopt the institutional logic of the platform? This is an idea that, it's not my idea actually, it is an idea which Gauntlet has advanced about YouTube. For instance, you are on YouTube, then you sort of talk about YouTube. Talking a sort of very, very professional, you know, sort of perfect immaculate advertising video. And the thing is that they do adopt, sometimes they adopt voices like that. You talk to people in a more sort of informal way. But what's interesting is that also people talk in a different way when they talk. When I say people, I mean sort of individuals, amateurs on these sites. And they adopt sometimes the voice of institutional authority and knowledge. That's like a phenomenon of hybrid performativity, as Schoenberg had called it. Because it's different theoretical perspectives regarding how institutions and institutional voices, authorities, you know, sort of act in the field, notions of governmentality, the notion of infrastructural inversion of Jeff Bowker, the notion that infrastructures make us do what we do. And then we need to take heed and look at, you know, how things are work in these infrastructures, below the lines, right? You'll find the rules or the changing rules of Facebook. You'll understand how these changing rules may change practices some authors have identified. The notion of functional genre in these utterances and these communications that happen on social networking sites, it's like the archaeological reports that we're saying is a genre. It's something and it really plays a functional role. What is this function about? What can we learn about the functions? They are the right functions that have been manifested between people in these communities by looting at the form of these documents. And finally, institutional isomorphism. So there's several things that end up sort of concluding at two or three minutes, right? Yes. Yeah. So several different things that one can find by looting, listening in on our social network site conversations that we thought is irrelevant. And, you know, because at the end of the day, as you were saying, what it tries to develop a method rather than do a substantial, substantive work at this stage. You don't try to say, this is what these social networking sites do. What do we mean? What do we want to say? Okay, what is happening in the field? What do people research? And what do we need as tools for documentation? And for representation, are we able to allow different conversations and different explorations, theoretical explorations. But among things that one can see is object agency. Many threads, as we find on Facebook in particular, start from a photograph, from a drawing or other record.  And then the conversation goes elsewhere. It might be on notions of identity, ethnicity, whatever. And that photograph is forgotten or the archaeological object is forgotten. But that's how it starts. Performativity. People like to post comments like, and these are efficacious, almost static acts in a way. Some people, you know, present themselves through that and the group becomes a middle stage in a sense because it's not even the open world, but it's not private either. It's somewhere in the middle. Multiple identities of people as they interact in this. You can be different things at the same time. Diverse foci with archaeological heritage, community memory, events, current issues and controversies sometimes that become part of this. And fun and trivia. Different modes of engagement, including activism and various aspects of pragmatic efficacy. Social capital, identity-making, affiliation, differentiation, community-building, symbolic appropriation of archaeological materials and goods, memorialization, and ethical and political outcomes that are part of this discussion. So, I apologize for my sort of power point. I should have put the PDF which is there, but I couldn't imagine that it won't work properly. But anyway, what I've been sort of working for some years now, when I was looking at the notion of archaeological knowledge curation, and with a couple of large case studies and some smaller ones, I was looking at Tertal, you can say, you know, what happens there with the use of these technologies. One of the things that I was working on also is the development of some abstract model, which is like an activity theory, cultural historical activity theory, derived model in a sense. It doesn't do very much like Einstein, but it is derived by some of the saving intuitions. And the notion is, if we need to be able to sort of create some formal mechanism that would allow us to create a grid, a descriptive grid and demonstrate how sort of represent things, what do we need to represent?  Because the idea is that to be able to say, this is one activity in the center, and this is the actor who made that activity. Is it a post on the side? Maybe someone posted something, or maybe somebody has already commented or something else. So we're going to try to look at the actor's artwork activity, but also what is the algorithmic source? That's actually the document. It might be the text of a post, it might be a photograph, it might be something else. And this has also references. It refers to a historical event. It refers to a concept. It refers to some cultural object of another kind. So this is the kind of idea for this model. And for this, the key idea and the key idea for our sort of topic is that we need to take into account both objects and people. So we want to see interactions between the objects themselves that are manifested in these sites, the photograph of this site, the photograph of this artifact, or the notion of the historical event as it is represented, and humans being archaeologists and non-archaeologists using notions such as the affiliative objects notion of Lucy Suchman. So what we did is, and I don't have to talk in detail about that because my time is running off, I think. I have a little time? Okay. Because of the cause one... I was just right. Yes, okay. So you will bear with me. I'm sorry. That's a terrible thing to you said now, Rembidas. I'm sure that nobody, not all people are going to thank you for this. But anyway, I'll take then a couple of minutes to say that in this model, and like in activity models in general, we have some basic notions as a notion of the actor. There's a notion of the activity itself. And there's a notion of mediating to and make many different notions. For instance, in a social networking site complex, and mediating to can be a system itself, but it's a fortress. But another mediating tool, it can meet the various norms or ideas or people see the ideas that people have. And another mediating tool is the actual post that people write. And all these are trying to sort them out in a way. And it can be a little complex if you try to do it in the big scale or try to do it formally. But at the end of the day, what we wanted to do is to come up with something that would allow them to create a simple descriptive grid. So that you can use this grid in order to say, okay, we've got this particular sort of community confession. We've got this Twitter interaction. What can we do in order to be able to document it and to put it then open for intellectual inquiry, for discussion, for understanding. This was the idea. And for this, we needed to look then at each of them in separate. For instance, actors, we needed a taxonomy of actors. We don't have one. But here's Collie in one of the few studies that are really sort of surveying the field in Australia, what they do is surveying social media use in Australian archaeology. One of the things that they do is they provide a list of taxonomy of classification of typology of different kinds of users, including archaeologists, both academic and professional archaeologists, government departments, architect scientists, other professional schools, university colleges, students who are in school or university, development, mining, another resource excavation, extraction companies, sub-original communities, et cetera, et cetera. So you need a list of subjects. You also need to have a sense of what these meat-making tools that this social network insights as we need to use our life. And for this, we draw from a publication from the field of management that identified the notion of building blocks. So they say all these sites, all these sites have the following things. They have something that is called presence. So they facilitate people to know whether they are online and exposed and facilitate that what others are online. There's something called sharing. They can exchange, then distribute and receive content to others. They can have conversations and they can communicate with with each other. They have groups. They can be grouped together in recognizable groups. There is reputation that is negotiated. People know the standing of others and they negotiate the room standing versus standing of others. There's relationships that can relate to each other. And finally, there is identity and people reveal themselves. And these blocks are useful as a heuristic in order to allow us and to say, okay, then what is happening with social networking sites within archaeology? Which of these functions are more predominant and in what way do they manifest themselves? So it gives us this. This is why we adopted this. We also sort of looking at stuff like relations, ties, multiplexity and composition for following standard, you know, sort of classic social network analysis theory. This is the work from Barry Wellman and his team that provides this classification here. And also, we're looking at the genres of actual texts and other sort of communication objects that appear in social networking sites. And we draw this from Gronemann and colleagues which were identifying the field of museums, a taxonomy, a classification of different kinds of content. Stories providing information, entertainment, news, announcements, records, stereo point of view, quizzes, pseudo questions and help needed. That's the things that that they identify. We're not exactly sure whether we want to sort of how we're going to proceed with that. Most likely, we're going to bring this with our colleagues in artwork and discuss it in the group and then refine it because we're not certain that some of these specifications are not elegant enough but consistent enough to put it like this. But still, I mean, this is where we are at the moment with this. So what is the purpose and approach when I'm finishing? It is to facilitate the collection and representation of empirical evidence on SNS archaeological practice, which is open to analysis and interpretation using diverse social research concepts and methods, such as the ones I mentioned before. And to do so, the idea is, first of all, to develop and use a simple activity model, not like the model I showed you, something much simpler that will allow us to have a syntactic layer so we can sort of put things in slots. Secondly, to refine an approach so that we can document SNS interactions and sites using conceptual graphs probably and populate data sets through either automated or human documentation according to scope and what it would do. And sort of discuss it with our colleagues in artwork waiting group three. So in our descriptive grid, we're going to include things like who are the actors of an SNS activity? How do these diverse actors interact with objects? And how is such interaction? Sorry, you were missing. What do they do? What are their actions? Do they post all the time? Do they just lurk? Do they just comment? Do they just like? What do they do? What is the input and the output of these interactions? How are these interactions motivated for specific actors and what are their consequences? What procedures, norms, system functionalities are they mediated by? What kinds of facilities they use? And what kind of community network effects does this produce? So this is what we did so far. So thank you. And for more information, I'm very happy myself and Ingrid to answer your questions now for me and either of us via email or Twitter. Thank you.