Business casual is the ultimate in-between dress code. It's kind of like the Goldilocks of dress codes. Not too dressy, not too casual, but just right. What's up guys? I'm Brian Sakawa. You're watching He Spoke Style and today five business casual outfit ideas for fall. One way to do business casual is to combine dressy elements with those that are more sporty or casual. Here, I'm doing both. Let's take care of the dressy element first, though, and that is this pair of charcoal gray flannel pants. Absolute must-for-the-fall closet. These are part of a suit from the made-to-measure collection with Michael Andrews that we are launching in the next couple of months. Up top we get more sporty and casual, starting with the brown gingham shirt.  I like to call it my blazer with an edge. Tie is by Seaward and Stern, very seasonal in a thick wool and also this beautiful rust color. On my wrist, as it will be in each of these looks, is the Vacheron Constantin traditionelle.  These are the Allen Edmonds McAllister. Next up is a very traditional and simple approach to business casual. Sportcoat, shirt, pants, loafers, all in the classic menswear palette of blue, gray, and brown. So the sport coat is definitely the key piece to this look. It's the garment that stands out and that is because of the wonderful brown glen plaid pattern. Really pops off the solid foundation. The flannel cloth is by Fox. Patch pockets give it a more casual feel. And this is another piece that will be in the HSS Michael Andrews MTM collection. We'll put a sign up link up there at the top as well as down in the description so you can be the first to find out about it. Two basics for the foundation of this look, of course, the blue OCBD and then the charcoal flannel pants from the first look, two inch cuff as always. And then on my feet are these kilty loafers with a strap by GH Bass. Next, we have something that is sophisticated, elegant, and yet modern at the same time. Obviously, everything about this outfit hinges upon the turtleneck and instead of wearing it untucked, that I've chosen to tuck it in. The turtleneck itself is by Peony Parma, cashmere and wool blend. Peony Parma is an Italian brand, very similar to suit supply, and I will be doing a review of them in the near future. Now, tucking in a turtleneck is a very high risk, high reward proposition. Done right, I think it looks very cool, very sleek, very modern. Moving on to the pants now, these are from a ring jacket suit, again, two inch cuff. A look like this that has more of sophistication to it is always enhanced in my opinion by a pair of glasses. The ones I'm wearing, one of my favorite pairs are by Cubits. Simple watch on the wrist, and then keeping that casual, elegant vibe going with some tassel loafers by Johnston and Murphy. Here we have what I would consider to be a more business casual version of the quote unquote uniform. The uniform, of course, being navy jacket, bluer white shirt, tie, gray pants, brown shoes. So obviously we have the navy jacket. This is in a hopsack fabric by Michael Andrews, gray flannel pants also by Michael Andrews. Now let's talk about the more casual elements infused here. First, we have the shirt. This is a denim shirt. It's by Peter Millar. And for business casual, I think a denim shirt is a great substitution for your classic OCBD or pop one or twill shirt. Just gives it a little bit of a casual edge. Next, because the uniform is pretty much a blank slate and because this is business casual, we have an opportunity to do something interesting with the tie. Went with a houndstooth pattern here, which makes it the focal point of the look. And then the final casual touch are the suede lace ups by Todd's. Final outfit today is a variation on a sport coat button down trousers theme. Now, when it comes to business casual, I can't overstate the importance of having a good sport coat and having two is better than one. Here I've got another Michael Andrews sport coat, but instead of a Glenn plaid, we have a gun club check. Cloth is wool by Holland and Sherry. Again, patch pockets, keeping it casual. Underneath, going with another denim shirt, this is a button down by Brunello Cuccinelli. Pants are vintage YSL part of a suit that I paid about $200 for a second hand a number of years ago. And then one of the best accessories you can have for fall, which is a lightweight silk scarf. I think if you're not going to wear a tie that a scarf is a great way to add something extra to a look, kind of finish it off and pull everything together. And speaking of pulling everything together, let's talk about the shoes, dark burgundy tassel loafers by Johnson and Murphy. So those are five outfit ideas for doing business casual this fall. All outfit details, as always, are listed down below in the description. If you want to be among the first to know about the HSS Michael Andrews MTM collection launch, that link to sign up is also down there. Leave a comment. Let me know which look you like best thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe. And until next time, thanks for watching and stay tail.


Okay. Yeah. So with this problem, if 5.0 grams of helium is added to a 1 liter balloon containing 1 gram of helium already, what is the new volume of the balloon? So the number of moles initially actually is going to be 1.0 grams. Okay? So we're going to have to figure out the number of moles by taking 1.00 grams and multiplying it by the inverse of the molecular weight of helium, which is 1 mole divided by 4.00 grams. Grams cancel and we get 1 divided by 4, which is 0.25, right? 0.250 moles. Okay? So that's going to be the initial number of moles. But 5 grams is added to 1 gram. How many grams do we have now? 6 grams. The final number of moles is going to be 6.00 grams because this is 5 plus 1. 6.00 is 5.00 plus 1.0 multiplied by the inverse of the molecular weight of helium, just like last time. 6 divided by 4. 1.5. Let's get some room here. Can I erase this, ladies and gentlemen? Ladies and gentlemen? These are the only variables that we've got, right? It must be off of us a lot because we could erase all the other variables, right? What we've got to do is isolate Vf, which is right here, and then solve for it. So the first thing we want to do is in so, sorry, we're looking for Vf, so we just got to get rid of Nf, right? So we just multiply both sides by Nf. Nf will cancel there, and we'll get back to equation. So the new equation is Vf equals Nf times Vi over Nf. Does that make sense? Okay? And now all we do is plug in stuff. So Nf is 1.50 mole, Vi is 1.00 mole of liters divided by 0 liters. Of course, liters cancel should be moles. Moles cancel, right? That makes more sense. Since we're looking for a volume, so we could have figured that out by knowing that we're looking for a volume. So 1.5 times 1 is 1.5 and divided by 0.25, 6.0. Volume and number of moles are also proportional to each other. So if you increase the number of moles, you should also be increasing the volume, okay? So if you get some answer that's less than your initial volume, then you know you've done something wrong, okay? So if you add more to it, the volume's going to increase. So this is Alpha-Gatros law solving for Vf.


Give the world a big round of applause because multiple things for us, I don't know how we manage it. When we woke up at five a.m., we were here at the end line to submit an article. Kudos to you all. Morning is my honour and privilege to be here. First of all, I'd like to acknowledge my friends who are also stalwarts five a.m. and in some way the creators of this domain are five a.m. So, I'd like to welcome somebody who doesn't have any introduction to this community or in the business and the quality of the community in India, Mr Dilip Seriat. Please give a big round of applause for Dilip Seriat. He's been an icon and a role model for a lot of us. I keep telling him when I grow up, I want to be like him. See, I'm trying hard. We have our keynote speaker who comes from Singapore and he's from Kachem. I would like to get your name right. Mr John Berry, welcome Mr Berry. Please give Mr Berry a big round of applause.  We need to be marketplace for buying and selling a media time in this space, like the commerce for a river. So, we were never intending to be a content player, we were not intending to be a media company. Me, Amit, and I were putting our jobs to build a marketplace for media. And we failed at it because we were ahead of time. In the other very face-to-face relationship-based society, media is not standardized, we weren't smart enough not that we are any smarter now. And then we exchanged for media to give me home, give everybody marketing, advertising, media, communication. And about eleven years back, I met a gentleman, I don't know where he actually is, Mr Singhla. And I said, I want to do, you know, we exchanged for media to become the platform it is today and it has become the number one platform. But, you know, we, in the main platform, we tended to do more about media planning, buying, marketing, that's how we started. And he said, we don't do anything for the PR and co-com in the community. So, I went and saw Dilip and then I met Prema and met Ashwini, met mother and met four or five people and said, we want to do this. And we put together the first IPR CCA, Ashwini contributed tremendously to that. He was the jury chair, he made calls and he really spent time. I really want to thank you, Ashwini. Gratitude is due to you and please give us a big round of applause. So, really, you know, as the day progresses, I'm going to say that we have a full house. It's already almost a full house. Now, your co-com and PR professionals, I don't have to tell you what's happening in this domain. Now, I spend most of my time in business work, you know, because I still have a long way to go there, but maybe another six months and we'll build what we set out to be got somewhere. But it's a company that acquired, you know, I've lost more air in Italy, but we're on our way. But I want to outline five things according to me, which in some way transforming the corporate communication with PR landscape. First thing, for the first time I see, I talk to a lot of PR professionals, they call, I'm mostly polite to all of them, except when people call an insistent talking, I take a call in that second and some people call me by my first name, I tell them I don't know you long enough, and some ask me if I show up for a press conference. I tell them if they pay me $10 million, maybe yes, but mostly I'm polite. But, you know, I can say for the first time I see a lot of people have a better business orientation than when I started 18 years back. I have to acknowledge that. Second, they understand the business environment much better. Third, they understand the marketing and business objectives much better.  I remember seven years back in a similar conscience, I talked about the, and then it was on that panel, I mean, he spoke, what is media agencies who buy most of the media take over the PR landscape? But that hasn't happened, so kudos to you. But it's still a threat. In the midst of the smaller media agencies, they still look at PR because they have a cloud to buy media. And when you talk to the government in the Senate, political institutions, they have media buying and PR is at their point. So how do the media agencies, the PR agency, the COPCOM professionals deal with that? Second, the biggest challenge is which team the media face but who has a professional face is the challenge of fake news. We are at the receiving end of that. We are not the creators of fake news. Politicians and respected groups create fake news. How do you deal with that? Third is the increasing number of content platforms. Today there may be an insignificant story on some platform that you never heard of which has come up three days back, sponsored by somebody, and suddenly spreads like fire, wire fire. So how do you keep track of the number of media that are growing? Of course you use technology, but at the end of the day, the response has to be human. There has to be a strategy around it. Fourth is, you know, our business of, even at the media business, dare I say, is becoming the business of content marketing. Today when I talk to clients, I talk to our advertiser, I talk to our subject, everybody in some way talks of content marketing. And you know, as an editorial person I don't like that because that means major advertising, that means... So how does a PR professional become a content marketing professional? How does a co-com professional align himself or herself to understanding the trends in content? The last, you know, earlier people would have a crisis in once in three months, once in a year. Today what I call crisis 360-degree boom. It's not the name of the platform. It could be, but today most professionals deal with, and crisis may be the strong word, but you deal with a complaint, you deal with an issue, you treat it 24 by 7. And again, technology can detect them, monitor it, but they don't even respond. How do you make sure you are geared up as a client, as a PR agency to deal with them? My last and probably critical point, I have seen in lots of corporates, the CMO become the CEO. We haven't done research, but maybe you should commission a little bit. No, I should be, you know. How many head of communications have fallen to become CEOs? Not many, why not?  He's the chief everything officer. You've got to have an appreciation. You've got to have a tail end. So these are the things that I'd like to outline. And today we have a fantastic line of speakers, and you hear them. In the evening we have our award, and I must say this. You know, Ashwini is there, he was in the first award.  As I said, I spent 99% of my time in the group. You know, there are too many awards happening. What is the differentiator between one award and another award? I can say looking in each one of your eyes and put a hand over my heart, and the jury will vouch for it. Forget me. And my editorial believes that these are the most honest, robust, process-driven awards. Can they be better? Everything can be better. But when you get an award tonight, you know that it has come through a peer recognition from professionals who understand this domain and it has a three-peer process. These are very honest, credible. And I think that separates the boys from men, the girls from ladies. Not to be shamanish, correct? So when you get the awards tonight, you know that they have been done in an absolutely process-driven manner. We are only custodians of the brand and the process. We have no impact on the awards. I also want to make some announcement. This is a domain that we've done, but we've not focused on it. I think the potential of this domain and to segment and sub-segment and to dive into this domain is huge. I want to announce three new initiators. We do an impact digital power 100. We do an impact top 50 women list every month. From early next year, we launch a PR 100 for the top professionals in the PR industry and top 100 professionals in the top company. We also launch under 30 young lists because 40 under 40 are no longer young. I know people like me have never mentioned that we are still young and we are in some way. But really, these are three initiators. So we do much more in this community, evidentially, because we tend to be a little more broader. And in exchange for media, we bring CEOs, CMOs, people beyond PR to this domain. There's a value in PR, people reading about PR people, but I think the value in the whole ecosystem engaging with your community and our community is much more important. Journalists, today at the conference, you see more journalists than you see at any PR conference. So I just wanted to outline this. Nammal also asked me to talk about three new initiators. This year, which has been ongoing, but they are bigger. Priyanka and Karan have put together Priyanka on the edict side, on the curation side, and Karan on the business side. These are two people. Priyanka also does an exchange for media news, broadcast awards. I remember when we started this, again, 11 years back, a lot of people said to me, why are you awarding news articles? What do they do? What do broadcasters do? I think everyone has a space. So they have, again, become the number one recognition in this domain. Again, we do everything through a jury process. So we have the jury on the 30th, Jan in the 16th, with our in-bath exchange for beginning. This year our jury is about 20 people. The chairperson of the jury is Dr. Kiran Kaili, and there are 11 editors on the jury who are not news TV editors. There are three attendees. There are two media planning CEOs. There are two former IMU ministers. Mr. Manish Tiwari is on the jury. Mr. Arif Mohammad Khan is on the jury. So we have a very, I mean, this year we have kind of taken the jury to another level. Two years back, we started the exchange for media digital outlook with the Densu Ages Network. It was the last 40 years with Madison, we do a pitch Madison advertising outlook. So on the 16th of Jan in Bombay, we have the Densu Ages Network Exchange for Media Digital Outlook, 2019, where we forecast the trends. So while we do it for pitch, for the advertising marketing, the next year we start to do a PR outlook where we look at the, you know, outlook for that domain including numbers, qualitative aspect. So I just want to tell you that we haven't done these three things in the past. We'll start doing, and then we've got a lot of data inputs inside. Last but not the least, our success and our domain platform are only about engagement. I don't want to talk about the traffic or how successful exchange for media is, but I can tell you, it's like having five hundred seats in the Lok Sabha, every election. I don't know. I wish, and I'm sure this word will get there in that dominance, but I just want to say that exchange for media is one of the involvement in the engagement of every one of you. And it totally, we don't do enough in the PR platform domain. We currently continue to head up business side on the PR domain. We'll be seeing as a sub-domain which is very important, but we're bringing in two more editorial colleagues on that. At some stage we introduce you to them, and we are bringing domain experts, people who have given the op-comp PR domain, they understand. So when they talk to you, it is a nuanced conversation. You know, you get something from them while they get something from you. So I just wanted to take this opportunity to share this. I'll have one of those few events that they have already, and I look forward to interactions and I look forward to learning from all the speakers and the staffers in the room, and all the young people because the young professionals have more hunger, more cuts, more curiosity, and there I say more energy to be able to create something new. So I look forward to our interaction with you and I wish you a day of learning and connections. Thanks.


I think one of the most important skills a man can have in life is the ability to see opportunities when they arise and take them where other people would be scared to. And I know for myself the reason that I'm sitting on this park bench, which is very glamorous in Regent's Park in 2012, near the end of the world, is because I took a chance and invested everything that I had on a small opportunity I was given I think four years ago to the day. At the time I was speaking in a very small dating conference in Sydney in Australia and there was a guy there very larger-than-life character called Vince Calvin, who many of you would know. And Vince liked my speech and he invited me to come to the POA Summit in Hollywood and at the time I couldn't afford to do that. You know the business was in its infancy we were really just getting by and I took a big jump there. However I had to I made sure that I went to that conference and I made sure that I delivered a speech that was very unique and was something completely out of left field to what most of the guys had seen and heard before. And as a result of that I met another young gentleman there by the name of Anthony Johnson and I think to get what you want in life you have to have this perfect blend of audacity and humility because men who are arrogant and try and force things in life tend to hit walls all the time. They tend to get judged, they tend to have to deal with a lot of conflict and they surround themselves with sycophants. Whereas a man who is too humble and sits back and waits tends to have life passing by. But you need to have a balance of these two things if you want to get what you want. You need to go for it and just go yep I want this and maybe it's not my turn but I here I am at the front of the queue. At the same time you need to have humility and to understand where the other person is coming from and not trying to push your agenda too hard. And so when I had a chat it was a very casual chat with Anthony over 10 minutes and I think we just clicked on an intention level. On a philosophical level it was a casual chat and I let him know I would like to come and speak at your conference and that was about it. So I think it was the next year or the year after I found myself in London in almost the same situation where again I couldn't really afford to be there. And I decided it was a very rocky time in my life. I was separating from my long-term partner. There was quite a lot of challenges going on in my life at that time.  And out of that my reputation spread a lot. I met another guy called Sasha D. Game who I've now been collaborating with for the last year and has highly influenced me and I think I've done the same to him and now the sky's the limit. So I count the 21 convention the first time I spoke of that as one of those pivotal moments in my life where if I hadn't have just bitten the bullet and gone for what I wanted then maybe I'd still be just hanging out in Australia doing alright instead of conquering the world.


I'm Josh Gelach and you're sitting in getting started for local SEO. Oh, is it? Okay. Do we have a mic? No. You're good up there? You're good. You guys saying you can't hear me? Can you guys hear me over there? Okay, okay. All right. I'll try to talk loud then so you guys can all hear me. Sorry about that. So I guess everybody's from the area. I'm actually from Pennsylvania. Just got down here yesterday. Brought my family with me, sitting up here in the front. I think these are the only two kids at today's World Camp. We're really enjoying our time at Raleigh. We had barbecue last night, first time. So it was really cool. We're really happy to be here. But anyway, you guys aren't here to hear about barbecue. You're about local SEO. So I guess I'll say a little bit about myself. I won't spend too much time because I don't like doing intros. But I've done SEO for a while now. A little over six years. I spent a little over 16 at T-Mobile doing SEO there and Content Strategy. In 2014, I started my own business, Expander Digital. And I've been doing that ever since. I am an SEO director at an agency up in Pennsylvania. And I manage about 92 to 94 clients that are doing local SEO. So a lot of clients that are really trying to rank in some of the areas that we're going to talk about today. So I guess that's all we're really sure about that. Thank you. But that's a little bit about me. Let's jump in. So if you're tweeting today, hopefully you are. Hopefully you're tweeting about the World Camp. If you are in this talk and you want to tweet, you can mention us at Expander Digital. That'd be cool. I'll have this slide at the end, too. But if you guys enjoy today's talk, you like this slide, you want to go back to them. You can download them at this URL. You'll find the slides from today. You'll find resources that we'll be talking about today. There's a couple of different tools I'm going to go over. And then you'll find my contact information. So if you have any questions about anything that we reviewed today, you can just email me and I'll be happy to help you out. But again, that slide's going to be at the end. So if you don't get it now, you'll be able to get it later on. So what is local SEO? I guess I thought this would be a good place to start because I think a lot of people have heard about SEO. But what is local SEO? So let's jump in here. So SEO is just generally speaking the process of improving your website's rank or web pages on your website, improving their rank. Local SEO is really about improving your website's rank in local search results. That's really all it is. That's simple. You see here I put a picture of my phone, which I have a pixel. So that's what you see in there, Android. Sorry, Apple people, no offense. But the reason I put this here is because local and mobile kind of go hand in hand. Usually when people are searching locally, they're on their phone. So I thought it would be good to kind of start here and show you what I mean by local search results. So right here we have the local organic pack, which is really the top of the three right here that you're seeing the results here. So I did a coffee shops near me search up in my area. And so this is what we call the local pack, the top three organic results. And the other side of it are local search results. And this little arrow right here is the bottom of the local pack. This is basically right below those top three. You see here I still have some localized results. So I live in Bethlehem, we're close to it. So you see there's a result there. I live in the Lehigh Valley, so there's a result here for that. So when you're talking about local SEO, it's about improving your presence in either local pack or local search results. And I thought that would just be a great place for us to start and just make sure that we're all on the same page for the definition of what local SEO is. So real quick, before I get into this, who in here is a local business owner? You own a business with a storefront, no? Okay, I'm going to say yes because he's coming into the storefront. Alright, cool. And then maybe who in here has clients who have storefronts? Okay, cool, cool. So this is if you're thinking about maybe having a conversation with your clients about local SEO and maybe kind of doing some of these things, probably going to be a question that you're going to be asked is why should I care about it, right? SEO in general is not a field of guarantees, right? So there's a lot of coulds here. So I'll just put that out there. It could increase your website traffic, right? Especially from local searchers. And that really could lead to more sales, more revenue, more traffic, right? If I look for something online, I go to a store that I found through search and I had a good experience. There's a chance I'll tell someone about that. So you could have more referrals, more traffic coming to your storefront and ultimately more revenue for your bottom line. That's kind of how maybe you could approach it with your clients and why you should care about it. So we talked about the local PAC and we talked about the local search results. This is where I think the question I get asked the most, right, is how do I get there? And this is where we're going to spend most of our time. So I'm going to talk about three tactics. Again, this is an introductory talk so I'm not going to get too into the weeds here. Hopefully I'll have some time for Q&A at the end if you have some more detailed questions but you can find me after the talk as well. I'm happy to sit down and talk with you about any specific strategies but for today's talk I'm going to talk about three things. We're just going to jump right in to claiming your online listings. It's free, right? So the listings I'm going to talk about here, it's always free. Nothing here is going to be a paid service. I think we'll start here with some of the local search engines that are out there. So there's four I've listed here. There are others out there. So these are not the only ones. But there's Google My Business, Yelp, Apple Maps, and TripAdvisor. Those are the four that I've chosen for this talk just to kind of keep at high level. And what do I mean by use websites that make sense for your business? For me, I don't have a brick and mortar location, right? My business is an online business. I meet with people at Starbucks or some local coffee shop. So I don't have a storefront. For me, having a listing on TripAdvisor doesn't make a lot of sense, right? Nobody's going to come to Lehigh Valley and visit me first of all because I'm an agency, right? It doesn't make sense. But I don't have a brick and mortar location. So one of the things you want to do is before you start going out and claiming all these listings and all these different websites, pause for a minute and say to yourself, where does it make sense for my business to be? Good general rule of thumb is Google My Business, right? I have a Google My Business because it makes sense for my agency. But this doesn't mean it works for everybody, right? If you have a storefront, for example, if you have a restaurant, it would probably make sense for you to be on Google My Business, probably Yelp, probably Apple Maps, and probably TripAdvisor. So it depends, right? Some businesses makes a lot of sense for you to be on all four. Some businesses not so much. It just depends on what you do or what your client does. So definitely go out and claim those or sit down with them. Now, it can take some time setting these up. You heard Bridget talk about, if you were in the keynote, you heard her talk about things taking longer than maybe you think. So it does take some time to set these up.  Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, I do. There we go. Oh, sweet. Can you guys hear me? Oh, maybe I should move this up. Can you guys hear me? Okay. Is that better? Excellent. Excellent. Cool. So that's the first tactic that I think you should take. Any local business should take to improve their local SEO. Second tactic we're going to talk about is using structured data. Is anybody in here familiar with structured data? Okay, not too many hands, but some people. Cool. This is probably going to be where we spend some time because it's kind of a newer thing it sounds like to most of you. So again, what is it? What is structured data? And I love Google's definition because I think it's really fitting. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page. So what does that mean though? It's kind of vague. Let's kind of show you what it actually means. And so you can see some examples. Before we get to the example though, there's a couple of different formats that are out there for structured data. There's micro format, there's JSON-LD. Google supports both, but they do recommend JSON-LD. So just keep that in mind. We're going to go over the JSON-LD example. We're going to go with micro data today. If you want to grab me afterwards, we could talk about that. But today we're just going to talk about JSON-LD, which is right here. So this is the JSON-LD code or the markup that you see over here. And this is just an example pulled right off of Google's website, the Structured Data Search Gallery. And this is just a real simple JSON-LD snippet. And you can see a couple of different things going on. Obviously you see that it's a JSON-LD script. And you can see some of the information here is about the business. So you have the business name. This is obviously a fictitious company, but you see the phone number listed there and some other information. And we'll get to that. That'll make a little bit more sense in a few slides. I'll kind of show you how you can start plugging your client's business information into that format, so we'll get there. But for local businesses, you're going to want to use local business structured data. And there's a couple of different formats out there. When it comes to structured data, you can use structured data for breadcrumbs. You can use structured data for blogs. Lots of different applications. But for local businesses, you're going to want to, or for local businesses, you're going to want to use local business structured data. And so why would you want to do that, though? If you use local business structured data, it could result in a knowledge graph card with details about the business if it matched the query. So what does that mean? This is what could happen. So you see here I typed in Taylor Roasted Coffee House, which is a coffee house up near me. I'm there multiple times a week. I sit down and do work, like probably many of you working out of a coffee shop. But when you put local business structured data onto the website, this is what the result could be. And so we have a nice, rich snippet here, or a rich card, I guess I should say, where you see information about the business. You see an option to call them, directions, their website. You see their address listed right here. And so this is what Google's talking about when it says, if you do that, this could be the result. So how do you get structured data onto your website? There's a couple of different options. You go with a free option, which we're going to cover here. There are premium options as well. Obviously, if you pay, you get support. So if you need help, that's an option for you. The free option we're going to talk about in this talk is Google Tag Manager. You could use Google Tag Manager. You could use something from the repository as well. There are a couple of different plugins out there that will let you implement structured data pretty easily. But we're going to talk about using Google Tag Manager because I think there are a lot of benefits to it. We'll talk about that. So Tag Manager, this is how Google defines it, or promotes it. It lets you add tags to your website for conversion tracking, for site analytics, for remarketing, and a whole bunch of different applications. So the reason I like using Tag Manager is because, for example, with a plugin, or if I'm using a structured data plugin, it's a very specific application. If I use Google Tag Manager, I can let a client do a lot of different things with marketing, or digital marketing, I guess I should say. We can deploy conversion tracking if they're using AdWords, if they're using Twitter ads. We can do Google Analytics through Tag Manager, do remarketing through it. So there's a lot of different applications, and that's why I like using Tag Manager. So has anybody in here ever used Tag Manager before? Okay, not too many hands. All right, well, it's a Google tool. It's free. This is the interface. You see that this is my website, so this is what you're going to see if you were to log in. Again, free tool, you just sign up, you log in, and this is what you'll see. And over here, you see the menu. We're going to focus really on the tags. And so if I were to click on tags, these are all the tags that are on my website, and you see a couple of different things going on here. Like I said, I got talked about before. You can do a lot of different things with it. There's AdWords going on here. There's Bing ads. There's a Twitter pixel. I have Google Analytics event tracking going on here. And this is the one that we're going to focus on right here. The custom HTML tag for local business structure data. So when you go into Tag Manager, you're going to see options for a lot of different tags. What we're going to use is a custom HTML tag. And this is what it looks like. So all I've done here, and I'm not going to go through it because I didn't go through it. I didn't add the screenshots for this presentation.  You select custom HTML, and this is what you'll see. And to kind of break this down, I'll go from the top to the bottom because of the lot of different tags that I have. I sort of have a naming convention here. You can do that too if you have a lot of different tags. So for me, it's what kind of tag is it? So it could be like if I have a Google Analytics tag and I put GA at the beginning. Where does it live? So if it's only on my contact us page, I'll put like contact page. If it's on all pages, I'll put all pages. For local business structured data, you're going to put it on all pages. And then what's in the tag? So maybe it's a conversion pixel or conversion tracking. For this, it's local business structured data. And you see here, I just kind of going back to the example that Google, we looked at Google example earlier. Going back to that, I've plugged in my information. You see my business name is here. My logo, the URL for my logo, my URL, my telephone number, the hours that I'm open. So this is going to tell Google all that information hopefully that we get that card. Going back to that knowledge graph card. And so this is how you would set up structured data using tag manager on your website. And once you have tag manager on the website, and I've specified it here, that it'll go on all the pages. So basically, I don't have to go into every single page or I don't have to configure a plugin. I've set tag manager up on my website. Tag manager is going to do the work for me. It's going to put this code on all my pages. And that's what we want. So that's the free option for tag manager. Again, I didn't see a lot of hands come up if you've used it before. If you are unfamiliar with this, you're unfamiliar with tag manager, you want to get some help setting it up. I'm happy to help you out after the talk. And we can go through it together if you want. That'd be fine. But that's the free option. The other option you could do is local SEO by WordPress, or local SEO for WordPress by Yoast. That is a local SEO plugin. It's a premium plugin. So there's a cost associated with it. There are others out there. I think Schema app is another one. That's a premium plugin. But these will be the options that you could use if you want support or you need someone to help you with it. Definitely an option for you as well. This is just a quick screenshot of what the local SEO for WordPress plugin looks like. You see, there's a lot of fields here. Really just kind of where you would be able to put in the business information. And then Yoast kind of does the legwork for you, does the heavy lifting for you. So the benefit to that plugin is it makes it easy to deploy on-page NAP, which we'll get to in a second. That means name, address, and phone number. We'll get to that. But it really makes it easy to put out structured data on your page, on your website. So it's really easy to do that if you go that route. But that's it for all the paid stuff. Again, I use the free option. I would encourage you guys to use the free option. But premium options are out there for you. So a couple of pro tips. Your structured data should always match your on-page copy. So phone numbers shouldn't be different. The name of your business shouldn't be different. Whatever you have on your website that users can see, that's what should be in your JSON-LD structured data. So definitely keep that in mind. You can use a structured data builder, like Merkel's schema markup generator. So if you don't, obviously we kind of went through that code pretty quickly. But if you're looking at it and you're like, that's a lot of information. I don't really know if I'm going to do that right. There's a lot that you could mess up. True story, you could mess it up. And we'll get to that in a second. But you can use tools to build the structured data and save yourself some time. So what does that look like? So this is the actual, this is a screenshot of the builder I just mentioned. And you can see here there's a couple of different things that you can do. Obviously I have local business here, but there are other forms of structured data. You can use this tool to build other pieces as well. But you see I've selected local business. And basically you just fill in the information here on the left. And what this tool will do is it will generate the code on the right. And so that kind of saves you time. It formats it the right way. And what you can even do, you see this little option right here for validate, which will be my next tip. Use Google's structured data testing tool to make sure that you got it right. So I'm going to go back here. When you build your markup, when you've finished all this and you get the code over here, just click on validate. And it will take you to Google's structured data testing tool. And you can see if you got it right. Google will tell you, it will tell you if there's a warning, it will tell you if there's an error. And you can go back and correct it. It will even actually drop you down into the code, into the snippet, onto that line and show you where the error is. So if you're, you know, you don't have to worry about saying, oh, what if I got it right? What if I got it wrong? Definitely validate it. Check it to make sure it's good before you launch it. And this is what the testing tool looks like. So you see my code is over here. And this is straight from my website. And then the readout, or the output, if you will, is over here. So you just drop in your URL, click validate, and then you'll see this, this particular screen, screenshot, but you'll see this on the, on the actual testing tool itself. And I guess you see two warnings here, because I don't have an address listed on mine, because I don't have a brick and mortar location. So that's why I'm getting a warning. But if I were to click on this, it would actually drop me down into the section where there's an option to put an address. So that's structured data. I know that's, for those of you who have never worked with it before, probably a ton of information. So I apologize for that data dump. So I mentioned NAP, which is name, address, and phone number. And for local businesses, this is really important, because it sends signals to Google about information regarding your local business on your website. So you want to make sure you put this information on your website. If it's applicable. Again, for someone like me, probably not so applicable because I don't have a brick and mortar location. So where you should put it is important as well. And so when I'm working with my clients, I recommend that you have NAP on the Contact Us page and in the footer. Now, there are a couple of rules about that, or I guess best practices. If you have a lot of locations, right? Obviously you want to put every location in the footer. But generally speaking, for your mom-and-pop shops, for like restaurants, for example, with like five locations or less, you can put it in the footer and that's fine. And you want to make sure you put that information on the Contact Us page as well. So this tip is going to kind of go back to the listings, right? Which was the first tip, clean your online listings. Whatever you have on your website for address, for phone number, and your name, obviously, you want to make sure that that lines up your listings as well. If it doesn't line up, you're sending conflicting signals to Google about your business. For example, if my website says one address, but my listings say another, Google's going to be confused by that, right? So you want to make sure that all across the web, your information is consistent. So those are the tactics I wanted to kind of talk about today. So again, claiming your online listings, using structured data, and making sure your NAP data and your name, address, and phone number is on your website and is consistent across the web. I'm going to talk a little bit about measuring your efforts, because obviously, this is a lot of work. And if you're going to go out and do it, or you're going to try and encourage your clients to do it, you're going to want to measure your efforts. And so we'll talk a little bit about that. So I would recommend doing a monthly check-in for your claimed listings. So if you register, for example, for Google My Business, Login, you can see information about that. Yelp and TripAdvisor are very similar as well. So check-in, make sure your information is right there. You're going to want to focus on metrics that matter. So your rank, very important. Obviously we want to try and get to that local pack or rank in local search results. Ratings are going to be really important. So on the listings pages, and maybe you've already seen this, right? The ratings are out there. I actually use ratings to determine where we're going to eat. I mean, we were in a barbecue place last night, came down to which one had better ratings. So definitely want to make sure that you are looking and paying attention to your ratings. And then traffic. So these are the three metrics I would encourage you to focus on and use to measure some kind of local SEO campaign or project. So when it comes to rank, you can use something like bright locals, local search checker. This is a tool that you can just, you can search bright local search checker, and you will see it. It's a free tool. And basically what it does is it mimics your location, or I guess it mimics a different location, better way to put it, for you from wherever you are. And you can see search results in Alaska, or in Florida, and you can see what's ranking. So that's going to be a way that you can check your rank. We already talked about this one. And then the traffic is the one that I would also encourage you guys to pay attention to. So you can use Google Analytics to do that. You can use Google My Business as well. And so I've kind of put some things in here because I'm a person that's always on the go. So these are some options for you. You can download the Google Analytics app. You can get that right on your phone. So you can see how you're doing here. There's options for you to measure by month, by week. So if you start implementing some of these tactics, measuring those things going forward, you could do that. And then the other thing I wanted to show you guys is the Google My Business app. This is really helpful for small business owners who right now have a million things that they have to do. They just want to check in and see how they're doing. It's a great way for them to do that. You see here, I'm using my business here. But not only do I see the Google My Business insights right here, but I also have the Google Analytics information as well because they're both Google products. They can integrate. And so I can just log into Google My Business and see how I'm doing in Analytics. But they're both options that I would encourage you guys to use to measure. This one over here I thought would be cool to include. It's another way to look at how your SEO campaign is performing or how your efforts are paying off. The blue bar is the Discovery. So those are people who are executing non-branded searches who are looking for services or using searches that might relate to your business. And the green is actually customers looking for your business by name. So you could look at this as non-branded and then branded searches. So again, this is something you're going to want to look at to see how you're doing. So a couple of closing thoughts and tips. This might be a no-brainer, but don't post reviews about businesses that you own. It just doesn't look good. If someone knows that you own the business, they see your name as a review. I mean, it's common sense, but you'd be surprised at some of the things I've seen, especially with working as many clients as I do. So please, don't rate your business. Let others who do business with you rate it.   Just tell them to not do that again, because that's just not a good idea. Don't sweat the small stuff, right? Google's a really sophisticated algorithm, very, very sophisticated. It's really good at figuring stuff out. So things like e versus east in an address, you don't need to worry about that. Now, obviously we want consistency, right? And I talked about that. That's very important to make sure that your listings are consistent. Your website has the right information as well. But something like this is not going to throw Google off. So you don't have to worry about that. Different street names, that's a different story. But something like directional stuff, not really a big deal. And then lastly, ask for help if you need it, right? I've been in situations where I'm so frustrated, setting up a listing or dealing with some kind of structured data issue where I can't get it to work. And it's just frustrating, right, when you run into situations like that. Ask for help. You can, like I said, you can reach out to me. I would say to Google my business has some fantastic forums where you can go on there, you can post a question. And there are top contributors on there who would be happy to help you out. They can help you out with things like maybe you've got a fake review, right? Maybe someone that never came to your business, left you an awful review. You can get those things kind of handled or anything, right? Maybe you're having a problem with structured data or whatever. Ask someone locally in your meetup. You'd ask me. You could go online, post a question. But definitely ask for help if you need it. And again, I put this up here in the beginning of the talk, but if you like some of the tools that we went over or you want to go back to them, you'll find the slides there at this URL. You'll find all the tools, links to all the tools that I just went over from Tag Manager to the Structure Data Builder to the Bright Local Rank Checker. There's links to all those tools on this website or this URL, rather. And that's it. I guess we have a little bit. Do we have time? I think we have time. Yes. Right? There you go. I guess we can open it up for questions. We have until noon. We have until noon. Wow, we have a lot of time. Actually, I think you've closed. I'm Bill Bryan. I'm the MC for this room. But I'm a volunteer. I don't know. He did come and tell me to make sure that you're supposed to go to the Happiness Bar, which is beyond the coffee machine back where we registered and be around for 15 or 20 minutes to answer more questions if we run out of time for questions. But for right now, we have 25 minutes if everyone here has a question. Lots of hands. Lots of hands. I'll start in the front here and then work my way back. Do you have a question? Yeah. So I am a local business without a storefront. And my home address is what's tied to it. Sure. How do I stop that? Google, that's a great question. For those that didn't hear in the back, the question was how do I hide my home address for a home-based business? You can do that through Google My Business. You can hide your address. You can do it for most local search engines as well. And I'm the same way, right? I don't really run my business out of any location, so I just check the box for hide my address.  Social media. OK, OK. So another option that you could consider is marking yourself as a service area business or a SAB, sometimes they're called SABs. That's what I have. So when people look up my brand name, for example, or my company name, they'll see in the Knowledge Graph card that we just looked at earlier, they'll see all the different areas that I service. So if you service a specific area, you can do that as well. But yeah, you can definitely hide your address on most of the listing sites. Yes, sir? Does this work in conjunction with... It's not in conjunction. It can work alongside of it though. Yeah. Yes, sir? When you had the slides up there about the Google Tag Manager, the SEO plugin for WordPress, are those... Does that take care of that for you? Are those competing products, or would you use one to put in the other? So if you use something like local SEO by WordPress, or local SEO for WordPress by Yoast, you would probably not need to use Tag Manager if you're just doing local SEO. Tag Manager, you can do more with it than just putting in structured data. So you can do AdWords tracking, all kinds of digital marketing activities with it. But if you're just focused on getting structured data for your website, sure, local SEO for WordPress would be fine. Yes, sir? If you do mark yourself as a service area business, do you feel that has any... So... That's a tough question to answer. It's a tough question to answer. We should talk afterwards, because it would be a long answer. We'll talk afterwards if that's okay. All right. Yes. Yeah, that's a great question. So ongoing activities, I think, would be obviously getting your listings on there, and that's citation building, right? Going out and doing some link building, I think would be a way to help your website as well. In the world of search, there's kind of two... At least in the world of organic search, the two kind of driving factors are content, obviously having great content, but also having people that back you up through links. So links that are pointing to your content are going to help you rank in Google, obviously. So that would be kind of the way that I would approach it, is building great content, trying to go out and get links to your content or to your website. Yeah. Yes. Oh, go ahead. If you're not going to buy your child's name and put it in your head or whatever... Great question. Great question. So kind of going back to tag manager, you mean? Yeah. Okay. Sure, sure. So if you are going to put tag manager in your website, you're going to want to go to header.php and you're going to put it in the head. So there's two snippets for tag manager. Actually, I think I can even just go into it real quick. And you can see there's one that goes in the head and there's one that goes in the body. And it's really that simple. You could, you could do that, and some people do. You could do that. So if I go... No, no, that's not what I wanted to do. Here we go. So this is where you put it. You put this snippet in the head and this snippet goes in the body. And that's it. You save it. You're good. Yes. So you obviously have to account for that. But yes, just generally speaking, this is where you put it. You mean like a... So I guess I would answer your question this way. If it is what I'd call a link farm where it's nothing but links, I would say no. But if I... But if the local newspaper, for example, runs listings for local businesses, that's a link I'd want to have. I'd want to go make sure I put my business on their listings page or pages so that people who are looking for services locally see me. And it's also a link back to the site. The only trick with that... What's that? Usually link farms you can identify because it's not really quality content. It's just links and links and links and that's it. But the other thing is that, you know, there's other indicators I guess I'd say. It could be slow. It could be designed pretty poorly. And the other thing that I think you might look at, you know, if you're comfortable doing this and you know what to look for is, is it a followed link or is it not a followed link? If it's a followed link from a link farm or from a website that's just a list of links, probably a link farm, right? You can tell it's a link farm because there's no... there's not a no follow on it. Meaning anybody can add a link and it's followed. That's a problem. If you're letting people add links to your website like a newspaper would, it's probably going to be a no follow. So it's not going to be... your link equity, but it's a reference for people that are visiting that site to look for local services. A local, maybe that same newspaper might write about businesses in the area and maybe they feature you and if they do a link to your website that could be followed. As long as there's no exchanging of payment for that. Google's pretty strict on paid links. So good question. I'm going to work back a little bit. Yes, sir? What do you deal with? That's a challenge. No, it is. I think... So me personally with my business I wouldn't take on a client that competes in the same area. I think there's an ethical challenge there. So that's just my take on that. If you want to keep both clients I probably have a conversation to make sure that they both understand that you're doing that. I don't know. I probably wouldn't put myself in that position, though, to be honest. Yes. Sure. No. No, that's a great question. So if you have a single page perfectly fine for you to put it in your contact us section. Yeah, div, whatever you want to call it. Yes, your contact us section. If you do that if you have a single page and you have a contact us section I wouldn't go again and put it in the footer. That's just me. Because I think it's kind of redundant. You could put it just in the footer. Sure. It depends on what that page looks like. But yeah, if that makes more sense you could do that. Absolutely. Yeah. Yes, sir. I'd have to research that. That's tricky. Sure. Sure. Yes, sir. Yeah. It's tricky, though. Yeah. Yes, sir. Risk. I wouldn't say there's risk. There are different applications for it, though. For local business structure data you don't want to use JSON. For other markup, not just there's local business, there's organization. I would use JSON for that. For blog type structure data markup I'd probably use a combination. So I'd have local business at the top probably micro data in the content. Yeah. Yes, sir. Sure. Could you get a penalty? I think this is just my opinion and another SCL might tell you something different. So just bear that in mind. My opinion is anytime you go outside the guidance that Google set forth you put yourself in a place of risk. I'll give you an example. This is kind of a little bit outside of this particular scenario but Google has structured data for job postings, right? And they recently said that if the job posting is expired but you haven't taken it off your website you can get a penalty for that because the posting isn't available anymore. So, and you're like it could be a human error, though. It could just be, you know, you forgot to take it down or whatever. So as something as simple as that when they do things like, when they say things like that kind of going back to your example it makes me think, well if it's outside of the guidelines you're going to put yourself at risk. Now have I ever encountered a specific situation like that? No. In fact I've never seen a structure data, a penalty for structured data but it doesn't mean that it couldn't happen. So, yeah, sure go ahead. I think I'm going to answer it the same way I answered your other one where if you're doing something that doesn't feel right or isn't right, you shouldn't do it. Yeah. So, and the reason I say it, if the site is popular and you could get what's called a manual penalty, that means a human at Google looked at it saw something that wasn't legit and then you get a penalty and then you're in a world of pain I think sometimes because that can be a very long process to get your site back on good terms with Google. It can be. So, who else in the back has a question? We have time left so, yes sir. I wouldn't do that. Yeah, I wouldn't do that because it's not, you're saying it's there, you're saying this is the location but it's really not the location. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. Yes sir. When you say penalty, are you talking about a lower ranking in the results? No, so there's a couple different actions Google could take with a manual penalty. They could remove a page from your website or they could remove a page on your website from Google, search results. They could remove a series of pages or your whole website could be just totally taken off of Google entirely. And the reasons for that would be? The reasons could be wide and various. So yeah, Google puts out webmaster guidelines. You can type in on Google webmaster guidelines and it'll come up. If you are doing things outside of those guidelines you could incur a manual penalty. I'm thankful I only had to ever deal with a manual penalty once and it was because when I was working at T-Mobile we had a user community where people could register and post questions or start a forum discussion and we had a spammer one time that we had a manual penalty for. Google saw one of those pages. I'm thankful it was only that one page. They took that one out. We took it down very quickly. We asked them to take a look at it and it was pretty fast. But that's not the story with everybody. So yeah, that's why I just say if you are in the guidelines you'll be okay. If you start doing things that are questionable. But they can remove one page, multiple pages or your whole site depending on the severity of the offense. Yes, sir? Last week I was in Google with my business for a new client. I had been in for a little bit of time and they reformatted it. One thing that was very obvious is that you could now add services into that. Yes. And so I built out some services. It was interesting you could do a main category and subcategories it looked like. But I just wanted to get your thoughts on that as it affects SEO. We should spend a lot of time working that section a little bit. I think you should, yeah. I don't know, I can't speak specifically to how it affects the algorithm. But I think anytime you have a chance to improve your listing, you have a chance to gain customers, right? Another thing they changed was they added descriptions back. Yeah. So, but descriptions, my understanding is before, they added descriptions recently to Google my business having taken them away a while back. So, my understanding was previously, they were in the algorithm, my understanding is now they are not. That's what I'm hearing from, in the circles that I'm a part of, that it's not concluded in the algorithm. So, even if you dump like a hundred keywords into it and just kind of throwing that number out there, but even if you dump a bunch of keywords and it's not going to affect it at all. So, having said that though, I think anytime you can make your business appealing, right, it's always a way, I would encourage people to do that, yeah. So, if you can say, I'm an SEO business and I do SEO, SEO audits and local SEO, instead of just this SEO bucket and tell people what services you offer, I think there's an opportunity there to gain business. Absolutely. Yes. Google my business descriptions. Yes. Yes. Oh, I see. So, she closed her doors. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Boy. So, there's, she's not, she has a business, but it's not that location anymore. Right? Right. This is challenging, because when you report things to Google, it can be a real uphill battle. You know, I kind of put one of the tips in here because I'm dealing with it firsthand. I know a business that's in my area that does use employees or has use employees to rate their business to, you know, give them a really great rating. And I've been trying to, I've flagged it and I said, listen, these people are employees. They should not be, and it's clearly against Google my business guidelines. You can't be a current employee or a past employee and rate that business. Similarly, if she's a business that is not at a location anymore, you could flag it, but it can be a challenge. I will tell you, if you really want to deal with it. Yeah. Sure. Let's see. Yeah, there, yeah. So, we'll go to the place I went to yesterday. Right? You can, usually there's feedback down here. Right? So, you click on the bottom of the knowledge, knowledge graph card. You click on feedback. Usually you can put stuff, well, this one you can report. Right? So, moved, closed or was never here. Sounds like that's your scenario. Right? So, she's, she moved. It looks like, it sounds like she moved. Sure. Sure. So, let me ask this. Are you seeing the, the, the... Right. So, right, right. So, if you can find her, the, the, the business that moved, if you can find them in the knowledge graph card, you can report them like this. Yeah. And hopefully Google will take care of it. I will tell you though, it's, it's an uphill battle. It is. Long time. It, it, it could take a while. There, there are some tactics though. If you are having trouble, you can come over to Twitter and you can go to Google My Business on Twitter. Okay? You can message them, right? And I have, I'm, I'm, the case I mentioned earlier that, you know, I'm dealing with this, this company that I know about. I'm working with Twitter, Google My Business right now on Twitter messaging, right? So, we're kind of going back and forth and trying to get it resolved. So, if, if you report it and nothing happens, this is another option that you can take. So, I think we're out of time, but I will be over at the happiness bar if anybody has any other SEO questions. Thanks, guys.


Let's take a look at an example of how to locate absolute extrema of a function. Remember that absolute extrema are going to occur either at the critical numbers of the function or at the end points of the closed interval. Remember also that critical numbers of a function are found where the derivative equals zero or the derivative does not exist. So let's go ahead and find the derivative of this and and we'll set it equal to zero because it is a polynomial function. There is no place that the derivative will be undefined, so we don't have to worry about that. We'll go ahead and solve this out by factoring out a greatest common factor and we find that our critical numbers, we have two of them, x equals zero and x equals one. These are our critical numbers. So absolute extrema are going to occur either at these critical numbers or at the end points of the function. So we need to evaluate all four of these values, the two critical numbers, and the two end points of the interval into the function. So we'll have to do f of negative one, f of two. It does not matter the order in which you do this and finally f of one. This part you can simply do on your calculator by substituting in. Give it a try and hopefully you get the same things I do and hopefully they're the y values.  Obviously 16 is the highest y value, so that tells us we have an absolute maximum and I'm just going to use the ordered pair of the point 2 comma 16. The lowest of all these of the y values, negative one, that dictates where our absolute minimum then is. And since it's a different point, I'll use the letter q. Now depending upon the directions, they might have asked you what the absolute extrema value is. Remember if that's the way in which the directions were worded, the once specifically the y value only, as your answer. Or they might have asked you where the absolute extrema occur. That typically implies either the ordered pair, such as we gave it here, or simply just the x value.


All right, thank you everyone for coming out so early on the second day of a conference. That's no easy task So I really appreciate it. I notice everyone is a little bit sleepy So we're gonna do something to wake up just a little bit and so I can kind of get a feel of the room So we're gonna do something called hands up and hands down So hands up is if you agree 100% with your hands with your hands and hands down is if you 100% Disagree with whatever I'm going to say to you. So here I understand public procurement and what it is hands up if you completely wow You can be in the middle so you can be anywhere between here and there so totally agreed looks like a lot of people know a lot about procurement How about this my government uses my money well hands up or hands down. Oh That's sad Okay, what about this there is a lot of corruption in my country hands up or cans down There's a lot of corruption in my country Middle middle the high good So it seems like a lot of people already know about open contracting and public procurement which is great So today I'm going to talk a little bit about what I've learned over the last two years working as our monitoring evaluation and research lead at open contracting partnership So when we talk about public contracting what we're really talking about is how government spends your money So that's on everything from bridges and schools to roads and airports It really touches every single aspect of your day So we often talk about very nebulous terms like value for money and market opportunity But I want us really to think as we're going through this exercise, which is not presenting I don't know if we can change it as we're going through this exercise about these are things that really affect us on a Data-day level. There are things that touch us every single day It's not some nebulous thing that's out in the aether. It's really the goods and services that our government provides for us every single day Thank you so much. So with that, I'm going to start with the takeaways So there's a lot of details in this presentation But I want you to just come away with three things from what I'm talking about The first is that when we're able to unite data civic tech in civil society and public participation We can track how our government spends our money and really change the way that spending works The second is that we do see results of open contracting both qualitative and quantitative from a lot of places and the three places I'll talk about today are Colombia, Paraguay, and Ukraine and It's not work. That's easy There are a lot of challenges and some of the main challenges that we've seen over the last two years are Identifying use cases or how exactly you're going to use open contracting in your community Promoting cultural shifts within organizations is really tough and data quality remains a challenge So why is open contracting important to begin with? We all know that it has to do with the goods and services we touch But what kind of scale are we talking about here? So public procurement is a nine and a half trillion dollar a year enterprise We spend nine and a half trillion dollars a year globally on public contracting So that's about fifteen percent of our global GDP is spent on contracting and right now We're estimated to lose about 20 to 25 percent of that budget just to corruption alone Not even just misuse of funds just corruption 20 to 25 percent of our spending on public procurement So sit with that number for a second think about what we can do in our communities with 25 percent more of nine and a half trillion dollars And you'll really see the value of opening up this information and getting citizen voices into how government is spending So open contracting has kind of two main tenements. It's about opening up information and data about public procurement And it's also about defending the rights of citizens and the private sector to have a voice in how government spends So how do we do this and you'll see throughout the presentation there are some links up here in blue So the presentations will be sent out and there's a lot more information in those links Which I won't cover today, but if you're interested later, that's where all of the extra information is So there are a couple of different ways that we work that are probably most relevant to this group So the first is that we work in a cross-sectoral way Which means that we want governments talking to civil society private sector Journalists academia in addition to other stakeholder groups to make sure that everyone has a voice in how the money is spent and how data are opened up So that means a high level of CSO and civic tech participation in this process on the technical front We maintain an open contracting data standard And so we provide technical support to countries who want to turn their maybe closed data or semi open data into a totally open International format and we also provide tools for analyzing those data So a big part of the work that we do then is working both in governments And then with people outside of government to build up their capacity and their data literacy from making use of that data The main goal really of opening up data isn't just transparency for transparency's sake It's making sure that whatever is published is actually used and it's really useful for people who want to do analyses about how their government is spending So we do work with data use My job particularly is focusing on monitoring and evaluation. So we're a very small team We're 12 people right now But we have actually two people that are dedicating most of their time just to monitoring our results and knowing if what we're doing is effective and a couple of different aspects of that are impact analyses and then global research that we do in partnership with other organizations So I'm gonna talk about three different cases today and again, I don't want to focus just on the big numbers here I want to focus on the human aspect of it because open contracting isn't just about data data is a big part of it But it's really about human stories So I want to talk about the case of Colombia and if anyone knows Bogota It's a city with extremely high poverty levels. So a lot of children eat their main meal at schools every single day But with about 700 schools in the area and a daily population of about 9 million in Bogota And one of the worst traffic congestion problems in the world the logistics of getting that food to the schools It's really really difficult. And so for a number of reasons The about 18% of the contracts for school meals were provided via sole sourcing Which essentially means that the government picked a provider for those school meals They didn't have any competition for that contract and the providers named their price and the meals went into the schools And you can see why that's a problem where there's no competition prices are going to be driven up It's not fair contracting processes and as a result of that and the corruption that runs really rampant in Colombia We saw for example chicken prices at about four times the market value and last year alone There were 30 million meals that weren't delivered to schools. So to put that on a human aspect That's 30,000 30 million times that a child in Bogota wasn't able to eat lunch because of either Ineffective or corrupt procurement practices. So this really does have an impact on our day-to-day lives So what did we do for solving this problem? We worked across sectors, but particularly with Columbia Compreficiente, who's the main procurement agency in Colombia Political advocacy to get open contracting on the agenda User needs workshops to understand what the different types of needs were across each sector and to be able to open up data That they would need to do their work better There was a large amount of technical work of getting the Colombian data into the international Format and a bit more friendly for the end user Later we did private sector consultations to know why some of the main food companies in Colombia weren't participating in the public procurement market And what we found out there is that firms were worried about a couple of different things They were worried about corruption and they didn't want to have to deal with the corruption that exists in Colombia Public procurement they didn't know how they would handle the volume of meals So they were concerned about volume and also about the bureaucracy that public procurement entails So one thing we were able to push was for the establishment of framework agreements Which is kind of a technical procurement term But it essentially it provided an extra level of security for firms who wanted to enter into public procurement for the first time And we were able to diversify the market of suppliers for these school meals Also data use events most recently we had an event for open day today in Colombia where we had actors from across society but really mostly from civil society come in and use the data Around school meals to find innovative solutions to getting better quality meals into schools So what are some of the outcomes of this first? We saw a better dialogue between the government who's the publisher of that data and then all of the end users across the Public sector side the private sector civil society academic etc. Better quality data So there's more data now and it's a lot easier to use the first-time participation of recognized companies so we have more firms that are competing in the same market and Colombia a contraficiente actually formed a business consortium of about 347 partners just to monitor the quantity and the quality of these school meals, which is really great And so what are the results that we've seen in the long term of this? The first is that Colombia a contraficiente thanks to their open data was able to expose a price fixing scheme That was increasing prices by about 45 percent So on the right we see a table that talks about the prices of fruits So CCE is the buying agency in Colombia and then there are the providers and these were the prices that were being quoted So for example for one banana the price quarter was about 141 pesos Which is about five cents and the providers were asking for 300 so a double in the price we see the same for red apples for mangoes and for pears as well and Thanks to exposing this price fixing scheme. They've seen savings is about 10 to 15 percent on school meals Which means cheaper meals and more meals for kids and so now the hundred and thirty million dollars that spent annually on a public public school meals is now allocated to 54 companies instead of just 12 so there's a lot more diversity in the market Which is great for businesses, especially small businesses, and it's also great for the kids who get the meals We get better meals for less money and that's amazing and 14 of those firms are actually new first-time firms that are entering into the market and As a result of that we now see about seven hundred thousand quality meals served daily in Bogota, which is really exciting progress So I want to take it down one more notch Just to look at what open contracting actually looks like when we're at the implementation level So I've talked about the results and everything seems great, but what are the activities that lead up to that? So I'm just gonna give an example for every case I talk about one thing we did in Colombia was this user needs assessment Which is actually very similar to what Joyce had mentioned about the data user story activity So essentially getting stakeholders from across different sectors to talk openly about what their realities are what their data needs are And what kind of things they were trying to achieve So what we were able to do was match up the intended impacts that they wanted to see with concrete data fields that they would need To be able to meet those meet those goals and then from there We mapped out all of those data needs to what's already available in the Columbia Compeficiente portal and saw where the data gaps are Then we took a step back as our organization had conversations with the technical teams at Columbia Compa to make sure that those data were prioritized for publication So by the way is actually quite a similar case To Columbia in that the thing the the main scandal that really put Open contracting on the forefront had to do with schools So I want you to take a look at this and imagine this is filled with maté maté is a type of tea That's very very popular in a lot of South American countries every day average teeth. Does anyone drink maté? How much would you pay for one liter of maté? Shout out. How much would you pay for this? dollar about a dollar All right This was costing and by the way last year 14 dollars Governments were spending 14 dollars on one liter of maté And in a country where in the capital the average salary is 356 dollars This was a gross misuse of funds and everyone knew it There was um, there were a lot of other types of issues going on with contracting around the time But that was really the story that broke through and people got upset and they wanted to do something about it There was actually a really big open data movement in by the way before this There was an active civil society who knew a lot about the theories of open data But didn't necessarily know how to use data and that's where our data literacy training came in So we worked on capacity development both within government and then with civil society to make sure that the data published in the portal by the bariwine procurement authority the dncp were actually used We also had technical consultations across sectors to understand what their needs were and what kind of Portal updates or visualizations they would need to be able to do their work better And we held a series of hackathons And as a result of all of this bariwine was able to make some changes to its portal including some revisions to the the way they were displaying infographics and Interactive graphs on their website, which made it a lot easier to use a lot more friendly They installed a book download feature an api output, which is really helpful for anyone who wants to do mass data analysis What were the outcomes of this? First we saw that the portal visits went up by about a third more citizens were participating in the procurement conversation And there was an increase in the number of suppliers in bariwine with 21 000 now registered And in a country where the population is only six and a half million That's a really significant amount of suppliers in the system So to give a concrete example of kind of what this looks like in the oh, sorry Let's talk first about results. So the long term results. So this resulted in an increase In savings to about 1.4 percent, which again for a small country with a small gdp is really significant And amendments on all contracts which are a prime source of corruption in a lot of countries dropped from 19 of all contracts to 3 of all contracts So, um, let me give kind of a concrete example of what this looks like in the field So this is an analysis that's done by reaction or reaction Which is a leading civil society group in bariwine And what they looked at was the spending at different schools So they wanted to see if the schools that were receiving the most public funds were actually the ones that were most in need And the results were really interesting So they found that half of the schools that had the most spending weren't even on land that pertained to the ministry of education So they shouldn't have had any public spending to begin with so that was a clear red flag Later they found that only one school that was actually the most in need was receiving the most money And to give kind of a technical view of why this is important why it's important to open up data The analysis that was done two years ago required about $2,600 and eight months of work But after the open data movement in bariwine that opened up the contracting data They only needed about $200 and two weeks of work to be able to complete the exact same analysis So to move on to Ukraine our final example This one is a little more geared towards the private sector, which doesn't necessarily speak as much to this room But private sector is a really big part of open contracting So before the 2014 revolution, Ukraine was one of the most corrupt countries on earth About 20 of public spending was being lost just to corruption And so to give a couple examples of what that looked like there were benches that were being constructed in the metros that were Costing about the same as the average Ukrainian car So it was just shocking the amount of miss spending and mismanagement of funds in this country So a very dedicated group of unpaid volunteers started up a movement called prozoro, which means transparency in Ukrainian And they worked hard to make sure that all of the public contracts were displayed on one portal in one site in a downloadable easy to use format And the pilot of this was actually so successful that two years later in 2016 the Ukrainian parliament voted to Make all contracts mandatory to be published on the prozoro website, which is now the main portal for Any public contracting in Ukraine? So the portal has a couple of different features the first is a business intelligence tool for analyzing tender data Which is really useful for first-time bidders and SMEs who want to get into the market and want to know what a good tender Looks like so they can win contracts with government There is also a complaint mechanisms for bidders Which is hosted on a separate portal, which is called duzoro, which is a feedback portal And it essentially allows anyone within a contracting process So that could be a member of the public or a firm to submit a complaint about how a public contract is run If they see a sign of corruption To make it as user-friendly as possible the prozoro team also developed an informational portal with training guides about how to use and analyze the data And so in total all of this results in a monitoring platform for buyers and sellers to rate their experiences and to be able to submit complaints So the very short term outcomes of this were that the prozoro inquiries the google inquiries went from 680 to 191 thousand in just one year As of today there are 15 000 buyers and 47 000 suppliers registered in the system And public bodies and state-owned enterprises are able to monitor procurement and the feedback on tenders in one central place That's very easy to use So what are the results? So we have the prozoro platform, which is where the contracts and the final Any amendments are listed and then the duzoro platform, which is the feedback mechanism So in the prozoro platform The average number of suppliers per contracting agency went up from nine and a half to 11 and a half essentially So that would mean for example that the ministry of education used to have an average of nine suppliers And now they have an average of 11 which is really great progress and it shows a diversification of that market And interestingly about 80 percent of those are now sms, which is great for for small business growth in ukraine On a user surveys 72 percent said prozoro reduces corruption in ukraine and about 80 percent said the procurement has improved with prozoro On the duzoro side of things the the kind of complaints platform Users flagged 5 000 tenders just in the first six months of those 50 percent 50 percent were resolved satisfactorily And as a result of that 50 percent 200 tenders were revised 22 criminal charges were pressed and 79 sanctions were issued So the public is very active in monitoring public procurement. They are now empowered to Submit complaints and say when something seems off Um, so a concrete activity related to this ukrainian work is the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework So as our organization we have frameworks in a couple of different countries and ukraine is our most developed one Um, we had our baselines taken in 2015 and we do annual progress reports to track how things are going And among the indicators which were decided upon based on consultations not only with the public sector, but also private sector and cso's We have information around policy changes data quality Engagement and feedback so it'll be things like feedback loops or how citizens are engaging with government And the hard results of business opportunities. So that would be market opportunity value for money and integrity within the country So i'm going to leave it there. There's a lot of extra information I can go into and i'm happy to discuss at any point today I want to leave with a couple of things This is not easy work. It's really satisfying work Because it does touch every aspect of what we use in terms of public services every day But it's tough and a couple of the really difficult things that we battle are identifying the use case past transparency for transparency So a lot of governments that come to us that want help publishing their data Want to do it because it's international recognition or they're trying to comply with some kind of commitment that they've made But they don't really think past that and as a result the data usually don't tend to be the best quality It's not necessarily an invalid use case to want to do transparency for transparency's sake, but it definitely doesn't lead to the most successful implementations Promoting a culture of cooperation and monitoring within organizations is tough We always have champions in our organizations and the governments that we work with who are fighting the good fight But there are a lot of institutional barriers that are pressing back against those champions at all times And at an organizational level, it's really hard to Get them on board with the idea of monitoring the results and having staff members take accountability for what they do The last challenge is data quality and completeness So this is in some ways related to identifying the use case and not really having a clear idea of why we're doing open contracting it's also related to lack of technical capacity at a lot of these organizations and government agencies Is that they just really don't know what to do with the data Which means that the data don't tend to be the best quality or they're not updated regularly or they're not in a format That's really useful for the end user So i'm going to leave it there. I just want you to remember that public procurement touches every aspect of life If you took a train into the conference center this morning if you took a car and you went along a public road That's public contracting and action right there So it's really our responsibility as members of this community to demand data And to be more proactive in asking for publications pushing our governments for publication of more and better procurement data And that's it