Anybody object if we start a little bit early since the room is full? I'll cover the boring parts first where I talk about myself for a couple of minutes This is content strategy in popular culture This is not going to be an advanced session But I am going to share with you some of the metaphors that I have used with actual clients to help them understand Content strategy a little bit better. I Am Brett Meyer. I am the chief strategy officer with think shout. It's a fantastic title gets to mean whatever I need it to mean Now it means that I lead our strategy engagements our UX team and some of our business development Actually 15 years ago. I was vice president of another web development company. We specialized in Financial sites we did sites for mortgage brokers. We did sites for giant derivatives traders At the same time my wife was working for a financial management firm So we were all about money all the time and we got tired of it at the same time We quit our jobs. We sold almost all of our things and we joined the Peace Corps That is a story for another time, but suffice to say it was very very hot. I Came back. I was lucky enough to get a job doing communications with the nonprofit technology network Eventually became the communications director there and during that time I had the opportunity to work with thousands and thousands of nonprofits Including things around content strategy and then I moved on to think shout In the time in between I've been a semi professional movie reviewer I've been a professional music reviewer and it is my dream when I retire someday to start a blog that reviews commercials So hopefully we can see some improvement there So I work at think shout think shout is a digital strategy and development agency We're based in Portland, Oregon And almost all of our work is with nonprofits and social good organizations very happy to be part of this team and Lucky enough to have had the opportunity to work with organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the humane Society of the United States Who happened to have a lot of content So I've been thinking about content a lot a lot over the last few years So content strategy At its basic level content strategy is just having a plan to fill up the websites that everybody here is building With things that are going to be useful to end users and also beneficial to the organization's end goals The definition that I tend to use is very dry This is from usability gov which actually does have a lot of great resources content strategy focuses on the planning Creation delivery and governance of content This is slightly different from the standard slide that people see at content strategy sessions from Christina Halverson She includes the words useful and usable. I feel that those are value judgments and when you are a content strategist Yes, you want to get the content to the state that it is useful and usable But in reality you are going to have to deal with a lot of legacy content that is neither of those things So for the purposes of the work you have to assume that the end goal is useful and usable But you're going to have a lot of work to do along the way and In practice that means you're going to be using a lot of spreadsheets and page templates content strategy at its basic level is really not Exciting But it is very necessary So I'm going to try to make it a little bit more exciting today because the reason that we build websites is the Content that is going to be going into it and that should not be a chore So we need to focus on the why of the content and when I talk about content. I'm not just talking about text This is the images. It's the videos. It's the animations. It's whatever you are putting on your website That is going to be useful to some human being in the world Your content is the connection between your organizational goals and your audience's motivations and Anytime a piece of content is added to the website It's because somebody somewhere at some point thought it was going to be useful It may not have turned out to be useful But I I hope that you so and nobody's just putting up content because it was their job And they had to get the blog post up for the day and so that's what they did But if you don't have a strategy and the bottom line is that if you don't have a strategy for the governance of Creation and updating of content your quest is probably doomed to fail So I've actually realized that My interest in content strategy goes back to my teenage years when I was a comic book collector I was collecting comic books at exactly the wrong time. It was the late 80s and Marvel and all of those things were using Chromium covers and pre-wrapping the comic books in plastic So you were destroying your investment if you actually wanted to read them. It was a little weird. Anyway, I Still love the comic books and I love them so much that I Built a flat file database and a way to access that on my Amiga 500 and I kept track of every single comic book I had I cross-referenced it with the supposed value from Wizard Magazine and Essentially what I had done was perform a content audit of all of my content books and I loved it And that's the thing content audits seem like a boring task But the content on your website if you love doing it, it's not a chore If you love doing it, it's going to be something that you want to do You want to make your content better on a daily basis and the tools that you build are going to be able to help You do that We love our own content and every organization we work with should be similarly invested in the content that they put on their sites So this is my favorite content audit template. It gets down to the brass tax There is the content users want there is the content the organization wants and there's the content that nobody wants this is from John McCrory and he makes a very simple case that The most important content is the content that the users want because at the end of the day Your content can be perfectly suited toward the goal that you're trying to achieve If it does not connect or resonate with the end users if nobody actually wants to use that content then that content has no value So there are some things that we need to know before we can start developing our content strategy At think shout we go through our discovery process that includes the content portion And we believe we need to understand three basic things when we are working with these nonprofit organizations We need to understand their goals we need to understand their audiences and Then we need to get into the content at that point since the content is the connection between those two things so goals There has to be a reason that you're putting stuff up on the internet You're not just doing it for fun. Maybe the goal is fun. If that's if that's your goal is just to have fun That's fine Actually, that's probably explains why cat videos dominate the internet It's they're fun but The clients that you're working with or even your own organizations you have goals You're trying to accomplish something with this content and you're trying to accomplish something in the world Nobody starts a company just for the heck of it I suppose there are probably a few people but generally if you start a company you want to do something like he wants to sell shoes Coca-Cola wants to make our teeth rot Not if the Southern Poverty Law Center wants to educate people about Hatred in the in the United States and talk about how that can be dealt with So at the high level you've got these goals and the content has to support the goals of the organization But then you've got the project goals and building a website as great as it can be is only a subset of the Organizations goals the website is a tool that is going to help the organization accomplish its goals It's become a central tool because it's the easiest way to get content out in the world But it's still a tool so when you embark on a project to Rebuild a website to build a website from scratch to improve it to treat the content in some way You're embarking on a project and you need to set the goals for what that project is going to accomplish So building the website. How is that going to help the organization? How is it going to help them achieve their goals and Then you've got your audiences Is anybody lucky enough in here to be working on a website that only has a single audience? Yeah, in reality Building a website full of content is difficult because you're trying to serve so many People and all of those people have different needs. They can be grouped into different buckets Generally, we talk with nonprofits. They've got departments and all of those departments want different things So the communications department wants names for the email list and the the founder the fundraising department Of course wants people to donate, but they've got all of these various folks coming to them. They might have students They might have teachers. They might have government employees. All of these folks are going to have Different reasons for coming to the website. So when you're thinking about audiences, you need to think about What are they trying to accomplish when they come visit your website? What is their motivation for seeking out your website? You've probably seen a lot of statistics around how much traffic is coming from search engines these days We have many many clients who have in excess of 60 percent of their traffic coming from Organic search and then a big chunk that's also coming from social media People don't come in through the homepage and then navigate through the path that we want them to navigate through They come in because they're looking for something Google is helping them shortcut all of your careful plays at information architecture and Getting them straight to the content that hopefully they want so you can take a look at your data And you can try to start to figure out well what do people want from us? What is the content that is resonating? How can we do more of that? You also have to take into account your audience's tolerance for digging to find the content that they want Say they click on a Google link and the first thing that they come up with is not what they were looking for How are you going to? Show them that maybe you have something else on your website that is going to be more useful to them And how much work are they we're going to be willing to do to fight your information architecture to find what they're looking for? And you also have to take into account their experience and this can mean all sorts of things it can mean How many times they've Interacted with your website before if they're a first-time user they probably have very different needs from somebody who has come Back to your site 10 15 times Understands your information architecture and can easily navigate your website to find just what their work with that what they want You can also think about it in terms of experience with technology I know that I have to take technical support calls from my parents at least once a month to help them do something with their computer It's I bet a lot of you have similar experiences in here But that's not the case with you and it's certainly not the case for the generation that's coming up behind us who have never known life without the internet and in the end What they're looking for is content that is going to be useful to them in their own lives They're generally not coming to your website simply because they think you are cool They're looking for something that is going to help them do something that they want to do in their own life So your content needs to prove to be useful to them So how do you bring this together? Content is the connection between your audience's motivations and the goals of the organization so Let's consider Marvel's extended universe here for a moment. Has anybody seen Captain America yet? Is it good? It doesn't follow the comic at all. Okay It did however have an amazing launch and does anybody remember when they first started kicking this off? Let's see if I can get this out here. Oh No, I don't know if the audio is gonna work anyway This is from the original Iron Man movie back in 2008 and This is the introduction of Samuel Jackson as Nick Fury agent of shield And this is where they first started teasing the Avengers 2008 now we're up here two thousand eight years later and they brought it first full circle They've made billions and billions in dollars off of this franchise and when I first saw this trailer I knew what they were leading up to and I thought there was no way I was going to work Mostly because I didn't like the Avengers when I was reading comic books, but But it did work and Marvel has been where'd my mouse go? Incredibly successful Marketing as project product. There is of course another comic book company out there. There's several more How many have seen this movie? How was that one? Yeah That's what I've been hearing about But let's break this down a little bit both of these Okay Both of these companies have goals that goal is basically to make money off of their intellectual property Of course, they want to maintain their brand in this case They want to make sure that they are putting out compelling content that is going to encourage you to come back when they do What are they doing secret wars? No Infinity war next so Marvel wants to make sure that they're building up to this big Comic book art that they did maybe ten years ago in print format Of course DC wants to do the same thing. They both have the same goals and they have a huge Library of legacy content. I mean this is stretching back decades and decades into the probably 40s or 50s for DC originally and Marvel was All right, all the way back to the 30s, so this this is a lot of content they have a huge content library and At a base level, I mean Batman versus Superman is doing okay It made eight hundred and seventy five million dollars or is on track to make eight hundred and seventy five million dollars worldwide That is not nearly as much money as people expected it to make It's got a twenty seven percent score on rotten tomatoes and a be on cinema score Which is apparently bad for an audience review We can talk about that later if you'd like civil war Launched much or like ten percent above that they're predicting that it's going to make one and a half billion dollars worldwide It's got ninety percent on rotten tomatoes and an a on cinema score Let me look at my stats here. So in Marvel's ten films since 2008 They've averaged two hundred and thirty seven million in production costs and they have an average worldwide ticket sale of seven hundred and fourteen million DC's made two hundred and six or cost two hundred and sixty five million per film and average only five hundred And sixty million so they're spending more and they're making less And if you take away Christopher Nolan's Batman movies, which were fantastic that number falls a lot so I would argue that in Considering their audience DC has largely lost track of their audience's motivations They want to have an enjoyable time at the theater from everything. I've heard Batman versus Superman was not an enjoyable time at the theater Okay, unless you like explosions you pretend it's not okay and They both have experience of the content, but DC has underestimated what it means or what they were looking for in terms of audience tolerance how Dark where the audience is willing going to go how far away from the character that some people knew from the 60s and 70s and May not have experienced Frank Miller's reboot in the late 80s when Batman did start to actually get dark But the DC movies are very very dark Marvel's movies are bright and sunny and funny and people like them They figured out what their audience wanted and they are reaping the benefits of it so Audience is very important Movies have a built-in advantage advantage when it comes to content structure. It's a fixed medium I mean when they're writing the screenplay they even traditionally stick with a three act narrative There is a very strict set of guidelines to writing a screenplay that you can take classes out If you think that you're going to be able to write something better than Batman versus Superman and please try But as Website builders, we're generally starting from the ground up Drupal gives us all of these amazing combinations of ways that we can Display and show various types of content including entire movies So I'm going to spend a little bit talking about the content model because this technical aspect of content strategy as is Often overlooked, but we as site builders know that we need a solid technical content model Defining the structures and boundaries of what we can create if we're going to be successful And it's not a problem. You need to websites How many people have made a diagram like this before something along the lines of delineating all of your content types and their various Fields and everything that's going to be displayed on the page All right. Let's talk about a video game Has anybody played Dragon Age Inquisition? Yep Two years ago I actually convinced my wife Melissa that I needed to buy a PlayStation specifically so I could see what the user interfaces was like and Turned out it was pretty good because they're doing some cool things there if you've played this role-playing game You know that it can be incredibly complex So and Stephanie, thank you for your help figuring this out If you want to create a mighty offense tonic That will provide damage bonus against the barrier You need to collect and combine 11 embryo 11 deep mushroom and two rash vine nettle and only the warrior class character can use it and There you know There are 15 potion types each with multiple variations and there are weapons and armor and on and on They have a content model that is running all of this When you are creating this potion it knows how much of each ingredient you have because it's being stored in separate Data structures when you combine it you put it into a new data structure and then you're able to use it in the game And it is pretty seamless once you have collected all of those things and made the potion You can use the potion when you are in combat The actual mechanics of the gameplay are pretty fantastic because you don't notice the underlying structure that is there You're just playing the game and using that potion to give you more health so or more power so that you can flick more damage Another one of my favorite examples is From Pearl Jam People visit their website. I mean they have some pretty clear motivation at this point They're making their money selling concert tickets and selling bootleg albums That they record themselves So there's a lot that's not to like about their website. It is not responsive It is not built on Drupal as far as I can tell But they have done some fantastic things with their content structure that enable them to meet their goals so this is a song page and Pretty much every song they have ever recorded or performed live has a place on the website And every song is structured exactly the same you can see it's got a title a release date the composer the artist the image in the lyrics That's it Everything on that page and much of the site is built through the application of structured data So here is an album It's a different content type if this was built in Drupal It's got a title a release date cover image links to purchase the album Of course and a little bit of text, but then it's got a song reference field We would probably use entity reference if we were building this in Drupal and the reference field is pretty key So every album is a collection of references to individual songs rather than a list built by hand and If you click on the song, of course, it takes you to the detail for that song It gets more interesting when you take a look at their set list Which is another type of structured content as I said they have somehow managed to keep track of every song They have ever played anywhere in the world dating back to I think 1990 or something like that So if you want to see all of the 662 times they've played Jeremy you can find that on your website But you'll see that the set list is similar. It's got the venue the location Link to the concert poster image Product links the bootleg and then the song reference field again. So again, they are building these lists of songs by referencing Extracurricular entities that are songs or they're building the set list by referencing all of these songs So when you are looking around the website and you're looking at all of those 662 times that they've played Jeremy It's getting you to this page and on that page is a link to buy the bootleg album So if you find oh, hey, they played they recorded that concert that I saw in Portland, Oregon I am encouraged just by exploring their site to buy the bootleg album so that I can reminisce about what a great concert that was The entire structure of their website is built to get you to these things So that you are encouraged to buy something or do something that takes advantage that is going to benefit Pearl Jam So not a great website great content model The truth of the matter though is that Your infrastructure needs to be invisible. We're building these content models. We're building the content types We're creating the fields. We're rendering them. We're Sending it over to the front-end engineers to make it look really good But at the end of the day if somebody comes to a website and says, oh, this is built in Drupal Then we've probably failed at something Take a look at what George Miller did with Mad Max that everybody see Mad Max. All right so this is actually a pre post production shot and When he was done with it it looked like that Similarly when the truck goes under that underpass that ends up collapsing This is what that looked like in real life But when you're watching the movie you don't see all of the architecture that went into making this such an experience You just see the finished product there You don't see the underlying infrastructure and that's what we need our websites to do We need people to come experience the content think this is a great experience and the technology should just work. I Will note that having perfect Infrastructure does not necessarily mean you are being entirely successful. I will put a pause for a moment so everybody can get the joke This is pretty funny Anyway, here is an example of what was pretty much perfect infrastructure that did not end up succeeding to its creators expectations The prequel movies were technological marvels I mean he did some amazing things with computer graphics with CGI which with making this universe look like it was much Bigger than it actually was but at the end of the day the trilogy looked a lot like a video game and people just didn't connect with it The way that people have connected with the original movies and more recently with the Force Awakens Everybody seen the Force Awakens. I thought this last lightsaber duel on What was a Starkiller base? Was pretty fantastic the little cross piece that was going to poke him aside You could hear the lightsaber buzzing you could hear when it hit the snow and if you saw it in a big th theater There were th thc theater thx theater Thx theater you could actually feel the weight of the fight It was a very physical thing much of the Force Awakens got back to what the original Trilogy was it felt like a real thing that you were watching there was there was this physicality to it The infrastructure was great. The content was great. The presentation was of it was great. And so it made like two billion dollars. Oh Yeah, this is an aside You are going to help yourselves Immensely if you build your websites with real content. Nobody should be using lorem ipsum at this point Nobody should be using any of the other ipsum generators which include hipster ipsum bacon ipsum We can go on and on with that that should if you need to use that for some early prototypes fine But when you're building the website, you need to be using real content The real content is often going to be different from whatever Guess you're taking at at the number of paragraphs and images somebody might want to put into a piece of content There are lots of ways that you can do this at think shout We have actually modified a Google Doc spreadsheet that we can import directly into all of the content types every time A site is built so it pulls the content from the spreadsheet and just throws it up on the site while we're building it So the clients can see what their real content type real content looks like in place There's sites like gather content where you can effectively build out your content types and then migrated over afterwards I think our technical team is discussing whether or not it makes sense to build out a base level Drupal 8 instance with just the structure of the content where the client can fill it in and then we can migrate it over to the build in progress Okay, it's just seeing if that was news to live So there are lots of ways to do that But you're going to have much more success building websites if you get the actual content into the build process Instead of waiting for some content staging phase right before you're going to launch If you do that you're probably going to need to bump your launch date out a couple of months because things are not going to Be the way the client expected them to be All right, let's talk a little bit about information architecture This is where Content strategy and I essentially bleed into each other if users can't find the content that they want on your website If the paths that benefit your organ organization are not well-defined and can't be tracked and measured Then the best written copy in the history of copy is not going to help you Does anybody ever had trouble finding information on a website somewhere on the internet? okay, I like to Think about it in terms of going to a cereal aisle at a new store say I wasn't Awaken time to go to the breakfast at Drupal con this morning And I wanted to go out to a grocery store to find some milk and cereal You've all been in the cereal aisle. I'm sure and when you go to a new one they've organized it differently and I have to navigate the seven kinds and three different sizes of Cheerios To find the golden grams because I want golden grams and I don't care about the rest of this But when you go into a store for the first time you have no idea how they've organized this information You just know that the cereal is hopefully grouped together and if you spend a long enough time Scanning the shelves. You're going to find what you want. It's very difficult. Let's go back to dragon age for a moment so The first thing that you notice about this game is how incredibly huge it is if you want to climb a mountain You can run over and climb a mountain. It doesn't have to do anything with the text I guess it can get too steep and jumping will only get you so far I'm not going to try to pronounce that word Stephanie So there is going to be a small number of people who want to explore every nook and cranny of this game And a lot of the other games that are coming out But they can't just rely on great content if you know Well, we'll see how successful some of the games coming out later this summer are going to be but If you're designing a game in the hopes that people are just going to run around and look at the pretty great graphics that you've created It's probably not going to compel them for very long. So in dragon age There is a lot of actual content. There are quests. There are written documents. It's all tied together To help you be more interested in the graphical world that they've created So the the world itself is the equivalent of the website and they've put all of this stuff in in terms of content And they've organized it so you can explore as much of it as you want But if you just want to go from quest to quest it is very very easy to do Now trying that on a website generally leads to those websites being very overloaded There there's a design trend that was in vogue for a long time You can still see it on like news sites the New York Times and CNN Where it's just a huge collection of links all they're trying to do is to get you to go to various types of Other stories without focusing on what you might be wanting to do so when you've got all of these blocks of Encouragement essentially to go to someplace other than you were hoping to go it largely gets in your way So I'm gonna quickly show this website although. This is not popular culture This is the somewhat recent amnesty international site and they have taken Their content organization to an extreme so they have a very limited. I a there's not many options in the navigation There are not many sub pages under that navigation So what they've done to get content out of the way of other content is build this Resource library you can see there that they have 40,000 28 results and pretty much the only way that you're going to get to that content through their website Except for a couple of places where they have related content blocks is to use the faceted search to find what you want Again, this is an extreme example. I'm not advocating that you put all of your content into a faceted search library I will note that it does help very advanced users find stuff very quickly As I said You are going to have to deal with legacy content at some point and there are ways that you can Architect your solution that is going to be helpful. So one of our clients is facing history in ourselves They are they essentially teach moral education or ethical education in schools And they provide a lot of great content to people around it. We started working with them About three and a half years ago. This is a shot of their Website when they when we first started working with them. This was on Drupal 6. We did not build it and We actually inherited a set of designs from another firm and we were told to to build out the new site You can see and I've intentionally chosen a very simple piece of content to demonstrate this concept You can see this is a really simple thing It doesn't have a lot of information people going into this are probably going to read that and they're probably going to leave The same was true when we rebuilt that site In part because we were not given a design for what the teaching strategy content type should be and So we just put the content up on the page But if somebody finds this on Google they're going to go to the page and they're going to read the content and they're Going to leave so we recently had an opportunity to redo this piece of legacy content again This is pretty much exactly the same. They have not changed the words in this content for three years So what we helped them do was make sure they had a robust taxonomy in place That allowed them to put related content blocks and calls to action and associated in association with that content So without actually touching that content we made it more useful That related content block that you see there can be either automatically generated based on taxonomy Or they can create something that looks exactly the same and Exactly reference the content that they want on that page and then place that block if they want to spend the time They can also change out those calls to action down at the bottom If they have specific calls to action that they think are going to be more useful for that particular piece of content So the wrappers that you are putting around content on your websites can actually take Make a lot of strategic sense when you know that your clients are not going to go back to that and touch that piece of content That they built ten years ago that they're just not going to give up on But as I've been saying and I'm going to continue to say your actual content has to remain central to the user's experience of it and At think shout we've generally recommended streamlining all the information that's around it How many site how many times you go to sites where there are pop-ups that are encouraging you to do something else? What they're doing is getting in the way of what you are actually trying to do in the first place and that's why it's so annoying Now there are times when that makes sense But we work with nonprofits in December the last two weeks of December You can make in a reasonable assumption that somebody is coming to the website to donate because as Americans We procrastinate and we don't do our tax write-offs until the last two days of the year I know this to be true because I have seen the actual data at this point like a good 35 40% of some nonprofit donations come in on December 31st So when that's happening, it's reasonable to say okay, I'm going to put a pop-up up You're coming to donate just click this button get them to it in that case You are working with their motivations instead of making them fight against what it is that you want to do to get To what they want to do And if you want to think about it in terms of dragon age some of them may want to explore your entire world Most of them do not don't make it hard for either one of them So as you plan your content structures, you need to keep in mind the navigational elements the related content blocks the search filters And the calls to action that are going to transform the user's delight that you gave them this great piece of content To nudge them in a direction that is going to be useful to your organization or to the clients that you're working with So is your goal to convince visitors to sign up for an email list? That's a pretty easy one highlight that call to action minimize everything else that you're asking them to do Don't try to get them to go read other blog posts at that point Don't try to get them to donate just focus on getting them to sign up for the email list Once you've captured the email list you do what Netflix you do what Facebook does and you send them occasional reminders saying hey Don't forget about us. We've still got all this great content come back and visit our website So that's kind of a roundabout saying a way of saying that I Find advertising very annoying Advertising's entire existence is to convince us that we are not doing what we should be doing at that very moment If you're reading a magazine, you've got an advertisement. That's trying to catch your attention to buy a watch You're trying to watch your favorite television show and you have to watch the muscle-bound Geico guys pumping iron in the gym. I actually kind of like this one. It's cute, but Commercials get in the way of what you're trying to do. You're trying to watch daredevil You're trying to watch whatever show it is that you're trying to watch and the advertisements are interrupting that and trying to get you to Think about or do something else Some advertisements are trying to get you to crash your car Billboards are there to make you look up from what you're supposed to be doing Driving safely down the road to convince you that maybe you need a new pair of shoes at that very moment and Of course websites are not immune ESPN is trying to distract me from the reality that Stefan Curry is going to tear the heart out of my beloved trailblazers tonight To buy me to buy her to get me to buy some crown Royal to drown my sorrows Advertising is trying to get people to do something other than what they want to do So why would we build websites that encourage that we have the control We have the power to just offer a few options that are highly tailored to the content that they're interested in To encourage them to do what we want without saying hey Maybe you want to do this and this and this and this so that they're overwhelmed with options and ultimately decide to do none of them That's the reason that Netflix has been incredibly successful Even with back to the DVD thing you could get the DVDs in the mail You could watch the DVD and you had no commercials their original programming They have no commercials when you're paying ten dollars a month You can download the most recent episodes of your favorite Netflix show you can watch them all in a weekend that you want There are no distractions along the way In fact, they've built their app so that the next episode will start playing pretty much immediately because they're assuming that's what you want They're not trying to get you some to do something else. They're trying to say this is our great content We want you to experience it we're going to put such great content out there that you are going to continue to pay ten dollars a month and We're going to be fine with that. We're not going to try to do anything else HBO is doing something similar although the HBO go interface annoys me for for some reason and But you can watch their shows without commercial interruption and that's why HBO is being incredibly successful at this point too So I've spent a long time talking about the technical side of things We should probably talk a little bit about the content itself and when I say written word I'm also including of course images and videos and all of the other content that you are filling your websites up with First of all It takes time to make great content You can make some content very quickly. You can throw it up on the web It's probably not going to be super useful if you want to get something that's going to Resonate with your audience that's going to be useful to your audience Then you have to spend time planning it and getting it up there Let's talk about Mad Max again George Miller first tried to make Mad Max Fury Road back in 2001 He took it up again in 2011 and he wrapped he didn't wrap photography until 2013 That means the movie didn't come out until two years later typically Hollywood calls that development hell and Is anybody in here seeing Ishtar? Oh a couple yeah, but there's a reason that not a lot of people have seen that but a lot of people have seen Mad Max George Miller took a lot of time Making Mad Max be exactly what he wanted to be and because he did that it resonated with his audience I need to stop using the word resonate. Sorry anybody got a something else that no, okay Connected okay, thank you and you can see that in a bunch of the other movies that have come out The Lego movie was in production for four years. I thought it was going to be terrible. It was adorable I love the Lego movie movie. How about boyhood? Have you seen boyhood? Everybody knows how long that took he spent 12 years making that movie and it was a movie about people living their lives And it was fantastic. It was amazing So it's clear that with the right people involved movies benefit from allowing the directors to realize their vision You can expand that into books and movies Books and music very difficult outside of some punk albums that I can think of To just go into the studio to go sit in a corner write a great novel and come up with something that is really going to be timeless The same is true for content that we're putting on your websites I'm not saying that you should be like James Joyce and obsess over every single word I am encouraging you to spend time making sure that you are thinking about the goals of your organization The goals of your website and what your audiences want as you are creating that content Let me assure you that people do read on the internet. There is this meme Started a long time ago by people who did eye test studies that people don't read I will wager that the content that they gave these folks for the eye test studies was not interesting How many people have not read an article through to completion on the internet? Oh One person in the back really, okay Well, I I know that there are some great sites the New Yorker The New York Times has some fast fantastic long-form content ESPN has long-form content And I will read every word of that because I'm interested in it people read content that they are interested in People skip and scan and leave content when they are not interested in it So you your goal as content strategist as content authors as website developers is to come up with the content that people Want to read and you don't have to get everybody to read it Everybody is not your target audience if you've gone through the work of defining who your audiences are It's much easier to define what the content is that you should be putting up on the website And you're going to know what is going to be interesting to them Briefly, it's okay to repeat yourself and this is a big task Especially with Google pretty much rewarding sites that freshen their content up and add new content all the time This is easier than on an email than it is on websites like for something like Drupal con I know when I was doing marketing for a conference site We would reuse words from the year before and customize it to meet the needs of this year's conference if that's Content that's probably going to be applicable to your website to the Drupal Association does Drupal con every year certain aspects of Drupal Con are going to be the same every year so you can reuse some of that content Hopefully your a b testing it so you can make it a little bit better every year And you can just change the dressing around it because you already know that it's compelling Anybody think of an example of a movie that reused a lot of content from an earlier time and was very successful for him it I Hope I'm not spoiling anything. It's still fun You should go see it Ultimately though you need to stay true to your vision. You need to stay true to your audience When you think about it empirically Fury road should not have succeeded with mainstream audiences. It's a two-hour chase scene That's all it is the hero's face is obscured for half the movie Except that Furios is the real hero of the movie as we all know It's daylight or its nighttime scenes were filmed in daylight and it prominently features a tanker truck full of breast milk but it grossed almost 500 million dollars worldwide and Fury roads exceeded because it stayed true to George Miller's vision He created something that was unique that was great And he was not the only one who wanted to see as it turned out because he stayed true to what he wanted to put on the screen it connected with people. Thank you for that and and He cut down Just to the bare elements of what he needed for that movie So they storyboarded the entire thing before they started filming. They largely worked without a script and He put just a few words into the script Google tells me that fury road had roughly 3600 spoken words across its two-hour running time You can consider an even a mediocre movie like Jupiter ascending also an action movie Has nearly 9,000 words because it is burdened by the presumed need to explain what's going on Here's a quote Your planet is just now entering its genetic age You understand very little about something which is a vital part of our reality in our world genes have an almost spiritual Significance they are the seeds of you are immortality when the exact same genes reappear in the same order It is for us, which you would call reincarnation I'm not entirely convinced that we needed to hear that Fury road doesn't care about telling us what's going on Because it doesn't matter. Why doesn't Furiosa have an arm? That's backstory. You just accept it How did a Morton Joe come to control all the water? Well, he just does he's a very bad man You know, he's the bad guy and It doesn't matter because it's a two-hour chase scene all he did was cut away all of the backstory that was unnecessary to the story he wanted to tell and Put in just what he wanted to he cut the movie to its barest bones and that fitted hit fit his vision perfectly Our clients as nonprofits have a built-in advantage because they have their mission their values and their vision as their touchstones They know the backstory of the organization and why they do the work so that can inform the content that they're producing You don't need to retell your entire story every time you're putting up your content on your website It needs to be focused it needs to accomplish a goal and it needs to be what your audience is going to find useful Because in the end Content has to matter If I don't know if you have to work with nonprofits to have heard about the ladder of engagement It's everybody familiar with this concept But you're going to get people to slowly climb the rungs Through a small action all the way up to being what the nonprofit ultimately wants So maybe the first thing you do is come to the website and read a piece of content. That's the first rung They said okay, that was great. I'm gonna go back I remember this website and the second time they go they find three more pieces of content and they say You know, this was really good I'm gonna give you my email address and you can continue to get in touch with me climbing the ladder To the point where they're going to donate and in every nonprofits a dream Someday leave a legacy bequest when they pass away and give the nonprofit everything that they owned This is not how it works in real life. I Prefer to think of it as a game of shoots and ladders now This is really neither here nor there but three members of my immediate family were diagnosed with some form of cancer in the past year and If you have had this experience or really almost any real experience in life You know that life gets in the way of any perfect system that we're trying to design People do not move linearly from giving you an email address to eventually giving you everything they ever ever owned They're going to have setbacks They're going to be times when they don't visit your website for things that are going on in their own lives We have to take that into account. We are providing Content we're providing information that is supposed to be valuable to the end user At Dries's keynote yesterday. He was talking about Developers as an audience and he was talking about Site builders essentially and content editors as an audience and then you had the people who were using the website Well, think about that in real numbers. How many folks are actually building Drupal? Thousands several thousand maybe a couple of tens of thousands How many people are using Drupal websites to add content or to build these websites? Probably in the hundred thousands into the low millions. How many people are using Drupal websites? Tens of millions of people are using websites. We are building websites to fulfill the promise of the internet the promise of the internet that is that people can find Information that they need that is going to be useful to them in some way in their lives without any Encumberance everybody is going to be able to find the same information I could do a whole net about or rant about network neutrality that I'm going to skip for now The point of building a website is to put content on it that people are going to find useful But we can't assume that they that users are going to do what we want We have to do our best as content creators to figure out what it is that they want and make sure that that Content is going to be waiting for them when they are ready to engage with it That is the slides that I have prepared and I'm hoping that you have questions because that's really my favorite part of this There is a microphone in the front if you want to ask a question This is being recorded. So if you want to just yell it out for the back I can repeat it for the recording and posterity. I see a question in the back I can cheat because I was an email marketer and I learned how to segment people by activity. So You know list churn happens.  Let's wait until we have something that they We really think they're going to be interested in and try to recapture their attention at that point Yep So, yeah, I mean that's that's where we start we do start with the data We do try to figure out what it is. I mean on thankshouts own blog We have a blog post from I think 2010 that Sean Larkin wrote about Some technology that I don't even remember at this point It is not useful to us as an organization right now, but it's clearly sitting up there at the top of our analytics But yeah, you start with the data you try to find what it is you do the audience work We do a lot of work around creating personas and then we try to map the content that exists to the personas and what their Motivations are try to figure out. Well, okay, are they not reading this content because it's not meeting their motivations How do we improve it so the data is a big part of it? We also do work interviewing representative users We do surveys where we take what we learn from the interviews We figure out what questions are to fill in the gaps in our in our knowledge. We send the surveys out It's a pretty long process At the end of the day You want to put some metrics around what success means to you in terms of that content and it's going to be different for every content type Is that helpful? Okay, yep Yes, well, hopefully it has relevance for users then because it's still popping up at that point I try to you definitely don't want to put that sort of content in any kind of navigation system It's okay for it to live somewhere. It just needs to be out of the way And when you do have good SEO when people are coming to find that content that has passed its shelf life I found it helpful to put a unique call to action on that page like on Sean's blog post You just put a little block somewhere that says we know that this information is out of date You might be more interested in this article. So yes, that's that's what I do with Drupal Yeah Any more questions? Yeah Great the question is about a government agency when they have lots of types of content And it's spread out over multiple pages and you want to make sure that people are going to read it Are these is this information PDF sometimes? No, okay. Well, that's good. That's a good start Government information is difficult because it's dry often But Theoretically the people who are working for the agency should have a vested interest in doing it I don't think that there's any way that you can Force people to read content that they're not interested in you can work with the design to make it more appealing So you accept that if they're not interested in it, then maybe they are going to scam the content So break it up with white space break it up with bullet points break it up into multiple pages If you want to see if they're reading it and you have the authority to say hey I know that you didn't click the link to see the next thing. Well, you can certainly do that I don't know if I would encourage it. I'd probably focus on the the design And making sure that the presentation of the content is going to make it as easy as possible to help people read stuff That they're not otherwise inclined to read Do I think images help break up the content?  It's a visual pause So, you know people are used to reading magazines and books and that's why we have columns and magazines because people only scan So many words across the page You get a break your brain gets a break when you turn a page in a book and Websites that are just presenting like 20 pages of text all in a line without any break It's going to be much Well, users are going to be much less willing to read all of that And if you just put a nice image maybe a caption to distract their attention for a moment It gives their brain that that visual pause that they need to be able to continue going on to the rest of it Yes Yep, you have stakeholders who are wedded to content that Maybe nobody else is at this point and probably lots of legacy content again. I go back to the data I've got a trick that I use where I recreate a site's current site map And I lay the analytics data over the top of it and it almost always shows that nobody is using the navigation structure as people thought That they were going to be doing but it really comes down to setting the goals and understanding your audiences if you are able to say not just well, nobody's reading this content, but Nobody's reading this content because it does not reflect back to what we're trying to achieve as an organization or what we're trying to achieve with this website and it's not Written for any of our identified audiences Then you can make a case that they either need to go back and update it to make it more useful or just cut it from the website In the end what usually happens is something like Amnesty International did and you throw some tags on it And you put it into a faceted research or research library or faceted search library So that the people who are interested in it usually your own staff can find it very quickly But it is pushed out of the way of everything else that you're trying to accomplish That is useful for the folks who say I just need a URL for this piece of content They're not trying hard enough and you should encourage them to try harder Okay, I Please if you are a developer of any sort join for the sprints on Friday They're going to be here at the convention center. They are a lot of fun and also, please remember to Review this session. This is a new talk for me. So if you have any feedback good or bad I would love to hear it. So all of the future people who may hear this are going to be better served than all of you were sorry Anyway, thank you very much


Hey, Psych2Go family, welcome back to another Psych2Go video. All the love and support that you've given us has aided our mission to make psychology and mental health more accessible to everyone, so thank you. Now let's get into the video. What do you think of when you imagine a person who is depressed? Are you thinking of someone who looks really sad or cries a lot? Well, those may seem to be the obvious hallmarks for depression. Not everyone who is depressed or going through a depressive episode will show how they're Instead, they may hide their emotions and appear to look happy and cheerful. As a result, this type of depression often goes undetected. Before we begin, we would like to mention that this video is created for educational purposes only and is not intended to substitute a professional diagnosis. If you suspect you may have depression or any mental health condition, we highly advise you to seek help from a qualified mental health professional. Number one, you seem cheerful, optimistic, and generally happy, only on the outside. Are you able to get up, go to work, and interact with others without showing how bad you may be feeling inside? According to Heidi McKenzie, a clinical psychologist practicing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, smiling depression is another name for high-functioning depression or persistent depressive disorder. This may mean that you are able to function normally and go about your day like any other person, even though you may be experiencing symptoms of depression internally. Two, you're obsessed with showing others how perfect your life is on social media. Do the things you post on social media reflect what's happening in your actual life? While it's normal to share only your best moment, actively trying to create an online presence to look like you're living the perfect life may be harmful to your mental well-being. Posting photos to show others how happy you are when you're not in real life may only serve to create a void that gives smiling depression room to grow. Three, you're reluctant to seek help because you're concerned about appearing weak. Ever heard of the saying, real men don't cry? Statistics have shown that men are far less likely than women to seek help from mental health problems. This may be because they fear being judged or treated differently for their depressive symptoms. As a result, they may be more likely to put on a happy appearance and keep their feelings to themselves.  Have you ever lost your job or moved to a different country? As with other types of depression, smiling depression can be triggered by big life changes. Whether it's a breakup with a loved one or the death of somebody close to you, these large changes may bring about symptoms of depression, as well as a pressure to keep up an appearance that you are unaffected. Number five, you throw yourself into hobbies and work to keep busy. Have you found yourself working overtime lately? Whether it's work, chores, or hobbies, people with smiling depression may throw themselves into being busy to avoid confronting how they really feel. This avoidance to acknowledge and address your emotions can be harmful and may lead to emotional and physical burnout. And number six, you struggle with denial. Diagnosing people with smiling depression is difficult for many reasons. Firstly, some people might not even be aware that they are depressed, and those who are aware often refuse to or don't seek help. Furthermore, according to a paper from the World Health Organization, smiling depression presents with conflicting symptoms compared to classic depression, which makes it harder to diagnose. Do you know anyone who might have smiling depression? Have you experienced any of the symptoms above? Tell us about it in the comments below. If you enjoyed this video, please like and share it with others who may find it helpful too. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and notification bell icon for more Psych2Go content. All the references used are also added in the description box below. Thank you for watching, and we'll see you in our next video.


This is stock number 9315. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used car headquarters. Today, we are checking out this super clean 2014 Mazda 6. This vehicle has the 2.5 liter four cylinder motor. From this HD video, you'll be able to tell that this car is extremely clean all the way around. No dense dings or cracks on that front bumper or valence. Really nice condition. It has the projector lamp head lamps and the paint is in really nice clean condition. This car has continental extreme contact tires with a lot of tread left. I'd say close to 70 to 80 percent of the tread comes with alloy rims and four wheel disc brakes. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device, turn them on now because it's like you're right here looking at the car with me. I did not see any single dense or dings on the hood. Fender is in excellent condition and as you go down this side of the car, you can see just how clean the body is, how reflective and glass like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down, you can still see the car, hear the car and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here. The roof is very clean. I didn't see any dense or dings on that and down this side of the car is very clean as well. Take a look at the back here. We have the four wheel disc brakes back here as well and you got lots of tread on these tires as well and they match the front tires. As you go around to the back here, no major dense dings or cracks in the rear bumper. It does come with dual rear exhaust. The deck lid is in excellent shape as well.  I didn't see any dense or dings down this side of the vehicle. We'll take a quick look at the trunk here. Lots of room back here. Very, very clean and this one does come with a spare tire and all the tools to change it. It has the rear seat releases so that you can put those back seats down as well and this one comes with a backup camera as well. Very clean once again down this side, inside the touring package gives you the black leather seats. Very clean. No rips or tears. This car has never been smoked and it was locally owned by one of our employees so that is the previous owner's information right there. Factory floor mats, power driver's seat, power windows, power locks and power mirrors. We have stability control, blind spot monitoring that's in the rear view or in the side mirrors and as you can see instrument cluster is nice and clean and that this car has 55,771 miles outside temperature display, mileage display. You have Bluetooth audio controls on the leather wrap steering wheel. Steering wheel is in pretty nice condition. Cruise controls on that side. You have dual climate control. You have the radio right here. You also get backup camera right there as well and you got AM, FM, Bluetooth so you can connect it to your phone and listen to music on your phone. Passenger seat is very clean as well. No rips or tears in that seat. Like I said this car has never been smoked in. Carpentine is absolutely perfect and dash and instrument clusters are all very nice and clean. We'll take a quick look at the back seats and then we will check out under the hood. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats. No rips or tears back here. It does have the latch child safety system and like I said before these seats do fall down for extra storage and they go nice and flat so that it's easy to slide stuff up there from the trunk. Factory floor mats back here and very very clean. Highly recommended car from a condition and quality standpoint. We got the previous owner owner's information so if you want to talk to him you definitely could. 2.5 liter four-cylinder motor. Engine based very clean runs very smooth sky active technology. This car has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off and this car is 100% ready to go. And to see more pictures of this car or one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers. You name it we got to go to our website www.SummitAuto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot. Videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at SummitAuto.com. Thank you so much for checking out the video.  Ask for one of our sales associates to make this car yours today. Once again that number is<PHONE_NUMBER>. Thanks again and if you want to check out more videos go to youtube.com slash Summit Auto. Remember to like, subscribe and share on those and this video in fact any second you see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more used inventory videos like this one on your right and if you haven't been to our website on the bottom a link to this car on our website click those check us out and we really look forward to helping you with the Super Clean 2014 Mazda 6. Thanks again.


Cool. All right. How's it going? My name's Austin. I'm a software engineer at Facebook. I've been at Facebook for almost three years now, full time, interned twice. So it feels like I've been at Facebook for almost five years, but really three. And today I'm actually going to talk to you guys about a hack that I did over four years ago at Facebook as an intern. I'm going to talk a little bit about the hack itself and that process. But actually, my main point of giving this talk to you guys is talking about some of the lessons that were first ingrained in me during that hack that I didn't really realize at the time were so important. But now, four years later, as a full time software developer at Facebook, these are things that I've seen time and time again on different teams that I've been on that have made me a better engineer, or that I've seen reflected in really good engineers at Facebook. So I just wanted to share the story and then share those learnings, and that's what this talks about. It's called 72 Hours to Launch Celebrate Pride. So the background is on June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. This was a really big deal in the US. Everyone was kind of holding their breath. It ended up being a 5-4 decision in the Supreme Court. And on that same day, Facebook launched this pride filter overlay. And it's just a simple overlay, but it also showed the world that it kind of supported this movement. It just supported this decision. It was giving people a tool, the power to kind of express that feeling as well. So clearly, this must have been like a very well-planned launch by Facebook to take a stance. But actually, it was a week before, it was an idea that I had as I was deciding whether or not to go to this intern hackathon. And I ended up going to the hackathon, mainly for the food, so it's always good at these events to have food. More people will show up. And yeah, it was the week before Pride Week in San Francisco. So it's a huge thing in San Francisco where they have this Pride Parade. A bunch of people at Facebook get really excited about it. They have flags, rainbow flags hanging all around campus. So I knew I wanted to do something for that. And I had a lot of coworkers that I wanted to build for. I actually wasn't thinking really large here. I was just kind of thinking of how can I do something small so that my coworkers, they're going to celebrate this next week. Hopefully, I can build something that they can use. So yeah, that's where I came up with this idea for the profile picture overlay. Just put a rainbow on your profile picture. And yeah, so I looked in the code. I was an intern, so naturally I just found some code that pretty much did the same thing. Or at least changed, content your profile picture, and I just changed it. I just copy pasted it and made it into a rainbow. And that was it. So I left the hackathon early. And I was like, yeah, I'm done. I didn't even tell anyone about it. I was just like, yeah, I'm done with the weekend, so I went home. So the next week, I shared it with my colleagues, and they told me to post in this internal group. We have this internal group called Facebook Global Social. Basically, all the employees are in this group. You can kind of just post in there. And so I did. I posted this link to this internal tool. I built just a button. And if you pressed it, I'd say with a 60% chance it would work, and actually then go change your profile picture. But over 1,000 employees used it on the first day. And that was really exciting. I felt like mission was accomplished. Like this is something I built, and my coworkers are using it. So yeah, this is the post. And then I was kind of done. I was like, OK, now I can go back to my normal intern project, like a good intern. So the next day, this guy comes by my desk. And he just says, are you the one that built the thing? And I say, yeah. He said, OK, wait right here. I'll be back. And I didn't know who he was at the time. It turns out he's the head of growth at Facebook. So I should have known. I should have been more attentive. But he came back, and he brought an engineering manager. He brought a designer. He brought one or two engineers. And he said, this is the team. You guys are going to stop what you're doing. You're going to go ship this by the end of the week externally. So that was really cool. That was really exciting. We immediately went into a room. And I mean, again, I was an intern. I really didn't know what was going on. I was just very happy they were still including me. And I didn't tell them I copy and pasted everything. And yeah, but it was amazing to see in that first hour in this meeting room, really how efficient these engineers, this designer, this manager could be. And kind of laying out what was going to be done for the next 72 hours. I don't even think for the next 72 hours we really met again. Like that's how well-planned it was. And everything was new to me. I mean, things like, I knew we had to make it external and probably had to fix the fact that didn't work all the time. But besides that, I didn't know that we had to make it work on mobile, on different browsers, get it translated into 50-plus languages, and do a lot of things. So it was a huge learning experience in a very short amount of time. So that's what this next talk is kind of about. Not those next 72 hours, because I think it was kind of like a team grind. Not much to say about that. But some of the lessons I learned along the way, as we were trying to launch, that I still think back on today and I still see reflected in day-to-day life as a software engineer at Facebook. So the first one is readoff. This is something that you definitely come across in school, or in interview questions. You have to make a trade-off between A and B. And this one has a faster runtime. This one has faster space complexity. But in the real world, it's different. It's real. Nothing is perfect. There's no perfect answer. And you're always really making a choice between several options. And even choices, even things that you see that are built today, are not always the best option. It's useful to go look at things that are existing today, existing solutions, and to think if they could be built better. Maybe you can go test it. You can run an A-B test by refactoring something, by changing something. So that was the lesson I learned here. The actual example in this hackathon was in this landing page. So the designer said, OK, it can't just be a button anymore. We have to make it more exciting and actually usable. So the landing page he designed was it'll actually show you your profile picture with the rainbow overlay when you land on it, which makes sense. It'll show you what you're basically about to change your profile picture to. Now, to do that, there's a couple options. There's a few options. And the two main ones here are you can either do this server side. Like the actual changing of the profile picture, when you click submit, it does its server side. It goes to server. It'll fetch your profile picture. It'll go pixel by pixel and try to compute what that pixel's new value should be. And we actually tinkered a lot with that to make it still work with these edge cases. If your photo is really dark or really light, to make it still work well. So that was a lot of computation plus the server call. So you can either do that and get pixel for pixel what it's going to look like. Or you could do this other thing, which was just layer some CSS on top of it to make it basically take a CSS semi-transparent layer, put it on top of your current profile picture, which we've already kind of fetched and cached usually, and give you instantaneously something that looks 90% of the way there. Like probably what it's going to look like on your profile picture, maybe not pixel for pixel. And that's what we ended up going with. And I think at the time that was the right decision. If you, like when we started looking at the data when people started using this, a lot of the time spent, like the waiting time was due to this server operation, because people are using it all over the world with bad connections. And so this ability to make this decision, I think probably, we didn't run it as an A-B test, I don't know for sure, but I think it actually helped more people use this at the end of the day. So that's the takeaway here, which I still use today is that these trade-offs are opportunities. They're opportunities to make a good decision. And even things that you see that are built today, they're not done deals. They were built by a human being at some point in time. So maybe you can find ways to build them better. The next thing I learned is about growth hacking. I didn't really know what this meant at all, but when I got to Facebook, I was on the growth team at Facebook. And the growth team at Facebook is kind of like notorious for just being really good at growing things. Actually, the way it used to work is, it might still work, is it's just this team, they're not working on like any one product. They're just really good at growth. And it's like things that need to grow kind of like come into this team. So it's almost like this organization is a data structure in itself, and it's just really efficient at growing things. So when Instagram first came on board, it's just like they got put into the growth machine. Anyway, I digress. But these people that I was working with as well were from the growth team. And the problem they were trying to solve was like, OK, we're going to launch this, but how do we actually get people to use it? And especially if we're launching it on the day of the SCOTUS decision, how do we get the word out there? So of course, you could run some ads maybe, or you could try to get like Zuck to do it like that, which he ended up doing. But I thought this organic piece, which is kind of the virality, the idea they came up with, is like you just, and probably the best thing we did was put the link to the thing inside the post. So anyone that changed their profile picture, their description by default would be a link to the tool that would use the tool. So basically, if one person uses it, then all of their friends are seeing this link. And so you kind of have this kind of exponential network effect. And as soon as celebrities start using it, then it'll just be present in front of millions of people. So this was a lesson I learned is about kind of this organic growth-hacking. It's super important, actually, I think. Like anytime you guys go build something, getting people to use it, even if it's not user-facing, even if it's like internal-facing, you're building a platform, you're trying to get clients to use your platform, like selling the thing, making it grow organically. Getting people on board is a super important lesson. And this was just kind of like the part of it that I learned during that hackathon. The next major lesson I learned is about how important domain knowledge is. And this is definitely something I've seen a lot more after a few years of full-time work, is basically the people that have spent active time acquiring knowledge, even when it's not related to their direct day-to-day work, something that they need to get done. The people who are spending extra cycles, reading a lot, both internally and external documentation, talking with people, networking, are usually the most effective engineers after some period of time. It's like learning a language where on day one, it's not like a linear thing. It's kind of like the more tools that you have. It's kind of exponential in the amount of problems that you can go tackle. So the one related to this hackathon was we were kind of very tight on this timeline to get it out before Friday when the decision was coming out. And we finished all the code about Thursday night at like 11 p.m. And at this time, we have at least on like Facebook's web tier has daily pushes. So just because you write the code doesn't mean it's like running on your guys' machines or running on the servers that you guys are hitting. It takes some time. And at that point in time, I think it was daily. Like every day we do a cutoff. We'd say like, okay, not accepting more code. We'll test it and then we'll deploy it the next day. So we had missed that cutoff. It was 11 p.m. The cutoff was at like 5 p.m. So basically if we just waited and did nothing and waited for the normal deployment process, it wouldn't have been live until like the weekend or the following Monday. Luckily, one of the engineers on the team had worked a lot. It was one of these people that was just like just knew a ton. You could tell he was someone who networked a lot with other engineers, just kind of knew everything that was going on. And he knew about this new code push. We just started this Tel Aviv office and they had set up just a month before a code push in Tel Aviv, which meant it was actually lining up to be 2 a.m. Our time in California. And it was because of this that we were then able to talk to people he knew in Tel Aviv and get them to put it into their push before our Friday morning. So definitely a part of this was luck for sure. But it was also like, if the other four of us that were working on this, I mean, none of us knew about this Tel Aviv code push. And it's not really something I think we would have found out either. So yeah, this is a very like, I guess contrived example of this domain knowledge coming in use, but this is one of those things where the most senior engineers I see at Facebook aren't really usually, there's kind of like a cap to how like technically advanced you can be. I think there's some unique people that are just kind of like technically beyond everyone else. And I think that's awesome and it's quite rare though. I think like the more common case of really senior engineers at Facebook are people that are just have a large domain knowledge set of tools, people that they know where they can just kind of get to a solution, not a technical solution all the time, right? Just a solution much, much faster than anyone else. Okay, so yeah, so this one, another lesson learned from this is about persistence. So when we actually launched this, we, it had been launched for like an hour when Zuck used it. So Zuck wouldn't use it, which was awesome, except that it wasn't awesome because it didn't work. And not only did it not work, which was like the worst fear. I didn't know it could get worse. It actually deleted his profile picture. So as I said, I had like copy and pasted some code and like we were still using that code. And it was a very weird thing. I don't even really remember what it ended up being. I think it ended up being something like it probably wouldn't have happened that often. Like I think it had something to do maybe with Zuck's specific profile. But nonetheless, like something happens and it was bad and we had to shut the whole thing down. So like our graph just down to zero like after an hour of being launched. After we'd spent so much time, we'd figured out the Tel Aviv code push. And so like this was definitely a moment where we like could have given up or like started crying and, but we were like, we were persistent. We just said, okay, like we all got into a room and like debug the thing and found like exactly what happened and fixed it. I don't even remember how we got the fix out, but we did and we turned it back on maybe an hour later. So yeah, this persistence thing. Yeah, the note I have here is that like a probability of something shipping is a function of you. So I think this happens a lot where I think if you put two different people on the same project, even with a similar skill set, like you'll get different results and someone will get farther. And it's oftentimes because it's a function of the person and like how willing they are to like continue to push the thing forward even when they hit bugs or yeah, something breaks. So that's kind of like a lesson I've definitely seen a lot. I think that's something that separates like junior engineers from senior engineers as well. And it was definitely an example of it here. Okay, it's my last lesson, I promise. The last lesson is similar. It's about following through. And I think this is also like the thing that separates junior and senior engineers a lot where actually launching something or like building something is, after a certain point it's actually not hard sometimes. It depends on of course what you're doing, but like getting it 80% of the way there, which sometimes is like launching something is really only 80% of the work. It's this like last 20% that is like very elusive and kind of like hard to pin down and like hard to get to 100%. And I think that's something that senior engineers do really well. So this again, this kind of like contrived example that I saw in the hackathon that is a parallel for this is once we launched it, right, we're tracking the number of attempts. How many people are effectively clicking this button and the number of successes. So it calls the server and the server is trying to do the thing and then it fails, right? I don't actually think what this gap is. It actually wasn't, I've zoomed in, right? Like the gap is there. It wasn't like my internal tool, which was like 60%. I don't actually know what this gap is, but it's there. But I think it wasn't bad enough such that we needed to shut it down or anything. Like people were, a lot of people, most people were still successfully using it. So we actually could have done nothing, right? Like this thing wasn't gonna be a, it was a very like finite amount of time. Like its peak was during this weekend, so during that weekend. So it's not something that we were trying to build necessarily to stand the test of time. But we, again, even though we had like not slept for a very long time, we like went back into the room and we tried to figure this one out. And we worked really hard and we figured out that it was actually based on the image size was like the main thing, which makes sense. Like if a lot of people's profile pictures they're nice, high rendered 2048 by 2048 photos. It's four million pixels. It's a lot of things to iterate through. And this was taking a lot of time. And so luckily we store, for everyone we store lower rendering pictures of your profile picture because we, you know, if you're gonna use another app or if you're gonna use Facebook Lite or some like other app that can't display high quality photos, so we have those. So we knew we had those photos. And again, this is another domain knowledge thing. I didn't know this as an intern, but someone else, one of the engineers knew that we store lower rendering photos of everyone. Everyone's profile pictures. And we used, hopefully that doesn't scare anyone. And yeah, so we ended up using those, right? Like we sacrificed a little bit of quality here. It's another trade off for potential performance win. And this is what the, this was the result when we fixed it. So this was falling through. I think this is probably my strongest lesson that I take as like a engineer. Because I think like a lot of companies as well are on quarterly cycles, half cycles, right? You're on sprints to get stuff done.  I already like built the thing, got the impact from, because it was, we launched and it was 80% of the way there. But to build credibility, right? You wanna be someone that people will look at the code like five years later and they'll look and see who wrote it and they're like, how does this still work so well? So it still works better than anything we've built. And this is just like a silly example of this or like a contrived example, but that's actually like the people I respect most at Facebook are those few people who, like I still look at some of their code so long ago and it's like not even using the best practices of like the new things, but it's so good. Like it's not gonna break. And you can tell they just kind of like cared a lot about following through on that. So that was my final lesson. I'll share the results. It's not what this is about, but the results are fun as well. So yeah, 26 million people used this, 5,000 people a minute at the peak watermark, half a billion likes and comments. So it was definitely an impactful thing that happened in a really short amount of time. Reiterate the learnings. So trade-offs are opportunities, right? So just, and nothing is ever perfect and even existing things aren't perfect. So I think some of the like biggest wins can often times come from not new things that you have to make a decision on, but actually existing things that people probably didn't necessarily make the best decision on at the time they built it. Growth hacking. So even like organic growth can be kindled.  This is definitely, it might apply more to kind of like client facing, user facing things, but not all the time. Be being creative in how you're gonna get people to use your product or platform. And kind of get it to spread organically is powerful. Domain knowledge is a toolkit, right? I think just like constantly spend some cycles learning and reading. Even if you have like a ton of code to write, it's actually probably just better that you just cut off 30 minutes or an hour every day to like be reading what's going on around you. Persistence. So like probability of something shipping is a function of you, right? And this along with following through is kind of like about you building credibility as an engineer and building things that you're proud of, that stand of the test of time, that work really well. And then this last kind of in Facebook blue lesson learning here is to ship to one person before you ship to a billion people. So my kind of like magical final quote. The meaning of this is actually and I reflect on this like intern hackathon and kind of how naive I was and I like wasn't even thinking about for launching this externally. I just wanted to ship it for like people at Facebook. I think that's actually, if I hadn't taken that approach by accident, then I don't know if it actually would have launched externally, right? Like the only reason that this VP came by my desk is because I had like gotten people at the company to use it and get excited about it. And that wouldn't have happened if I like built the thing and then like immediately after I built it, like started telling people like we need to launch this externally. It's gonna be huge. Like I don't know if people would have believed that or it would have felt it as much as getting some small organic usage internally first. So yeah, this is kind of just a plug for building things or if you are doing hackathons, which you should, they're awesome. Built something small and like built something for a smaller group of people and you'll have a higher chance of succeeding. Yeah, so that's it. Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. Thanks.


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Okay, good afternoon folks, Larry Pesavento with the Mid-Morning Up, Mid-Afternoon Update for TFNN. We've got the stock indices lower. We've got gold and silver under a great deal of pressure. And we've got the grains under a great deal of pressure. If you look up at the board today, there's only a couple things that are green. The Japanese yen versus the dollar is one. And then we've got, I believe it's crude oil is up just a tad. So those are the only ones that are up. Everything else is under an extreme amount of pressure. So whether that will continue or not, I don't know. I posted the chart here into the Tiger Den showing you the volatility that we've had this morning in the E-mini S&P folks. We've had a move of well over 60 handles.  And we're almost our way to our hundredth handle as we sit here as the market is trying to get back to even right around this 18, excuse me, 41, 51 level. We know what the pattern looks like. We've made it through the dreaded solar eclipse and new moon of Thursday and Friday. And so we're going to be really exciting Monday coming in. And believe me, folks, this market could break out to the upside. There's no question about it. We have been here for five straight days and it's a giant battle going on and that battle will be in full swing when we come in Sunday and Monday. That's my opinion. And remember, it's my opinion only and opinions are like armpits. Everybody has one and it usually smells pretty bad. Anyway, let's take a look at one other thing that's very important and that is the fact that these markets have exhibited some of the most strong resilience to bad news that I have ever seen in my 60 some years of watching these markets. I mean, they have thrown everything at this thing and it just hasn't gone down very much. Banking scares COVID. It doesn't it doesn't make any difference. That in itself should scare you. And believe me, I'm raising my hand being short and say, yes, I will be scared. We're short from the area right around the 18. Wow, what I keep saying 1841 78 is the area where we sold. We're going to have our stop at break even today because if we get out there, we want to stand aside and look at it again Monday. And if we close below 41 30, we're going to add at least I am going to add to the short position to see if it works. We're going to take a break. Mike Moore is our guest. More analytics at the break<PHONE_NUMBER>. We'll be right back folks.