It's nice to be here. I spent half my time in Boston and half my time here, so it's nice to be back. My name's Amber Case. Like, you know, could you just hold up all your phones? I think you won. You're the fastest one. So the idea is that you're all cyborgs, but some of you are more reluctant cyborgs than others. And you don't have to have anything involved when you give cyborgs. The term cyborg actually came from a 1968 girls' space travel, and the definition is an organism to which external components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new ambient spaces, the whole idea of a cyborg space travel, so that you can adapt as a human to places that humans shouldn't really go and they aren't able to survive it. And so I got my start studying what it means to be a cyborg and what it means to wake up next to a phone before your loved one in the morning and have a device that cries and have to pick it up and soothe that to sleep or turns against you if you don't upgrade it fast enough. Along the way, I was studying the cell phones in 2007 when I was writing my thesis. I wanted to do something near the same location. In anthropology, you usually go to these other countries and study other people, this idea of anthropological others.   You're the one that you might want to study because now, just 15 years ago, we didn't have these little clicky devices that we were dealing with all the time.  I just pretty much looked weird with a little clipboard writing down what people wrote. And a lot of people in my class said, why are you studying cell phones? It's not really a big deal. Why are you studying social media? And I said, well, one day, everybody will have one piece and the world will have changed and we won't really notice it as much. And along the way, I found this concept called quantum technology. And I found all these different quotes. One quote that I like to quote is this, 50 billion devices will be online by 2020. It depends on what you call a device and what you call online. But we're on our way to having many, many more connected devices than before. But usually this quote is given at conferences where chip manufacturers just want to make sure that we put more chips in everything without the consequences. And it's usually exciting, but anytime somebody gives a quote like this, I like to ask whether this sounds good or not, let's consider the things that we already have in our lives. When the smartwatchers first came out, they just replicated all of the notifications you already had on your phone, so you have to change them. And it's nice if you have like an IRC or like a Slack alert, but people were just getting panicked because they were getting double notifications. And if you've forgotten to bring your phone and probably have a phantom ring or a bus in their pocket anyway, when you think somebody's trying to get in touch with you, this plus your wrist. Or all these companies kept trying to, there was a whole year where lots of different devices and manufacturers tried to get me to make these smart fridges. They said, we want to make a smart fridge. And I said, can't we have smarter people, not smarter devices? Like, why do we need to have a smart fridge?   I don't have to worry about this at all. Or the idea that it will tell you when the bananas have gone bad. The bananas have appeal, it changes color. I know what it's about. I don't need $100,000 of technology to tell me that, plus a startup in the background, it's only going to have funding for two years and then go away and then my fridge will be bricked and I won't be able to use it anymore. When you put all this together, you get what I like to call the dystopian kitchen of the future. This is what it's like to program right now, right? I mean, everything's written in a different language. Not all of it's really documented. There's open source that's exciting and some that's not anymore. Contra employees want the new language. Some people don't. People leave. They don't leave behind anything. They expect you to retain it. Half of it's hackable. I can imagine your teapot getting hacked and then that gets your password. I think on the Samsung fridge, apologies if Samsung is a sponsor, but on one of the Samsung fridges, you can use it to get somebody's genome password. It's kind of a cool idea. All you have to do is walk in their house and you've got your email. But there have been times in which these things have failed already and this just increases the surface area for a tact. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to be a system administrator to live in my own home. I actually just want to go home and have an enjoyable time. For those of you who have pets, you probably have an automated pet feeder when you leave and the ones that are attached to a wall and set up a timer are pretty reliable. But this startup called PetNet, they said we'll go one step further. We'll make it so that you can Skype your pets too. So you can feed them water them and Skype them and check in on them. So what do you think happened with this startup? So of course, the server went down and these connected pets, people didn't really know what was going on. They didn't know how long the server would be down for. There's kind of a Twitter update that said sorry, our servers are down. So people had left, people said, the website said, you can leave your pets, you can Skype them, you can check in on them. Never worry about your pets again in a couple of weeks later. Oh no, everyone's bringing up other pets. They're breaking into their own house in this column, which doesn't tend to somehow go back for vacations and things like that. So, well, this makes sense. I mean, if on the cover, on the cover was my boss covering more, but on the site it says that you don't have to worry. Do you really have to worry? So I went in and turned to service and it says, you agree that you will not rely on the services for any safety or critical purposes related to you or your pet. And this is not intended to be 100% reliable. So where should the consequences? So then I tweeted it and then I said, so the one thing that you were supposed to do, you didn't do. And they said, yeah, well, we didn't implement offline support. That was in the bug tracking system. This is what I'm concerned about in the rush to just get everything out. And it's not usually developer's fault. It's really the managers and bosses of the market are saying, you have to make the product. You have to get it out. We don't care about code debt. We don't even know what that is. We'll just throw it out. It'll be fine. Then these things fell as we get closer and closer as sideworks to having these functions support or day to day, when things fail, it's catastrophic. So we have an era of interruptive technology. It's not just interruptive in that. We're getting text messages all the time and robotic notifications, but we're also dealing with bad battery life, disconnected networks, servers that go down. So how do we deal with that? How do we design technology for suboptimal situations instead of the perfect situation that we design it for in the lab? So we need the opposite of what we have right now. We need a kind of calm technology where the tech proceeds in the background that supports us to amplify our humanness instead of just turn us into robots as we kind of are when we yell at Siri four or five times in a row because some of us have a slight accent or a list and it won't understand us the first time. Maybe the only time a technology understands you the first time is in Star Trek or in films where they can do 40 takes and they can just put the script in it. And that aesthetic from film is what gave us these unrealistic expectations that technology can understand us better than we understand each other. We don't even understand ourselves, not to mention the person next to us. How could technology understand us better than that? So we have to work with the limitations of the technology that we have and make better experiences. When I was writing my thesis, I found Xerox Tark and Mark Weiser Mark Weiser died in 1999 which was kind of considered the father of the book of his computing which we kind of now know as IoT. And the idea behind the research that many of these people did is that they didn't just have pure engineering, they had anthropologists and artists and social scientists to kind of balance out the pure engineering. And what they said is that in this paper called The Community Called Technology is that in the future, the scarce resource will not be technology. Technology will be incredible cheap. Scarce resource will be our attention. And how we use tech and how we design to handle that attention will make a great future technologies because we have a limit to what attention we can have. I think that every day, the amount of attention and information that our devices forces to deal with is kind of akin to maybe World War II style if you were like a general and you were dealing with all these information streams and having to coordinate them but that's a wartime situation. We're dealing with that much information on a daily basis. So how do we kind of take our time back a little bit so that we can think a little bit better? One of my favorite quotes is from Mark Rothery, just as a good tool is invisible. And by invisible, it's not this invisible interface that doesn't exist. It's that the good tool is invisible because you can focus on the task, not the tool. If you look at somebody that's really great with woodworking, they don't focus on their tools and have to update the saw or whenever they just use a saw and it's just an extension of their hand. It's just a tool. And the book is fantastic because the complexity is internalized. It's covered. So you just close the book and there's the complexity and you store it on a shelf and then if you want the complexity, you open the book back up. It's pretty stable. You don't have to worry about updating the book and it's there. You can throw it on your shelf and when you read a book, the interface dissolves you into it. You don't even notice that you exist anymore if it's a good book and well-written because it's just there. So how do you design a calm technology? Some of the research that Weiser and I have taken and compiled and put into a series of principles. The first one is that technology should require all of your attention. Just some of it and only when necessary. An example of this is a teacup. You set it, you forget it. You can go into another room. It'll call to you when it's done. It's really simple. And this kind of calm technology is just there when you need it, not when you don't. And it lets you know. This is part of using your peripheral attention.  You can hear something in the background. You can feel something by haptics, by touch. How do you compress information into those different senses to still be attuned to your environment in the same amount of information and not be distracted out of it?  Everything else, like the foot pedal glancing back and forth between the rear view mirror, that's all there is secondary tertiary attention to getting your focus on that goal to keep all the variables where the cars are in your head. This is a silly example when this is the Lumobag master sensor just buzzes you when you're slouching. Technology should be informed in a cop. How do you compress some information into a kind of ambient awareness? My old co-founder and I made this tiny Q light bulb system. It's just a Q light bulb attached to a weather report. So instead of having a disembodied computer voice wake you up and telling you the weather report, you just walk into the kitchen and it will just show the color of what the temperature is going to be like for the day. So I was walking in the kitchen this morning and it was a few years ago but it was yellow. And I knew it was going to be something important. I was really excited because most of the time I wake up I'm just a few boredom. But I didn't have to look at the weather report if I didn't want to but there's just an iPad on the wall so you can see it anytime. But the idea is low resolution then high resolution give the person a choice to go from low resolution to high resolution so that they're just not attacked by the information. Technology should amplify the best of what tech can do and what the best of humanity can do.  You end up making humans act like robots. I like Google because when it first came out people tried to scroll down because they didn't know how to use it. The idea of Google is it's just a human switch for it. It's just connecting you to what other people have done on the web with a bunch of bots behind the scenes. It's doing 80, 90% of the work for you giving you results but you're the one that's choosing the results. It's not trying to make a choice for you. And in this way you're collaborating with a machine side by side. You're not having the machine choose something for you which will almost always be wrong or if it's right really terrifying like on Amazon. This is my friend Tom Kaufman. He found that all these biologists were scanning tissue samples by hand and they would lose their vision over time. It was horrible things. He said, well I'll just take some Alienware computers and make a robot that scans the tissues and does two-dimensional scanning the three-dimensional tissue sample and then with a network of doctors and a voting system be able to send a sample in see whether those cancers are not and then send that back to the database and that cybernetic feedback would not an AI, not a machine learning a cybernetic feedback with humans and computers was able to be more accurate and be able to predict cancer at larger and larger time stamps before the cancer actually hit. And that's much more interesting to me than a closed system that you think is perfect. You say, these things are imperfect. We can improve them over time. Let's make something that's not entirely great but it will improve. And even if it's 80, 90% it's better than what looks like a perfect system that just doesn't scale at all. Technology can communicate but it doesn't need to speak. C3PO knows how many 200,000 languages but he's annoying in every single language. But R2-D2 just has a language of cute beeps and you know no matter what country you're from no matter what background you're from no matter what language you speak you know exactly what R2-D2 feels because you can hear this universal tongue language. When we have devices that speak to us in a human language, in English not only do we have to translate them to a bunch of different languages to ship them all over the world but we have limitations because we expect to be able to communicate with the device in the same way that it communicates with us. And that's one of the problems about having things that speak at us. This is an old installation it was just a servo motor attached to a string and this would work around based on the serve activity at Xerox Park.  Everybody's wearing location tracking badges by the way so you can kind of see them on a board. But it was fun, it was a lot of social activity and it was ridiculously silly but this kind of art project because they had artists there that were just doing weird things with this fun indicator of what was happening with that actually happened to tell you what was happening. You had to go find out and that created connections across different departments. The Roomba just gives you a tone it goes da-da-da-da when it's done and da-da when it's stuck and you have to help it out. And it's an awful vacuum cleaner it doesn't even clean any of the corners. People find it so adorable that cats ride around on that YouTube videos because it doesn't expect to speak to you in this English language when it's not shaped like a human it's just a trueabyte filter feeder it's a prehistoric device that's more right. Technology should consider social norms. What is a social norm? Well everybody in this auditorium has a phone with a video camera in it and that's normal. We aren't panicking like 15 years ago saying privacy is dead, don't point that thing at me. What is this? Now people just use cameras on their phones to take pictures of their food before they eat it as a pre-digested ritual. So whatever is normal is invisible and you have to figure out what that norm is. Anything that restores you to that invisible norm is restored. So it's like a prosthetic leg or glasses they can be even decorative. We don't look at somebody who has glasses on and say, ah, that's terrifying. But we do look at somebody with Google Glass and say, oh no, the general public does. So you have to think, what was the difference between, let's say, Google Glass and an Apple product? Apple products innovated through making a digital walking mission where they could store more than CD. And then you could wear that around and eventually it led to a touch interface and then it led to an app store where 14 year olds can make a fart app where you press a button and makes a fart sound. And that led to dinner table discussions and friendliness and silliness and then lots of apps being made in the store. And then you had Google Glass which one of the only apps that came out for it that made a lot of sense was the blink to take a photo, which was terrifying. And when you release all of these features at the same time, people often press usually focus on the scariest one which is persistent video recording. But you can't do on Google Glass. It makes the display really hot and you can't even wear it for that long and it runs the battery out. But tell that to the press, that's not as exciting as the world is over and Terminator glasses are here. So you have to figure out what the metabolism rate is for the people using your technology because people can only handle them by just maybe one feature per year if you want to. When elevators first came out, people were terrified that they didn't compress into a disk like this because they never accelerated that direction before and it'd be artificially slow down. And then elevator operators were the only people who could press the buttons and people afraid to press the buttons. And then when the elevator operators went on strike, people realized they could press the buttons themselves and they wouldn't die and that's why we could press our buttons on the elevators. This is how long it takes for new technologies to get into an ecosystem. The right amount of tech is the minimum to solve the problem. This is the hardest thing, especially when companies are getting so much funding right now. They're all just spending money on everything they can. I did a startup a couple of years ago where we just said, let's raise the least amount of money we can. We wanted to do location-based messages. We said, well we can't afford tech messages so we'll try this new thing called pushing notifications. We didn't know how that worked so we learned how that worked. The whole time it was just, what can we not spend money on? Because each new feature, each new support, every single thing that you do, the many add more things, you have to support every single one of those things and it becomes more complex. So how can you use the least amount to get the thing done? It's the last for a really long time and that's hard to talk about when everybody's trying to build things really, really quickly. These are my favorite technologies. The toilet-optic bed sign on a plane is like the only sign that doesn't change because it's a pictogram so anybody in any language will understand it. Even if you're red-green colorblind, you understand because it lights up whether it's occupied or not and the streetlight is just a punctuation for reality. When we created cars, urban streets and districts, we kind of figured it out. It's a light indicator. Could you imagine making a streetlight today? You have the blue tooth to each intersection on your phone and then you have to disengage and press 10 buttons and then it would send you that little heart that says, the light is green. You wouldn't be able to see which light it was and what you did to it and it would be awful. So technology should be used to be near and far. This is my kind of weird graph of what I think could happen in the future. If we had computing that was really far away from us in terms of mainframes where if you were building it, it would sneak out in the middle of the night in high school and try to use your time share of like 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. on it and then we had desktops where everybody kind of had their internal in their house which was a really nice time because you didn't have to have any web access because there wasn't really a web. I mean you could have a PBS if you wanted but then suddenly all this data started to go away from you to kind of like remote mainframe cloud things. I know that my Facebook photos are stored somewhere in the DALs but I can't just walk there and say, hey, can I have access to my photos in the service facility but kick me out and they'll report me as like trying to hack into their service facility. So much of what we do now is not with us and if you were to put your phone in airplane mode you probably wouldn't be able to do anything other than like take photos and like the notes that maybe the audio recorder. So what I'd like to see happen is we go back to a kind of desktop era but it's on our devices that we use each of our devices as a kind of personal server. So if I go to the doctor, I can say, hey, I'm going to share my personal data with you for the next 30 minutes in order to get treatment plan and then that data will be stored back to my own personal servers, back to Star Trek, the off-person servers and then if somebody hacks into that database they're only getting the data that's been shared for the last 30 minutes. So it's all about decreasing the service area for attack and the excitement of trying to get into this kind of iceberg style databases. Not to say that this would work. There's a lot of interesting technologies that break bits up and allowing you to download things from other people around you. IPFS is interesting to follow but it'd be nice to see a mix. Process as much as you can on the device itself because there's a lot of power. And that way when you're on a subway and you get out of some network range you don't have a really bad experience. I would be encouraged with the Sirius 7 radio and you go into a tunnel and the song stops because they won't even buffer for like three or four seconds. So you're going to download most of the song anyway. Why not have more in the buffer? Why not say that the experience is going to be bad? For most people they're going to have a bad phone. They're going to have horrible battery life. Why not make something work even when it fails? An escalator reverts to stairs when it fails. Why can't our technology when it fails degrade gracefully level after level so that we can guarantee a good experience for people? It's harder to build but the support requirements are far less if you do it right. So good design allows you to accomplish your goals in the least amount of years and you try to take those moves away until there's nothing left to take away. Then a calm technology allows you to accomplish the same amount of goals with the least mental cost because I don't know about you but when we talk about automation if you want to automate hanging out with your kids or falling in love or getting married, I mean some of you might but the whole idea is that we have an excess of what the Greeks call the chrono time. It's kind of an industrial time where it's 90, I'm 10, I'm 11, and everything is structured and everything can just interrupt you. But the Greeks also had a name for the opposite time chyrus time and chyrus time is this undefined time where you lose track of it, where you go into a state of flow where you say why was I doing that thing for six months that was totally unnecessary usually when you're on a vacation and you have this epiphany and then you have to go back to the work schedule. So if we make technology a little bit more like what they thought of maybe in Xerox Park we can have some of that time back we can get some chyrus time back and then we could be more intelligent instead of having smarter technology and then we can have smarter humans because the scarce resource is our attention. That's the thing that we need to pay attention to and sort of otherwise we'll just be doing the same thing over and over again with more funding and it will crash in catastrophic ways we've never seen before and we'll have to clean up the mess. So I wrote a book on this called Calm Tech and I'm writing another book which is about if you have to have audio alerts how should you make them sound? So this is just a sequel that will come out later this year. And then I made a website where I put together all the original research on Calm Tech and it's just calmtech.com and it has the principles there I really encourage you to read these original research papers some of them are from 1989, 1991 and they talk in a way that sounds just like we're reading it today it's really ahead of its time. So thank you so much.


Good morning, everybody. JR Fisher here. It is a Monday morning. We've got a nice, bright and sunny day here in Georgetown, Texas. Let me know what it's like, where you're at. Don't forget to chat. Put some comments in that chat box. Tell me what you're doing, where you're at, any questions you may have. Today is gonna be really cool because I'm gonna talk about some huge changes in social media. And if you're doing social media, if you don't know about these changes, man, you could be left behind. But if you do know about them, and you do them, you're gonna just excel in 2022. I mean, the world has changed. Social media is changing.  Everything's changing up. So you wanna stay to the very end. I'm gonna give you a list of all the things that have changed, also things that you can do to make sure that you're part of the conversation and you don't get left behind. Don't forget to subscribe. If you don't subscribe, like down there, turn it from red to gray. Don't forget to ring the bell, turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live, or if I upload a video. So guys, this social media thing, and I'm not a big social media person. I gotta tell you, I'm just not. Now let's see here. Paul says, let me put it up on the screen here. I gotta get everything on the screen. Paul says, FYI, your last cooking video was incredible. Can't wait to try. Yeah, that was the chicken mushroom garlic and cream sauce over the butter noodles in case you're not hungry. That was a good recipe. I'm not kidding you. It was like, it is because, and I don't wanna get off track here, but Paul did, you did this to me, Paul.  And guys, if you're interested in recipes and cooking, run over to my other channel. It's restaurant quality recipes. And I show you how to cook at home much better than a lot of restaurants and save a ton of money. But let's get into the social media stuff. That's what I'm gonna talk about today. This social media stuff, because this is some interesting stuff, guys. This is stuff that we think we learn and we're on top of and then things change. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go through all the changes, why they're changing and what you can do about it. And there's a lot of different trends right now. I use a program called HootSuite and that's how I post all my social media. But let's look at some of the trends, okay? The first one is TikTok will become the most important social media network for marketing that there absolutely is. And I get somebody waving outside my window. They're my wife's outside with the dog. So Instagram actually held the number one spot for social media marketers for the past few years but that's all changing. TikTok has surpassed one billion user mark since what, September, 2021, it was, I believe. They made the seventh most popular social media network, excuse me, in the world. If you exclude messaging networks, okay? You take out the messaging ones. TikTok is actually the fourth most popular social media network after Instagram. That's huge. I mean, that really is huge, guys. What's the big deal? Well, in January, 2021, it only had 689 million users, only 689 million, right? That's a 45% increase in less than a year. So if you're not using that platform, which I admit, I'm not using TikTok, but I gotta tell you guys about it. I gotta tell you what's out there. And this comes after the largest growth spurt of global user base of 1,157% between 2018 and 2020. To put it in perspective, think about this. Instagram's monthly active users grew at a rate of 6% alone in 2020. Even more interesting, Google search trend shows that TikTok completely dominates Instagram short-form video content. Because we all know that Instagram reels is out there. But over the last year, search demand for TikTok has grown by 173%, but search demand for Instagram reels has grown by only 22%, and it has decreased by 33% for stories. So if you're doing that story thing on Facebook, people aren't looking at it anymore. Despite TikTok's rapid growth, most businesses are hesitant to invest in the network. Take the results from Hootsuite's social media trends report and listen to this stuff, guys, this is huge. You do need to get involved and we probably will too. Only 35% of respondents say they planned on creating or increasing your investment in TikTok in the next year. So if you do, you're gonna be ahead of them. Most businesses continue to place big bets and reliable networks like Instagram and Facebook, but man, they're dying out. They're just dying out. I got another comment in here. Let me stick that on the screen here for you Paul. How do people drive people off TikTok to a sales page? Can it be used to build email lists? Same thing as you would with anything else Paul. It's links, putting links in there. I don't use TikTok, so I'm not gonna tell you that I'm an expert on this. I've just done some research on what the big things are and the big changes are. So I wouldn't be your best person to learn about that. But as you know on YouTube, there's plenty of videos on TikTok and you could learn that stuff. Next thing, number two is actually, you will start spending big ad dollars on smaller networks. That's the big trend now. All of the social media trends on the list, this is probably the most surprising thing that people are getting away from a lot of the big networks and they're going to smaller ones. Now there's a lot of reasons for this. A study by Cantor commissioned by TikTok found that consumers rank TikTok ads as inspiring and enjoyable as ads on other platforms. A Nielsen study actually commissioned by Snapchat found that ads on Snapchat had more reach than TV ads and led to greater awareness and purchase intent. So if you're doing TV ads, which are very expensive, you may want to get off of it, it's not working. A Pinterest business study showed that ads on Pinterest had greater return on investment and cheaper conversion rates than ads on other social networks. So that's something that you really want to be aware of. Google search trends also show increasing search demand over the last two years for ads on these networks. So that's something you want to look at. Things are changing up. So the smaller networks aren't as saturated with ads as Facebook and Instagram. So you're going to stand out a little bit more. There's less, I guess, user fatigue. They don't see as many ads. So your ads will stand out a whole lot more. A lot of social pros have had to diversify their ad strategy in early 2021 in response to Apple's iOS 14 update. This is actually when Apple announced an opt-in to ads tracking options for all Apple users, blocking Facebook's ability to target a vast chunk of its audience. So that's something you got to look at. Importantly, though, TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat all encourage advertisers to make their ads fit in with organic content. Let's see here. Just got a little message here, and it seems important, but I'll take care of it later because I'm talking to you guys. The result is that ads are more entertaining and less disruptive, increasing conversions and all around vibes for businesses. Like something on TikTok is probably pretty interesting to watch. On Facebook, not so much. So what do we need to do? You need to take a closer look at your engagement across all platforms. Have you been underestimating interest users, neglecting the potential of your Snapchat audience? You want to study the content people post on the network to see what other people are doing. See if you can improve your brand's way of doing ads and fit in with the vibes that are actually on the platform. You want to seem more like the platform. Experiment on creating ads on the network or at least test new networks, especially if you've discounted it too much effort for organic content in the past. The next thing, number three, and let's see, what are my time? Oh, I'm doing good on time. Shoppers will expect to buy your products directly on social media. They no longer want to see something on social media and have to click and then go to your website. Before the pandemic, social commerce was like a flashy opportunity for the most innovative businesses, like mattress disruptors, eyeglass disruptors.  But increased social media consumption combined with stay-at-home mandates increased the perfect conditions for all these businesses for social shopping explosion. And basically what that means is while they're on that social platform, they could just click and buy. They could just click and buy, which is pretty cool. Let me see here. I'm gonna come in and I'll stick up on the screen. Let's see here. I think you have to be genuine on TikTok. The ones where they don't relate or have a non-speaking video have limited appeal to me personally. Yeah, I want to weigh in on this and I want to tell you my opinion, but I don't know on TikTok, okay? It's not my thing. I'm just giving you the data so you can do with it what you want. Do you find people relate to a more guerrilla marketing style video or a superstructure type video? Well, I do my ads, and I did for many years on Facebook and I do them on YouTube now. And I got to tell you, I'm not doing a lot of ads right now. And the reason I'm not doing them is because we're out of product. So there's no point in advertising for more sales if you can't supply it. If business dies down a little bit, and I don't want it to, obviously, but if it does, then of course, I'll go into doing more of those ads. eMarketer predicts that social e-commerce will be an $80 billion industry by 2025. That's insane. It's riding on the coattails of equally massive e-commerce growth at an increase of 18% for 2020 alone. So guys, this is where you wanna be for your advertising. 81% of shoppers were already using social media to discover new brands and research products before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, okay? So many businesses have figured out that letting these users check out in the same app just makes sense, okay? It keeps them on the app. And I think the app likes it better too. They're probably gonna show your ads to a broader audience because if they're not leaving the app, then of course, they're keeping them on there and they're making more money. After all, navigating to a website is an extra step, okay? So the fewer the steps that we can put in front of somebody, the better our conversions are gonna be, okay? That's just the way it works. Especially on mobile where card abandonment rates are super high because a lot of people just click to see what the heck it was. Most social networks have an in-app shopping solution now, including live video. So that's something that you wanna look at. What was the other thing I wanted to tell you? Oh yeah, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are the most popular and TikTok, Twitter and YouTube aren't far behind. So they're all doing pretty well at this point. So things that you could do to help you in this area. If you sell products to people, you wanna set up a Facebook shop and an Instagram shop and test out product pins or Pinterest. There's some design flexibility in these shops. So make the customer experiences visually seamless as possible with your brand, okay? You wanna do that. Don't worry about getting your whole inventory up there. Just focus on putting like certain items on there. Maybe some of your hottest selling items. You wanna experiment with shoppable posts or even ads. This will allow customers to see your products in context and then place an order in just a few steps. So that's something you may wanna do. Let's see here. Let me get over to some of my comments. Paul's doing good today. Is eMarketer a site or YouTube channel to be checking out? It's a site. And I believe, let me just check one thing here, Paul. I want to check. So before I say it, that's a great question that they are a site right now and they do a lot of research. I just wanna see something before I say it. I just wanna see something before I say it. Right there, I'll do that one. All right. All right, now let's see here. Hang on. Did any of you guys watch the Oscars? Was anybody watching the Oscars? Did you see the video of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock? Let's see here. Okay, now I'm looking because I wanna make sure what Paul just asked about eMarketer. And I don't see a actual YouTube channel for them, which is weird, but I can check that later on and I'll let you know. Which platforms have the best ad rates to get most bang for the buck? I'm gonna go with TikTok right now and here's the deal. Here's the thing. You can't just say what is the ad rate because the ad rate is going to give you a rate based on how many people actually see the ad, but it doesn't tell you what your ROI is. So you've gotta kind of combine what the ad rate is with your ROI. And in addition to that, it's different for every business. So to say, you know, hey, Facebook's got the cheapest ads that wouldn't mean anything if nobody's clicking and nobody's buying. But then again, some people will buy on Facebook, let's say survival food, but then again, they won't buy t-shirts, okay? And I'm not saying that's the case. I'm just saying that different types of products do differently on different platforms and your ads matter a lot too. So you gotta switch up and do a whole bunch of different ads. All those things are important. I think Chris Rock got a lesson on boundaries. You know, I'm on the other side of that one, Paul. It's like, I think that comedians should be allowed to say whatever they want in the response of the audience can be we can watch them or not watch them. I don't think we should censor any comedians whatsoever. It could be really offensive. And I've been offended by comedians before. I know that there was somebody I subscribed to on a serious exam and I quit listening to them. But that's my choice. I don't think we should dictate what they're allowed to say because they're gonna break boundaries. They're gonna do that. That's really the nature of comedy is to go as far as you possibly can to where you actually offend somebody. There's been a lot of comedians in the past that have done that from Lenny Bruce on Ford to Richard Pryor to all those great comedians, Eddie Murphy. I mean, if you look at some of Eddie Murphy's stuff, and I don't wanna get off the bandwagon here, but if you look at some of Eddie Murphy's stuff, he was extremely offensive when he was on stage in the 80s and I think even into the 90s. I mean, he said some stuff that you couldn't say nowadays. But I believe all comedians should be able to say whatever they want. I do. I just believe all comedians should be able to. That's the only, I guess, area. You can't be like a president and call for the ouster of another world leader, if you know what I mean. But as a comedian, I think you should be able to just say whatever you want. You just should. No one will want, this is number four, by the way, of Keaton Pryor. No one's gonna wanna talk to your brand on the phone anymore. Between lockdowns and halting global supply chains and labor shortages and all that stuff, guys. Consumers have had more urgent questions for businesses than ever before, but they've discovered they can get answers to those questions more conveniently by using social media. So they don't really, I mean, I get so many of these, I guess, chat messages on our website now. In a Nielsen survey commissioned by Facebook, 64% of people said they would prefer to message rather than call a business. And according to Gartner, 60% of all customers service requests will be managed via digital channels by 2023. They're not calling anymore. We don't get many phone calls, we just don't. They put in support tickets. Despite the rise and demand, many organizations aren't ready to deliver effective customer support over social media yet. And I'll tell you, having a message bot, which is what we have on our sites, and I use Cartra, it comes with Cartra for free. You don't know what Cartra is, I'll have a link to Cartra in the description below. You can click the link, you can watch everything that Cartra does, but one of the things it does is it gives you one of these messaging bots. And it's not really a bot. I'm calling it a messaging bot. Messaging center where somebody can send you a message and you can respond to them. That's really nice and that's free with Cartra. So check that out. There's a link below. And if you like Cartra, you can get a trial for like a dollar if you want. So what do we need to do? We need to start thinking about social media, customer service strategy, okay? Have we done this in the past? A lot of us have not. Create network specific response templates for frequently asked questions. If you haven't already, try using a chat box if you want. I don't really like chat box. I like to actually answer them. I know it's not instantaneous, but it's real. Merge your customer service conversations into one tool naturally. There's all kinds of ones out there. I like Hootsuite inbox. So you can check that out. Train your social media marketing team and customer support best practices. Better yet, if you want higher dedicated customer service agents for your social channels, that's a good idea if you have the money to do so. Next thing, number five. Long form video is a bust. It's a bust except on YouTube, which is where we are now. We do long form video. If you're trying to do long form video on Facebook, it isn't gonna work. It just won't. I'm looking at a chart right now and I can't really put it up here, but the stat puts video link on social media platforms into perspective. If you have a zero to 62nd one, that is about 37% of the content. That's crazy. A 61 to 120 second one is about 23%, 121 to 240, 16%. So that accounts for about 80% of all of the videos out there. Two years ago with the advent of IGTV and Facebook watch, not to mention the supposed demise of Snapchat, there was a moment when we all thought that long form video was the future. For a second, we thought that. Now it still is on YouTube. YouTube known for its long form educational videos was rewarding videos that passed the 10 minute mark, of which all my videos are past 10 minutes. Okay, I just do that. And Facebook wanted to compete in the same arena, but see Facebook is not a video site and that's the problem. Businesses rushed to make TV series for their social platforms. Will Smith, the guy that slaps people, even named an IGTV show for national geographic. It seemed like Facebook might not only be taking on YouTube, but cable TV networks as well. So, but within TikTok arrived in North America and responds Instagram reels in late 2020 started and the rest is history. Fast forward to 2021. Instagram has depreciated IGTV. No one talks about Facebook watch anymore. And even YouTube in the last bastion of long form video on social media has introduced a new format. You guessed it, YouTube shorts. I don't do YouTube shorts. I don't get YouTube shorts. Maybe they were, and here's the thing guys, I'm gonna go through all this with you. There's a lot of suggestions here. You don't have to like or do all these things. I just wanna let you know about them. The success of reels in TikTok follows the success of stories. Another short form video format. We saw rapid user uptake from 2018 to 2020, but it's declining now. Facebook hasn't updated the 500 million user account for stories since the release of reels in 2020. So we can't really tell if it has grown, but attempts to copy the disappearing short form video format on Twitter and LinkedIn failed in 2021. So it's probably not working anymore. This suggests that social media users won't watch just any short videos. They have to be entertaining. They gotta be educational. They gotta be fun. Okay, if they're not fun, people are gonna watch it. Whatever the reason, HootSuite's 2020 social media trend survey shows that businesses prefer short form video too. They just do. Let me get to some of these comments here because I've been talking for a bit. A bit. All right, let's see here. Oh no, I think I'm caught up. Yes, I'm caught up on that, so I'm good, I'm good. But put your comments in there, guys. I definitely wanna hear what you've got to say about all this, super important to me. I love your opinions and you guys really keep the conversation going. So what can you do? If your goal is to reach new followers, experiment with TikTok videos. If your goal is to re-engage your existing Instagram audience, experiment with reels. I don't like either one of them, but I'm just telling you, I'm just giving you the data. If you have successful short form videos in one platform, try it on another because every business is different. Every person is different. Also take note of the results. As a result, you'll wanna translate videos to each channel. No TikTok watermarks on reels, okay? Just put a little bit of work into it. Number six, you'll outsource at least some of your engagement tactics to a creator. The creator economy has been around for about a decade but it boomed during the pandemic as people looked for ways to diversify their income due to unemployment or sudden influx. The spare time are even both. But we're not just talking about millionaire TikTok stars or YouTube stars. It's now considered common for regular folks to monetize their hobbies, create a second income or find freelance work through social media too. I mean, I have a second income on YouTube. Hence the rise of creators, okay? We have creators out there now.  As of 2021, get this. Over 50 million people consider themselves to be creators on social networks. 50 million, okay? That's a lot guys and businesses are set to spend 15 billion on influencer marketing in 2022. I get people contacting me all the time. They want me to promote their stuff. And I can't justify it based on how much they wanna pay me. Even if it's 1500 bucks or 5,000 bucks because if I spend that same amount of time talking about my business, I build up my business. If I spend time talking about their business, I just get one payment, you know, and it just doesn't matter much. As a followup to staying in contact with customers, thoughts on messenger versus email marketing.  So I don't like it. I like email marketing and people have said that they actually prefer to talk to businesses based on email marketing. They don't mind, you know, their brands contacting them through email, but they feel it's kind of intrusive. And I do too when people actually send me a message because I feel like that's a personal thing. So I don't like it. Social networks are both driving and responding to this boom by adding many new monetizations.  But some of the things, some of the monetizing tools you may want to use are going to be Twitter's paid super followers. That's kind of cool. YouTube brand content, TikTok's creator marketplace, Instagram collabs, Instagram's branded content ads and Facebook brand's collabs manager. All of those are really, really good and I would suggest that you check all of those out. But some of the things you can do, you can define your audience that you want to reach and which platform they're on, that's important. So when we say one platform's better than the other, it depends on the niche you're in, okay? Browse creator marketplaces make a short list of people who have clout with that audience. And get ready to pay fair rates. Even the most micro of creators know their worth and they won't be willing to work for free, okay? So you're going to have to pay these creators if you want to use them. You need to learn paid advertising even if you don't do ads yet because you will, you're going to do ads, 43% of respondents say the decline of organic reach and the need to increase paid advertising budgets was their biggest challenge. So organic reach is just nothing anymore, especially on Facebook, it's just dead. But it's very good on YouTube. So this makes sense. The decline of organic reach has been well documented for years. We all know about it, especially on Facebook and Instagram and most have limited funds to pay towards, you know, pay-to-play type tactics. So they're going to go towards these smaller creators now. The fact remains that the average organic reach for Facebook is about, what do you think it is? Put it in the comment section if you know. I'm going to tell you what the average organic reach is for Facebook. In other words, when you do a post, what percent of the people actually see it that are in your sphere, okay? And put that in the chat section, put it in the comment section below and I'll tell you what it is in just a second. So you can expand your social media strategy to other networks where it's still possible. You could do that, but if it's not possible, it ain't possible, okay? Do you think a survey to customers to find where they hang out is worth the effort? 100%, I think it's really good. I love surveys. You got to be careful with surveys.  If you survey 12 people, it doesn't mean much. If you survey 1200 or 12,000 people, it means a lot. So you really got to kind of look at how big is your survey, but I think they're definitely useful. So what else can you do? You can keep using organic social media content to increase brand awareness. And put in that chat there, guys, or the comment section, what do you think is a percent of organic reach on Facebook right now? Keeping using these things, the organic will still help because you're gonna get something back, okay? Experiment with promoting your top posts to new potential customers. Try that. If you're ready to level up your ads game, consider investing in a solution like Hootsuite Social Advertising. It allows you to publish ads on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn and track the performance in the same dashboard. Let's see here, I've got a comment. Yes, Paul, Paul, you're working hard. I appreciate it, buddy. 15% when organic, they definitely push target ads on you to get no results on Facebook. Here's the number. Are you ready for this? 5.2% is organic reach now. 5.2% is organic reach on Facebook. So 95% of your audience will never see your post. 95%, that's pretty amazing if you think about it. They're just not showing it to people because they don't make money on organic stuff. That's not true on YouTube. The eighth thing I wanna tell you about is you won't post anything without social listening strategy, okay? During the pandemic, many businesses jumped on board of social listening train for the first time. They liked being able to respond in real time to questions and conversations with their customer during, let's say, a health crisis. But as this world illness progressed and it was buffeted by ongoing political upheaval of labor shortage and increased resentment towards corporations, even more businesses learned that social listening could help them understand their customers, changing preferences and avoid the PR mishaps, okay? So the trend is backed by data from Hootsuite's 2022 social media trend survey. Many of the respondents said that they either somewhat or strongly agree that social listening has increased in value for their organization over the past 12 months. So get out there and see what people are doing. And here's some things you can do. Set up three search streams in your preferred social media management tool. If you don't have one yet, try Hootsuite. I think it's really good. I use Hootsuite. Your brand mentions, your branded hashtags, products, spokespeople, all that stuff. Your competitors brand mentions, brand hashtags, products and spokespeople. Look at that, okay? You're looking at search streams right now trying to see what's on there. Look for keywords, hashtags important to your industry as a whole, check that out. And I'm getting down to the last one now. The last one, let's see here. Paul's the only one working today. You got other people on here, guys. Put some questions in there, put some comments. Your VP will ask you to develop a social audio strategy. What's a social audio strategy? Now, Clubhouse launched in April 2020 but grew steeply in popularity in 2021. I personally think it's an entertainment thing and it's a waste of time. I really do. Twitter launched its social audio platform Spaces quickly after and Facebook is also reportedly trying to enter the live audio format. The problem with what I saw with Clubhouse and I think they've since changed it is as soon as you had a conversation on Clubhouse, it was only live, you could only hear it live and then it disappeared, it was gone off. So that was a bad thing. Now these elements had many social media teams including Hootsuite scrambling to decide whether it was worth investing in social audio strategy. And as of 2022, social media trends shows that the majority of businesses seem to think it's worth it. I personally don't like Clubhouse. I think it's a total waste of time but you know, it is what it is. We asked specifically how they were planning to invest. Results were fairly mixed across the board but the most popular option was posting leading audio live streams as thought leaders. Now I do believe in that and I'm doing that right now but this video is gonna be available as long as YouTube's there. Okay, this is not gonna go away. It's still gonna be there. People can still listen to it later on. And I get probably 99% of my views after I've gone live. Okay, and I get that. People look at it live and they go, okay, I'm busy right now but I'll go listen to that later. I get that all the time and that's fine. I don't mind them doing that. So let's break down the data a little further. The survey found that most often VPs in mid to large size companies who plan to invest in social media or audio and thought leadership as well as companies that were already confident about providing social media's return on investment use highly sophisticated social marketing tactics, okay? Which isn't for the regular person but that makes sense, right? Because they're high level people. I think, lastly, Clubhouse has started the ads that won't even be part of its business model, okay? I don't think it will be. I personally don't think it's gonna last but that's just my opinion. This is either a pro or a con for businesses depending on how you look at it. Either way, the lack of ads means integrating your brand into Clubhouse will take some imagination at best and I think it's a waste of time. The path to return on investment will be a long difficult path, I can tell you that. But here, there are some things you can do. You can have, excuse me, you don't have to choose one particular social audio platform over another which you should start thinking about how your businesses can take advantage of social audio in general. Once you've got an idea of the value that you could bring to listeners, start thinking about the different platforms that you wanna put it on. So let's say you wanna put it on spaces to engage your existing community on Twitter. You may wanna try Clubhouse if you want, connect to new followers and then bring them over to the other platforms. You may wanna look at some of the thought leaders, hopefully good, charismatic, humans and plenty of improv experience in your company to host a talk on behalf of your brand. Make sure you hire a pro moderator who can help minimize the risk of trolls and unwelcome questions, okay? And I expose myself to that every time I do a live and every now and then I'll get a troll, not a big deal. If no one fits the thought leader bill in your company, consider partnering with an influencer who matches your brand values to host a talk on your behalf. That's all you really gotta do, guys. It's not that difficult. Let's see here.  Rumble, Mark Cuban's fireside and still waiting to see Trump and social media platform. And you know what? Last week, Elon Musk said he did a survey to ask people if they thought that the social media platforms were censoring them too much and 70% of the people said they were. So he said he's thinking about a new social media platform too and I guarantee you that will grow fast just because it's Elon Musk. And I think Trump's will too, just because they have a huge following. And you can love or hate these people.  I'm just talking about what's gonna work for our business. And I think Elon Musk, oh my gosh. And then today, was it today or Friday? He announced he's thinking about a stock split again. Now I bought Tesla when it was really cheap. I think it was like $137. And then it did a five way stock split and I made a ton of money. And then I bought more of it and it's gonna do a stock split again. I think it could go crazy. So if you don't have Tesla, I think you need to buy Tesla. It's gone from like around six or 700 bucks about a week and a half ago to 1,100 this morning. All right, right around 1,100. Let me see what it is right now. Let's see here. Let me see what it is. And I think, I think, I think. Does anybody else listen to Clubhouse? Put that in the chat there if you listen to Clubhouse. Yeah, the stock's going through the roof right now guys. If you don't have Tesla, it's a 1084 right now or whole stock markets up right now. I know I'm up a lot since Friday. But yeah, check out Tesla guys. I mean, it's in the news. It's happening right now. So we wanna be very aware of that. Anyhow, that's what I got for you today. Are you ready? Are you ready for 2022? Who knows what 2023 is gonna be? We don't know. But we know 2022, all these things are happening. And to be part of the conversation, you gotta be on top of it. I hope I'm helping you stay on top of it. I hope I'm sharing the information that's gonna help you succeed, because that's my job, to share information to help you succeed. Guys, thank you so much for being here today. I really appreciate it. Wait a second, I'm gonna go into the comment here. Let me get Paul up here. If why I heard YouTube was at podcast movement, evolutions, and LA, YouTube is probably going to be at podcast movement in Dallas. This August in Dallas might be worth checking out this year. Yeah, you're right, Pauline. And I don't do a podcast. My wife does, and she's getting quite a following. She's gonna get way ahead of me, but that's okay, because she can pay the bills. That's okay. I don't mind that. We can both share those bills. And guys, next month, which is April, I will, I'm trying to see the dates, and I wanted to share this with you real quick. Real quick. All right, what is my calendar here? I'm gonna be out of town. And I have people staying here, so don't think about breaking into my house or anything. But I'm gonna be out of town. I think it's, shush, shush, shush, shush. The 15th, which is a Friday, so I probably won't be live, because I'm gonna be traveling through Monday. So I think that Friday and that Monday, I won't be able to be live. Maybe I can squeeze in something in between there, or maybe I can do some kind of live. I will be in New Orleans, celebrating Easter in New Orleans with a friend from high school, so that's gonna be pretty cool. Let's see here. See you Wednesday gang, Paul's saying goodbye. So yeah, I think, yeah, we're at 10.37. Heck, I'm way over, aren't I? Sorry about that, guys.  I appreciate you being here. Paul, thank you for all the input and notes. He's really good about that. Later on, I get a lot of comments from you guys, so don't forget, if you're not watching this live, don't forget to subscribe. Hit that red button. Turn it gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every single time I go live, or if I upload a video. Was that too fast? I think it was. Give me a thumbs up if you don't mind. Hit that thumbs up.  But if you've already hit the thumbs up, don't do it again because it unthumbs ups it. It makes it go back down. We don't want that to happen. We don't want things going down. That's not good. Guys, you have a great day. I appreciate you being here. I'll see you on Wednesday.