New Web Analytics Tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare – November 2, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbA8j0vmxY

New Web Analytics Tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare

Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. This week, among other news, Ray covers the new Web analytics tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare.
(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)
If you'd like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments.
In this Cast
Ray Sidney-Smith, Host
Show Notes
Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Call for Testing the Widgets Screen in Gutenberg 9.1 – Make WordPress Core 
WP Bakery WordPress Vulnerability Affects Millions of Sites 
WordPress Update Fiasco 
A New Way to Publish Your Blog Posts Simultaneously as Twitter Threads – The WordPress.com Blog 
WordPress can now turn blog posts into tweetstorms automatically | TechCrunch 
Web Stories for WordPress - Download the free WordPress plugin 
Facebook to charge for WhatsApp Business services 
Facebook & Instagram Drop Support For WordPress Embeds 
Facebook Is Removing Its Restrictions on Text Content in Facebook Ad Images | Social Media Today 
Google Podcasts Manager shows you search impressions and clicks from Google Search 
Google Podcasts Manager 
Frequently Asked Questions - Amazon Music for Artists 
Windows 10 update removes Adobe Flash Player for good - CNET 
Cloudflare Announces Free Web Analytics - Even for Non-Customers - Search Engine Journal 
Cloudflare Launches Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress – WordPress Tavern 
Clarity Dashboard 
Microsoft's Digital Marketing Center for search and social management adds features, opens beta 
Social media - Digital Marketing Center 
Meet the next generation of Google Analytics - Analytics Help 
Discover the Next Generation of Google Analytics : Google 
Google Assistant gets custom shortcuts for directly interacting with third-party Android apps - The Verge 
Apple supposedly building a search engine to rival Google Search | Financial Times 
Get 2021 health coverage. Health Insurance Marketplace| HealthCare.gov 
Everything You Need to Vote - Vote.org 
Events – W3 Consulting
Join us in Web and Beyond Community

Raw Text Transcript
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases.
Read More

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:04 Hi there, everybody, and welcome to web and beyond live for November 2 2020. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith. And I am president of W three consulting as well as managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable WordPress and web hosting along with domain registration services and other web related services for small business. And so I welcome everybody here to web and beyond live, where I come to you each week to talk about digital marketing and productivity, and other technology news that I want to share with you that's related to your small business. And today we have an action packed show. As you know, the last three weeks or so, I have been covering cybersecurity topics, which are not the sexiest topics of all, but I tried to do my best to help guide folks through really a fairly important topic in National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And so with that out of the way, we are now going to make our way back to our normal digital marketing and productivity and technology news that I cover each week. And so this week, I have lots to cover,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbA8j0vmxY

New Web Analytics Tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare

Each week, President of W3 Consulting and Managing Director of W3C Web Services (https://web.w3cinc.com/) Ray Sidney-Smith broadcasts live to update you on the latest small business digital marketing and business productivity technology updates you need to be effective. This week, among other news, Ray covers the new Web analytics tools from Microsoft and Cloudflare.

(If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://webandbeyondcast.com/ for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.)

If you’d like to discuss this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post), or feel free to contact me here about any other questions or comments.

Ray Sidney-Smith, Host

Resources we mention, including links to them will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Call for Testing the Widgets Screen in Gutenberg 9.1 – Make WordPress Core 
WP Bakery WordPress Vulnerability Affects Millions of Sites 
WordPress Update Fiasco 
A New Way to Publish Your Blog Posts Simultaneously as Twitter Threads – The WordPress.com Blog 
WordPress can now turn blog posts into tweetstorms automatically | TechCrunch 
Web Stories for WordPress – Download the free WordPress plugin 
Facebook to charge for WhatsApp Business services 
Facebook & Instagram Drop Support For WordPress Embeds 
Facebook Is Removing Its Restrictions on Text Content in Facebook Ad Images | Social Media Today 
Google Podcasts Manager shows you search impressions and clicks from Google Search 
Google Podcasts Manager 
Frequently Asked Questions – Amazon Music for Artists 
Windows 10 update removes Adobe Flash Player for good – CNET 
Cloudflare Announces Free Web Analytics – Even for Non-Customers – Search Engine Journal 
Cloudflare Launches Automatic Platform Optimization for WordPress – WordPress Tavern 
Clarity Dashboard 
Microsoft’s Digital Marketing Center for search and social management adds features, opens beta 
Social media – Digital Marketing Center 
Meet the next generation of Google Analytics – Analytics Help 
Discover the Next Generation of Google Analytics : Google 
Google Assistant gets custom shortcuts for directly interacting with third-party Android apps – The Verge 
Apple supposedly building a search engine to rival Google Search | Financial Times 
Get 2021 health coverage. Health Insurance Marketplace| HealthCare.gov 
Everything You Need to Vote – Vote.org 
Events – W3 Consulting
Join us in Web and Beyond Community

Raw Text Transcript

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:04
Hi there, everybody, and welcome to web and beyond live for November 2 2020. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. And I am president of W three consulting as well as managing director of WCC web services, which provides affordable WordPress and web hosting along with domain registration services and other web related services for small business. And so I welcome everybody here to web and beyond live, where I come to you each week to talk about digital marketing and productivity, and other technology news that I want to share with you that’s related to your small business. And today we have an action packed show. As you know, the last three weeks or so, I have been covering cybersecurity topics, which are not the sexiest topics of all, but I tried to do my best to help guide folks through really a fairly important topic in National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. And so with that out of the way, we are now going to make our way back to our normal digital marketing and productivity and technology news that I cover each week. And so this week, I have lots to cover, including at the end, we’re going to talk about Microsoft and CloudFlare really trying to step up their challenge to Google Analytics, that’s going to be a really interesting thing coming down the pike. But first note that we are in November now we have just passed daylight saving time. So we are now back in eastern standard time here in the United States. So if you happen to be watching from another timezone, or from another country, just note that we are now in eastern standard time. So we have, you know, changed times. So this is now 11am. Eastern Standard Time, in case you weren’t aware. Okay, so let’s get into the news. Because I have a lot of it. We’ve been backed up backlogged from doing all the cybersecurity news over the past cyber security topics over the past weeks. But let’s just get into some of the things that I wanted to cover. This week. We’re going to talk about WordPress, we’re going to talk about Facebook, we’re going to talk about some podcast News. I’m going to talk about a more analytics news when we get to the end, and lots of little goodies in between. So let’s first start off with some, just a couple of things out of WordPress. First and foremost, WordPress is working toward WordPress 5.6, to come out sometime in December, and they recently put out a call for

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:25
people to test their widgets screen in Gutenberg 9.1. And so for those who are not aware, Gutenberg is now the block based drag and drop editor that you use when you’re inside WordPress. And since we host words WordPress websites, obviously we’re big fans of WordPress. And WordPress is calling for testers for that system. So if you are if you have the fortitude to play around with an experimental set of features, the widget screen is basically that part of the the area of WordPress where you can go into appearance and change those widgets where they show up within the theme of your WordPress website. This is very powerful stuff. Because we’re bringing now the editor functions, the Gutenberg editor functions into the widget screen. We know they’re trying to bring the navigation screen online and those kinds of things. So So in essence, we’re bringing what was now the kind of back end drag and drop capabilities. They’re trying to bring that now to the front end of the site. So it’s going to be very, very powerful. It’s not going to get rid of drag and drop web builders like WP bakery and other kinds of tools like that, but it is definitely going to give us far more power in the system. Speaking of WP bakery, if you have WP bakery installed, I highly highly recommend that you make sure you update it There was a recent vulnerability and it’s obviously affecting all installations of WP bakery page builder. So if you have not updated WP bakery in any length of time, make sure that you do okay. You will also note that WordPress made a little bit of a gap recently, they installed a new release that was in alpha state and they push that out to all of the WordPress installations globally. Now, I’m not sure all of the WordPress installations got updated. But either way, they fixed it. They went back and they rolled back the update. So there was a maintenance maintenance release that was pushed out so all WordPress websites that were automatically updating should have gotten that update and rolled back. That being the case what you need to do. Every person who has a WordPress installation, what you need to do. That means you if you have a WordPress installation, you must go to your WordPress installation, login. Make sure all your plugins are updated, make sure all of your themes are updated. But go into your themes directory. And you will see that WordPress probably now has all of the default themes that were created in 20 2010 2011. through, you know, whatever 2020 themes are probably now installed in your WordPress theme directory. If you are not using them delete all but one of those default themes just as a backup theme in case something happens with the theme you are using. So delete those excess themes, you don’t need them. And they pose somewhat of a security risk if you do not keep them up to date. Likewise, WordPress also probably installed its default akismet the spam filtering plugin, so go to plugins, and see if a Kismet is installed. If you are using another spam plugin, then go ahead and you can go ahead and delete a Kismet because you don’t need it. If you’re using a Kismet and all’s well there, keep on you know, using it, you’re good to go. But just know that it did do that process of you know, installing that accidentally. And so we are going to have to deal with that. So if you have WordPress installation, go go do that, because it’s just good for security. Next up, though, I thought this was really interesting. So WordPress has a plugin called jetpack. And what it does is it brings a whole bunch of functions and features that are normally present in wordpress.com, which is the hosting that is provided by automatic the company, they have their own hosting, because they develop WordPress, the open source software, they host WordPress websites themselves. And they have they have a plugin called jetpack, they maintain jetpack, as well as WooCommerce, and several other, you know, plugins of that nature. And they recently added a new feature that allows you inside jet jetpack to basically tweet an entire blog post. And so what that means is, is that I’m going to show you the article here on screen. But what you’re what you see here is, you now have the ability to take a blog post that you’ve written. And what it will do now is it will go ahead and break the whole blog post into

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:59
a tweet thread. So if you’re not familiar with Twitter, if you tweet once, and then you open up that tweet on your screen, you can click the Reply button, that little comment looking button. And each of those subsequent tweets from you, not from others, but from you specifically becomes what’s considered a thread. Now that thread can include comments from others and that kind of thing. But the primary focus here is that items that you post are showing up in that thread and it’s readable. This is very powerful for those who want to write a tweet that is more than the, you know, 280 characters that you can fit inside of a single tweet. So that Twitter thread now pushed from WordPress as content through jetpack now gives you the ability to have embedded images, video, audio content, all kinds of different, you know, multimedia embedded within the tweet, and it will then just naturally display that content in the Twitter thread that is published from the blog post. This is very powerful stuff. And I’m really looking forward to writing some posts and pushing them out as Twitter threads to see what happens in the tweet thread. So if you see me on Twitter, doing some of that, that is what I will be. That’s why it’s doing it because I want to see how it all works. In that sense. Okay. Moving right along, we have some other news out of WordPress. And that is, in addition to being able to Oh, I just wanted to close out that is. So as a reminder, Google has launched something called web stories for WordPress. So if I, if you if you’ve missed a couple episodes, and you weren’t aware, please know that this exists. And you should start using it. ASAP. I’ve now started seeing it show up in my google news app and in Google discover, and it’s pretty amazing. So these are basically stories, the stories format that you have come to know through Snapchat, and Instagram, and Facebook and otherwise, the Instagram Stories feature. Now it’s also in LinkedIn. LinkedIn has stories from the mobile app. So if you are aware of stories, you know the power of stories, you can now do this directly inside of your WordPress installation. So go check it out. Very, very powerful stuff happening there. Okay, moving right along to now, some Facebook news. Let’s start off with the the bad news. Facebook is deprecating their ability for you to embed your Instagram and Facebook posts that you have embedded in the site. So this has already happened. So Facebook is already you know, dropping support for embedded content on WordPress websites. What that means is is that you are going to have to create an IF YOU’RE techie, you’re going to have to create a Facebook developer account. You may have to do this either way. This that’s that’s the first step. And then go ahead and register a Facebook app, you’ll then go ahead and be able to then embed content

Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:12
directly inside the WordPress installation. This all requires quite a bit of tech Enos, there are instructions for that I’ve linked in the video and the show notes. So you can go check that out. But if that’s not quite your flavor, if you need a WordPress plugin, there are two WordPress plugins that will overcome this. So if you’ve ever embedded Facebook and or Instagram content on your website, that will break very soon if it hasn’t already. And so there’s two Oh, embed plus, oh, embed is the technology that’s used to embed content across the web. And WordPress supports many sites to be able to do that. So if you’re in a WordPress website, for example, you could take a YouTube URL, and just paste that as a new line in your WordPress installation, and it will naturally embed the content right of the display the video, you can go ahead and go from there. You can also do that with another WordPress link. So for example, if you took a blog post from my website, went over to your WordPress website and pasted that link into your own blog post, it would naturally display an embedded and embedded form, it wouldn’t be the whole blog post, but it would be kind of a little beautiful embed of that WordPress blog post the title and link to it and a little bit of the preview text of that particular blog post. And then you can go ahead and write commentary and so on and so forth about that blog post, right. So I’ll embed is very powerful technology, it works for Twitter, and many other sites. Well, WordPress is dropping support for Facebook and Instagram, because Facebook is dropping support for Oh embed. So Oh, embed plus is one of those plugins and allows you to be able to do that either way, you’re gonna have to create a Facebook developer account. So you’re gonna have to do that one way or the other, I believe, then smash balloon plugins, the Smash balloon plugin is the other one that will be able to allow you to go ahead and do that. So you register your Facebook developer account, you create the app inside of Facebook. This is that’s all fairly easy. That’s not difficult to do. I mean, it’s just basically checking some boxes and filling in some data fields. And and then Facebook will pop out an API key for you to provide 201 bed plus or smash balloons, but just know that that is happening. Okay. Secondary bad news, Facebook is going to start charging for WhatsApp business services. So Facebook said on October 22, I’m sorry, on Thursday, the Thursday prior to October 20. Oh, yeah, on October 22, they noted that they’ll start charging for WhatsApp for business. So in essence, they’re going to start charging for having a WhatsApp business account. As well as they’re going to continue, obviously, to charge for advertising on Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. So they’re going to start charging for its chat services. And it says that they’re, you know, just going to start offering, you know, more and more opportunities to build revenue. You know, for Facebook, by virtue of that, I guess they have to, you know, support the system somehow. And so they’re going to be doing that. So then was a little bit of good news. I just came across this and didn’t realize this had happened. But in September, Facebook has now removed the restriction. I haven’t removed the content guidance, and the guidelines on this, but the restriction on text content in Facebook ads has now been removed. Meaning that once upon a time, if you had more than 20% text in an image of an ad, it was automatically rejected. And then you could appeal to say, hey, there’s a reason why I have more than 20% text here. Going forward. Now though, as of September 7, it says here, Facebook started removing that restriction completely on ad images on Facebook. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:56
that’s very, very powerful and very useful. Of course, they still recommend that you keep less than 20% of your ad images, you know, to to text. So just be mindful of that. But it’s great that they removed it as a restriction so that you don’t get those blocked. Okay. Moving along. We have some podcasts news, one Google podcasts manager is the application that you can claim your podcast. And if you have a podcast, you can claim your podcast and Google podcasts manager by going to podcasts manager.google.com. And they’re now at the bottom of the screen. Very cool, you are now able to see the search data. So very similar to how you would see this in Google Search Console. You can now see how many impressions that you got from Google search. So I have my podcast ProductivityCast. I can see just looking here at the podcast manager screen I can see how many impressions I got in the past 30 days 28 days. It shows me how many clicks through Google search. I got to the podcast and its click through rate and then below that, it shows me topics search terms, basically what people searched to find the podcast. And then on the right hand side, the top discovered episodes. So this is showing me a top 10 list, you know, I can obviously keep going to see more of them. And you can then sort those by impressions by clicks, and by click through rate. So very cool on Google to continue to give you more information to be able to level up your podcast in that way. Next up is Amazon has recently launched within the amazon music platform, Amazon podcasts. So if you have a podcast, or you planning to have a podcast, Amazon now gives you a way to submit your podcast directly to amazon music. Of course, amazon music has 55 million global customers. And now they are giving you the ability to, you know, syndicate your podcast, to the Apple Music, you know, customers that are in there. I know, with Amazon Prime, I have amazon music. And while I don’t pay for amazon music, for the additional, you know, on the amazon music Unlimited, I still access amazon music, and I’m capable of now listening to podcasts directly in there. So that’s very, very cool. Okay, so that’s, I think all of my podcast news. Oh, yeah, a little bit of security news, Windows 10, has recently announced that they are going to kill off Adobe Flash Player for good. I mean, thank goodness. So Flash Player, which is very popular in the 90s, as some of you know, is a tool that has just it’s run its course it is now full of security risks. And slowly but surely all the major browsers have been getting rid of support for it and limiting its view. So if you have a website that once upon a time, ran on flashplayer, I can’t imagine you’re getting any traffic any longer, because, you know, they’ve basically gotten rid of it on all the platforms. But windows 10 now has now removed support for it. And and actually is going to, you know, preemptively remove Adobe Flash Player from devices that are running Windows 10. Now, so in this update, as of December 31 2020, the software reaches end of support completely. But before that, there will be an update that goes ahead and deletes Adobe Flash Player from your device. Anyway. Unfortunately, this is you know, not unfortunately, I mean, just realistically, this is not a surprise, you know, Adobe, apple, Facebook, Google and Mozilla, which produces Firefox, all have plans to end support for flash by by December 2020. So flash is dead, and the Flash Player is dead. And we should all not mourn the loss because it’s a good, it’s a good death.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:49
All right, next up is kind of what’s called the featured story this week. But I wanted to talk about all of the various web analytics players that are now in the market. First and foremost, CloudFlare announced two products in the past couple of weeks. And and I’m sorry, in the past month, and both of them are pretty interesting. So first, CloudFlare announced a free web analytics tool to really rival Google Analytics. It’s not at all as powerful as Google Analytics. But for those of you who are not using an analytics tool, that is you have not already set up Google Analytics, I would recommend that you set up Google Analytics. But for for those of you who are really anti Google, or if you just have have a very light need, right, you just want to know how many people are showing up on your website and some basic statistics about it. CloudFlare now has a tool called CloudFlare web analytics. They call it a privacy first web analytics service, quote unquote, privacy first, but they are trying to focus on giving you fairly accurate web analytics tools. Now, the good part about the way in which I see this is that I always recommend to clients that they have multiple analytics tools on their website. And the reason for that is that you can’t and shouldn’t always trust only one tool to giving you data statistics are malleable statistics are just a snapshot based on the set of algorithms and the design of the software for those systems. So you really have to be mindful of how those how that how those data are shown to you. And I like to see multiple versions of it. So for me, we run not only Google Analytics, but several other tools that give us different views of our data analytics. So that we’re able to see that if if all the data kind of looks the same, then we know everything’s running right. But if for some reason something seems very skewed in one tool, and seems normal or normative and the others, then we’re better able to understand maybe, and troubleshoot what might be going on and why the analytics tool might be giving us you know, this randomly difficult And data. So CloudFlare has announced the web analytics tool, it’s free, you can go ahead and install it. And there’s links to that in the notes here. Next up, CloudFlare, then immediately turned around in the first week of October and announced a new product are calling the automatic platform optimization for WordPress service. And this new service, basically, is supposed to do a whole bunch of performance improvements for sites that can be slowed down by either shared hosting slow database lookups. Or if you have a bunch of plugins on your system. And it turns out that it really, really works. So I wanted to test it out. So I took it and I placed it on one of my WordPress websites. And and I just basically installed it, it’s five bucks a month. So it was really nominal in terms of cost. And I turned it on. And within just a short period of time, the site is blazing fast. I mean, it moved the site from loading in eight to 10 seconds, down to less than two seconds. So it is doing lots of optimization in the background. It took very little effort to set up. And I was really, really pleased with its setup. So if you are looking if you’re in shared hosting, right, whether that’s what WCC web services or with another shared hosting account, and you are looking to be able to speed up your site really quickly, for five bucks extra per month, you can really, you know, speed up the speed of your site with this aapo for webs for WordPress, the automatic platform optimization for WordPress service through CloudFlare. So check it out. Next up, then Microsoft in any amoud not to be done up by CloudFlare or Google has gone ahead and announced the release of clarity. Clarity is their own web analytics tool that allows you to be able to do a fairly similar things to Google Analytics. They’re trying to push some front end pieces that seem to be different one, they’re calling it session playbacks where you can watch individual session recordings, in essence, examining users behavior as it happens. Now, of course, I’m presuming that they’re not telling you who those users are, right, they’re going to keep that abstracted. So you can identify individual users. But the idea here is that you can watch what a user does, through these things they call session playback, that’s going to be really interesting to watch. They’re also doing heat mapping, like Google Analytics. And so they’re bringing heat maps, which means just like colored views of where people click on screen and where they’re scrolling, and how they basically navigate the website behavior in the Google Analytics terms. Of course,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 22:44
they’re going to be giving you insights in terms of geography, and people who are scrolling and who, where people are navigating the site in terms of data. And then of course, trying to give you back information that can help you build on that. So at the present moment, clarity is a free service. And they are noting that they are GDPR compliant as a data controller for visitors and processor processor for the data gathered by clarity on your site. So they they are saying they are GDPR compliant, which is a great step in the right direction. And so yeah, you can get started by going to clarity.microsoft.com, as well. Microsoft also announced in October, that they were launching a free platform for us small businesses, it’s called the digital marketing center. And the digital marketing center allows you to be able to set up basically a one stop shop for advertising across various platforms on various, you know, campaign platforms. So you can do this across Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And so it has moved into beta, it’s open, it’s free for you to be able to set up the feature that I think is really amazing is that if you actually go to the to the digital marketing center, I haven’t tried this myself. But what they’re saying is, is that you’re able to actually use it to create and publish content across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. So if your dominant social networks are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you should be able to publish that content, you can draft and schedule that content directly in the platform. Now, mind you, you can right now schedule content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Now, it says here, this is really weird. so on. So Microsoft owns LinkedIn. So that’s to be expected that it should manage and allow you to do that content on here. Let me just pull this up on screen so you can see this. So right here, it says, draft and schedule content to publish on linked, which I presumed was LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter accounts. But then when we go over to the Social Media tab, it says publish content. So publishing content, draft and schedule content to publish across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and then you post up to 10 of your different profiles across Facebook and Twitter. So very interesting, because there seems to be some discrepancy between which platforms are supported. But I’m gonna set this up and see how it works for me, and and you can go ahead and do that, let me know what you find. Because obviously, there’s a little bit of discrepancy in terms of which platforms are supported there. Okay, so with that, we have CloudFlare, with a new web analytics tool, we have Microsoft with clarity, their new web analytics tool. And of course, Google has been working on Google Analytics for so there is currently running Google Analytics, Universal Analytics. That is the current product that everybody has. But Google has now built the next generation as they’re calling it Google analytics platform. So you can now create those, they can run side by side with your Universal Analytics. And you can now see what Google is doing. In addition to that, Google has created a nice little force that is called discover the next generation of Google Analytics. This is for beginners, it’ll take you less than an hour. And it’ll walk you through Google Analytics for and what it can do, how it’s different from the Universal Analytics. And you can kind of see how those pieces work. So if you’re interested in learning about that, you can go ahead and take that course. All right. So with that, we have just a couple of other items. And I’m trying to get back to my screen here. Where is my? Where’s my screen? It seems like the the screen sharing in the system doesn’t like me. All right, there we go. So with that, oh, I wanted to show you this, this is really quite brilliant. So the handler, as you know, is one of my favorite tools. It is a graphic design tool. And it has so many other features and functions in it, it has really leveled up my own productivity when it comes to doing this stuff. And what they have done is they have allowed that they’ve created now the the real time collaboration functionality inside of Canva. So in essence, what you can do now in Canva, in addition to the content planner, where you can schedule content to go out to various social media platforms, they are now giving you the ability to see changes in real time, you can

Raymond Sidney-Smith 27:41
save, you know, work, as you make your way along, you can comment and share thoughts and feedback. And and you know, work across any location on any device, all in real time. This is really, really cool to see, kind of like Google Docs, or Google Sheets, or Google Slides, where you’re live inside a document with your team, you’re now able to go ahead and make changes in real time and really speed up the production process

Raymond Sidney-Smith 28:08
for these kinds of things, so kudos to Canva for that. So if you are not using Canva, you absolutely should. You can use the free version and figure out whether that’s good for you. And then kind of go from there. A couple of quick little Google notes. I will be doing a separate episode for the What’s New at Google for both September and October 2020. So all of that Google News, I’m going to put into an episode that’ll go out on web and beyond cast. And then later this week, I actually have my second interview in a series that I’m doing on franchises with franchise coach, Pfizer and Kemal so you can go ahead and on Thursday, you’ll see that episode, Episode 20, of web and beyond cast go out in the podcast feed and on web and beyond cast.com. So Google Assistant is leveling up some productivity, they are now allowing third party Android apps to be utilized within Google Assistant. So you can say things like, hey, big G, which is the term I use for calling the Google Assistant. But hey, big G, you can say send a tweet, and then it will trigger google assistant to go ahead and open up and allow you to by voice, share a tweet. That’s really, really powerful. So lots of different applications are launched with that functionality. So far, you can use Etsy you can use YouTube, Instagram Nikes. Adaptive sneakers, didn’t know they existed, but you can use those tik tok Spotify Postmates, discord, Walmart, Snapchat, Uber, Amazon, Facebook and others. So this is very, very powerful stuff. And so now more and more voice controls will be brought to Google Assistant with these custom shortcuts. So that’s really powerful. I also am going to be talking about in the What’s New at Google episode. Apple is supposedly developing an alternative to Google search. I’m going to kind of debunk and discuss what that really is all about. And and there’s lots of other Google News that I have to cover in that episode. Okay, so we have run to the end of our time, I have a couple of announcements before we close out. And I just wanted to bring up a couple of items, so that you’re all aware. So first and foremost, today at noon, if you happen to be watching live, or you’ve watched this within the next 30 minutes, I’ll be hosting the Small Business virtual roundtable for November, that happens at noon Eastern, and we’re actually talking about podcasting, how you can use podcasting to market your business. So if you’re interested, go ahead and join us at noon. You can also go to web and beyond community or if you go to W the number three c Inc. I NC comm so w three c i NC comm forward slash events, you’ll find the link on Eventbrite to it. Or you can go to weapon beyond community and inside the community, you’ll see also a link to do that. So you can join the event from either place, but you have to register in one of those in order to get the zoom link to join us. Also note, I have now launched the web and beyond webinars, whether it be on webinars is going to be our new webinar series. And it’ll be done in conjunction with the launch actually of our new email newsletter that we’ve been working on. And it’s gotten a little bit gnarly with the pandemic. So we are working very hard to get out the new monthly newsletter. And so as soon as we have that together, that’ll probably go out mid month each month, and just have all kinds of content and news and other kinds of interesting things that we want to share with you all in the newsletter. But either way web and beyond webinars will begin this month. Our first one will actually be this week, this Thursday 11. Five, we’re going to be doing one on podcast marketing changes, you need to know, again, if you go to W three c inc.com, w three c i nc.com forward slash events, you’ll find the link to register for it, it’s free. And you can join us for that, I’m gonna be talking about all of the various things that have changed over the past year in podcasting, and why you should be paying attention to podcast marketing, then 1119, I’m going to be covering Google workspace for small business. That is to give everybody updates. G Suite has been rebranded as Google workspace, and there are some really big changes that have happened on that side. So I want to cover that. So Google’s Google workspace for small business 11 1912. Three, I’ll be doing a kind of Year in Review year in preview for digital marketing. So small business, digital marketing, and 2021 will be the webinar on December 3, and then we’ll close out the year with 1217, where I’ll be doing my lessons from a year of going live. So I’ve been going live to you all here on YouTube and the other platforms each week, throughout the year. And I’m going to be giving you my best tips and tricks for what I’ve learned in this whole process of going live kind of you know, not in obscurity. But I’ve been doing this to you the small audience that is and has been paying attention to me. And I want to share with you what I’ve learned, and what I plan to do with this whole live stream program going forward into 2021. And I’m looking forward to closing out the year. And having that conversation with you all in the web and beyond webinar. If you want to find out about any of these events, stay on top of things and also interact with other small businesses, you probably know that I’ve launched a community called web and beyond community. And you get to that by going to www dot web and beyond commute dot community. And so if you’re watching me live, you’ll see that link on screen, make sure to put in the www, but www dot web and beyond dot community. And that will take you into the community where you’ll find all the events posted, and you’ll be able to RSVP to them as we put them out. So please join us lots of fun there to final notes. I wanted to make sure everybody who if you do not have health insurance or health care, insurance, make sure that you know that the open enrollment has begun. So if you go to healthcare.gov, and you’re a freelancer solopreneur or otherwise, know that open enrollment started. And so it is through December 15, I think you can register so you can get started with your 2021 coverage by going to healthcare.gov and starting the process there. And then last but not least, tomorrow, at least in the United States. It is election day. And so I would be remiss if with my civic duty if I didn’t let you all know that tomorrow is election day. And obviously, no matter what the political persuasion, voting is important in, you know in every way, especially as it relates to small business, so go out there and vote for the candidate you believe is going to help small business The most and just go vote. So make a plan to vote, go to vote.org and figure it all out. And I look forward to seeing you guys at the polls, hopefully with a mask and socially distance.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 35:12
But I wanted to just let you all know about that and make sure that you go out and vote. Okay, we’ve come to the end of our time together this week for web and beyond live. If you’ve enjoyed the live stream, please feel free or the video, please feel free to go ahead and hit the thumbs up icon that helps us make new small business friends. And so thank you for doing that. We have a question feel free to leave a comment wherever you might be watching or listening. And of course, I have on Twitter, you can go ahead and you know, tweet at me or you can go ahead and DM me direct message at W the number three so w the number three consulting on Twitter. We come back here every Monday at 11am. Eastern and unless otherwise noted on our social channels for another time. It’s usually 11am Eastern, and so I look forward to seeing you guys again then. Thank you so much for spending this webinar beyond live with me. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith on behalf of W three consulting and WCC web services, have a great week ahead marketing and managing on the web and beyond. Take care everybody