In this podcast episode, Michelle Frechette and Corey Maass discuss their experiences at a WordPress Rochester April Meetup. Michelle recounts giving a talk on WordPress and image optimization, focusing on audience engagement and technical challenges. Corey reflects on the presentation’s success and its technical and engagement aspects. They also explore broader topics like content management, SEO, accessibility, and the balance between technical and non-technical content. Additionally, they address the difficulties of organizing Meetups, the need for engaging content, and the nuances of marketing and self-promotion for introverts and small businesses. The conversation highlights the importance of community knowledge-sharing and the journey of building an online presence.
Top Takeaways:
- Value of Incremental Growth: The participants recognize the importance of celebrating even small victories in their online presence, such as an increase in views on tweets or website traffic. They understand that consistent efforts over time lead to gradual growth and are encouraged by the progress they observe.
- Engagement with Community: Michelle emphasizes the significance of community engagement, not just content marketing, in building their online presence. They discuss strategies for interacting with their audience, participating in Meetups, and leveraging social media to foster connections and expand their reach.
- Adapting Marketing Strategies: Corey acknowledges the need to adapt marketing strategies based on their current resources and audience size. They discuss the challenges of scaling efforts and recognize the importance of starting where they are, rather than aiming for strategies designed for larger organizations.
- Balancing Work and Marketing: Corey reflects on the challenge of balancing work responsibilities with marketing efforts. He highlights the need to prioritize tasks and allocate time effectively, recognizing that while marketing is essential, it cannot consume all his resources. They discuss strategies for maintaining a sustainable marketing effort while managing other responsibilities.
Mentioned in the show:
- WordPress Rochester’s April Meetup
- Yoast
- WordPress TV
- WordPress events
- Give WP
- Stellar WP
- WordCamps
- Meetups
- Graham Lawlor
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Post Status
🙏 Sponsor: WordPress.com
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You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:
- Corey Maass
- Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis.
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Transcript
Corey Maass (00:00:00) – Weeeee, wooo, weee
Michelle Frechette (00:00:05) – Welcome to our live stream, where we play with color and everything else. Wait till the yellow thing again, because that was fun.
Corey Maass (00:00:13) – Well, this is like you just. You just shouldn’t give me this much control, because then I like I’m like, okay, I, I know that looks bad.
Michelle Frechette (00:00:22) – I don’t even know how you’re doing the things you’re doing.
Corey Maass (00:00:25) – Maybe that looks bad. Saturation. I could burn the hell out of it.
Michelle Frechette (00:00:30) – Is this a video filters thing?
Corey Maass (00:00:34) – It’s so the camera that I have comes with. Comes with these things. You know I look.
Michelle Frechette (00:00:44) – Look. Look at me. I match a brand now. I can’t hear you anymore. I don’t know if I lost you or if you lost me. Or you’re just moving your lips and playing a day after April Fool’s joke on me. No.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:16) – It might be my headphones. Oh, no, I can hear. That’s not my headphones. But let me switch them just to be safe.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:35) – Okay. Try now. Nope. Still don’t have anything. It’s you. It’s on your end. It’s on your end. Okay, cool. Well, then I’m putting my headphones back on. It’s you. As Taylor Swift would say, it’s me. I’m the problem. It’s me.
Corey Maass (00:01:51) – It’s me. There we go.
Michelle Frechette (00:01:52) – I hear you again. Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:01:54) – So I think I told you like my computer. Went wooo last week. And so I had to rebuild everything, and it still seems to be having some of the same issues, which is very frustrating.
Michelle Frechette (00:02:07) – That’s unfortunate.
Corey Maass (00:02:09) – Yeah. No. No fun., but yeah. So I was trying to say that, so I, I have a fancy camera, and that’s so it comes with all these options to tweak, including. Can I do it? Can I do it? Cameraman. So the like. Follow me.
Michelle Frechette (00:02:33) – Oh.That’s psychedelic.
Corey Maass (00:02:35) – Isn’t that weird?
Michelle Frechette (00:02:36) – That is a little weird. Yeah.
Michelle Frechette (00:02:38) – Especially when I get that close and personal.
Corey Maass (00:02:44) – Which is why I don’t use it. I actually like I, I when I bought it, I part of the reason I was like, oh, this would be neat. But I was like, no, it’s like it ends up being like really soupy.
Michelle Frechette (00:02:56) – So yeah, I’ve seen people on TikTok that have like the whatever the camera follows you or whatever, and like it can suddenly get distracted by the dog walking in the room or.
Corey Maass: Right, exactly.
Michelle Frechette: A kid and or another person or whatever. And it’s like, wait, I’m over here. Come back.
Corey Maass (00:03:11) – Yeah. Don’t like it. So.
Michelle Frechette (00:03:15) – Well, let’s talk about last night’s. I like to call them dog and pony shows. I think they’re fun when you get just a great term. I use when I used to work for, in the higher education market, we would go and we would, you know, do recruiting. We called it our dog and pony show. But, so last night you were my guest at WordPress Rochester’s April Meetup, and it was on April 1st.
Michelle Frechette (00:03:38) – But it was no joke.
Corey Maass (00:03:39) – It was it was very, very serious. It was no joke.
Michelle Frechette (00:03:45) – No joke. But yeah, so it was I thought it went really well. People had a lot of questions, which was awesome. Sometimes I have guests come in and they talk about whatever the subject is. And a lot of the time, I mean, the people in my group have asked for specific subjects, right? Like maybe it’s about blogging or it’s about whatever, and somebody will give a half hour presentation and then it’s like crickets. Nobody has any questions. It’s like, all right, well, moving on to whatever other topics you’ve all got. But last night they were really engaged. And I have a lot of. Breadth in, technical ability in my group. So I have people who. Couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag, right? And I put myself more towards that end, although I think I have a little bit of a more in-depth knowledge of things and WordPress working on it day in and day out.
Michelle Frechette (00:04:34) – And then we have some incredible developers in the group as well. And so, the questions usually come from the more from the people who don’t understand a lot about WordPress. And, and we saw that last night too. So my friend Jim Hector, he didn’t use his his catchphrase, though he usually says things like, can you put it in terms for us mere mortals he didn’t use, he didn’t say that last night.
Michelle Frechette (00:05:00) – So, so clearly. You were reaching the right audience level and you weren’t putting things too technically for people. But it was.
Corey Maass (00:05:07) – Good. Yeah. And yeah, I tried to go high and low and then even also set a couple of times like you may understand this, but, you know, let me explain it just in case. And so I thought.
Michelle Frechette (00:05:20) – Yeah, exactly.
Corey Maass (00:05:21) – Well received. So.
Michelle Frechette (00:05:24) – Yeah, I thought it was really good. And, and we didn’t talk about it, and I should not have have thrown you to the under the bus, so to speak, with, hey, why don’t you do a live demo? So maybe we, we work on that for the next time we do a presentation is, had that live demo, but they could get it on the website too, for sure.
Michelle Frechette (00:05:45) – But sometimes it’s fun just to walk somebody through it and then let them ask questions in real time as it’s happening. So that’d be fun to add, to add to it the, but yeah, the engagement is great. I think people understood you talked a lot about, you know, what makes a good featured image? How we can we shared some, resources where you can source free images and then also why sometimes you might not want to use free images. I thought that you had some good points there as well. And then, you know what is open graph images versus just, you know, images on your site, why you would want to engage in open graph images and how that impacts social sharing. So yeah, I thought you hit all the marks and I was impressed.
Corey Maass (00:06:28) – Thank you, thank you, thank you..
Michelle Frechette (00:06:32) – Especially because we meet at 630 at night like 630 to 830. So it’s like, you just want to go hit my couch at some point during that.
Michelle Frechette (00:06:40) – And when it was in person, you know, it was because everybody had to get out of work and all of that. But I’m wondering, I mean, we’ve been doing it at this time for years. So it’s not we’re not going to change it. But man, sometimes I think, wouldn’t it be nice if it was like three in the afternoon instead?
Corey Maass (00:06:55) – Yeah, it definitely hard. And and after a long day trying to concentrate and it’s like this is one of my, my quandaries. There’s a word, like going to the Meetup that’s an hour south of me. So I leave here at 430. So before my day is over and. And that drive an hour and it’s back roads and you know and so I’m usually like and then and then trying to be engaged and friendly and, you know, conversational. I’m just out of practice. You know.
Michelle Frechette (00:07:30) – It’s been a pandemic. We’re all just kind of in our if I don’t see just this part of you on a screen, it might be too much.
Corey Maass (00:07:37) – Right. Exactly. So, yeah, when things to get used to. But, but yeah, I like it was fun giving a talk. It was honestly fun to. Oh well. And the other thing that I was happy that I, I thought to say it was at the beginning was like, this is a new talk. And so I will I’m going um and aw, which I do anyway. But. And, missing, you know, things that are missing. And so I tried to write down as things were popping into my head as I’m talking. I tried to write them down, and so I added some notes and, next time we’ll, I think, have more. And then you recorded it. So I’m actually at some point going to go rewatch.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah.
Corey Maass: And, but I was talking to, my Marketing Mastermind group today and was I tend to think, while, I speak out loud. And in so doing it was like, oh, right, this is this is what I used to do.
Corey Maass (00:08:37) – Like speaking at WordCamps frequently. I would pitch ideas by like I’d write a, like, you need a title and a description, and then you pitch them and then if they choose one only then do you go do all the work to flesh them out. And, once you’ve got a talk fleshed out, like you, you use that, you try to you try to do that over and over again at different WordCamps, like because you have new audiences.
Michelle Frechette (00:09:07) – Yeah. No, I think that’s very true. So, I’ve given it’s and it’s funny at WordCamps, a lot of the times the talks are recorded. So like the first talk I gave, I gave like four times in the same word or the same year at four different word camps. And there’s like four versions of it on WordPress.TV. And I’m like, maybe I should just pick the best one and then ask them to delete the others. But I don’t know. I think everyone’s every time you give it it, you probably emphasize something differently or build on it or whatever.
Michelle Frechette (00:09:37) – So I mean, it’s not not a bad thing to have that out there.
Corey Maass (00:09:40) – Yeah, exactly. And. Yeah. At first. First talk had done in a while. First talk to organized and while. And it’s still. So this is this is always the danger, right? Like when we first started talking about the topic some weeks ago, I initially went in and did a brain dump and. And then walked away and and I’m glad I did that at least. So I had, you know, like get it out of my head and on paper. But there was stuff that I, I like reading notes. I was like, I don’t remember what I meant here and, you know, and then and then there’s a bunch of ideas that are not fleshed out. And I remember this from pre-pandemic WordCamps giving talks. It usually took 2 or 3 times to like really get the organization, the flow of it in my head. Like what? What’s likely to make the most sense? Like going big to small, going small to big, you know, whatever it is.
Corey Maass (00:10:42) – And, and the thing that I caught myself out doing was your good suggestion from previous discussions was, going over some of the, like, photography basics, rule of thirds and things like that. And I was like, this is impossible to describe. I in a picture like a simple illustration would. Make make this easy to understand, but I started looking for images and, like, these are. I don’t have the rights to use these, and I don’t know whether if I. And so then ChatGPT could you generate. No, of course not. Like. And so then I was like, you know, it felt definitely, felt, discombobulated trying to explain these concepts. So I was like, okay, so next time, you know, and and people were good. I think it was even you, were posting links to illustrations or or articles or whatever. And it’s not a course on photography, so, like, I don’t feel terrible about it, but, definitely something to improve on.
Michelle Frechette (00:11:47) – You know, it’s I think that that’s true. Right. So, like, was it bad talk? Not by any stretch of the imagination, but when you’re the one giving the talk, you start to think of all the ways you could make it better next time. And so I would say pat yourself on the back. It was definitely a good talk. People got a lot out of it. And if you can use that to make the next time better, great. That’s awesome.
Corey Maass (00:12:06) – Right. Yeah. I mean, and I think, I think we picked a good topic like I’ve, I’ve done talks before where people might listen, you know, with one ear and they’re on their phone the whole time. This time like we even before starting a couple of people, we’re like, I have questions about images. I was like, great, that’s what we’re going to talk about, and, and it’s a fun topic too I mean, it’s been a fun year for me, having learned about this stuff.
Corey Maass (00:12:34) – And there are these interesting. It’s like I’ve learned. Technical things, there were, there was there were mysteries within WordPress that I just sort of took for granted. The fact that it generates a whole bunch of thumbnails, whether you like it or not, and generally there aren’t ways to turn that off. And how like I actually had to go back and it was, for better or worse, SEO, SEO, Yoast was the guinea pig for me. Where I. The plugin overrides, overwrites their open graph image. Which is sort of the point, right? They have hooks for that. Like that’s fine some. But sometimes it wasn’t working, or sometimes there were, strange images would show up. And so I actually had to go back and forth with them a few times before I understood. Like, they, they have they’re great. They have unbelievable amounts of documentation. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find or that it’s easy to understand until you’re like in the conversation.
Corey Maass (00:13:41) – And so to understand how they, how the plugin tries to go and find an image and, and use it and then how to override it, write. It, and in their goofy situation they’ve had doesn’t matter code stuff, but, but yeah, understanding all that and then also trying to. So there’s tech things that I’ve learned. And then there’s people things that I’ve learned where again, people don’t understand,often don’t understand the difference between an open graph image and a featured image. Or they do, but they assume that they’re the same thing. Because, again, most SEO plugins will use the featured image as the open graph image, and so they can be separate. Oh wait. What? You know.
Michelle Frechette (00:14:28) – Yeah, exactly. Oh, you mean your open graph image can have different things on it than your featured image does and all of that. So yeah for sure.
Corey Maass (00:14:37) – Yeah. And then and then there was a good question that really put me on the spot of like basically why, why on earth do I need your plugin.
Corey Maass (00:14:44) – And that’s still.
Michelle Frechette: We had talked through that though.
Corey Maass: Yep, but it’s still a, it’s, it’s a challenge still. Right. Like because it’s not I’ve had this conversation a few times and we did the last time we talked I think of like okay we are not, we’re not there’s a better way to put this. There’s a, there’s a startup-y way to put this and I can’t we’re not a band aid. We’re a t- shirt or something like there’s a, there’s another. There’s a, there’s a known phrase but I can’t I keep not being able to find it, but it’s like we’re not because we’re not solving a pain. We’re enhancing. Right. Like we’re not fixing your car. We are the racing stripes on the car or something. And so it’s a different way to look at it. And, and then what I thought was interesting was, the, the person who asked was like, well I don’t, I don’t really, I don’t care about sharing.
Corey Maass (00:15:37) – And I’m like, yeah, but you do. Like you might not be sharing your pages, but other people, like, I’m about to, I’m about to send a link to your product to my wife and, and it and it needs to have an image and it needs to have a good image. Otherwise she’s going to be like, what? What on earth are you sending me? Like, this is, you know.
Michelle Frechette (00:15:58) – Interestingly, I so the WordPress 5 what is it 6.5 came out today and Regina Carter is the jazz musician that it’s that is named that is named for. And she has a website, Regina carter.com, which it looks like it’s a WordPress website. If I was reading things correctly, I mean, I, I was reading things great. It’s a WordPress website, but there’s not only not a featured image on the home page, there’s nothing for for open graph at all. And even like, I mean, I know the trick. I’ll take it and run it through a reader just to make sure that you know it’s going to show up or whatever.
Michelle Frechette (00:16:30) – No, it doesn’t. I had to, like, take an image from her website, post it with that, with that link so that there would be a photo of her when I posted it from Underrepresented in Tech. So yeah, you know, she might think like, oh, I don’t care. I’m not gonna gonna, you know, share it. But whoever is building her website should have thought of that for sure, because her home page, of all things, should have an open graph image associated with it.
Corey Maass (00:16:57) – Right. Yeah. And it’s I think I think one of the. Yeah, there’s just there’s so many things to that that are. Assumptions or that we take for granted like. The various versions of the SEO plugins do or do not include the option. The free versions do or do not include the option to include an open graph image. Though they might still grab the featured image. Right? And it’s, I mean, just stuff like that. And so it’s like you.
Corey Maass (00:17:27) – Yeah. And then and then there are people who have. Deep, deep knowledge of. I mean, there’s tech stuff, but like, their own content, or and I struggle this with with this with my clients too. Of unfortunately the way that WordPress. What has evolved is there’s 1001 fields on the post edit screen, and and every new thing adds more fields. And so, and I don’t, I don’t know what the answer to that is. I think I’ve tried to build. Yeah, I have for, for clients in the past I’ve built like essentially selective UIs using like ACF or something like that. I think I’ve also hacked so that it was like a, like a wizard kind of thing of like, okay, enter a title slide, enter content slide, you know, just using meta boxes, and in an attempt to make it less confusing., but forms are forms, right? Like, even today I, I added a new podcast episode to,, a podcast service that we use.
Corey Maass (00:18:39) – And by the time I filled out all of the fields, for some reason, the audio that I had initially uploaded, like, didn’t stick. And so when I saved, we had a moment of panic because the, the podcast wouldn’t play because the audio wasn’t there. You kind of need the audio.
Michelle Frechette: It helps.
Corey Maass: Yeah. So it’s just like, you know, the nature of the web and, and the, the there’s no easy way to, to sort of do and explain this to everybody under for every circumstance.
Michelle Frechette (00:19:08) – But I thought they had some good questions too, around SEO and accessibility, which we’ve talked about in the past as well.
Corey Maass (00:19:15) – Yeah. Yeah. And and how yeah, again, it’s these things that like the tentacles of the conversation can go anywhere and everywhere and, and, at one point you, you called me out in a good way or. Were the to my bud dum bump, where I would like the answer to a question is yes and no. And you were like, well, yeah, you’re a developer.
Corey Maass (00:19:39) – The answer is always it depends.
Michelle Frechette (00:19:42) – I mean, I’m not a developer, and that’s always my answer too, to be fair.
Corey Maass (00:19:47) – But it’s just yeah, it’s it’s tough. It’s. And so that’s why honestly, these things are fun. If you haven’t engaged group. These things are fun. And I thought we also had a good mixed group of expertise, and so because there’s like going to my local meetup, there’s, there’s the people who, who run it. So they’re very techie. And then the people show up who, who have a website and maybe have kind of heard of WordPress. And so it’s tough to like I, I commend them, I compliment them for they do lightning talks like that’s the format that they’ve chosen. And so, a couple of the people who work there do these, these short talks and they, I know they I mean, first of all, coming up with a 15 minute talk every month is going to be hard by itself.
Corey Maass (00:20:40) – I think you and I could find infinite topics to talk about, but to do it in an organized way, you know? But like the last time I went, they, they were talking about one of the talks was, ACF flexible content and what which even I, have only used so much. And the cool thing, I mean, this is why it’s great to go, right? I learned some new stuff. I didn’t know you could include field groups within field groups as flexible content. And I was like, oh, I mean, as a developer, I love that. Right? It’s you’re not don’t repeat yourself dry, that kind of thing.
Michelle Frechette (00:21:19) – Like a Russian nesting doll.
Corey Maass (00:21:21) – Yeah, exactly. But no, but I could tell that I was, I was the only non employee who understood what was going on because. You know, most of them didn’t ,didn’t know what ACF was, hadn’t heard of it. And so yeah, what on earth does this, you know, mean.
Michelle Frechette (00:21:40) – The more outspoken people. And excuse me. The more outspoken people in my meetup would have said, what’s ACF? And then they would have been asking you to demo ACF and explain everything there had to do with ACF. So I’m really glad you didn’t break up ACF last night. Because then it’ll be like, how could this make my website better? And you’re like, right, dude, you sell spindles? No.
Corey Maass (00:22:09) – Well and so and so. The other talk that they gave at my last Meetup was like the history of color, which I thought was great. Again, it’s like it’s something that that person cared about and, and everybody could, could, could relate to it. I think a little better than a deep dive on ACF. But it’s also not necessarily helpful, right? And not that every talk needs to be helpful, but so it’s just it’s a, it’s a it’s a tough line to, to walk. I think.
Michelle Frechette (00:22:36) – It is, it’s hard when you’re, when you are organizing Meetups to come up with content on a monthly basis.
Michelle Frechette (00:22:45) – I mean, which is why I made WPSpeakers.com in general. Right? But even even so, sometimes it’s hard to find somebody who’s available at the time who talks about what you want them to talk about, who then follows through and shows up. Because I’ve had some people no show me in the past. So yeah, it’s it’s, it’s it’s a little difficult. Right. And and I mean, it is what it is. And people are very understanding and kind., but still it’s, it can be challenging. And so to have people like you who are willing to come in and it doesn’t have to be the most polished talk. It has to. It’s just about sharing knowledge, sharing information and helping people. Do better with their own websites, and I think that’s great. So, yeah, I hope other Meetups will ask you to come in and talk about it too.
Corey Maass (00:23:30) – Well, and yeah. And so thank you for that. Thank you for doing a remote Meetup like I didn’t obviously the Post Status ones are remote.
Corey Maass (00:23:40) – I didn’t it hadn’t occurred to me. Weirdly because like so the other New Hampshire WordPress Meetup. At least some of the time is remote, and I’ve gone a couple of times, but it hadn’t occurred to me to go. Do some research. Like, I don’t want to go join every freaking WordPress Meetup on the off chance that it’s remote. But if there are ones that are remote and they’re looking for speakers, then I’m going to go. Then I’m going to approach them. Especially doing a talk like this, it’s like, okay, let’s hone it. And then at some point I will use it to apply to like if, if they, they do manage to get Boston off the ground, which it sounds like they will, then I’ll use that to apply. You know.
Michelle Frechette (00:24:24) – Let me share my screen and show you something kind of cool, I think. Yeah. This is what I think. Okay. Are you seeing WordPress events?
Corey Maass (00:24:33) – I am.
Michelle Frechette (00:24:34) – Awesome. So this is events.WordPress.org and these are all the upcoming events.
Michelle Frechette (00:24:38) – So it will talk about WordCamps. But it also talks about Meetups. And so the Athens Meetup is an online one. Bakersfield is online. And you can just continue to load more. And so you’ll see online, online, online, online. And whenever you see that then it’s somebody who may be looking for somebody. And look I mean all of those are just April 4th, April 3rd or fourth. There’s literally hundreds of them every month. If not, if not more than a hundred. So there’s an easy place for you to kind of data mine for opportunities.
Corey Maass (00:25:08) – There you go, there you go. Yeah. So yeah. So that that all kind of aligns with you and I talking about focusing a little less on content, written word content and trying to do more events. And going to WordCamp. So, yeah. And we’re all addicted to swag. So of course I’ve been, I got ,we got our stickers, stickers, stickers with the QR code. Yeah. T shirts.
Corey Maass (00:25:44) – I got a patch for my backpack.
Michelle Frechette (00:25:47) – Do you have your, your patch there to show her. No. Is it already sewing? So.
Corey Maass (00:25:50) – No, I left it downstairs foolishly.
Michelle Frechette: That’s fine.
Corey Maass: Because I need to bring it closer to the backpack or it will never get on the backpack because the backpacks. Like in the back of a closet.
Michelle Frechette (00:25:59) – Once it’s sewn on, take a picture. We’ll tweet it out.
Corey Maass (00:26:02) – Yeah. For sure. And. Yeah. And I because I keep talking about I’m like trying to take inspiration from everything. Right. And, us talking about or you, you setting up the classified. We talked about that last week and so using fun language and the one of my favorite newsletters just reopened ad slots. So I think I’m going to buy at least one, if not more. Last time, I did very boring or very the language you’d expect. Like it was fun, but you and I. Now this time we’ll sit down and come up with something bizarre and more eye catching.
Corey Maass (00:26:42) – And and I, I like the. It’s like if you if you had all the time in the world or a team of marketers, like there’s all these great ideas and, and I definitely I think a lot of us struggle with the like, well, if you if you can’t take it to the logical extreme, then, you know, I need to do the two minute version and it’s like instead like the things that we keep talking about here, you know, let’s, let’s link to a page that does something, right. And so it’s more fun than linking to the home page, which is probably which is kind of proven to not convert. Let’s link to a page that has some, some simple language. It does. And it doesn’t have to be a choose your own adventure, crazy, time consuming thing. Like what’s, what’s that middle ground? And so thinking about, you know, more creative content and it’s fun to brainstorm, you know, okay, what can we fit in 280 characters like honestly, I find because I’ve always loved playing, I at one point I was a poet and songwriter and I played with loved playing with language and still do.
Corey Maass (00:27:53) – Just where it’s funny. Like for better or worse, it all culminates in dad jokes. But dad jokes are the epitome, often the epitome of just playing with language. Right? And anyway, so, so doing that kind of stuff. But I’m also. I said to. Oh, so one of the guys in my Mastermind group is self-conscious about he. He bought a really nice, branded polo, and it actually has, like, blocks of color just on the on the shirt, which fits perfectly with his logo. Like, just nice coincidence.
Michelle Frecheete: Oh, nice. Yeah.
Corey Maass: But I know he’s a little self-conscious about wearing it, and I’m like, I get it. Like, we all at various at some point in our lives, almost all of us have struggled with feeling icky doing sales and marketing and then also the like being, being a walking billboard and it and and I’m, I’m trying to having gone through that journey myself. I’ve been trying to sort of reassure him, like, you wear it while you’re there, you don’t ever have to, like, don’t wear it to the pub.
Corey Maass (00:28:58) – He’s English, so I can say that, you know, it’s like you’re not going to wear it all the time. Like, your friends aren’t going to think you’re a loser, you know? But this is the right time and place for this kind of thing. And. And I caught myself saying, like, if if I thought that I could wear a banana suit and it would lead to more sales, why aren’t I doing that? And I was like, okay, well, I don’t think there’s reason to wear a banana suit, but why aren’t I wearing like, I have a nice black t shirt with OMGIMG on it, which stands out, but I learned long ago I’m like, don’t make your logo this big out of shame. Make it this big. Because if you do it or don’t, you know.
Michelle Frechette: Right. Go big or go home.
Corey Maass: Yeah. Or go to the I was going to say something mean. But. But yeah, like be, be the branding or don’t you know.
Corey Maass (00:29:56) – And so, so I was like but often at conferences you get cold, so then you need a layer over the top and then you’re hiding. And so I was like, all right, I’m going to go by like, I should. I sent you a screenshot today like a freaking iridescent green hoodie. And, and so it’s like, buzzing like. That you know and draw attention. Like that’s the point. If you’re there and you’re doing it, you know.
Michelle Frechette (00:30:23) – Do you know who does that really well? Is Robert Winder from formerly Inside. Is its just called Side. I have never seen him not in their signature lime green branded t-shirt and his hat that has all of the WordPress pins on it. He has so well branded not only himself, but his company. He, I literally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him. Not in one of those green t-shirts on video in person. Doesn’t matter where he is perfected. The art of do you own more than one shirt? But yes, you know it.
Michelle Frechette (00:30:57) – Actually it’s it’s a signature and nobody ever goes, where does he work again? Because it’s right there on a shirt. And if you want to know what it’s about, he’ll tell you. Because if you’re like, hey, what Side? He’ll tell you about the agency, what they do there. So I think that’s a really good point.
Corey Maass (00:31:14) – Yeah. And you draw your own lines like I, I a lot of, a lot of discussion I end up having is. Is this right? Like people feel icky about marketing and sales and. We and, we if you want. If you want to succeed, you kind of have to get over it. It’s kind of like the, the, the comment last night about, somebody’s response to the sharing and other things is like, it’s all about money. Like that’s like almost all of us, for better or worse, the internet now is 99.9 infinitesimally about money. Like there was a time when we had artsy websites, creative websites, places to just post things because it was fun and interesting.
Corey Maass (00:32:00) – All that’s gone. It’s all about money. It is what it is, right? And so if you you have a website, if you’re putting effort into your website, if you’re blogging, whatever it is like, it’s probably for money, but also like, that’s okay. And, and you just but you need to follow that thread essentially. And people don’t want to people want to pretend that it’s just not true, you know. And I and again, I get that like it gives you an icky sense. But so it’s like you have to find your own boundaries of, of what’s icky. And you know, because people immediately like, you know, I hate used car salesman. It’s like, so don’t be a used car salesman, you know? But you can you can wear a t-shirt and you can you can answer gently when I ask you what the t-shirts about, and then you can change the subject, you know, but you can’t you. There’s just some truths you can’t deny.
Michelle Frechette (00:32:53) – If you don’t talk about your product or your business. Very few people are going to do that for you. It has to start with you. You have to be the one who’s telling people about it. I remember once, gosh, this was I don’t even know. This might have been in my MBA program, which was over 20 years ago now, where it wasn’t, it was at a, an event where people were like all women with their businesses, and somebody stood at the front of the room and said. How many people here have businesses that are the hidden gems of your community? Like half, the half the hands went up, right? And then the person said, why are you hiding them? And I was like, oh, that hit deep, right? Like that was like, oh boy. Yeah, pretend I didn’t put my hand up kind of thing. You know, you saw the people in the room just kind of, like, sheepishly look like, oh, boy.
Michelle Frechette (00:33:44) – And and I will say, I think there’s a propensity for people to not want to brag. And I will say, I think especially amongst women, but that’s, you know, my background and where I come in talking about women is we have been told our whole lives not to put ourselves bigger than, than other people. And so I think that it was an even harder lesson there. But in general, people in general are not the the type, generally speaking, and especially introverted developers. And I’m not saying you are one of those people, but there are a lot of introverted people who are building products that are these hidden gems because they don’t either partner with somebody who’s got a loud voice, or find their niche and shouting about their own product easily, and so it makes it hard to sell it to individuals. It makes it hard to sell the business because you haven’t grown it enough for people, for it to be interesting to people. And, yeah. So I’m proud of you for that green shirt.
Michelle Frechette (00:34:42) – That’s awesome.
Corey Maass (00:34:43) – Exactly. There was a this this actually gives me an idea. I there’s. So my favorite Meetup ever was called Ultralight Startups, founded by a guy named Graham Lawlor. Give them a little shout out. I have no idea what he’s doing. I haven’t talked to him in ten years, but back in the peak, I would argue the the first big wave of SoCon, Silicon Alley, New York City startups and stuff like that, he started this great Meetup. Of all the people who had an idea or had a, you know, a little, you know, beginner start up, pocket start up, you know, web app idea, blah, blah, blah. And he, he just did a lot of things, right. He, he, he managed to grow it well and quickly and had really good people. But one of the one of the initial selling points of this Meetup was if you pitched. It was like $10. If you didn’t pitch, it was $30.
Michelle Frechette: Oh.
Corey Maass (00:35:54) – And if you were a service provider, it was $1,000 or something. Which he learned quickly because people like me would sneak in and pitch, you know, pitch our services. Indirect. And I learned to do it indirectly because I would build things, and then I would talk about how I built it. But that’s, that’s actually kind of neat. Like, I wonder if we couldn’t do that on Zoom. So everybody had 60s and and he even there was a, a woman who was essentially a coach for, I want to say she focused largely on women specifically because of some of the social issues that you bring up. But and I think she, I don’t know that she’d have turned anybody away, but helping people learn how to present themselves better. So there was an aspect of public, public speaking of, you know, and she called herself sorry for the language pitch bitch, and then, you know, but she, she, she became a staple of these Meetups.
Corey Maass (00:37:01) – And so she was there every time. And before we started, she would go up and she’d go, okay, like, here’s the three minute. Little talk on how to give a 60 sec. You say your name. You say what you do.
Corey Maass (00:37:16) – And you say. You know why it’s different than everybody else. That’s all you need. You know, take a second. Write it down. And then you get up here and in 60 sec. Hi, I’m Cory, I have this awesome plugin. It’s different because. And you need it because thank you. You know, and I feel like honestly, all the people that we’re talking about and I mean, the reason we have this, this podcast marketing is hard and the reason why we have Mastermind groups about marketing, and we have channels dedicated to marketing, and we have all these people trying to teach each other marketing, because marketing is hard. And more than that, it’s scary, and so I’m now wondering, like, maybe there’s something there, like we should have a we talked about.
Corey Maass (00:38:01) – Doing a dedicated marketing Meetup. I say that I totally forgot I lost the thread of where we are with that.
Michelle Frechette (00:38:10) – I haven’t done anything with it, and I added three more Meetups next month actually this month now so that we’re hitting and this is talking about Post Status specifically hitting both the, North American, South America time zones, but then also for a pack and so and anybody in between can kind of pick one or the other because I can’t do four, for each of them. But,so we added those first and then, we’ll talk about maybe doing a quarterly marketing Meetup. I only have so much capacity to run these things.
Corey Maass (00:38:42) – And, you know, like, I’ve run them before. I’m happy to run one for you if you want, but I this idea of having popped into my head, I’m like, oh, this is kind of neat, like 60 sec you are. And this things that one of the things that Graham did really well is like, you were cut off, like you were off the stage and the other person was on the edge of the stage.
Corey Maass (00:39:02) – And so because, you know, 40, 50 people would show up. And so how do you get through 40, 50, 60 sec pitches? And so he ran it very tightly. He’d also he’d have panels and speakers and, one time I moderated a panel and he had pulled me aside beforehand and said, like, you like, be mean, be. And so he sat right in front of the podium that I was standing in front of. And the moment somebody would start rambling, he was kicking that podium to like, Corey shut him up now. And it was. And so we ran, it was great. And subsequently it was great., but I’m thinking we could actually do that with Zoom. Like, yeah, I unmute you, you go, I mute you, I unmute the next person, you go, you know, and you do the like. Corey, you’re on deck. Michelle, you’re in the hole Sam go. Sam’s done. Corey. You’re you’re going, Michelle, you’re on deck.
Corey Maass (00:40:02) – You know and and we do that. And that way everybody just has to at least once a month or once a quarter give their elevator pitch in 60 sec concisely. I love this idea. All right. None of this has anything to do with OMG.
Michelle Frechette (00:40:18) – So you did remind me though. So I once, I was trying to see if I it was so many years ago that I was hoping I still had a text message. I don’t, I belonged to a networking group, and there was one chair per business type, so I was the web designer marketer in the group. Right.
Corey Maass: Oh yes, like REI. Or one of those. BMI?
Michelle: Yeah like one of those. It was like a B M I but it was, we made our own. So there were no dues. We just you had to show up and that was that kind of thing. You had to buy breakfast because we didn’t have to pay rent, but you had to buy breakfast in order for us to have the room.
Michelle Frechette (00:40:51) – But like, there was somebody who did flooring. There was somebody who did home inspection. There was somebody who did power washing, all that kind of stuff. And we would have, you know, you’d get that. Thirty, it was 30 sec. We had 20 something people in the group, and you did your little elevator pitch at the beginning, go all the way around the group every week. And, and then you did 30 sec of intro, then what your needs were like, or if you had, any, what what do you call it to pass on.
Corey Maass: Needs or leads?
Michelle Frechette: Thank you. Needs or leads to pass along. Yep. And then one week we decided that in order to learn each other’s businesses better, we we matched people up where they had to introduce each other. And being the marketer in the group, my Son-in-Law is a DJ and he’s got all the equipment and he’s also got that great DJ voice. And so I sent him a script and I I’ll, I’ll have to see if I can dig it out ever, if I still have it anywhere.
Michelle Frechette (00:41:42) – But he basically did the ‘In a world where’ kind of thing. Right. And I was introducing a guy who had a computer repair shop, you know, it’s like could sell or could leap yout desk towers was in a single bound kind of kind of thing. It’s a bird, it’s a plane. It’s kind of. And it was like, and I went first and everybody else went, I’m not doing this.
Corey Maass: Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: Because I just put that speaker on the desk and pushed play, you know. But, yeah, there’s there’s definitely ways to there’s good ways and bad ways to introduce yourself. I mean, there’s not a bad way. There’s good ways and there’s better ways or less better ways. Introducing yourself and all I was good. So I’m not gonna say that’s a bad thing. Right. But getting that elevator pitch down, what do you call it. That or something else is so important for to engage people. You say what you do and if the eyes glaze over, you did not hit the mark.
Michelle Frechette (00:42:34) – When I used to tell people I worked in WordPress, I worked for Give WP, they said, what do you do? And I’d say, oh, I, I work for this plugin company plugins or something in word. And I would literally go down this like explaining what WordPress and I could tell they were just, they just wanted to walk away from me. And so then I now I say, and I don’t actually do those things anymore, but I still say I’m in marketing in the web tech industry, and people are like, oh, what does that mean? And then I can talk a little bit more about content marketing, community marketing, those kinds of things. But like web tech industry, what’s web tech? What do you mean by that? You know, and so you learn to create phrases and, kind of put your pitch in a way that it doesn’t sound trite, but that people it makes people want to go. What does that mean? Like I was talking to a guy the other day.
Michelle Frechette (00:43:21) – I’m on dating sites, I’m not going to lie. And I said, well, so what do you do for a living? And he says, I’m a penetration tester. And I was like, this sounds dirty. But I didn’t say that. I said, tell me more. And he said, he’s in cyber security. He tries to break into his client’s websites to see if he can and then report back. And I’m like, they should call it something other than penetration tester. But man was I was like, this could go one of two ways. I’m gonna ask anyway, right? So like, yeah, there’s, there’s there’s ways to intrigue people. If he just said I’m in cyber security, for me that would have been interesting. For most people that would have been a snore. Right. So yeah.
Corey Maass (00:43:59) – And and he typed out his, his punchline. I mean, he did it on purpose and, and thankfully it, it, especially for your tolerance of that kind of thing.
Corey Maass (00:44:09) – Thankfully, it went one of the, the better of the two ways, I.
Michelle Frechette (00:44:13) – I mean..
Corey Maass: But most of us would have shut him down.
Michelle Frechette: My finger was on the block button. I’m not gonna lie.
Corey Maass (00:44:19) – In a bar, that joke goes over every time. And he knows that he’s okay saying it. And so he is shocked you. But then now he’s intrigued you, you know, and so so he wins. That’s great I yeah for me I, I go the banal way and it it pisses off anybody who knows anything about tech. But people say what do you do. And I say I make websites. And because I, I have decided after over years of like I have to start there and, and there and people that are will roll their eyes in me like like be more specific. And I’m like, okay, I’m happy to. But you know for the your average person, especially in, you know, wherever I am in New Hampshire, you know, southwestern New Hampshire of like there is no tech here.
Corey Maass (00:45:11) – I mean, there is people are in their bedrooms doing tech, I’m sure, but it’s not a, you know, I’m not in New York. I’m not in an area known for tech, even in Nashville, like there was a lot of there was a startup scene and stuff. And so here it’s it’s honestly the better place to start a conversation.
Michelle Frechette (00:45:29) – Can I challenge you to tell people that you’re a spider? And then when they say, what do you mean? You say, well, I build the web, and then it’s even more interesting.
Corey Maass (00:45:38) – I love it, all right.
Michelle Frechette (00:45:39) – Because they’re gonna ask you what you mean by that.
Corey Maass (00:45:41) – And dad joke appropriate. So.
Michelle Frechette (00:45:43) – Oh of course. Yeah. I mean, it’s all good.
Corey Maass: Okay, I love it.
Michelle Frechette: And I want to report back the next time you say that to somebody.
Corey Maass: Okay.
Michelle Frechette: On what’s their response.
Corey Maass (00:45:52) – In order to to get me out of the house and to meet other human beings. I bartend at the local golf course every Thursday.
Corey Maass (00:46:01) – And so it’s an older crowd. It’s a non-technical crowd. They will eat a joke like that.
Michelle Frechette: Okay.
Corey Maass: for breakfast. Easily.
Michelle Frechette (00:46:09) – So you’ll you definitely have a you definitely have an audience for that then.
Corey Maass (00:46:12) – Absolutely, absolutely. And and they they honestly love me there for my dumb jokes. You know that I.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah.
Corey Maass: Like I’m not we have we have the old guy who like so a Pope, a Rabbi and a ba-ba-da walking a bar and it’s like you’ve already told me that one. You know, you need a new material.
Michelle Frechette (00:46:31) – Sorry, Frank. We’ve heard that one before.
Corey Maass (00:46:33) – Exactly. But there’s but there’s a lot of folks because it’s it’s a I mean, it’s a bar, but it’s not a hard drinking establishment. Right? It’s a it’s still a country club. It’s still a golf course. It happens to be a bar. So it’s I love the atmosphere. It’s very light and friendly and jokes like that go over well.
Michelle Frechette (00:46:52) – That’s awesome. I love it every time I hear a dad joke now, I’ll share it with you so you can share it with Frank.
Michelle Frechette (00:46:57) – I mean, it’s a it’s a pseudonym. We don’t know. I don’t know, Frank, but you know who I mean, Frank. I mean, like, here’s another one for Frank.
Corey Maass (00:47:04) – I think his name is Sam.
Michelle Frechette (00:47:06) – Oh, that’s so anticlimactic. I mean.
Corey Maass (00:47:11) – I know right? Okay, so we have eight minutes. No, 12 minutes.., I had my marketing accountability group, my Mastermind group today, I did my, it was good. We’re having, like, we’re gelling better than many masters. I’ve only been in, one would hope that one is only ever in so many Mastermind groups. If you’re in hundreds, then you’re doing it wrong, right? But, I have been in a few over the years, and. At least half of them have been very dry or very like this person talks, then this person talks. And nobody really there’s not like really good interaction. This one, we’re a good group. We’ve got just enough in common, I think.
Corey Maass (00:48:04) – And, and I’m being more assertive than I usually like. I’m leading it, and I’m being more assertive. I’m not necessarily following, you know, the sort of the strict timing rules and stuff. I’m like, because I’m determined I’m not going to waste my own time. I think is the difference. Right? Like in the past, I’ve like waited months for like something to blossom, whereas like this. No, like I’m going to interrupt you. We’re going to talk about this thread. We’re going to try to pull things out of each other, you know. But anyway, so what I talked about or what my, my action item, so to speak, is. As we’ve talked about now, a couple of calls in a row of like. De-emphasizing written content. But, I do want to. I feel like we still need content. Like content still needs to be going out. And and if nothing else, we need content to talk about in order to because it’s like it’s not just a blog post, it’s it’s tweeting about the blog post and it’s posting the blog post to the Facebook group and it’s, you know, and, and essentially trying to get more conversation or at least more notices of, of that.
Corey Maass (00:49:19) – So, so I think that the main, my main task, because I’m, as you and I have talked about offline, like I’m, I have to, refocus on work a little bit and stuff like that. But I’m going to look at essentially queuing up another five, eight, ten blog posts, one a week, and then all of those get, you know, auto shared and some of it we have to do ourselves. But like at least getting, getting keeping the, the momentum going on, on that kind of thing.
Michelle Frechette (00:49:55) – And I think I figured out today I did it poorly, but I think I figured out today that the scheduling tool that, that you have for it and I for some reason, it’s not it wouldn’t let me unless I had an image with it. So I don’t know if that what the limitations are. So maybe I’m doing something wrong. We could talk about that next week. Maybe. But, I feel more confident now to start adding some content there as well to the social calendar.
Michelle Frechette (00:50:19) – So, so I’m going to try to put at least three posts a week up myself into the social calendar that aren’t blog post related. So those will be extra content. So be on the lookout. Hold me accountable, because I definitely want to be held accountable for doing those.
Corey Maass (00:50:35) – Cool. Yeah, I think that would be great. And it’s I like. Again, it’s I think, one of the things that I’ve struggled with often and I’m doing better with OMG because it’s been a couple of years and and Covid and so stepping back and and. Let. And I’ve also now been ten, ten plus years out of like the startup world culture, whatever. Which doesn’t mean that I’m not like I still read Hacker News and and whatnot, and I’m still looking at looking sideways at other like a bigger, more successful WordPress plugin companies or or people. But that but I’m not being as hard on myself. Like there’s this there’s an expectation of tweeting, you know, ten times a day and, and a blog post every three days and, you know, content, content, content.
Corey Maass (00:51:29) – And it’s like, you can’t you can’t do that and live a life and work a job and, and all that kind of stuff. And, and so that’s like those, those people are to be admired and you can let them inspire you, but you can’t let them.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah.
Corey Maass: Make you feel intimidated or like you’re less than, which I’m very guilty of.
Michelle Frechette (00:51:49) – It’s interesting you bring that up. So my title at Stellar WP is Director of Community Engagement. I created the title myself. I thought it was a great title and I still think it’s a great title. It really kind of covers all of the bases, but when people ask me what I do now, I say community and content marketing. Because community marketing is something that people don’t talk about. And it includes the content marketing, right? Especially the social stuff. But it’s it’s also being present. It’s showing up at events, it’s speaking at events. It’s all of the things, that I do outside of the day to day posting online and that kind of stuff.
Michelle Frechette (00:52:26) – And there’s an art to it for sure. Community management, community marketing, all of that. And, what you’re talking about is getting outside of just the scheduling posts and actually interacting as a brand. And I, I consider that more community marketing than I do content marketing, even though it’s done through social channels. So a lot of the time.
Corey Maass (00:52:45) – Yeah, yeah, I mean, and I think that there’s. There are. There’s a there is a minimum cadence. If nothing else, to be valued, to be valuable like tweeting once a year. Why tweet at all right. But you know but it’s to. But tweeting sometimes is okay. And scheduling some tweets sometimes is okay and.
Michelle Frechette: Absolutely.
Corey Maass: You know and, and that that I think is, is also where it’s easy for those of us who are not marketers first or are intimidated by marketing or whatnot. You know, you you listen to to Gary Vaynerchuk or you listen to, you know, you read the book on marketing and it’s like a lot like I, there was a course.
Corey Maass (00:53:35) – Yeah, there was a course that I was contemplating signing up for because of course, I’d rather buy a course than do any of the actual work. But the in reading the description, it was like, uumm.
Corey Maass (00:53:51) – Essentially taking it from one, you know, one up instead of from 0 to 1. And I’m like, I’m arguably still at zero. So like this isn’t for me. And thankfully they they had a couple of disqualifiers, which is, you know, a thing you often want on a sales page, but it was like, you need, you need some content or some audience. And yes, technically I have some content and some audience, but, you know, but are these are these techniques going to work for me?If I’m still this small and it’s like, probably not, then this isn’t for you. And so it saved me $119 or whatever. And it’s like, I want all that knowledge. And I’m hoping obviously to apply it at some point, but it’s,
Michelle Frechette: But you have to start where you are.
Corey Maass (00:54:37) – You have to start where you are, you have to apply things to you that will work. And then I also think there’s the time factor of like, okay, and this is where I, I’m something I’m really bad at. And you and I need to look at at some point. But it’s the like letting months go by and then seeing if, if the graph goes up, you know, because I’m, I’m very much a like do this thing today in front of me. And my brain doesn’t comprehend a month from now. You know, people ask me like, where do you want to be in five years? I’m like, I literally can’t understand that concept.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:14) – What does that mean. Yeah.
Corey Maass (00:55:16) – And so
Michelle Frechette: Out of curiosity.
Corey Maass: So I struggle with that.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:19) – Did we see a spike in, even a small spike in, traffic based on, last night? Did people go and look at the site? I mean, I know it was a small group. There was like 12 people in the group, so that might not be a bad note to add to end.
Corey Maass (00:55:33) – On to who. A one, a two, a three.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:34) – Visited.
Corey Maass (00:55:35) – How many?
Michelle Frechette (00:55:41) – How many licks does it take to get to the center of. Tootsie Roll?
Corey Maass (00:55:44) – A Tootsie roll center of a Tootsie Pop?
Michelle Frechette: Hmm-hmm.
Corey Maass (00:55:47) – WordPress may never know.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:50) – You never know.
Corey Maass (00:55:52) – Probably not a couple.
Michelle Frechette: You know, a few.
Michelle Frechette (00:55:56) – Like, I mean, there was, like, 12 people in the room, so. I mean, I can’t expect huge numbers, but.
Corey Maass (00:56:00) – So, yeah, I mean, the the the sad fact is, is our daily visits are around ten. And yesterday we had 12.
Michelle Frechette: Okay.
Corey Maass: So probably probably everybody who was involved went and checked it out, which is very cool.
Michelle Frechette (00:56:19) – I mean that’s 20% more than usual. That’s not nothing.
Corey Maass (00:56:22) – Yeah. I had a buddy of mine, one of the first people I ever knew who, like, got funding and and went up, up, up,, and wound up selling a business for, I think, single digit millions, but, you know, so not the unicorn, but, I mean, a phenomenal accomplishment.
Corey Maass (00:56:40) – And, and at one point, this is like I was still very, very fresh learning things. Learning even just how to how to apply strategic thinking. And so like one month he, he spoke in front of a small Meetup. The next month, I think I invited him to speak in front of my small Meetup and he said no. And I was like, oh, how dare you, you know? But he’s like, you know, I spoke in front of 12 people. I can’t next time I have to speak in front of 20 people, I can’t, you know, unless unless I perceive value because it’s like over time, if he’s seeing growth, he has to kind of grow with it. And his the value of his time has to grow. And obviously there are exceptions to that rule. But, but I just never kind of thought about that, you know? And so it’s like I am still happily at the place of, you know, speaking to 12 people or whatever, because it’s if we’re getting if we’re getting ten people to the site a day, then then great.
Corey Maass (00:57:47) – Here’s another way to get, like you said, a few more people and they’ll tell some people and, you know, you accumulate over time.
Michelle Frechette (00:57:52) – But I’m looking at our, Twitter account to see. So. So the pinned tweet on our OMGIMG account has 129 views. The tweet I put out tagging you and me today less what an hour and 15 minutes ago. has 164 views. And the one from last week is 399. So yeah, we’re growing.
Corey Maass: Yeah.
Michelle Frechette: But but and even I’ll tell you what. And then the, the ones that are sharing things. We don’t have a lot of you know, we don’t have a lot of, traffic on the ones that are talking about, I don’t know what about Facebook? I don’t know why oh Facebook, the Facebook group. Right. Okay. Yeah. So other things like that. So. Yeah. So. Some things do better than others. That’s. We know that for sure anyway. But, but yeah, it’s kind of exciting.
Michelle Frechette (00:58:48) – I love the,. By the way, I love the Mondrian. Whatever that you have on top of the page there.
Corey Maass (00:58:53) – I mean its just our logo stretched.
Michelle Frechette (00:58:55) – I mean, I see that, but it still looks. Yeah. Okay. So yeah. So here’s my. I don’t want to say joke because it’s not really a joke, but if you pull up the logo and you look at the logo, right? So, let me see if I can share my screen so that there’s a visual here I need on screen to wait. Oh, here it is. Here we go. Okay. So do you see the M and the M.
Corey Maass (00:59:22) – Hmm-hmm.
Michelle Frechette (00:59:23) – It makes me think of the Star Trek shirts. And I’m sorry for the second M because it’s a red shirt.
Corey Maass (00:59:31) – Oh.
Michelle Frechette (00:59:33) – Like the black bottom. And then the then there’s like the gray line and then the top. And I’m not even a Trekkie. My ex-husband was though, and I’m like, oh no, that second M is the red shirt.
Michelle Frechette (00:59:44) – It’s never going to last. But but I love that about it too. I think that’s really cool because it it kind of leans into a little bit of the sci-fi nerdy side of us, too, which I think.
Corey Maass (00:59:56) – 100%. Yeah, it’s six Star Trek, six people from, from Star Trek. That’s the uniform.
Michelle Frechette: Yeah.
Corey Maass: That’s fricken awesome. that whatever.
Michelle Frechette (01:00:02) – Whatever generation it was, you know? Isn’t that fun? So anyway.
Corey Maass (01:00:04) – Awesome.
Michelle Frechette (01:00:06) – Very cool. Well, we will be back next week. I don’t know what we’ll be talking about yet, but we always think of something, and, we’re. In the meantime, I’m going to tweet more this week, and I’m going to see if I can come up with a couple more Meetups online that you can present at.
