How to overcome technology overwhelm

How to overcome technology overwhelm

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and we are live thank you to everyone who's watching on the joyful business club today um it's always such a pleasure to be doing these sessions and today i have a very special guest of course as you know all my guests are special but we were having a chat before and let me just say she's truly dynamic if you're one of these people who worries as a small business owner that you're not good with tech that you're not good enough with tech that it's only something that the young people of this world maybe your children maybe your grandchildren aren't good at let me just say that tracy is going to convince you otherwise so tracy is recognized as a certified practicing marketer by the australian marketing institute she's a speaker she's a small business digital coach and she's author of the end of technophobia a practical guide to digitizing your business she has done many amazing things and she's also a podcaster and she is on regular judging panels for various industry awards including the australian marketing awards and the australian podcasting awards so that's a pretty tall order [Laughter] tracy how did you get into all this technical stuff like was it hard as a woman getting into this or it was just fairly easy i grew up in regional australia and the options when i left school were kind of banked or meat works really that was that was the area that i lived in and neither of those appealed to me so i um i found a job going in a company at the time called strathfield car radios and if you're from new south wales you'd probably remember them i know the year was 1990 and mobile phones had been out a couple of years so i go back to the you know the old handheld things that were more of a security device yeah someone over the head with the big bricks weren't they huge yeah yeah well i've been around that long wow and at that time i remember it was only the really you know uber wealthy that could own them um and in fact just to digress a bit when i was first learning mandarin chinese they had a nickname um for mobile phones which meant da which was basically a mafia kind of slang term for like older brother and you know at that time it was only like the super wealthy mafioso types the triad types he could afford a mobile phone it was seen as so exclusive but now you know i don't know where i would be without mine um i think if anything i think we've become a little too dependent you know if my phone actually rings now i'm like who's what what who's calling me just send me a text message people what's going on so even my voicemail says you know i don't listen to voicemail so don't bother leaving me a message to send me a text so i think it's kind of funny how it's how it's evolved right you'd leave the house or you'd leave your business not that long ago and no one knew where you were or could get in contact with you and now we can track you within kind of meters yeah it is and sometimes it can be a bit scary i recently watched the social dilemma with my kids oh you don't do that that'll scare you for life well actually we've been watching a movie um a comedy about two older people who interned at google with two comedians i can't remember vince someone and someone else so we sort of had the we do what we do because we love google one week and then the next week google is evil so it was quite interesting to kind of contrast balance right it's a nice balance yeah so on from mobile phones that look like giant bricks in the early 90s what are some of the other sorts of projects you've worked on yeah so i i've been really blessed to kind of be a part of most of the major milestones of small business technology since 1990 so i was part of the pilot team that tested sms technology so every time you send a a text message um i got to kind of be part of that closed group that was testing it to see if it was going to do any good and a really cool little side note on that we actually tested it to be inclusive for the deaf community wow that was how sms technology kind of got its leg up in australia to begin with was to help out the deaf community and now you know we we send send me milk um so that was fun i launched the iphone so as part of a role i had at telstra i've done a bunch of um mobile phone upgrades and network upgrades so i went from the old analog to next g to 3g to 4g to 5g so i've kind of been a part of a lot of them um i remember i wrote the the learning and development manual for telstra to teach people how to put a device in the hands of a client when you know with the phone started getting the little screens on them that you could watch videos or you could stream you know i think optus had a streaming service on your mobile phone for a while so i've kind of seen all of the iterations to where we are now it's just been a it's a lot of fun wonderful that is fascinating now if you are watching please stop and say hi always love to know who is out there and if you have questions for tracy make sure you answer them so you've seen a lot of things that are happening now how excited are you for new technology what is it that is exciting you right now to trial and to think about possibilities for yeah it's it's a really interesting one because mainly and you and i were chatting about this before we went live mainly i work now with people that are over 40. so they're they're my age group you know we grew up without tech so we didn't have computers in the house we didn't have any of that kind of stuff technology's happened to us and it can feel a little oppressive and overwhelming at some times like it's this other thing that we've got to learn oh i have to be on facebook i have to know tik tok i have to know whereas i kind of say that tech and technology should make your life easier it shouldn't be another thing that you have to spend all this time on so you know just like if you're an accountant or a sparky or you know anything you're always kind of watching out for what's happening in your own industry and you're always reading stuff and keeping up today i just kind of think like technology for me is that thing that you read about for maybe half an hour an hour a week and you're doing the general kind of perusing of what's going on in the small business world but i think where people kind of go oh i what's the next big thing what's the don't worry about it just do what you do do it really well and then if you reach a point where you're kind of hitting a wall and you're going hey it'd be really good if there was a thing that would do this there probably is and that's where you start to spend a little bit of time and investigate it but if you get caught up in the bright shiny object syndrome you're never going to get your own work done so you know that's why there's people like me that spend our lives getting caught up in the bride bright shiny object syndrome so we can tell you what to spend time on and what to avoid yeah thank you for that i just want to acknowledge that michael hanrahan who i know you also know is online and he said hi um and uh so shiny object syndrome and you know thinking about all these technology you know as a small business owner especially starting out it is really tempting you think you have to spend a lot of money on a lot of different apps and a lot of different things and everyone does talk about you know automation and how powerful it is but i agree with you you could spend literally all your time automating all your processes so that they were all perfect or you could be too scared to start until everything was totally automated and automation is a great example i think in my personal opinion i've seen people go so far into the automation that they lose the personality you know so really now what we are seeing and if you you talk about you know what's coming what's the next big thing automation's going to stay but it's it's getting that personalization back in so it's really spending time to understand your clients your community knowing who they are what they want and you know what what kind of makes them tick so you can perhaps create lists or groups of people that you talk to that are smaller so i'm not sending you surrender something that is completely irrelevant to you because i'm just sending out a big glass once a month going hey i've done this fabulous thing i don't care no one's got time for that tell me what i need to know tell me how this thing is going to make my life easier if i'm in the publishing world or this thing's going to make my life easier if i'm in the coaching world like just talk to me and that's where you kind of need to get to now with your order my automations or you you're just going to lose your people you're going to annoy them and they're going to disappear yeah it's something that i struggle with myself like i've automated processes now for instance for someone to book in to be a facebook live guest or to be a podcast guest but some people just get annoyed with it they're like well i'm available to you know 12 30 friday and that's it and i'm like you know i've got a form and it's handy for me if they fill out the form because and i know you did but you know everything is one place but some people are like well i'll just send you emails i don't have time i'm not bothered you know and i've been a guest myself on podcasts where the amount of hoops i've had to go through before i'm even a guest and the amount of information i've had to fill out and which they probably don't even need it's just annoying for me yeah it's that it's that happy medium isn't it that when you're the one creating the content you're the podcaster or in this instance doing what you're doing there are certain things that you need and you need them in the format that you need them in because that's what works for you i think what happens is often we reach out to the wrong people they may not be exactly our target demographic or they may not be so i find whenever something like that just kind of isn't gelling then that's time to sit back and go are they actually the right people for me to be interviewing or are they am i the right guest for them i was on a podcast the other week well i was invited to be on a podcast the other week and when i turned up for the interview i said to the person you know i'm not convinced that i'm actually the right person for your audience so i'm really happy to have the chat and you know what i'm going to leave it with you and if you don't feel like our conversation is going to hit the bull's-eye for your people don't play it because it's just going to end up alienating your audience and he was like wow that's really secure of you to say and i said well there's no point like your audience is gold right your clients are gold treat them like that don't get someone on that's not going to hit the mark or you know you've got to give them that return on attention why am i turning up why am i giving you 15 minutes half an hour of my time uh you know thank you for that there's some really insights in that and things i can relate to as a podcaster we will come back to technology but since we both have a love of podcasting i'd like to delve into this further um and you know i find sometimes there's a lot of competition to get you know the best guest you know the really famous guest and you know like obviously you want to do that like in its um i see podcasting partly is a way to make some amazing contacts and you obviously do want industry leaders thought leaders who are going to share their message but you know it can sometimes become like just having the famous people now interestingly on my podcast which has been in existence for 18 months this particular podcast it's my second podcast is consistently the highest ranking person on there um is an anonymous blogger from melbourne she goes by the title late start of fire she's a woman in her late 40s doesn't publish her name she's not a superstar she doesn't go on tv she's not regularly on other podcasts in fact i think she's only ever been on my podcast or at least i would know i was the first and you know she's like really when i show her the stats and i'm like no no you you are number one you're the top and she doesn't believe me to be honest yeah so i i think that's a perfect example of you're finding people that meet your audience's needs you know so obviously whatever it is that that lady is presenting or talking about is banging the wheelhouse of what your listeners want to hear so you can't argue with the stats right so that that tells me that sometimes chasing the industry expert is not actually what your people want to hear because often the industry experts go off on a bunch of jargon that make me feel completely inadequate because maybe i don't actually get what it is you're saying or it's not completely relevant and again return on into return on attention why am i giving you my ears for half an hour an hour if it's not something that's adding value to me i listen to all my podcasts on one and a half or two speed as it is because i listen to a lot of podcasts so you know if if you know if your show doesn't win me over in that first few minutes i'm out i'm done so yeah it's an interesting one too i mean i love listening to your podcast hubby and i um listen to them on drive on long drives this was you know pre-covered locked down maybe we'll be doing some long drives again and he does the editing for my podcast he's my sound producer so he notices all the little things that um you know the hi-hats that tick tick ticks the um ums the rs i listen to the interviewing techniques um so it's really fascinating but i think this is one of the amazing things about podcasts you're not limited to just listening to what's on the radio at a particular time you can really choose your genre yeah absolutely i i call it communication right when we listen to something that is educational when we're commuting because that's kind of what really drew me well i was listening to podcasts when they were still rss feeds so i'm a bit of a geek when it comes to that but once they kind of i think serial was the first one that kind of blew up that that made podcast mainstream it was the first one to hit a million downloads it was the first podcast to have a skit from saturday night live made about it so it was kind of the first one that really elevated podcasts to mainstream and i do i think it's really interesting that people now seek out niche things that they're interested in whether it's educational or community-based or hobby or whatever it is and that's their you know that you've i'm choosing to let you into my ears you know what i mean so it's a really a position of trust i think to hold a podcast with your audience i agree i feel it's like a conversation so it's different to say youtube which is blingy and it's really when you people are engaging with their the sound and the listening it's like a conversation um absolutely and i i see that's where platforms like clubhouse now have really supplemented what we do as podcasters you know because we as a as a podcaster of often i see the conversation is almost one way you know we're having that that chat like you and i are now but as a listener i can nod along but i can't butt in and kind of go oh but what about you know or what do you think of i'm starting to see platforms like clubhouse have this beautiful place where you know you can have your podcast this week comes out on a tuesday on friday you get me back on for a half an hour chat on clubhouse and the people that listen to the show can now come on and go hey so you said this thing about this and what did you mean by that or what about this and you know you're creating that real dialogue so i see how those platforms now are adding that extra layer and really starting to add some depth to the communities that we're you know we're creating wow exciting times so i want to bring us back to talking about technology and you know there's often a perception that it's only the young people who can be good at technology or that they understand technology i have two boys one's nine one's twelve my twelve-year-old has started teaching he's been teaching himself animation for about a year he's got his own youtube channel he's a bit secretive about it but he's doing some good work um when he lets us watch it that is and my nine-year-old who's much more extroverted is um really into doing live streaming for his gaming program and also editing videos but there's a perception that only the young people can do that is that true are older people locked out of technology no absolutely not i feel as though we need to cut people our age and oldest and slack right because like i said earlier we didn't grow up with this stuff like your kids did you know we grew up with nintendo and you know even before that atari was kind of the big thing when we kind of hit teenagers or remember in my office at home i've got the little flip nintendo screens that were um greenhouse and donkey kong and stuff like that that was kind of our introduction to technology but you know i didn't have computers in the classroom when i went to school you know we had a room the computer room that had maybe four computers so there's that sense that you know we missed that indoctrinate indoctrination that your kids have had so they'll never know not having mobile phones i'll never know not having a laptop they'll never know not having internet all those kinds of things so in that regard it's just a choice that we make you know as in the small business owners there's a lot of choices we're always making how we marketing you know how we're going to show up in the world how we're going to maintain that space for our clients all that kind of stuff being tech savvy is just another choice that we need to make you know when it comes to marketing well technology sits alongside of anything now so if you want to be successful as a business owner you need to speak the language you don't necessarily need to do it all though right so that's the tip well one of the tips to overcoming overwhelm is that that you don't have to do at all no good grief no no one's got time to do it all right and and it's like you know again as a small business owner you have those core group of advisors around you right so you always have a really good accountant you probably got a solicitor that helps you do your hr documents and all that kind of stuff you need a good website person that you can lean on and maybe you need someone that can teach you or help you understand how do i use facebook better or how do i what crm should i have customer relationship manager or how should i be emailing people or you know those types of things it's just gathering another advisor in my my hobby who is also a mad tech head says all the time i don't know how to play a violin but i know when one's played well and i think it's a really important thing to kind of think of that i don't know how to build a website but i know when one's built well and i know now how to have a conversation with a website designer so i'm not getting ripped off so it's just learning the language it's being able to say to a web person or a marketing person or a automation person i need it to do x y and z and then what happens if that is a great example and i want to acknowledge that we have jackie owen here watching and she's a website developer um my new uh venture the joyful fashionista launched its um marketplace uh um online marketplace today it's a platform for buying and selling secondhand clothes and in the first instance with jackie support she put me in pointed me in the right direction i built a prototype now the prototype wasn't perfect but i didn't think it was actually too bad for someone who had never i mean i'm a blogger so you know bloggers always you know build basic wordpress websites but this one had a lot more functionality but it's now been professionally uh built by a team in the philippines it's glitchy today i'm cranky i've had several messages with the developing team but the point is that because i had gone through that system of building the prototype even though it wasn't very good i had an idea so we are speaking the same language about what's happening and i'm actually as part of this project i'm working with a team at anu a team doing a masters of computer science so they're all programmers so there's six of them in the team they're based in china it's the program called tech launcher and they are using gamification to develop this cute game that's going to go with the the system and we have weekly meetings of course i have no idea what coding language they've gone they've gone from using something that was super smart to html5 to view i don't even know how to write for you but you know that ability to have conversations with them every week about what they're doing and to communicate the vision like i'm not scared to do that even though i don't really understand the technical details of what they're doing if that makes sense and that's all you know i liken it to you're used to listening to am radio but suddenly the dials on fm yeah you just need to or you were saying you were learning or learnt mandarin earlier um you know it's like having a conversation with me and mandarin and i have no idea what it is he's saying so we just smile and nodded each other you know so maybe i need to draw a picture and and point at the picture and have you you know we just need to figure out what's that common language because sadly one of the biggest things i hear from the people i work with is i've been ripped off by a web designer i've been ripped off by a marketer i tried facebook ads i threw money at them they didn't work you know and it's not the web designer's fault it's not the client's fault it's that neither of them are speaking a common language yeah that's a really good point too and i think true that that fear that you know when people start saying oh i'm not very good with technology i'm not very good with computers um that's an inhibitor and i think you know like why while i've made a decision that i'm not going to run off and study a masters of computer science because it's not the best use of my skill set or time you know if i need to work out how to do something there's usually youtube so in a work context i was doing some part-time work earlier this year and you know we were establishing a facebook page and people are like oh i don't know how to use the facebook business page because they've got a whole new business page suite i forget the name of it now like i don't know how to use it either right i mean i've used it before but i'm not an expert but you know i watched a few youtube channel channels i i tried a few things but the next day i was an expert [Laughter] yeah yeah it's look i um a lot of my people now i i started a small business tech club just for people who want they've recognized that technology needs to be a part of their lives but they don't know where to start so you know they're my people and then you know like you said jump on youtube or you know if you're talking about facebook they have an amazing free learning platform called blueprint so anytime you want to know anything about facebook or instagram google facebook blueprint and they have hours of courses and videos and step-by-step guides and all that kind of stuff google has google garage you know so if you want to know about running google ads or doing seo or any of that kind of google analytics any of that kind of stuff google garage you know they build it they maintain it you're not going to get better advice than going and jumping on their platform so it's just being brave enough to follow a recipe you know like the first time i learned to cook a cake i didn't well i did actually just put the flour on the floor and dropped a couple of eggs because mum thought i was out with dad and dad thought i was in with mum but you know as we get older typically what do we do we go hunt for a recipe you know i need two cups of this and a cup of that and a bit of this and a bit of that it's the same thing with technology you know if you kind of go i need a facebook business page go find the recipe you know you work it out i just want to acknowledge that jackie owen has some comments she said um choose what you feed your mind she's also said that is so important speaking a common language yeah i agree and i know i've had some conversations with jackie where i've been sort of here in the vision and she's like yeah i don't really care about that so much like what i think you actually want me to do i don't mean that in a bad way jackie you know what i mean like we need to come back to the you know what are the actual tasks we're doing and what is it going to look like jackie said also understanding the scope of what the technical expert is bringing to the table they often focus on a part of the project's scope and aren't focused on the context or the whole picture that's a big one i'm working with some people at the moment to get a website built and um you know they didn't have ux they didn't have a customer design so and the web person wasn't doing that but again because there's an assumption that oh i'm getting the website built that must mean they make it look pretty and they make it functional and they maybe not maybe they just build it maybe they don't have the graphics the the customer design team behind it that's going to make it you know fit what your clients are looking for again it's knowing what to ask and working with people or being comfortable enough to then kind of say what haven't i asked you that i need to know you know and then jackie would say well actually we don't have a ux designer or we don't have a content creator you're gonna need to supply the content oh okay you know instead of getting six weeks into the project and both being frustrated with each other because this isn't working or that didn't happen or whatever yeah well um just as we wrap up and i'm sure you will have some things to comment on this you know as i am you know going through my current project with this website design and it's quite i mean marketplace websites are quite you know big it's not just a normal just a blogging platform it's not just a brochure style thing um it's a little bit more interaction but you know one of my kind of regrets is we went from talking about oh yeah we can do this and this is how much we charge an hour to suddenly having a different project and we now have milestones and you know what milestones would be reached before each payment but i really wish we'd worked that out beforehand and that we've done that and that we've done that under a contract that was really clear i mean it's nothing bad like things are going according to schedule but you know i really feel on a few things it sort of disrupted the trust a little bit because we weren't as clear at the front like it's one of those things that i didn't know how what i didn't know and you know what you don't know right yeah exactly they're my people you're my people speak to me well you know i obviously hide them because i'm not a professional website developer myself i don't know this level of coding and i've made a decision that i'm going to focus on other things rather than learning that but then the other kind of you know regret was around project management so they didn't have good project management tools so then we'd had you know over a period of months and discussion about different tools and we're now using a system and you know i sort of thought we were all on the same board we'd had you know many discussions do you like this system you're happy with it now they said no we don't like this system we don't really use it what we do use is trello and i'm like well you could have told me that three months ago it would have been a lot easier but like it's okay no now so now i'll just transfer the data over to trello the rest of his team can see it and that way we can be a little bit more clearer so when i notice little fixes and things i can put it in there and they can know what they they need to fix because at the moment the communication's a bit like this yeah yeah so it's just and that's you know we don't have time to go into working with with contractors that are based in different countries and things but along with getting the common language there's also cultural things to understand you know if you're working with people from the philippines they don't want to offend so they're they're often very um and you know ameniable to things that are yes yes that's fine that's fine and it's only when you've been working with them for a period of time that they start actually um yeah we don't like that you know tell me that up front but that's not the culture so there's a lot of stuff that we need to navigate as small business owners you know whether it's tech or you know working with virtual contractors whatever it is there's a lot of hats where we're wearing and plates we're spinning yeah exactly well i have learnt so much from this and it's also been so encouraging uh you were talking earlier about the you know the age demographics of small business owners so you know maybe if you want to share this as a party uh piece of wisdom yeah so this scared the living crap out of me when i first read it to be honest so there's 2.1 million small business owners registered abn's in australia 63 of us are aged over 45. so that's why i've chosen to work with my people my age group plus they get my random 80s movie references when i was sliding you know when i put something in there about ghostbusters or something so i've got an elephant all the way through my book called aegon because i named him after aegon from ghostbusters but you know they're my people the point is the majority of us are aged over 40 45 tech happened to us just remember that we didn't grow up with it so it's something that we have to choose to adopt and adapt if we want to be you know thriving and surviving in another five years if we know one thing covert has disrupted a lot of stuff for us as business owners it has it's not going to go back to the way it was it's up to us to find out how our clients in our community want to work with us and turn up in the way that works for them well thank you that's fabulous and i just want to add one final thing since we're talking about 80s movie references which is a couple of weeks ago my family and i watched this movie about um two you know middle-aged men who became google interns so i was mentioning i can't remember the actors but they're both very famous and it's both very funny was it the interns with yeah so vince someone and it's very faint they're very famous i just can't remember off the top of my head but everything they do you know they're they're you know doing teamwork with these young people who are great at coding but have no soft skills or communication of everything else and they actually excel because they've got this you know teamwork kind of ethic and they bring in all these 80s references like flash dance references and things like that so it's really funny but you know they have absolutely no idea they keep talking about on the line rather than online totally out of that so just remember that if you think you're overwhelmed by technology at least you're not going to be going around saying on the line that's exactly right or carrying around a box and calling it the internet i always remember that from the i.t oh yes [Laughter] that is one of my all-time favorite episodes of that as well you've got me laughing i think into the afternoon now well thank you so much tracy make sure you leave your contact details um in the thread and more importantly um some details about your book so that people know where to buy it and to support what you do thank you all very much and uh next week we have misty henkel talking about sales and her new book that she's in the process of writing as well thanks for having very much thank you you

2021-10-25 00:33

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