Women in STEM History - Judith Love Cohen

Sometimes you read about a person and then immediately have make a post about it. This is one of those times.

Judith Love Cohen (August 16, 1933 – July 25, 2016) was an American aerospace engineer and author who worked on the Apollo Space Program at the height of her engineering career. In particular she worked on the Abort-Guidance System that saved the lives of the astronauts on the Apollo 13 mission. After retiring as an engineer, she started a publishing company called Cascade Pass in order to publish educational books encouraging children and girls specifically into STEM fields of work. Many of these books she authored herself.

Now I would not normally mention my subject’s personal life at all, because that’s not what this series is about. In this case I will make an exception because there’s a particularly good anecdote as follows.

On the day of the birth of her fourth child, she went to the office in the morning (for the Apollo Space Program) to do a little more work. When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a computer printout of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called her boss and told him that she had solved the problem. And . . . oh, yes, the baby was born, too.

The baby that was born that day? Jack Black… yes that Jack Black. One can only assume much of his excellence comes from his brilliant mother.

You can read more about Judith Love Cohen in an obituary written by her son Neil Siegal here

Email Marketing – what should I use???

Mailchimp, Aweber, Convertkit, ActiveCampaign…. The list goes on.  CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software and autoresponders abound with wildly varying price points and feature lists.

So What Should You Use?!?!

I DON’T KNOW

Here’s a better question, what do you want to do with your contact list? Here’s another pertinent factor – How old is your business? / How big is your list? / How quickly do you want to grow?

Sorry, that was three in one, but they affect the ultimate outcome of your decision, so actually not sorry. I can’t tell you what software you should use, not without getting to understand you and your business. But here’s a list of questions you should be asking yourself.

• What’s your budget?

• Do you want to grow your list through contact forms and social media marketing?

• Are you emailing out blog posts?

• Are you mainly contacting customers who’ve already paid?

• Do you have somebody who can administer the system, internal or otherwise?

• Do you like manually sending emails? /Do you need automated email sequences?

• Will you use reporting? (Are you using it now?)

• Do you need form building?

• Do you want site & event tracking?

• Lots of integrations?

If you’re a new business, have a low budget and are mostly sending emails manually – you could just use Mailchimp. It’s cheap and should have most of the features you need.

If you’re looking to grow quickly you should look for a solution with solid contact forms, site & event tracking and good automation systems. Convertkit, ActiveCampaign, and Aweber might fit the bill.

All of these solutions – ALL OF THEM will need maintenance.

Can you do that? Are you prepared to learn?

Or is this the one thing you might be better off handing over to a T-VA?

You can always contact me if you need help answering those questions.

Read more from the Blog

Why you shouldn’t complete that project.

You know the one I’m talking about. The one that seems like a such great idea, that your mentor told you to do, that definitely works for everybody else but… you just keep putting it off.

Here’s what to do about that.

Get old school and do an old fashioned full business case with a SWOT analysis, a competitor analysis, and every other kind of analysis you can think of.

We, as small business entrepreneurs, don’t do those kinds of business cases very much. They’re clunky and take a lot of time and are mostly unnecessary when you’re not trying to communicate a business idea to anyone other than perhaps a partner.

So why do one now?

Well, a full business case report will help you identify where you’re stuck with getting the project off the ground. Maybe you don’t want to accept the risks, or the potential client isn’t what you want for your business or… any number of other reasons.

Once you’ve written it all down, the project itself should be clear; then you can decide finally, do you want to do it?

Don’t do a project just because you have the idea, or your mentor told you to or because everyone else is doing it. Do it because the business case fits your business.

And if it doesn’t, now you know why. Put the project down, archive whatever you’ve already done and focus your efforts on what does fit your business and you.

Keep the business case though. Review it in 12 months time or 5 years time, it might work in the future even if it doesn’t work for right now.

If you want more information on how to write a business case, there’s a pretty good article about that by Adobe Workfront.

Sometimes you might need specific advice to really understand the risks and costs of an IT project, so if that’s what you’re struggling with, perhaps I could help you out.

Tech notes: Youtube video embeds

YouTube remains the best place to host video content for consumers and businesses alike, but the functionality does change every so often, usually without much of an announcement.  If you've been using YouTube to host the sales videos embedded on your site, you might remember that you used to be able to prevent the "related videos” from showing up after the video had finished playing but you don't seem to be able to anymore.  

As it turns out, as of September 25th, 2018, the API functionality was changed, and the simple checkbox was removed from the user interface. “An Embed API is the code generated when you use the embed option of the share function on YouTube videos.” 

The main changes in that update were to remove the option to prevent related videos from displaying after your video has played, and the option of not to displaying the video name and channel details. (side note: this also happened for videos cast from your mobile device to your TV which I personally find quite irritating.) 

The stated reason for these changes is to “Increase standardisation across platforms”. I find that to be a weak reason given the whole point of those options was to allow businesses to have relatively unbranded videos.  

While the call to remove name and channel details is entirely gone, (the code won’t work even if you had it before), the call to prevent related videos still does something. Where the value is set to 0, the related videos will only be videos from your own channel. This still isn’t great if you’re using the embed code on a sales page with one purpose (and therefore really don’t want other videos/links/content diluting your message), but I guess it’s better than random videos or user targeted videos showing up.  

As noted above you can’t set this value with the user interface anymore either. So, all future embeds will show random related videos unless you specifically change the provided embed code to include the call. 

Of course, I can help you with this if you’re not interested in editing code yourself. 

If you haven’t heard anything about these changes, that’s not surprising. Technically the changes were publicly announced on their embed API documentation page, but I have to say that’s not quite the same as sending out a media release to relevant news sites, is it? From what I can tell people are mostly noticing when the options that were available before are no longer there. I personally heard about it through the Clickfunnels Facebook group so shout out to them for sharing the news. 

This is all pretty disappointing to me as I’m generally a pretty big fan of Google (and by extension YouTube), but there’s no denying that this is a fairly hostile move towards the businesses using the YouTube platform for sales/marketing purposes. If you want to see the revision history of the embed API you can find that here.  

I also have a one page guide on how to change the embed code correctly, which you can download below.  

GET THE GUIDE

Youtube Blog Post Form

Women in STEM History - Mary Somerville

Today’s Woman in STEM is Mary Somerville. Born in Scotland in 1780, she wrote 7 influential science books in her lifetime, earning the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for "Physical Geography" in 1869. She and Caroline Herschel were also the first women honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. She is currently featured on the back of the Royal Bank of Scotlands ten pound note with a quote from her fourth book "The Connection of the Physical Sciences". As this book is well out of copyright, the ebook can be found for free, digitised by the Gutenberg Project, here.

Women in STEM History - Virginia (Ginny) Strazisar Travers

Today's Woman in STEM is Virginia (Ginny) Strazisar Travers. She was working for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) during the "bread truck" packet swtiching wireless San Francisco experiment and is credited with developing the first true TCP/IP router in 1979. The Computer History Museum wrote an excellent article on these events on the 40th anniversary in 2017, found here, and also created an excellent panel interview with Virgina Strazisar Travers and others on the 30th anniversary in 2007 available on Youtube (and embedded below.)

How to write an incredible email subject line.

Or

Email marketing is one of the most important things you can do to keep your business running steadily, this is as true now as it has been since sending emails got more popular than sending letters. Which means we all have to get good at a wide variety of skills that were not at all necessary to the average business owner prior to about 1990, including but not limited to, copy writing, SEO and my least favourite task of all, writing email subject lines. Email subject lines are unfortunately important in making sure your email is opened and read; write a good one and your open rate can jump from the standard 20% average to over 80%, write a bad one and literally nobody will even see your email, let alone have to decide whether to open it or not. The margin of error here is... huge.

So how do we decide what's good and what's bad???? (aha, see what I did there).

Well as the quote suggests, there are some actual hard and fast rules that will at least make sure your email gets to the inbox.

1. Don't use multiple exclamation points, no matter how excited you are by your product launch. One is enough to get the point across and anymore is likely to get picked up by spam filters.

2. You also can't use both an exclamation point and a question mark, for the exact same reason. Either ask a question, just the one mind you, or use an excited statement, not both.

3. Emoji's are... a grey area. I wouldn't recommend it in general, but you can probably get away with using one.

4. Don't use all caps. This is the internet syntax for shouting, so if your audience is made up of people primarily 40 ish and under, you may be literally shouting in their head. It doesn't leave a good impression and I personally have blocked people for typing like this. (There are locations like headings and buttons where all caps doesn't translate to shouting and some fonts can also change this, but in general, body copy and subject lines shouldn't be in all caps.)

5. Don't use swear words... I know in some cases it can be a part of the business brand to still use swear words, and I don't personally mind it, but the spam filters don't care about my feelings (or yours for that matter). Using swear words will vastly increase your chance of hitting the spam box.

That was a lot of negatives, so here's some positives to balance it out, just a bit. These things will (hopefully) work to get your email read, now that we've given it the best chance of being seen:

1. Follow the Kiss Principle. (Keep it Simple S....) Subject lines don't need to be complicated to get our attention, often the best ones I've seen have been only 4 or 5 words total.

2. Do use the same line as your blog title, if the email is a blog update notification, and, sneaking a "don't" in here, don't have your blog name or email list name in every email. It's good for the Welcome email and then it's unnecessary from there on out. If they're reading your emails, they can see who it's from in the "From" field, so you really don't need to add it again.

3. Let it go... not every subject line will be perfect, it's better to get your emails sent and delivered than stress about whether you're setting the exact right tone with your subject line.

If all else fails - go and look at your spam box and then your inbox. See the difference? Yeah, do the same things as the emails you open and avoid the mistakes of the spam box. (This seems like really obvious advice, but I genuinely didn't do it until recently, so I'm just passing on the obvious wisdom in case somebody else didn't think of it either.)

I should also note that it can definitely help your deliver-ability if you remind people to add your email address to their contacts on sign up. We can't make them do it... but we can politely remind them that they are in control of what they receive and see.

And of course, because I have an (many trash filled) email address(es), I have examples!

First, one from the Spam Box.

This one is a big old Woops, because it is a company I definitely subscribed to and whose emails mostly end up in my Inbox… they do regularly use Emoji and all caps and exclamation marks in their subject lines, but I guess this one was a step too far for my spam filters. There’s no need to toe the line like this.

And now two from the Inbox.

So simple and yet so clear. In fact, it’s so good that gmail has marked it important for me. I haven’t even bought from this company (yet) but they’re showing up in my inbox in such a respectful but useful way that I always see their content.

Two words… just two words is all it takes for me to be interested and open the email and then click on through. Shout out to Matt Giovanisci for providing the masterclass in my inbox.

If still want help with this, or any of your other technical woes, book a call, I’m sure I can get you sorted out.

Or you can connect with me on social media to see more of this sort of thing.

What’s up with that Open Letter to Australians?

Content Warning: This post contains swear words and slang.

If you are in Australia and use any Google products at all, then I'm sure you've seen the notices they've put literally everywhere about the ACCC's proposed arbitration code between News Publishers and *digital platform services*.

I clicked through pretty quickly because it was odd and I have a habit of reading things that look like error messages. The Open Letter to Australians from Mel Silva, Managing Director of Google Australia is pretty clear in what the impacts of this code would be for average Australians (and average Australian businesses...) but of course various news publications and the ACCC (whose content was also definitely served to me by Google....) are saying that Google is using scare tactics and is generally incorrect about what the code would do.

So I went and found the draft code, and skimmed through the definitions at the front till I got to the meat of it. .... The phrase that comes to mind is pretty rude, so lets tone it down and say that I think the ACCC is on something if they think this is, in any way, a reasonable piece of legislation. It truly seems like they've seen the problem i.e. Australian publishers are struggling to meet the demands of the modern digital business world, and looked for the largest non-publisher businesses to pin the cost on. (I’m not the only one who thinks that)

Now, I'm not particularly sympathetic to large news corporations because many of them have been absolutely raking it in, enjoying full control of the content distributed in this country for more than 50 years in some cases. That they are now making less profit doesn't worry me in the slightest. It does bother me that their response to making less profit is likely to be reducing the quality of journalism by firing and/or cutting pay to journalists, but to be clear that's how they have always done business. So consider me biased against them. That said I'm not exactly biased towards Google either, Google can certainly afford the amounts being asked for to an extent.

So what's my problem with this code??

The way they've written it, whether they realise this or not, will affect EVERYONE. It will definitely privilege content from large news corporations over anyone not registered under the Australian Communications and Media Authority as a "registered news business corporation". Looking at the AMCA website it appears that this will be a new type of registration, given that the licenses/registrations currently available on the site relate specifically to Radio, TV and Telecommunications Carriers.

So if you're a local newspaper you will first need to go get this new registration to be covered by this code, oh and you must already have greater than $150,000 per year in revenue as a corporation, and if you're anyone else, congrats you're shit out of luck.

To be clear, what this means is it won't matter if your content (as a creator or a person or a business) is more relevant to the search query, Google, YouTube and Facebook will be forced to show that news content first, even if it isn't relevant, even if it's behind a paywall AND they want Google and the others to pay for the privilege of showing less relevant content.

It seems like they've misunderstood what Google Search is?

The relationship between Google and news publishers is as the sooty newspaper kid, shouting the headlines in Victorian era movies was to the newspaper printer. The kid didn't pay the printer, the printer paid him. Just because the kid is now a global corporation with it's own independent funding sources doesn't mean the flow of money should be the other way round. To Google's credit, they were in negotiations to pay anyway.

That aside, here are the main points verbatim from the draft code that will screw over everybody:

52M Giving explanations of information

Subsection (2)

(a) a list and explanation of the data that the digital platform service collects (whether or not it shares the data with the registered news business) about the registered news business’ users through their engagement with covered news content made available by the digital platform service; 

(b) a list and explanation of the products and services supplied by the digital platform service that collect data about the registered news business’ users through their engagement with covered news content made available by the digital platform service; 

(c) a list and explanation of the data that the digital platform service currently has a practice of making available to registered news businesses;

(d) an explanation of how the form of the data mentioned in paragraph (c) differs from the form of the data collected by the digital platform service about users of the digital platform service;  

(e) information about how the registered news business corporation can gain access to the data mentioned in paragraphs (a) and (c).

I am deeply unclear how the ACCC doesn't see this as a massive invasion of privacy, but lets break it down. Sub-subsection (a) means that any registered news corporation will be provided a list of the kind data Google has by virtue of you having any engagement with online news. This is followed with sub-subsection (e) that says now we know what data you have, we would like to have and use that data too.

This means that if you use Google Search or literally any Google product that shows news then they will have your usage data, possible including, IP address, physical location at any given time, full name, email address, etc ad nauseum. If you have a Google account or a Facebook account then news businesses feel like they should be able to have and use that information.

Maybe they didn't mean to include full name, email address and physical location at any given time in the list of things they want access to... but it sure doesn't say they are excluded. Maybe the Australian Privacy Act will protect us... but probably not before a bunch of news organisations are given/take this data and a data breach happens.

They can already see aggregated data about who engages with their content through Google Analytics or any other web analytics program, same as the rest of us. Why they feel they deserve access to a higher level of data than we, the users, have authorised is beyond me.

The next section in summary:

We think we should have special knowledge of your algorithm so we can always rank highest and we want 28 days notice of you changing it.

Woops meant to say,

52N Algorithmic ranking of covered news content

(1) Subsection (2) applies if: 

(a) changes are planned to be made to an algorithm of the digital platform service; and  

(b) the changes are likely to have a significant effect on the ranking of the registered news business’ covered news content made available by the digital platform service.  

(2) The responsible digital platform corporation for the digital platform service must ensure that: 

(a) notice of the change is given to the registered news business corporation for the registered news business; and 

(b) the notice is given: 

(i) unless subparagraph (ii) applies—at least 28 days before the change is made; or

(ii) if the change relates to a matter of urgent public interest—no later than 48 hours after the change is made; and

(c) the notice describes the change, and the effect mentioned in paragraph (1)(b), in terms that are readily comprehensible; and

(d) the notice describes how the registered news business can minimise negative effects of the change on the ranking of its covered news content made available by the digital platform service.

There's also special sections for pay-walled content, the way that content is displayed in search etc and advertising of news publishers, but I won't sport with your intelligence by including those sections too. They follow the exact format of the section above.

That's right.. news publishers think it's reasonable that they have advance and detailed knowledge of the search algorithm, including as it relates to pay-walled content, the design of displayed links and even the ad algorithm.

I would LOVE to have access to the exact requirements of the search algorithm, it would make SEO so much easier, but this is a case where it absolutely has to be *everyone* or *no-one*. If only news publishers have that information then they can make sure their content displays first on anything and everything to the exclusion and detriment of all others. Obviously that's not ok, right???

Oh but we wouldn't USE the great and terrible powers, they say, we just want to HAVE them.

Bullshit

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

Give one group of economically motivated people a way to make MUCH more money at the cost of harming multitudes of anonymous people and history has shown they will. Every. Single. Time.

Nobody should have access to the algorithms.

Every company who has one is right to protect it, not because "it's a trade secret" or because it earns them money to be the only ones with it (though it does that too), but because the internet is at it's best when everyone has the opportunity to get the highest ranking through hard work and quality of content.

To try and legislate how that works can only have detrimental effects for everybody.

What this all comes down to, is that News Publishers don't have the distribution monopoly they once had and some of them are floundering around in this new world looking for someone to blame. That's nobody's fault but their own and the ACCC's incredibly heavy-handed attempt to help them out is definitely not the right way to go about ensuring Australia continues to have quality news media.

This legislation can harm me, as a person through the handing over of my data and as a business through the disadvantage of not having access to the algorithm. If you are a person in Australia who uses the internet, it can harm you too. If you are business, not covered by the registration definition, then you can be harmed too. I’m not ok about that, and I have sent a version of this post to the ACCC as an “interested party”. You can do so too here, bargainingcode@accc.gov.au, submissions are due by 5pm 28th August 2020

Sources:

1. https://australia.googleblog.com/2020/08/13-things-you-need-to-know-about-news.html

2. https://stratechery.com/2020/australias-news-media-bargaining-code-breaking-down-the-code-australias-fake-news/

3. https://about.google/intl/ALL_au/google-in-australia/an-open-letter/

4. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-14/australia-shouldn-t-make-facebook-and-google-pay-publishers-for-news

5. https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Exposure%20Draft%20Bill%20-%20TREASURY%20LAWS%20AMENDENT%20%28NEWS%20MEDIA%20AND%20DIGITAL%20PLATFORMS%20MANDATORY%20BARGAINING%20CODE%29%20BILL%202020.pdf

6. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/google-downplays-news-value-in-fight-over-1bn-compensation-fund-20200531-p54y4m.html

7. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/google-delays-local-licensing-deal-prepares-for-accc-fight-20200816-p55m58.html

8. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/google-facebook-profits-won-t-be-wiped-out-by-publishers-payments-accc-20200809-p55k1q.html

9. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/02/australia-google-facebook-news-390388

10. https://australia.googleblog.com/2020/05/responding-to-revised-publisher-code.html

11. https://australia.googleblog.com/2020/05/a-fact-based-discussion-about-news.html

12. https://www.acma.gov.au/

13. https://www.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/privacy#:~:text=The%20Privacy%20Act%201988%20(Privacy,and%20in%20the%20private%20sector.

14. https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/australian-privacy-principles/

15. https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/australian-privacy-principles/australian-privacy-principles-quick-reference/

How to work with a virtual assistant in 5 bullet points.

You’ve worked with all sorts of people in your various previous careers, colleagues, bosses, employees. Now you have your own business and you’ve come to the point where you need to hire someone to help you on a regular basis. You know how it would work if you were hiring someone to work in the same location as you… but that comes with overheads, and you don’t actually have an office. The easiest and cheapest way to do that is to hire a remote contractor, somebody from Upwork or Freelancer or just the world wide web.

Photo by Kevin Bhagat on Unsplash

Here’s what a great working relationship with a remote contractor has:

1. The project(s) is/are outlined and broken down in a project management tool like Asana or Trello.

2. There is clear and open communication about goals, business requirements, timelines and how your lives are affecting all of that.

3. There is more than one way to get in contact. While most communication is through the project management platform, it is important to have an instant messaging channel in case either of you have emergencies.

4. Be clear on your boundaries around your working hours and accept the same from the contractor. That means, if they don’t work weekends or after 9pm, it isn’t ok for you set up tasks that will require them to work those times unless they specifically agree to it.

5. Begin the relationship with a video call, it’s much easier to work remotely when we don’t have to just imagine the other party is a real person.

You’ll note that all of those relate to communication and respect and that’s really what it’s all about. It’s not so different from working with somebody in real life, we just have to get very good at communicating our needs and expectations in writing and respecting theirs. If you’ve had a virtual assistant before and it didn’t work. This is probably why. We all fail to communicate our needs effectively sometimes and that can easily break a remote working relationship, but if you really work on number 2 then you will be able to spend much more time growing your business.

Why I can’t recommend Keap (formerly InfusionSoft).

There’s many, many, many, many CRM’s/Email Marketing tools available to help you manage your contacts and keep in contact with them.  With all the choices available it’s important to check out reviews for potential software purchases beforehand.  

So, here’s my review of Keap (formerly InfusionSoft).  

Keap is an all-in-one email marketing and sales CRM platform. In terms of functionality and price -point, they’re competing with Salesforce and accordingly I would expect they’re best suited to businesses of roughly 15 people upwards. Less than that and you’re unlikely to use the functionality you’re paying a premium for, which is never a good situation. 

The interface is fairly clean and tidy, and the automation tools appear to be pretty powerful, but settings often aren’t in the place you would expect them to be so it’s not as easy to learn and then use the various features as it should be. I say this as a person who can and does learn how to proficiently use at least one piece of software every month for my clients, if I think it’s annoying to use, then you are going to tear your hair out.  

The email designer is just ok, it loses out for ease of use to even Mailchimp and you can’t access email templates except through the campaign builder workflow (unlike Mailchimp). Even though there is an email template tab in the account settings. This tab apparently refers to notification type emails and allow you to edit the email test and metadata with no way to change the appearance. Not what I would call a template. 

The lead/contact management interface is similarly fine but doesn’t appear to have any clear engagement/lead rating system.  

I don’t have experience with other parts of the functionality, so I won’t speak to those, but there’s one final and very important piece of functionality that all online software MUST have, and that’s the ability to export your data and cancel the account with ease.  

Here Keap breaks the unspoken but vert strict rule of online software. You can’t cancel your account from the account settings interface. You have to fill out a “contact” form and WAIT for an “account manager” to call you back. This by itself would be reason enough for me to never recommend them to anyone.  

However, it gets worse. 

A client of mine had signed up for Keap on the recommendation of someone in their network (prior to becoming my client by the way). My client gave the software a good go, taking a course to understand how to use the functionality. They built out templates and automations and other pieces in the software, but even with the course information they didn’t use 90% of the features.  

The truth was Keap was more complex than their business needed, which is fine, it happens. So now they needed to move to a cheaper and easier to use software. I exported all the data I could. Got their written confirmation to close the account. And went to do so. Cue red flags and alarm bells!! The cancel account option is a contact form! Surely that isn’t right, I think. So, I google “How to cancel Keap account”. Ah, yep, Keap documentation says this is how you do it…. Ok then. I enter my clients’ information as they’ll have to be the ones taking any calls. I notify my client and hope for the best. Several days later, we have a catch-up call and I ask if the account has been dealt with. She says no, she’s repeatedly tried to get in contact with them, and NOBODY has called or replied or done anything that might constitute contacting her.  

Which I think is ridiculously unacceptable. The next step for her was contacting her credit card company to get the charges blocked. The account was cancelled after that, but I feel like one should never have to get to the point of calling your credit card company to cancel an account, and it really shouldn’t be so hard to get in contact with a company. 

After this experience, it occurred to me to compare this poor experience with the procedure for cancelling a salesforce account. A little research tells me that with them also you need to contact an account manager to go through the process of cancelling the account. A quick google shows several very dissatisfied former customers who had similar issues. Given this information, I think there is one major difference between Salesforce and Keap. In my prior dealings with salesforce, we had an account manager that we were in regular contact with. We knew who to talk to if we had any problems. On the other hand, my client did NOT have an account manager at Keap, they had no one to contact and no way to get a message to someone who might do something about cancelling the account. They were completely at the mercy of this ridiculous “Contact form”. It should also be noted that both Platforms require contact with a sales rep to OPEN an account.  

To conclude, be careful what you sign-up for. If you have to talk to a Sales Rep to open an account with an online software platform, you should also expect to talk to one to close the account. My general advice would be that if your business is smaller than 15 people you most likely don’t need software that requires an account manager. If you DO get a piece of software with this kind of sign up process, make sure you know who your account manager is and/or ALWAYS have a current contact at the company. Finding yourself at the mercy of contact forms and tech support portals when you need specialist help is certain to cause a bad time. 

Women in STEM History - Beulah Louise Henry

Todays Woman in STEM history is Beulah Louise Henry. She was a prolific inventor through the early 20th century. She held 49 patents in her lifetime and has around 110 inventions attributed to her. You can read more about her here.

Women in STEM History - Mary Jackson

Todays Woman in STEM history is Mary Jackson. Hopefully you’ve heard of her before, because she’s been portrayed by Janelle Monáe in the film Hidden Figures. Mary Jackson was first hired in 1951 at Langley Research Centre as a “computer”or what we would now call a research mathematician. In 1953, she moved within Langley to work with Kazimierz Czarnecki in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. It took her sometime to become qualified as an engineer but from 1958 to 1979 she worked as an Aeronautical Engineer for NASA, the first black woman to do so. From 1979 she continued to work for NASA as the Federal Women’s Program Manager in the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs until her retirement in 1985 . She authored or co-authored 12 technical papers over her time at NASA and helped many women and other minorities advance their careers within NASA. You can read more in the book “Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” by Margot Lee Shetterly or on NASA’s own website.

The Too Long: Didn’t Read of Pop Ups

This article on Pop Ups by Lauren Minning of ActiveCampaign is worth a read but it is pretty long so here’s a summary with the main points. I encourage you read the full article to find out more but I know we don’t all have the time for that.

TL:DR

• Pop Ups are annoying

• But Good Pop ups convert really really well compared to other placements

• Pop ups need context, they work best when they show after a relevant action

• No Pop up should come up as soon as you enter a website, nobody goes to a website to see their pop ups

• Good Email sign up forms should be Prominent, Promise useful benefit and provide Proof of benefit.

• Entrance and Exit Intent Pop-ups, Overlay/Modal/Lightbox pop ups, Slide-in boxes and sticky forms are all good types of pop ups that can work for you.

The How to on Group/Subreddit start up and moderation

“One tip I like, is to offer your early subscribers the chance of becoming a mod in exchange for making regular submissions”

— u/Raerth

Starting a facebook group can be hard, how do you find content and keep it moderated? As it turns out the same question has been asked about creating subreddits and answered a long time ago by Reddit user u/Raerth. Obviously some of this advice is tailored for reddit, but other advice like using RSS feeds to grab relevant content from a variety of sources works for any group you’re running. Well worth the read . You can find the full article here

Women in STEM History – Susan Kare

Todays Woman in STEM history is Susan Kare. She is a graphic designer who has been instrumental in building the online world we live in today, though I never knew about her until today. She designed the original Macintosh Icons in 1983 including the save icon, the watch, the trash bin and many more. She went on to design for Microsoft, Facebook and now Pinterest.  There’s a New Yorker article here that’s very good if you want to know more or you can simply go to her own website to see which pieces of her work you’ve known about, but not known about, for years. 

Does the Google + consumer shut down affect my business?

So, the consumer shut down of google + has started… a month ago. Did anyone notice?  Yeah me neither. Still there will presumably be some consequences for businesses eventually so I thought I’d go and check out those FAQs so you don’t have to.
The long and short of it is that consumer gmail accounts will no longer have an associated Google + account. If you’re a paying or academic G-Suite user of any sort then your gmail account will still have an associated Google + account. So far so simple. 
There’s not much more to be said about consumer accounts, but for G-Suite accounts, the details are a little more complicated. For example, if you have upgraded your original consumer account to a paying account then any data added to Google + prior to the upgrade may still be deleted. If your business had a Google + Page, that will also be deleted. Circles are being phased out and after April 2nd you can’t create new circles, Add people without a google + account to existing circles or share a post to a circle. Collections are also being phased out and you won’t be able to create new collections, or add content to a collection that is not domain-restricted. There’s a number of other changes but the above looked like the ones that would affect business users the most. Personally I never used any of these features, but that’s kind of the point/problem isn’t it. You can find the rest of the details here  https://support.google.com/a/answer/9229693
If these changes do affect you, then the only recourse is to back up the files through takeout.google.com or backing up your Google + Photos to Google Photos. Given the deletion started a month ago, it may already be too late, but they do say that the deletion process was expected to take several months so it might also still be there. In any case here’s the main FAQ for the shut down  https://support.google.com/plus/answer/9217723#whatshappening

Women in STEM History - Ada Lovelace

Today’s Woman in STEM History is Ada Lovelace. She is generally considered to be the first ever computer programmer for her work translating and augmenting a french transcription of Charles Babbage’s seminar on his Analytical Engine. In her extra notes, she wrote an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers. Unfortunately the machine was never completed so her program was never tested. More information on this fascinating woman can be found here.

Women in STEM History – Hedy Lamarr

Today, I’m starting a new series highlighting Women in STEM History. I’m beginning with Hedy Lamarr, because it’s one of my favourite pieces of historical trivia, that one of most famous and glamourous film stars of the 30’s and 40’s was also the inventor whose frequency-hopping signal technology paved the way for our current Wifi systems. You can find out more about her here