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Tom’s Tips Podcast: Episode 7 – Plenty To Be Thankful For

Written by Zach Gilbert

Published: 11/28/2018

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Audio Transcript

Announcer: Hey everyone, welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast! Your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. And now, your host, MagHub product manager, Tom Bellen.

Tom: Hello everyone and welcome to the 7.2 and Thanksgiving themed, Tom’s Tips Podcast. I’m joined by our Marketing Director Zach Gilbert. Zach, how are you today?

Zach: Good Tom. How are you?

Tom: I’m doing well. And our two interns, Travis. Travis how are you?

Travis: Great. Welcome. I’m glad to be here.

Tom: Arjun and how are you today?

Arjun: I’m all right.

Tom: He’s all right we had a great and all right. All right, it is Thanksgiving, so I think, first thing we will just start by what we’re all thankful for and I’m just thankful to have two wonderful interns, Travis and Arjun. Who now, Travis is going to start at U of M next semester, correct? University of Michigan?

Arjun: Yeah. That’s correct

Tom: We are all University Michigan graduates, and now we also have that in common. So I’m thankful for both of you for coming and making Aysling an amazing, wonderful place. Zach, what are you thankful for this season?

Zach: Working here, there we go.

Tom: That sounded very enthusiastic and I really believe that. Travis, how about you?

Travis: I’m very thankful to be very able bodied.

Tom: That is something to be thankful for. And Arjun, how about yourself?

Arjun: I’m thankful for my actual family, and my Aysling family too.

Tom: Ok, so a couple of things, one actually is actual family. So does that mean you have like a fictional family somewhere? There’s an actual family, Aysling family, and there’s a separate fictional family that you have somewhere else.

Arjun: It is like my future family.

Tom: But you’re not thankful for them yet?

Arjun: No. But I will be.

Tom: But you will be. That’s like a pending a family to come down the line.

Arjun: Yeah. You are going to have a very good case.

Tom: Is there anyone having any exciting Thanksgiving plans?

Travis: I’m sorry, I don’t.

Tom: I’m sorry for you too. That’s too bad. We just had finished a lovely Aysling Thanksgiving lunch hosted again by Claire, our Creative Director. She made all the food for us. So that was very good, and she may turkey even though she’s a vegetarian. So she couldn’t eat any of the turkey which is kind of a brutal thing. It’s a very nice thing to do.

Zach: She’s a partial vegetarian.

Tom: Partial vegetarian? What does that mean?

Zach: So, her family hunts, and she eats what they caught, but she doesn’t eat meat from like a store.

Tom: So, that wasn’t a hunted turkey?

Zach: That is, well, not by her family.

Travis: Oh, it’s simple.

Zach: But she did make amazing food though.

Tom: Yeah, it was amazing food. You know what else is amazing? The 7.2 Release, that’s a transition right there. Which again, our interns did a lot of work on because a part of this release is we are working a lot on the order management we’ll talk about it a bit. That’s obviously not in 7.2, but let’s talk about some of the exciting things that went to the 7.2 Release.

Tom: One of those was an updated version of the multi-select, we actually recently sent a survey about that, and got a lot of great comments about it. A lot of positive responses as well. So, looks like something we’re going to move forward to implementing in the rest of site. We will tweak it a bit, again, based on the feedback. We also obtained updates in some other areas of the site to improve it, which one of those was the email signature, which I know Travis worked on a little bit on that case to improve that.

Tom: So, you can do more things in terms of HTML, make it more like what things you might have in Outlook or in Gmail. And again, we also added that to our new direct email sends. So if you are sending your email directly from the system, that signature will automatically populate in there. You can delete it if you want, but again, make it more like that’s coming from any of your systems instead of just kind of for MagHub.

Tom: One of the other things we also did update was doing more of an auto-push to MailChimp, which I know Zach has already taken advantage of. Again if you put someone on a contact list, do automation, do a dynamic search or just manually, the system is going to grab those changes each night and automatically push that person to MailChimp. So you don’t have to go in and manually push it yourself. Another improvement on some of the things that we already have in the system.

Tom: We’ve also again pushed more things to the data warehouse. Everyone who’s listened to this podcast, meaning, one other person and my mother. We pushed more views to the data warehouse. So Arjun’s always somebody who’s worked on views and he helped build some of these ones as well. Those have been pushed in there against helpful things in terms of view of all of your public sales year over year.

Tom: So again, if you do that, and you can just get all that data dump into Excel or another tool, it’s all right there for you. Nice and bundled up. So no query writing don’t have to do that. But you can still take advantage of the data warehouse in that case. And we also added a new option in terms of grouping invoices based on order. So a little more fun for probably not the most exciting feature, but helpful for a lot of customers.

Tom: They want to make sure when they invoice something to a customer, it’s based on a specific order. So they can go backtrack and be like, “I got this invoice, what order was it for this one?” instead of having multiple orders on one invoice for it can get kind of complicated. So that was one of the more functional changes. And we also added a new report, which is a resource management report. This is kind of very powerful for any groups that are taking advantage of projects.

Tom: Right now, it’s on our site, we continue, I think it’s very, very powerful as more and more publishers or groups are using service sales and managing their team. Again, it’s just a way for you to be able to track how many hours you’ve assigned to your team, and see if they’re overworked or again, you have more resources to dedicate to separate projects. So that’s a new report.

Tom: Again, some of the just small little improvements that were to clean up within the site. That again, was Arjun’s big task was the report permissions. So, against some of the reports, we’ve added tailored sales, forecast report, making sure that you can limit access mainly to financial data to some of your users. Again, that’s always a hot button topic, do you show data to users or not? We’re going to continue adding those permissions and other kind of small improvements in the next few releases as we get ready to launch both our new orders.

Tom: Again we’re very excited about that. That will be in beta, hopefully, pretty soon for people to start testing. We also have the exciting new eCommerce or Consumer Direct. So being able to sell directly, send somebody a page so they can buy an ad directly from you, or other products and services, not just ads. Excuse me … So that’s also really exciting that we have again, coming down the line and next part of this year as we finish up 2018. Anything more we finished up 2018, and now it’s 2019.

Travis: I’m ready for that year.

Tom: Why are you guys excited for 2019?

Travis: That’s the year run my first marathon.

Tom: You’re running a marathon?

Travis: Yeah. I’m going to try to, that’s the key word.

Tom: What city?

Travis: In Ann Arbor, they have one in March.

Tom: The Dexter and Arbor marathon? I don’t think it’s an Ann Arbor marathon. I think it’s Dexter and Arbor.

Travis: I just saw this one in Ann Arbor in March

Tom: I think it ends in Ann Arbor. I ran the half marathon of that, I ran the Chicago Marathon before so, if you need tips, let me know. Number one tip don’t run a marathon.

Travis: Oh, okay.

Tom: The funniest thing that happened at the Chicago Marathon was at the end of it like mile 24 or something, that point you’re not actually tired you’re just bored and sore, was they have like bananas that they gave you to like keep … but then people just throw the banana peels. So it’s basically running through banana peels.

Travis: So you’re playing Mario Kart.

Tom: Yeah, exactly. That’s it. Anyone else? 2019?

Zach: Yeah.

Tom: Why are you excited?

Zach: Getting married.

Tom: Oh, yeah. Congratulations. And now everyone who listens podcast is invited, congratulations. Arjun are you excited for anything in 2019?

Arjun: I am, I’m battling a wrist injury in golf so hopefully better by 2019 and I can play again-

Tom: Make that Brooks Koepka return to golf?

Arjun: Yeah. Exactly.

Tom: Speaking of which, are you watching the match on Friday, Tiger/Phil?

Arjun: I was thinking about it but it’s expensive and being a college student I don’t know how I’m going to afford it. So…

Tom: That’s too bad I was going to hope, you are going to watch it then I can come over and pay for it.

Arjun: I’m trying to pool money with people so,

Tom: It’s $20 dollars. Now-

Arjun: I know.

Tom: It’s not quite … I know college is tough and you don’t have a lot of money, but it is $20 dollars.

Zach: We do pay our interns, just so you know. We’re all paid.

Tom: We are going to get sued for all that stuff.

Arjun: Working two hours it is.

Tom: But for 2019, I don’t really have anything planned. So it’s just another year.

Travis: That’s too bad.

Tom: Once you get older it’s unless you have a lifestyle thing like, a wedding. I had a kid last year, and I’m not planning to having a kid in 2019. So, I don’t have much planned to. But thinking about things completely unrelated to that, let’s talk about cats for a second and the movie question that we have to get to.

Travis: I like cats.

Tom: So, you love cats?

Travis: I do.

Tom: Not really a cat fact just something to know of Ann Arbor is … There’s actually Travis and I may go to this together, I did invite Arjun, but I think it’d be too expensive because I think it’s like $10 dollars. But at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, they’re doing a cat video just they’re showing cat videos. And all goes to the humane society and it’s going to directly affect Tiny Lions which is a cat cafe which I volunteered at twice.

Tom: Where you just went and helped with the cats but even for me who likes cats, it was so awkward, I couldn’t go back. Because basically, humans there hate you because you’re not a cat. I’m like, no one would talk to me because I’m not a cat. So, I was like this is a little much

Travis: Like the visitors that will come. They ignore you or they?

Tom: And the staff, both. It was just-

Travis: Well you’re not a cat.

Tom: Yeah. Exactly. I should dress as a cat. So anyway, that’s the cat fact. That’s go to the humane society help that out, go to a cat café, great causes. Let’s talk about the movie trivia, because this is something that I always like to come up with, no one answers. We’re going to keep it in the Thanksgiving theme. Has anyone seen Trains, Planes, and Automobiles?

Zach: Absolutely.

Tom: Really you’ve seen that?

Tom: I’m going to say that Zach has watched it. So, that’s a great movie, and I’m going to have two trivia questions because one of them kind of came up today in our conversation about movies involving Tremors. So, I’m going to relate Tremors to this. So, two possible answers, one, who was a star from Tremors that beat out Steve Martin for the cab in the early scene of the movie, because Steve Martin’s trying to get home for the holidays, home for Thanksgiving. So, what star actually got the cab?

Tom: The second one, even more random is in one of the scenes John Candy, they need to make money. And he is a salesman, with a certain type of product, and he turned them into earrings and sold them to people to make money off them. What was he actually selling when he sold those, quote unquote, and I’m using the finger thing. Quote unquote earrings to customers? I believe it is buster.

Tom: So those are two things what Tremors star stole a cab from Steve Martin or what was John Candy selling at the bus stop to make money and he pawned them off as earrings. And that is it, I thank everyone for joining or listening to this podcast. Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving and a great 2019.

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