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Tom’s Tips Podcast S3E5: Ending on a Sad Note

Written by Zach Gilbert

Published: 05/15/2020

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 Tom’s Tips podcast, the 9.2 version. Your host Tom Bellen, Project Manager for Aysling. I’m joined by always, from Mark Gilbert, our Marketing Director Zach, whatever your name is. How are you today? Whoa.

Zach:

I’m good if you don’t call me Mark Gilbert. Even though it’s clever, with marketing, so well done.

Tom:

Well, it’s one of those days. It’s been a fun thing, it’s the day of the release, stuck in some room somewhere. We had this lawn crew come do a cleanup and did some of the opposite things that my wife said, there’s a lot of things going on.

Tom:

It’s just one of those days. But it’s a beautiful day here in Michigan after the polar vortex kicked in this weekend, which was amazing and just made everything cold. So you say turn the corner like 85 times a year in Michigan and then you get slapped right in the face. So I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall/drop. It’s supposed to be 72 and rainy this week, that’s nice.

Zach:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom:

I don’t know if you have any plans for this nice weather, anything you’re excited for now that it might be warm for like two weeks?

Zach:

My wife and I are still moving, so we’re just going to be moving more stuff.

Tom:

Moving. I know that your internet was destroyed.

Zach:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom:

Are you moving to the place with the destroyed internet, or are you moving away from the destroyed internet? And is the destroyed internet the reason you’re moving?

Zach:

That’s a lot of questions there.

Tom:

Yeah.

Zach:

We are moving to the new place with the destroyed internet, because very similar to your landscaping services, our landscaping services saw a sign that basically says, “Hey, fiber internet is below here.” And rather than stopping, they dug deeper, and then out of confusion of figuring out what did they just dig into, they started pulling the line out of the ground. So by the end of it we had about 30 feet of fiber internet in our front yard because they just kept on going with it. It’s like pulling a string on a shirt, they just kept going to see what would happen, and they found it. So now the internet thankfully is resolved, but it was a mess to say the least.

Tom:

Maybe they were thinking, “Ooh, fiber internet, let’s get it.” Maybe that’s how they did it. It’s like, “Oh, we can get fiber, I’ve been waiting for fiber because I’m on Comcast.” And, “I’m still on Comcast, I want to switch.” But you’re storing, for no rational reason, fear of switching. Because maybe they were hired by Comcast to do that. Comcast is that evil, they’re just hiring grounds crews to dig up the fiber.

Zach:

I don’t think we’re supposed to say this on a podcast, say that a certain company is evil. I’m pretty sure that is probably against some rule of us hosting on another platform.

Tom:

I’m sure we’ve broken so many rules.

Zach:

That’s probably true too.

Tom:

And we can bleep that part out, and we can do all that and any other things that we … Rules that we break along the way. Well, speaking of not breaking rules, I went golfing. I’m going to try and go golfing this weekend again. I do not break the rules in golfing, though it’s weird right now because you’re not allowed to touch the pin and they put these little foam things in the hole so you don’t have to reach down and grab your ball, it sits up there. But I don’t know what to do because there’s definite times I’m like, “That ball would have gone in the cup. It would’ve gone in but that foam thing is there and I don’t know what to do.” It’s also effecting my putting.

Tom:

Overall that’s my weakest part of my game is my putting, I’m very streaky, it breaks me mentally. But I don’t know what to do in these situations because now I’m trying to put it more gently, usually I’m an aggressive putter but now I’m trying to ease it in because if it rolls over the foam it’s going to go over. And there’s sometimes where I’m like, “That should count.” It’s weird, how do you do a handicap right now? It’s messing with my head, I don’t know how to do it. These are the struggles of our lives. Your fiber internet goes away, my golf putting is … it’s a tough time.

Zach:

It doesn’t sound like a tough time, let’s just be fair.

Tom:

I really don’t know why I’m not getting as much press about this type of stuff, how am I supposed to manage this as I’m going through this? You know what? One thing that isn’t hard to manage is all the great features that we’ve put into this upcoming release in 9.2. Another fantastic transition by me. So anyway, we’re coming to the 9.2 release. This is kind of in a way, I view it as a transitional release, kind of like the spring, because we started this digital media stuff a couple months ago and building out. And we always knew that it wasn’t going to be like, “Oh, here’s a dumb feature, just launch it.” We always knew it was going to be an ongoing process, but instead of trying to hold things off and launch it in one big fell swoop, again our philosophy, right or wrong, you might like it, not like it, is trying to get things out there and try and get feedback. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from this, so it kind of tells us, “Okay, we have something here, so invest more time and effort into it.” Which is what we’re doing.

Tom:

We really have a plan, and this release is kind of this next step of we’re expanding on the slot products, which we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback for as far as our placement for newsletter sales. It’s a lot easier to manage the inventory. One of the big things, and we knew it was going to come up as soon as we released it was, “Hey, we want to be able to put multiple things on an order. I want to add an item every time.” So we’re adding that. We’re adding notifications to people when things get oversold, we’re planning on expanding that in the next release. I think that’ll be helpful for the reps just letting them know, “This is gone, go back to the order,” instead of finding out later like, “Hey, what happened?” I think better tracking of inventory in general is one of the big parts of this process.

Tom:

Continuing expanding into our reports. It’s a weird thing, this digital media product, it’s kind of living in an ad world and kind of a service-y world. We’ve kind of had to breaking out our reports in different ways, we’re going to continue that with how we enter goals. We’re going to be coming up with new ways to enter goals in the system, which we think is going to be simplified quite a bit. You can still do it granularly in the future, that’s something we’re going to do in June. But we’re going to also make it a little more higher level, easier entry, easier to enter those things. Getting a lot of things planned with the digital media still as we continue to go through it. I think one of the things I’m most excited about as we get to it is in this release we’re adding things, if you’re using GAM, to be able to do more rotation creative.

Tom:

Basically if you have 300 by 250 you can add multiple creative sizes to that one size in GAM and then if that’s rotating in GAM, pull in the statistics to see what ad’s doing well or not so well, and then you could turn one off or replace it. Soon we’re hoping again to be able to display that to the actual advertiser within Client Center. So that’s not in this release, but again, something we’ve been working to that’s kind of our end-goal. Again, in June.

Tom:

Along with that we’ve added new integration with a service called BlueToad, which does digital addition management. So if you want to control who accesses digital content you’re using that tool, or maybe you’re looking for a tool to manage your digital addition, you can now manage that so they have to login, it validates that their subscriber has an active subscription. You can manage it based on pub, or a plan. If you only have one plan that has access to it within your subscriptions you can do it at that level. So that’s in there. They actually have an integration with GAM too we’ll look into of actually selling ads directly in digital addition, how they can push. That’s something we haven’t done quite yet, but something that looks like we could take advantage of as well. Just trying to think of all the fun things that we’ve been doing.

Tom:

Again, some new notifications on if you delete an item, there’s improvements on notifications to that. So if an item is deleted you can still access a view of it from an email to see what was deleted. We’re going to expand that to the future items in the release as well. And just one of the big items, which is a hot topic in our world, is trade and barter. We’ve always had a thing of barters on ads, it’s kind of built in the system a certain way. It wasn’t really the way, when we got the barter that’s how it worked. There’s a lot of arguments on how to do it, but we’re moving more of barter really is just a payment. Kind of going in the IRS model, it is just a payment method more than it is a different bucket of sales. You still sold it for that amount, but someone paid you in goats potentially, or golf lessons. Or Zach might pay someone in, I don’t know, board game trivia. I have no idea, I just made something up. I just know you like board games, that’s all.

Tom:

But anyway, barter is that payment method, and so we’ve actually upgraded our trade administration section. The barter aspect, anytime you want to apply a barter payment, you’re going to have to record you received something in barter. Now, if you don’t really care, it’s like, “Hey, I just want to mark it as barter,” you can always just put in a generic bucket, so it is a little extra step, but that way you can record it. And then we are looking to expand that so that can be applied to not just ad items, but also services, and then digital media items in the future. That’s another thing that’s kind of starting, which we see an end for being there.

Tom:

But I guess I should talk about my most exciting feature again, the thing that I love is accessing the data. People make fun of me at the office, it was a few years ago, I was looking at a couple tools. They said I should go work for those companies instead because I really liked these BI tools and I was trying to look at embedding those in the system. Some of our customers might have been part of my trial demo site. For what it’s worth, one of those companies, when I demoed it in front of them, said that I should work for them because I demoed it better than they did, which is accurate, I did. But they’re super expensive, like 60+ thousand. They’re really cool, but with what we’ve done with Metabase and the data warehouse, there is some technical levels to it and you can get really techy, but you can build some really simple reports that are really useful. And now we can actually embed them into our new dashboard.

Tom:

That is another goal that we want to finish in the next couple months is basically migrating all of the dashboard. I know I’ve heard it multiple times from people, “The orders waiting for approval gadget, like when that’s going in the new dashboard?” I promise it will be there. We will have that gadget. Again, some of these projects come up and things get delayed, but our goal is to finish that dashboard and have that as your go-to dashboard. All of the current gadgets will be there in some form or fashion of another, including this Metabase gadget dashboard. So it’s going to be … Imagine custom reports, custom gadgets at your disposal. I’m really excited about that. Zach, I don’t know if there’s anything in this release that you’re particularly excited about, looking forward to.

Zach:

Yeah, I would agree with you on the Metabase stuff. I think the new dashboard is a really cool dashboard and it’s a really graphic interface. All the stuff you can do, it’s definitely a step up from our previous dashboard that just kind of showed very few little gadgets. I think this is definitely cool. Metabase, like you had mentioned, it’s a really cool way of gathering that data. I know we get a lot of feedback of saying, “We wish we had report X and report Y,” Metabase definitely gives you that, and they can usually give it to you in a way … Kind of a neater function than what you would’ve expected. If you’re definitely into reporting, please look at data warehouse and Metabase, it’s definitely a feature that I think you’ll love. If there’s any type of reporting, it will likely be there, and then more so. I would agree, I think that’s the coolest thing. And putting that on the dashboard, that was just an awesome idea. They are really neat looking reports, and graphs, and charts. It is way cooler than most people might think it is.

Tom:

The graphs and charts people love. I think too, as more people use it and we are getting more feedback. We initially did the data warehouse, we know it’s like you hear data warehouse and you look at it and you’re like, “No.” To be fair, when I first started here I remember Rudy was always saying, “Well, they should use a data warehouse,” this was years before we did anything with it, and I’m just like, “There’s no way that anyone is going to be able to do anything with this.” Through a lot of painstaking learning, and process of this, I think we’ve done a really good job to make it a lot more user friendly. I’m hoping as more people use it we can create a community, because I feel that most people are going to want similar reports, so once you have those, we can really kind of share those within the tool.

Tom:

We can make that report accessible through other people’s systems. And then you can restrict who can access it in your site too. So that’s another thing. If you build it, you can build it for specific users, you can make sure users can only see what they need to see. There’s a lot of cool things in that part of it. One of the things, towards the end, we are having digital Maghub U soon. On the last day of reporting I am going to spend a fair amount of time on that part of the site, because it is my baby, I’ve been working on it for two, three years. I feel like it’s finally grown up, it’s finally leaving the nest. So I’m excited about that.

Tom:

I know Zach and I have worked on this a little bit too with some of the drip campaign capabilities that we’ve added recently is like pulling the reports in that way, so you can do a lot of interesting things. You can tie a drip campaign email, send based on a day. Let’s say you sent it last month, and then you can basically say, “Okay, anything I send from here, opens, clicks, activities towards it, and did we get any sales on any of those companies since we sent that?” Some really interesting things you can do with it, so I’m excited for it.

Tom:

One thing I was also excited about is my cat keeps trying to run out of the house, so maybe one of these times it’ll just leave and never come back. I’m hoping to release my cats in the wild. They always want to leave, and I am at the point where I am like, “Just go.” So, I was thinking cat fact stuff, and the terrible things. Obviously in these times it’s basically a lot of at home time, and I’ve seen Tiger King. I don’t know, Zach, if you’ve watched Tiger King at all?

Zach:

I have not, sorry.

Tom:

That’s okay, it actually starts as, “Oh, this is entertaining. Ha, ha, ha.” And then it gets super awful. Watch the first two episodes just to be like, “That’s entertaining.” Then it’s just like, “This is really sad and depressing.” But anyway, I found out though that cat’s genetic makeup is 95.6% tiger, so they’re in a way almost a tiger. So there you go. But another thing that we’ve been re-watching [inaudible 00:14:06] home. I don’t know, Zach, is there anything you’ve been either watching recently that you’ve found? Or re-watching with all this at-home time?

Zach:

No, just because we’ve been moving a lot of stuff and I didn’t have internet, so I’ve been very disconnected from Netflix and all those services. It’s been very board games, and in-person type of things, it’s very unique. It’s a weird time to be alive right now.

Tom:

Humans.

Zach:

I don’t know what’s going on. No, I haven’t watched a lot of stuff. Sorry.

Tom:

My wife and I have gone back to one of our close favorite shows, and stress-free shows too. Because that’s kind of the thing, you want a stress-free show, even though I started watching Westworld, and that’s not a stress-free show and it makes me feel dumb. But we’ve been watching a lot of the British Baking Show, repeats of that. I know we had a back-and-forth about that recently, it was the new host that they just hired. Because I just found out this the other day, was that they hired Matt Lucas, who I always liked from the show Little Britain.

Tom:

I know you’re a little on the fence about it, but … Oh, I’m going to reject this call for a second. But as far as the trivia for today, I was thinking about Matt Lucas, and some people probably don’t know who he is at all. You might have seen him in a few movies, but probably one of his most famous films was he was in a film in the early 2011-ish, with a lot of former famous SNL characters. Actually, it was one of the movies that launched Melissa McCarthy in it, and there’s a lot of famous people in this film so I’m not going to give away the exact thing. But let’s just say it’s involving a lot of ladies on a fun trip involving a very big ceremony. That’s one part of it, so that’s easy enough. But really the question is, his character was a small role in it, and he actually was the brother of a sister character, who is a very famous sister, and who was she? Who played Matt Lucas’ sister in this film in the early 2000s, or 2010s. A bunch of SNL people, a lot of famous, in a ceremony, a bunch of ladies, that’s enough.

Tom:

Who was Matt Lucas’ sister played by? Also a famous actress, and quite a singer I may add. So I gave you a lot of clues there, there’s a lot of clues in there. I feel like that’s enough, so I hope people get that part. One brag thing that I did, I did make (zero idea how to spell this) this weekend, I think I pronounced that correctly, which was a very fun dish that I made that they did on one of the finales of the British Baking Show, I think it’s season three. I re-watched that just to see them do it, and I’m much better than them. So I’m ready now, I think I’m ready. I think that if I got on that show, if I could fake to be British, I’ve done a lot of bread recently for the first time, I think I can do it. I think I can do it. That’s going to be my next thing is to become a British citizen and get on the British Baking Show so I can go and have Matt Lucas critique my skills.

Zach:

Terri Hatcher is not British though, and Terri Hatcher was one of the celebrities. I think you don’t have to be British, just be very famous.

Tom:

Well, I can be infamous.

Zach:

Ooh.

Tom:

Maybe I can be infamous. That’s in-famous, that’s more than famous according to the Three Amigos.

Zach:

That’s a great movie.

Tom:

Yeah, it is a great movie, one of my favorites. But I want to be on the competition. She’s on a one-off. And I know John Lithgow was on it too, and I saw some of those. I want to compete, I want to win.

Zach:

Baby steps.

Tom:

Ah, I watched What About Bob the other day.

Zach:

Another great movie.

Tom:

I found out in that film that Richard Dreyfus hates Bill Murray. That was funny to find out. He hates him.

Zach:

In real life?

Tom:

Yeah. Truly, he’s like, “Worst experience of my life. Great movie, hate Bill Murray.”

Zach:

Wow.

Tom:

Yeah, I know, right? I saw it and I was like, “It makes sense why they had such good chemistry of sorts.” I really did feel like they hated each other, because they did. But anyway, on this tirade of movie trivia, anything that you want to bring up Zach before we get off of this call?

Zach:

A couple small things. One thing is be sure to either tweet us, or put it on Facebook, the answer to the movie trivia. I will put in a stipulation, just because we do have some very loyal followers, we are looking for a new person to answer it. If you know the answer and you’ve already answered a question, please don’t answer it. However, if you know somebody, get them to tweet us and answer the question. That’s fine, we can deal with that workaround, we don’t really mind. But we want to give more people the chance to answer these questions, but we are happy with our loyal followers and we’re glad you like Tom’s cat facts and movie trivia facts, they always are fun. Today’s seemed relatively easy, but whatever, I guess I won’t go into that tirade.

Zach:

The other thing I will mention is we do have a Maghub Feature Focus webinar, that’s coming out this month. It is on leveraging third parties, so this is for groups who are Maghub customers or Maghub prospects that use Twilio, MailChimp, Metabase, any of these type of tools essentially. We’re going to do a high level look at how you can connect those to your Maghub instants. Some really big ones are Zapier, WordPress, and Gravity Forms. So if you have landing pages on your website and you capture those leads, those leads should be filtering to Maghub, that’s the point of a CRM. And we’re basically just going to show you the different avenues and ways you can do this.

Zach:

I think it’ll be a really great lesson. It will be very high level so we’re not going to go into the super weeds with this one, it’ll be very brief in regards to each component. We’re basically trying to say, “Hey, we have a lot of integrations, a lot of dedicated integrations.” And I can’t name a single week since I’ve been here in the last three years that I haven’t talked to a client and they’re like, “Oh yeah, we use that,” and it’s like, “Was it connected to Maghub?” And like, “We didn’t know you could.” I think this is going to be a really great webinar in regards to, “Hey, do you have any of these tools?” “Yes, we do.” “All right, let’s connect them to Maghub.” And we’ll kind of walk you guys through some of that.

Zach:

But like I said, it won’t be a technical thing, or super techy thing. If you want help setting it up, we have a great support team, they’re all working, they’re all available to help you out. Obviously the help center that Tom’s kind of built out is really robust as well. And a lot of you guys also have live chat if you’re a Maghub client. So there’s a lot of different avenues to get the help that you need. Please reach out to us, but also, that webinar invite will be going out to emails and in an announcement inside your Maghub Instant. So please share it. It should be available for all departments, so sales teams, production, whoever uses Maghub that wants that information and they’re connecting to another platform, this webinar is certainly for you.

Zach:

But other than that, I think that’s pretty much all the stuff that I had Tom.

Tom:

All right. That sounds good. Just as I’m thinking about this week, in memoriam to Little Richard and Jerry Stiller. I was thinking about that. Made me sad, sorry. But that’s all.

Zach:

That was sad. I agree.

Tom:

All right. Thanks everyone, sorry to end it on a sad note, but that’s how we do things around here. All right, enjoy the new Release 9.2.

Zach:

All right.

Tom:

Thanks.

Zach:

Bye everybody.

Tom:

Bye.

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