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Creating an influencer or affiliate program is a huge headache for most brands. Vetting the people you let in, assigning them links and promotions, keeping an eye on their posts. And then what about tracking performance and understanding conversions? Sounds like a nightmare But it doesn't have to be. Shibo Xu is the Co-Founder and COO of Refersion, which was built on the idea that you could completely flip that process on its head. Instead of the burden falling on the brands, influencers have to prove their worth. And rather than getting lost in vanity metrics or other out-of-date KPIs, place value only in a select few areas. These ideas helped launch Refersion to success and helped the brands that work with Refersion, like Puravida, Impossible, and 19,000 others remove some of the challenges of influencer marketing that have plagued them for years.Shibo talks about all of that on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, which was guest-hosted by Albert Chou!Main Takeaways:What's My Motivation: Despite what you might think, cash is not always the biggest motivator for influencers. Some are driven by a desire to be closer to a brand, to explore new products or to get products for free.And Your Total Is…: Total order value, total revenue and total conversions driven are the main metrics that will help you determine how influencers stack up against each other. When you accurately measure those three KPIs, you get a fuller picture of how an influencer is working, and whether or not they are worth continued investment.It's On You: Rather than vetting influencers before letting them into your affiliate network, Refersion's strategy is to let anyone in who fills out the form, and then make them prove their worth through their performance. By putting the burden on the self-appointed influencer, brands can focus only on reviewing results and turning affiliate codes on and off based on that.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Albert:Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Up Next In Commerce, and if you hear my voice, it definitely is different. This is no longer Stephanie. My name's Albert Chow. I work at The Mission. I am guest hosting today for the COO and co-founder of Reversion, Refersion, excuse me, Shibo Xu. Shibo, welcome to the show.Shibo:Hey, Albert. Nice to meet you.Albert:Hey, Shibo. Nice to meet you as well, and before we go any further, please tell everyone exactly what is Refersion, what does it do, and why does it matter to commerce sellers.Shibo:Sure. Yeah. Refersion is an affiliate tracking and influencer tracking platform. So, we help merchants measure and sign up influencers and affiliates and figure out, of the thousands of orders you have every month, which ones came from who, and how much commission you owe them. So, we help you run that entire process.Albert:All right. Now, I want to dive into the technicalities of this product really quickly because I want to come at this conversation from the perspective of a merchant who's been burned. I think you are familiar with what I'm talking about. So, for a lot of merchants and sellers, they have experience with affiliate marketing, but their experience has largely been, I would say, less than ideal. There's a lot of, I call them clickjacking, clickjackers, that are in the affiliate world. They'll just set up sites, or they'll actually buy PPC traffic at a number that's just low enough to make an arbitrage commission. There's low-quality traffic. There's a lot of positives, certainly, but there's also a lot of negatives, and so I'd love to hear how Refersion... What makes it unique? What makes it different? Because it sounds like you're working with more... You mentioned influences, so I'd love to hear what makes it unique, that makes it a little different from what maybe a merchant who's been burned by affiliate marketing before has experienced.Shibo:Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's a good question. It's a wild world out there, for sure, and what we try to do is just focus on the data. We try to give the merchant all the data that you need to make a good decision, like is this clickjacking? Is this coming from a coupon site? Did this referring URL actually come from CouponCabin instead of clicking onto the page itself and landing there and actually completing a purchase. So, we really try to take a step back there and give the merchant all the information they need to make these decisions and decide whether or not they want to credit this influencer and affiliate.Shibo:On another level, though, I think it's interesting to think about what kind of product you have. If they're able to make the marketing math work, what are they doing, and how are they making that math work, and why can't you beat them at their own game as a PPC? So, I think there's a lot of strategies to be learned there, and you can always pull back the affiliate program anytime. So, I think working with influencers and affiliates and learning some of those strategies can uncover a lot of insights for your brand that could be quite useful.Albert:Have you identified or do you have any anecdotal stories of people that got a materially different result from using Refersion versus... There's a lot of affiliate programs out there. So, imagine I just signed up for CJ or LinkShare, and I just did it. You know what I mean? I didn't really [crosstalk]Shibo:Yeah.Albert:You know what I mean? I signed up. I approved some affiliates. All of a sudden, I see my commission payouts are going up, my revenue is flat. All of a sudden, I'm like, what am I doing here?Shibo:Yeah.Albert:I've seen the interfaces of all those tools I just mentioned. I mean, they're hideous. The world of affiliate somehow forget UI matters. I don't know how this happened, but the whole world of UI... The affiliates don't care about UI. I don't understand. But it can be a daunting task for a merchant sometimes to manage their own systems. I mean, there's actually even... As you know, there's a subculture of business that does affiliate management, so I think people sign up for an affiliate program, they've got to hire an affiliate manager, they've got to pay commissions, so it's really complicated. I'd love to hear [crosstalk] you'd have of someone who's in that struggle, and then your data to help figure this out.Shibo:Yeah. So, that's always a hard problem, and it's kind of case by case. There's one case study with Pura Vida that I really like sharing where he looked at the total number of affiliates and influencers and realized, "Okay, I have all these signups. Most of these guys aren't doing anything except the top two or three." So, he kind of thought about this, and him, [Griffon], and Kelly from Pura Vida team thought about, "Okay, how do we motivate these folks?" They talked to a few of them and realized, okay, it's not actually cash that motivates these folks. They actually love the brand. They want to feel closer to it. So, they started sending bonus rewards, motivating the first sale, third sale, fifth sale, and that really helped actually lift up the entire kind of long-tail of their influencers, and now they're seeing a lot more traction.Shibo:So, that was one of those things that I thought was very interesting, and we rely on the merchant looking at the data to understand, hey, we have this long-tail. How do we kind of motivate them? How do we identify them, talk to some of them, and figure out a strategy that works? I would also say that the thing about affiliates, and I didn't know this because I didn't come from the affiliate background, I actually came from a tech consulting background, kind of building tech products, and the affiliate world is old in a certain way. It started, I think, in the 2000s and the '90s with bloggers, and you mentioned CJ, and I think in that world there's a lot of tactics, a lot of strategies, but there's also... The same technology is being used to track influencers as well. So, there's a lot of mixing, and it's hard to figure out what's good and what's not. Measuring apples to apples, figuring out, looking at conversions, referring resources, is probably the best thing we've found.Albert:So, one of the things that's obviously on the rise, you've kind of already mentioned it with your use case from Pura Vida, is the rise of influencers, and I've heard from the merchant side it's frustrating because everyone says they're an influencer, of course, and they're hitting every merchant up, like, "Hey, go get me some free products. I'll be a great influencer for you." One of the things that becomes very, very cloudy is who is and who is not, and one of the things that you've kind of mentioned a couple times now is this idea of how it's better... Your technology can help you better track influencers. I'd love to understand a little bit more about what you're doing, how you're helping to identify those, like you said, those top 1% to 2% influencers, which that makes sense to me. They're not motivated by money. They just love the brand so much, and so people align to them, their lifestyle or... I don't know what they're doing, but I don't fully understand influencers that much. But I'd love to hear how the data is helping identify who is worth investing in, beyond the commission. You know?Shibo:Yeah. So, the strategy that we kind of give to merchants is that, "Look at your few KPIs, your total revenue from an individual person. Just rank that across all your influencers to see who the top people are, and then work with them to understand what strategies they're employing, and then kind of bring that into the rest of the network." When thinking about who to let in, I think it really depends on what phase of the network and what phase of your product it's in. So, for example, what I mean by this is that I've seen merchants build funnels of influencer strategy, so they would start with awareness, and for that to work well you would need an influencer that's maybe a bit bigger, more of a little celebrity within your network.Shibo:Then you move from awareness over to consideration, where you work with people who maybe have smaller followings, and can demonstrate your product a little more, show how it fits into their lives, and then finally, work with brand ambassadors or smaller micro-influencers to do more of the conversion activation, performance-based kind of incentives, and that funnel seems to work relatively well. Now, it's really hard to figure out who is a celebrity, who is the person who's going to give you the other stuff, and for that I really recommend... There's all these kind of vanity metrics of followers, of comments and engagement, and we all know those can be fake to a certain extent.Albert:Yep.Shibo:So, I will look at those, but really think, look at the content. Just pick out a few and really just look at their content. Make sure that they're real people, and communicate with them. Just a very simple drip campaign can really suss out a lot of information about, "Hey, I saw you just signed up. Thank you. Tell me what your favorite product is," and something like that just to help qualify a little bit can go a long way.Albert:Okay. I mean, I agree. I think you do need to do a little labor to figure out, is someone actually interested, or are they just signing up for... Because you've been on the other side. When you sign up for an affiliate program, you can be like, "I want to be in this, this, this, this." You can just sign up for hundreds of them, right?Shibo:Right.Albert:So, I agree. It does require a lot of the manual contact and, let's say, influencer development to figure out who's going to be a good influencer for your brand. I didn't know, do you have any types of rating systems or things like that that allow merchants to make it easier for them to identify people, such as, "Hey, this person has a..." Because some of the things I think about because I've been on the merchant side trying to find influencers, things I care about beyond commission, of course, follower engagement, but there's other parts. For example, I would love to know how fast you reply to email. I would love to know how many campaigns have you worked on for more than a period of maybe six months, because one of the things that you find with influencers, or a lot of influencers today, and I think you'd agree, is that they're not really responsive. Most of them are not responsive. It's amazing how little they respond. They're like, "I want to be in your program." "Oh, cool. You're going to market my stickers," and they're like, "Yeah. No." They don't say a word after that.Shibo:Right, right. I think we have to remember that influencers are kind of consumers in a certain way, and you have to market to them. So, what I encourage merchants to do is actually to get them into the program at a low commission rate, or just suss out the signup, and then market to them, create a drip campaign, see who engages, and then move them into different offers. At the end of the day, Refersion still likes to look at total order value, total revenue, total conversions driven. That to us is the apples to apples that we're measuring across all influencers and people who sign up. But you can kind of put them in different offers, different segments, and kind of market to them differently. For the top performers, you might tell them about new things. For the bottom performers, you might want to keep just giving them strategies to try to give them an incentive and a way to kind of build and start creating content, because they need help getting started.Albert:Yeah.Shibo:So, I think you can't approach influencers as master marketers. I think they're just trying to figure it out like everybody else, and so a human approach there I think goes a long way.Albert:That makes sense. So, it's not quite an install it, and then all of a sudden your relationships with these influencers is magical, but you do have good tracking, so I know that I'm getting exactly what I'm paying for. One of the things I want to ask you about, though, is there's a huge wave where Apple... We already know that Apple iPhone accounts for a substantial amount of traffic from most merchants. That's just how it is, and the privacy rules or the privacy objectives that they have are now making it harder to track... It's harder to track traffic over periods of time. That's reality.Albert:How is that impacting your ability to track these affiliates and influencers? Because that's one of the things... For example, if I was... So, I'm an avid, I say it in every show, I'm an avid surfer, so if someone I follow is like, "Hey, this is a good leash to use," I might click on the leash. You already know this, but from the moment I hear about it to the moment I buy might be quite a long time. Of course, these influencers want to get credit. Of course, you want to be able to track them and see their influencer. How are you guys approaching the new privacy rules or privacy features of iPhone and other operating systems who follow as well?Shibo:Yeah.Albert:They're trying to prevent traffic monitoring over time, or behavior monitoring over time.Shibo:Well, I don't think that they're actively trying to stop tracking, because they have an advertiser ID. They just want you to do it in a more respectful way, right?Albert:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Shibo:If the person says, "I don't want to be tracked," they don't want you doing it, and I agree with that. I think that's probably the right way to move forward. We've been tracking with first-party data for the longest time, and what I mean by that is we embed data just like Google Analytics. You know?Albert:Sure.Shibo:You land on the page, and it embeds data against your own domain. So, from our perspective, it's your data. It's not our data. A lot of times, affiliate companies, some of the incumbents have built their tracking systems on redirects, and so this is what it prevents this kind of constant jumping, and the problem with the constant jumping is that it also creates situations where you can have clickjacking and things like that. So, from the ground up we always built with first-party data in mind, embedding the JavaScript onto your page so that you own it.Shibo:So, as long as Google Analytics is giving you traffic, we're able to kind of do the same thing. We're not necessarily reading from your browser. We're actually generating data, embedding it in there, and then looking at that artifact of data on the order so that we know this all kind of comes through. So, that model is kind of what we work on, and the advertiser information that Apple is providing is helpful, but we're still looking at our own data on that way and just embedding these tags. It doesn't matter if I call you number 10, number 15, number 15-A. As long as it shows up on the other side, I know that this chain wasn't broken.Albert:All right. So, let's walk our listeners through what's happening so that they can kind of better understand what's unique about it. So, let's use that example. I see an influencer. They're showing me this product. They say, "Hey, smash my wink in the bio." So, I go to their bio, I'm on Facebook, I smash the link, as they requested me to. I'm now on the merchant site, but I don't buy. So, what record are you recording, and how do you ensure that you're connecting the dots? Because let's say... What's a person going to do next? They're probably going to go do a little homework, or they're going to talk to some people. Imagine it's a seven-day window before I see that product and I buy it. Tell me what your guys are doing on the technical side. You don't have to reveal any secrets, but give us an idea so we know that you can correctly attribute that to that influencer.Shibo:Yeah, sure. So, once you click a link, a lot of times, like I said, sometimes you would bounce. Maybe it's a Bitly link, right?Albert:Yeah.Shibo:If it's a Bitly link, you'll bounce to Bitly first. Bitly will embed some data, and then you'll go through a merchant site. We provide links that... It can be Bitly, so the affiliate can track as well, but really, we start tracking once the user lands on the merchant's site, and they would land with a parameter at the top, just like a Google Analytics, like source, their UTM. We have our own parameter that we read from that tells us which affiliate that parameter belongs to. You come in, you land, we use that parameter to embed some data into your browser so that when you come back to the site, the data exists. This doesn't use cookies. It's called local storage, which is a more modern way of embedding data, and more compliant. It's what browsers prefer as well. The big difference is that local source doesn't have an expiration period, although you can wipe it if you'd like.Shibo:So, now you are a user with a browser that has some of this data embedded that would stick if you revisit this website. You might consider this information, come back, add a cart. If you add a cart, we create another data piece, throw it into your browser, and it's important to send to your browser because your browser then sends that data back to us and says, "Hey, these are all the different local storage value variables and values that we have." So, we look at that. Now we have your click ID, we have a cart ID that matches to that click ID, and then our system actually has a listener with. So, we're looking at every single order in the system, we're trying to match those cart IDs with the cart IDs with clicks that we have. So, once we are able to make that chain of the click ID, cart ID, and then cart ID and order ID, we're able to say, "Hey, this affiliate created this conversion for you." So, it kind of goes all the way through.Albert:Very cool. When you're doing this, I'd love to hear some of the results that some of your clients are seeing. They've done well, and I agree. It's like any other program. You can buy the world's best email program, and if you don't set up a good email campaign, it's going to do nothing. Every program a merchant can do still requires some user input, no different from if you buy, I don't know a hammer. It doesn't mean you can build something. But for the people that you're seeing be meticulous about the data, getting rid of low-performing affiliates, or clickjacking affiliates that are not leveraging a material lift in revenue, what are you seeing as a percentage of sales? Are they seeing lifts? Are they seeing explosions? I'd love to hear some of the stories of what clients are getting when you narrow, I guess, your affiliate pool or your influencer pool to just these high-power influencers, and of course, get rid of the arbitrage guys. What is happening to top-line?Shibo:Yeah. I would say that in the large companies, like let's say you're a 1-800-Flowers, a lot of their business is actually influencers and referrals. You can see as much as 20 to 25 percent of total revenue being attributed back to referral revenue or influencer or affiliate revenue. It really depends on the brand that you have. I mean, we see Glossier and other brands that build completely off influencers, and these are people who basically approach their marketing strategy not as, "Hey, I'm going to buy all these ads to compete with my network," but, "Let me just give it all to my network and let them do all the promotions for me," and that's a very different model in terms of how you market the product, and I would argue that that's driving most of your revenue in that situation. So, I think it really depends on how you approach it, and I think there's something that I kind of started realizing as I'm talking to you, is that I think there's a kind of, not incorrect, but a different strategy that has been employed by the incumbents. Right?Albert:Yeah.Shibo:When you work with CJ and you work with ShareASale, you kind of work with an account manager on that side who then helps put your product in front of their network of people, and then tries to get their adoption.Albert:Yeah.Shibo:We approach it very differently. We say, "Hey, let everybody in, then market to them because they're people who are interested in your product, and figure out what works and what doesn't work." Right?Albert:Okay.Shibo:Instead of, "Here's this product. Let me sell..." You're not selling through CJ to them. I'm hoping that more merchants kind of interact directly with their network, create marketing campaigns, "Hey, we're having a Christmas sale. What does that mean for your commissions?" things like that to help motivate.Albert:Yeah. So, how do you facilitate that, then? Because that is true. Most people do come from the... Let's say if they've been in the game for a little bit, that's what they think. They think they sign up for an affiliate program, they're going to be accessed to all these affiliates, influencers, whatever they say is on the other side. It's a marketplace. I can recruit them. They can sign up for me. But to your point, they have to be in that program. If they're not in that program, it's not available to you. Okay. So, this is definitely different, what you're talking about with Refersion. You're saying, hey, you have tools, but you can enable anyone to become an influencer or affiliate for you, and it sounds like you can do this without too much signup. Is that accurate? I'd love to hear, what do you mean on the recruiting side? Because that is true. I noticed recently when we tried to sign up a couple influencers, they had no idea what these tools were. They were like, "What? I don't know what that is. I make TikTok videos and I crush it. Okay?"Shibo:Yeah, exactly.Albert:"Tell me how I'm going to get paid."Shibo:Exactly, exactly. So, we create a registration form that you can embed into your website, and that's your default form, and then we also have a custom offer. So, every offer has its own commission rate, and its own registration form too. So, you have a public one and you have a ton of private ones that you can send over, and you can also switch affiliates between offers and different kind of segments very easily within Refersion. So, you send them this registration form-Albert:Okay. This is very different.Shibo:Yeah.Albert:This is very different.Shibo:Yeah. It took me a lot because I'm not actually from the industry either, and we kind of just thought about it very differently. But yeah, you give them all a registration form. You can make that form as easy or as complicated as you want, "Give me your Instagram profile. Give me your followers. Give me your life story." You can do any of those things and customize a profile, and that's the way to start getting a mass-market program of, "Hey, we have this program. Look at it." You can even invite ads to that web page if you want to.Shibo:At the same time, a lot of merchants also start by looking at their customer lists and seeing the top customers, do they have social followings? Do they have any sort of profile with Google? They'll go to Social Blade and look them up. Can I find something? Then give them a private offer and go to them and say, "Hey, you're a great customer. I'd like to give you more credit on your purchases. I'd like to give you money back on your purchases. I can give you store credit on your purchases that you drive. Can I help you do that?" So, I think it's a way of working with your brand's fans and just figuring out a way to motivate them.Albert:Okay. So, they sign up for the program. You let them in. That's pretty awesome. So, it's still based on... You say appended links, right? Do you give them tools to let them easily make their own links, or do they have to remember to paste links and stuff?Shibo:So, they have to remember to paste links, but they can also create a link to a specific product if they want to. Any-Albert:Okay. So, I don't have to create it for them?Shibo:No, no. You don't have to create a huge list of links. They should be able to-Albert:Wow. This is so much better.Shibo:... pull some stuff. Yeah.Albert:This is basically everyone who's ever managed an affiliate program. Okay. So, I'm an influencer. I like something. Let's say I like... Well, I'll just keep using... I always want to come up with examples that are not actually my hobbies, but I can't do it because I only know my hobbies. So, again, we'll go back to surfing. I like surfing, and so I'm on an equipment company's site and I could be like, "Hey, I really like this," like I said before, "this leash. I like these sets of fins. I want to promote them because this is what I like." So, I'm in control. I go and create my link. I go and create everything, and then I do what I want with it?Shibo:Exactly. Yeah, and it's a one-to-one program. So, we have Refersion Marketplace, so if you're working with multiple Refersion merchants, you can work with that, but generally speaking, if I'm the affiliate, I go to the surfboard website, I see this leash, I'm going to sign up with the brand. I'm not thinking I'm signing up with Refersion. I sign up with the brand, I get my own dashboard and coupon codes, if they provided any links, and I can generate my own. I can track my sales and do all that stuff, and then I might find another surfboard company, and I'll join them as well. So, it's more of an individual brand-based kind of approach, because I'm not going to CJ. I'm not going to Refersion.com and signing up. I'm signing up through the merchant website.Albert:That's completely different. That is great. So, I got to ask now... Talk a little bit about... Were you, yourself... So, you don't have experience with affiliates, so how did you know this was the problem?Shibo:I didn't, actually. So, I followed the data. So, Alex and I, this is a wild story, but we met in an Adtech meetup, and it was just a one-time meeting. I was on my way out. He was just standing there, and we just kind of chatted, and he had experience in affiliates because he used to work at LinkShare. Everybody had these ecommerce sites, and he knew ecommerce and affiliates work really well together, and he saw that there was no affiliate software. So, he started building one, and he built it the way that he thought affiliate software should work in terms of tracking, in terms of letting people do their own then, and then I met him, and I noticed that there was some success. We had some traction already, and I just started doing customer service, sales, marketing, trying to round out all the different skillsets.Shibo:What ended up happening was that because we took this approach of integrators, we wanted to focus on a few things really well, like our tracking, our data reporting, giving merchants their dashboards, things like that. We tried to offload as much as possible, so we wanted to build apps and make integration easy. We built integrations to Klaviyo to do email on the other side. So, what ended up happening was that merchants now can sign up influencers, affiliates really easily. They couldn't do it on CJ or on other businesses, on other incumbents, because they were asked for tax information. You're asking a 16-year-old Instagram user, "Fill out this W-9 and give me all this information," and it kind of scares them. What we found is that merchants used our platform to sign up a lot of influencers, affiliates, and just paid them with PayPal.Albert:Very cool. Very cool. So, you had no idea how bad or jacked up the existing world was. It sounds like your co-founder was the one that knew that there was a problem.Shibo:Yeah. I think that he looked at it, that there was a problem, but I think it's also how you approach SaaS. I think a lot of times... We were founded maybe five, six years ago. Around that time, a lot of VCs would go to you and say, "Hey, you need to have a platform," or, "You're just an app. You're not a platform in and of itself."Albert:Sure.Shibo:I think that's the wrong way to think about software as a service. Software, I think, is strong because of interoperability. My software is able to work on Windows and Macs, or works on all Windows machines. Right?Albert:Yeah.Shibo:So, I think this integration is really important. So, I think a lot of the businesses did not build with this integration in mind, and we kind of started with that. We started by building and trying to just offload as much of the work as possible, make it as [inaudible] clicking a few buttons and get integrated with all the different ecommerce platforms. So, I think our ideas of what makes good software is kind of what led us to this route.Albert:Now, how about as a... Have you and your business partners, have you guys ever sold anything online? I'm curious if you have any experience on the merchant side.Shibo:No. My background is actually in tech consulting.Albert:Okay.Shibo:So, I worked with ecommerce businesses. I worked with a big one called Sigma-Aldrich at the time, and that was back in 2013, and they were already doing a billion dollars online. But they sold fine chemicals, and you need to have a real profile to buy from them. Alex actually ran his own hosting company for a bit.Albert:Okay.Shibo:So, he sold hosting. A few other developers at Refersion also did that as well. It seems to be a common developer entrepreneurship path, I guess. But yeah, we learn a lot from our merchants. So, we focus on the tech, the measurements, making sure the data flows well, and our entire account management team is here to support merchants on the data, but also learn from them and figure out, okay, what's not working? What do we need to measure for you better? What doesn't make sense?Albert:Yeah. So, I'd love to hear that. So, in the beginning when you were developing this product, what were the merchants, I guess, saying that you were interviewing? Because, again, you guys don't have... It's hard to build something for someone when you don't have that seat, but it's also good that you don't have the experience because then you can not make the same mistakes or get, basically, a knowledge bias, like, "Well, I know this," so it starts putting you in a box. So, you have no box. You're building software, but you are hearing the merchant problems. Talk about those first few conversations. What was that like? What were the merchants talking about that let you say, "Okay, I'm going to go about this in a different way"?Shibo:I think, honestly, merchants just said, "We want an affiliate program," and I looked into it and figured out what an affiliate program was. Right?Albert:Yeah.Shibo:I looked at the tracking technology. We looked at what they did, and a lot of it, to your point, didn't make sense to me. The [crosstalk], the flows, none of that made sense to me. So, we just kind of started building and doing what we thought was right and what we thought made sense. The fundamental ask, if you focus on the fundamental ask, is that I have these people who want to promote my business, and I have no way to incentivize them and run this process. I need a way to run this process, and once we understood that, we understand that maybe there's this concept of profiles, maybe this concept of payments, and then we're just looking at what's the smallest amount of clicks to go from one to the other. What's the most obvious information architecture that can help the merchant understand, okay, recruitment and setting up a registration page, building that, how do I give them all the breadcrumbs to teach them how to do the thing that I'm trying to get them to do?Shibo:So, that's kind of how we approach that, and my background is in tech consulting, as I mentioned, and I built products for a lot of different companies, and the reason I left consulting is because I wanted to work on products and dig into it and learn more and make it better and better. In tech consulting, you kind of building a product from one to zero and give it a way. So, I was really good at figuring out the fundamental problem and coming up with a software solution for it. What I wanted was to dig in deeper [crosstalk]Albert:Yeah, and then you had mentioned Pura Vida as one of your clients. I didn't know, do you have any other clients that you can share about who's leveraging your tools to get better influencers?Shibo:Yeah. Secretlab is using us, and we helped connect them with IDN, so that's been a fantastic relationship for them. DXRacer is also on our network as well. I'm kind of a gamer, so I just kind of get excited by the gaming brands that I find.Shibo:I mean, there's tons of great brands on Refersion. I just saw one called GLD Shop, which sells bling and chains, which I thought was pretty cool.Albert:Dude, all right. So, funny story about that. I'm looking it up right now, GLD Shop. All right.Shibo:Yep.Albert:Hip-hop jewelry, the GLD Shop. Oh, dude, they have... Oh, this is expensive. Okay. So, one of the things that... So, I'll just name the company. This company's called the Shotty, and they sell jewelry as well. It's funny you mentioned GLD Shop right before I was going to use this use case. Their claim to fame is that their pendants are like Alex and Ani pendants, which are... Each one has a story, but the Shotty necklaces are actually puncturing tools. It's for shotgunning beers. But they constantly have people... He doesn't know what to do, really.Albert:So, I didn't really know this existed, because I suggested what I knew, which was, "Well, you should make them sign up for an affiliate." He constantly has people coming forward, because that's the new way now. There's a lot of people coming forward and saying, "Hey, I'm an influencer." So, really, this kind of technology makes it easy for you to be like... I mean, I feel like you don't even have to personally vet too much, be like, "Hey, I have a signup form here. You can sign up. You can use whatever you want, get links. I'll pay you if you get me a commission." It's a pretty simple conversation.Shibo:It's kind of like... Yeah.Albert:Then I as a merchant can then, based on the data, as you suggested, be like, "Okay, these people are doing something for me. I want to get closer to them. These people aren't doing something for me. I think I can turn it off." You said you also have ways to identify these guys are just clickjacking somehow. These guys are literally trying to insert themselves after a Google Search process. He's running retargeting ads for the search term because he's a clickjacker, and I'm basically paying PPC for him to get a commission. I can cut him out of the pool.Shibo:Yeah, yeah. You can see that on the referring URL, the clickjacking. Either they try to hide it, so the referring URL is kind of weird, or it shows the Google-added, which has a GCLID parameter in it, but essentially, the idea is instead of looking at every affiliate and trying to understand whether or not they're successful before they enter your program, the idea is just let them in and then ask them to prove it. Right?Albert:Yeah, yeah. That's materially different, because like I said, he's constantly having people hit him up like, "Hey, I can be an influencer." Then they'll always have a catch. They'll be like, "Oh, I can make a story for you. It's going to cost you 500." It's like, oh, jeez. I don't know who to trust, who not to trust.Shibo:Yeah, yeah. The pay-per-post model is definitely tough because you don't know what you're going to... It's kind of like buying ads on PPC or anything, because you have to pay up front without knowing what's going to be the result, and it could be worth it for some of the higher-level influencers I mentioned, where you're talking about awareness or consideration. Yeah. That awareness post might actually get you a lot of awareness, which is great, and that can help your other influencers convert better. So, I think there's kind of like a strategy for each of those things, and you've got to try different strategies for different groups, and there's a funnel here that needs to be built out.Albert:Okay. Then based on what you know, based on what you just said, I want to ask you a question. I don't know if you've ever seen this post, but it was definitely done. We can look it up. You can Google it right now if you want. One of the Kardashians definitely got paid to post about Febreze, and she talked about how she loves Febreze, and she was in her bed, her luxurious 35-foot bed or whatever, and she's got all these bottles of Febreze lined up next to her. She's like, "When I want to clean, I use Febreze." This probably cost a million dollars. I don't know what Febreze paid for this, but it's probably pretty expensive. I want to ask, do you think that worked?Shibo:I think for her audience, yeah. I think that's one of the cool things about it, is merchants sometimes, and this is... I always tell merchants, "You should not do this," but sometimes merchants find an influencer, and they give them content and say, "Hey, post this," but that kind of defeats the whole purpose. The goal is to work with content creators and have them create content for you and give them the messages so that they can be enabled to do that for you. So, I think this is one of those examples where if you're not a big fan, maybe it doesn't appeal to you, but if you're a huge fan of hers and you consume her content like that every day, this might work. I don't know. I need to go home and ask my wife. She's kind of a fan.Albert:Yeah. Kardashian Febreze. I mean, just look it up, see does this-Shibo:If I start seeing a lot of Febreze in my house, I'll know that's where it came from.Albert:Listen. I mean, I have no idea, does it work or not work, but I'll say this. They continue to pay that family. So, you're absolutely correct. At that size and stature, with that kind of reach, sometimes it can be worth it. For smaller merchants, we already talked this, it's very difficult to invest your money because you only have so many marketing dollars to go with, but I really like this idea of let people organically, who already like your brand, instead of going to... We already talked about how the old way of doing it was you go into this database, almost, of randomness. It's very difficult to figure out who's going to work for you. It takes quite a bit of an effort, actually.Shibo:Yeah. So, when they ask you, "Hey, can you pay for this post?" you say, "I can't necessarily do that, but I like your audience. I like your postings. I like your content. Why don't I send you maybe a product, and then I'll pay you after it if your post generates any revenue?"Albert:Very fascinating. All right. Before you go, Shibo, it was awesome having you on the show, but we got to transition over to the next segment, and that segment is the Lightning Round. The Lightning Round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and what we'd like for you to do is answer each question in a minute or less. Are you ready?Shibo:Sure.Albert:Okay. What's the one thing that you think will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Shibo:I think it's going to be influencer marketing. Everybody's talking about it. This is just the beginning.Albert:Will TikTok surpass Facebook in attributed sales?Shibo:That's a really good question. I don't think so because Facebook has just more properties. I think TikTok would need to acquire more, like more WhatsApps, or build it on Instagram in order to get that. I think Facebook just has way too much reach, and they basically have a profile on every single person on the planet.Albert:Yeah. We ran some TikTok ads, just for your reference. We had five million views and $2,000 in sales, and then we ran the same Facebook campaign, and it gave us way less views, but it actually had more sales, so we're like, well... People keep saying they don't use Facebook anymore. They're lying.Shibo:We're all using Facebook, just like how we're all using Microsoft.Albert:Yeah, yeah. People go, "Well, I don't use Facebook." Okay, you lie, though. What ecommerce tools or technologies, besides your own, that you're most excited about?Shibo:I really like some of these data aggregation comes. Glue is really cool because it helps you kind of do what we believe in, which is figuring out apples to apples, how do I measure things all consistently? So, a lot of data products are really fun for us. I also really like Recharge. I think they are [crosstalk]Albert:Where everything's subscription?Shibo:Yeah.Albert:Subscription billing, Recharge?Shibo:I think so. I think it's interesting. I think it's interesting for merchants to have this kind of recurring billing business side. I think it's fun. They're a great group of folks, and they're very focused on building really good software as well.Albert:What's something that happened in 2020 that you hope sticks around for the rest of 2021 and beyond?Shibo:Well, I guess [crosstalk]Albert:We're looking at the positive. We're trying to look for the positive.Shibo:Yeah. I think ecommerce. I don't think that's going to go down. I think those in the ecommerce space have seen a good growth, and I hope that continues, and it looks like it is.Albert:With that being said, is it going to be easier to harder to start your own ecommerce business going forward? Is it going to be easier because the tools are easier, or is it going to be harder because there's going to be more competition than ever?Shibo:That's a good question. I'm not sure. I do think the tools are going to be easier. Fundamentally, it's going to be more niches and more people selling to their small audiences. Everybody's going to become a little brand.Albert:Okay. Then that begs the next question. It sounds like it's going to be harder, though, to succeed.Shibo:Not if you have a good niche. If you have a strong audience, you might not sell billions of dollars, but if you sell consistently to your strong audience, it can be successful.Albert:I like that, both easier and more profitable if you focus on niches. Shibo, I want to thank you for joining us today on Up Next In Commerce. Your insight was awesome. I thought you did a great job explaining to old-school people like me what is different about your platform than others, and I'm with you. If it was available to me and I was selling things, I would give it a try. I will recommend... I'm going to give it a try. Listen, I'm going to give your product a try. Don't flood me with these clickjackers. Okay?Shibo:I'll do my best. I'll do my best.Albert:Yeah, I'm going to give it a try.Shibo:If you ever problems, email me.Albert:I'll report back and let you know how the influencer goes, because I'm telling you, these companies that I'm familiar with, they all have the same problem, which you're trying to solve right now, which is all these people, TikTok, it doesn't really matter whether they are influential. They're coming forward and saying, "Hey, I can influence your brand. How do I participate?" and they don't know.Shibo:Right, right. No, thank you so much for having me.Albert:Awesome.

Grab a coffee, settle down and listen to the guy’s view – thoughts covering this week in the markets. New and exclusive to Share Talk In this edition of “Sunday Roast,”  Zak talks to experienced and seasoned investors Phil Carroll, Albert Arthur and Kevin Hornsby regarding the past weeks’ movers and shakers, market sentiment.Sunday Roast: 15s Phil’s week: MyHealthChecked (MHC), 33s Valereum Blockchain (VLRM), 3.19m Rambler Metals (RMM)4.00m Albert’s Week: Valereum Blockchain6.03m Zak on being too early in the market.6.40m Albert on MHC7.46m Novacyte (NCYT)8.40m COVID stocks / Scancell (SCLP)10.19m Zak on the new ISA week11.00 Ed joins11.45m Kevin’s week - MHC, Rambler (RMM), Supply@Me Capital (SYME), Zoetic (ZOE)16.35m Ed on people buying FastForward (FFWD) shares.17.24m Zak on the Roast, MHC and Tiziana (TILS)18.13m Ed on stock market discussion19.38m FFWD’s investments/strategy: Kanabo (KNB), Cellular Goods (CBX)22.00m Albert: What does FFWD actually do?24.00m Ed on the FFWD focus24.50m Ed on Bobby Axelrod25.41m Phil: What does FFWD look for in investments? Yooma.30.19m EMMAChttps://www.share-talk.com/zaks-sunday-roast-11th-april-analysis-of-stocks-markets-by-traders-and-investors/

Aashish Rego is a music and film producer and has been composing music for films and TV series in India for years. Where does intuition come from? How do you build human connection through music and film? For him, the human senses are only useful for forming opinions through our limited mind. But we have the infinite potential to feel through our soul, and the soul is infinite and is connected and linked to all the energy in the universe. I ask him how can we be more authentic storytellers. The biggest issues in life is being disconnected with our own selves. So when we are connected with ourselves, we build a channel, we become the channel by which the universe passes its force to you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hujv-2tnlU Watch the full conversation between storytellers Aashish Rego and Albert Bonet. About the path to real connection: How do people connect normally? Normally by surrendering, by trusting, by loving. Aashish says his aim as a storyteller is: to alleviate the distrust, the mistrust that people have for anyone or anything that’s different from them. Because I am just another you, and you're just another me. You can get in touch with Aashish Rego in Facebook and Twitter. Read the full transcript: ALBERT: So here I am with Aashish Rego from India. He's a music and film producer, and we've been connecting the last few days here in Kuala Lumpur for these crazy courses that we're doing.AASHISH: Highly crazyALBERT: Hi Aashish, how are you doing?AASHISH: Great, how are you?ALBERT: I'm good. It's been great to be working with you in the last few days. You're just so heart centered and so calm under pressure all the time, and I feel I have to learn that.AASHISH: And you're so professional, and it was an absolute delight to work with you. Collaborating with you in the project we did together. It was totally amazing. And I think we rocked it.ALBERT: Yeah, we rocked it! Us and all the other forty people, right?AASHISH: AbsolutelyALBERT: It was great, thank you for that. So, were talking about intuition and I want to bring that to the field of authenticity. So of course animals are the most authentic they can be because they don't have rationality that makes them act in a way that they look good, that they're right, they're in control, right?AASHISH: I would say they don't have unnecessary baggage.ALBERT: Unnecessary baggage. And so they're connected with their intuition.AASHISH: Yes.ALBERT: What were you telling me about the source of intuition for humans and animals?AASHISH: Well in my experience, animals are connected from a position of fear. Humans have the ability to think much, much beyond animals and a lot of times we tend to overthink things and that complicates matters. And leads to circles within circles within circles. And we somehow lose track of the intuitive abilities within us. Whereas animals, if you just observe them, they just go around sniffing each other, then you probably get the feeling that “He’s cool, he’s ok”. And sometimes, their hackles are raised and it’s obvious that they've not even communicated with each other but they know the other animal knows it is in a position that is threatening to them. And so they raise their hackles. As humans when we observe each other, we observe through our eyes, the nose, the five senses. We form our opinions based on that, through our mind, which is limited in nature.But we have the infinite potential to feel through our soul, and the soul is infinite and is connected and linked to all the energy in the universe. That is how we get hunches, and why certain feelings that we get sometimes when we meet a person we can still be vulnerable to them.  So that is the feeling of intuition we have at times. And there is the other intuition which comes from knowledge and wisdom. And a third level further than that which is awareness. ALBERT: Awareness?AASHISH: Awareness.  Awareness means awareness of the truth,

Episode 194 (49 mins 05 secs) Since “Ralph Breaks The Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2” is focused more on the internet aspects of the story, as opposed to the video game stuff like with the previous installment, did it work for Jiaming and Albert? What did they like and didn’t like about the movie? Take a listen.07:18 - Full Spoilers 27:50 - Credits 28:30 - After Credits - AMC’s The Walking Dead (Spoilers) 33:54 - Game Night (Spoilers) 38:40 - The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs and Cam (no-spoilers) 45:11 - about Roma, Aquaman, and a few other things (no-spoilers)Jiaming Liou twitter.com/jiamingliouAlbert Patrick twitter.com/albert5x5 instagram.com/albert5x5 "I Saw That Movie" blog the Stuff & Junk Show podcast C.O.ComixMix Extra Stuff Extra SpoilsMessage us! whowhatwhereswhy@gmail.com Follow and comment! instagram.com/whowhatwhereswhy/ Like and comment! facebook.com/whowhatwhereswhy merch! zazzle.com/whowhatwhereswhyWant to show your support? -> whowhatwhereswhy.com/support or Listen to Spoilers Pleeze on RadioPublic Podcasts -> https://radiopublic.com/spoilers-pleeze-whowhatwhereswhy-8XR7B1Music provided by The Y AxesThis episode was produced by Albert VergeldeDios and Jessica LinMore episodes, our other podcasts, and movie reviews, at whowhatwhereswhy.com#spoilerspleeze

Episode 185 (39 mins 57 secs) “The House With A Clock In It’s Walls” looked like a cross between the Goosebumps movie and Harry Potter, but does that matter? At least did it matter to Jiaming and Albert? What did they think about the movie, and how does it compare to properties like Harry Potter? Expect general spoilers for the Harry Potter franchise. Also, to their surprise, Horror movie maestro Eli Roth directed this kids film? Albert also goes over how this movie influenced “Supernatural,” as the screenplay is done by the man who helped create that TV show. Take a listen to everything that was discussed on this episode!04:30 - spoilers for the movie begins 29:32 - Credits 30:49 - After Credits - Star Wars Rebels, Cloak and Dagger, Ducktales on DisneyXD- how the “Supernatural” TV show was influenced by this movie - Michael Jackson’s Thriller paired with this movie’s release - Star Wars Rebels - Cloak and Dagger on Freeform channel - Ducktales on DisneyXDJiaming Liou twitter.com/jiamingliouAlbert Patrick twitter.com/albert5x5 instagram.com/albert5x5 "I Saw That Movie" blog the Stuff & Junk Show podcast C.O.ComixMix Extra Stuff Extra SpoilsMessage us! whowhatwhereswhy@gmail.com Follow and comment! instagram.com/whowhatwhereswhy/ Like and comment! facebook.com/whowhatwhereswhy merch! zazzle.com/whowhatwhereswhyWant to show your support? -> whowhatwhereswhy.com/support or Listen to Spoilers Pleeze on RadioPublic Podcasts -> https://radiopublic.com/spoilers-pleeze-whowhatwhereswhy-8XR7B1Music provided by The Y AxesThis episode was produced by Albert VergeldeDios and Jessica LinMore episodes, our other podcasts, and movie reviews, at whowhatwhereswhy.com#spoilerspleeze

Episode 179 (41 mins 16 secs) Needless to say, "BlacKkKlansman" is going to provoke a movie going audience to think about the themes it's presenting. Did Director Spike Lee's joint work on Jiaming and Albert? What did they like or didn't like about the movie? Take a listen!27:30 - Credits 28:47 - After Credits - The Meg (spoilers discussion) Jiaming Liou twitter.com/jiamingliouAlbert Patrick twitter.com/albert5x5 instagram.com/albert5x5 "I Saw That Movie" blog the Stuff & Junk Show podcast C.O.ComixMix Extra Stuff Extra SpoilsMessage us! whowhatwhereswhy@gmail.com Like and comment! facebook.com/whowhatwhereswhy merch! zazzle.com/whowhatwhereswhyWant to show your support? -> whowhatwhereswhy.com/support or Listen to Spoilers Pleeze on Radio Public Podcasts -> https://radiopublic.com/spoilers-pleeze-whowhatwhereswhy-8XR7B1Music provided by The Y AxesThis episode was produced by Albert VergeldeDios and Jessica LinMore episodes, our other podcasts, and movie reviews, at whowhatwhereswhy.com#spoilerspleeze

When you hear the phrase “technology sector” you probably think of multi-billion dollar companies like Google, Apple, or Facebook. But you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to work in tech. There are opportunities across the globe, both in offices and in working at home. It is one of the fastest growing labor sectors, and the jobs pay above average salaries. And it’s not just for startup founders, engineers, or coders. The experiences, skills and values that serve you in one field--whether it’s marketing, sales, communications, HR or anything else--can be used in the diverse tech field. This week on Find Your Dream Job, Mac chats with Albert Qian a high-tech digital marketing and product marketing manager, and founder of the tech-centered job community, Albert’s List. Albert has helped professionals around the country find rewarding work in the technology space. In this episode, he shares tips on how you can make the jump into big tech. In this 34-minute episode you will learn: Backgrounds and skills that help people thrive in the technology sector How networking makes all the difference in landing a tech job How you can use your humanities degree to find a technology job The benefit of code training academies and what to look for in technology bootcamps This week’s guest: Albert Qian (@albertqian | LinkedIn)Founder, Albert’s ListAuthor, The Social Media EcosystemOrange County, Calif. Listener question of the week:  I have an upcoming interview, and I’m curious how I should prepare my online profiles. What are employers looking for when they Google my name? Do you have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode? Please send your questions to Cecilia Bianco, Mac’s List Community Manager at cecilia@macslist.org. Resources referenced on this week’s show: GlassDoor.com - Highest Paying Jobs In-Demand Hongkiat.com - To 10 Websites to Learn Coding (Interactively) Online Code Academy TreeHouse CodeTree Khan Academy Albert’s List Coursera U2Me Workbridge Associates Tech In Motion Events Land Your Dream Job in Portland (and Beyond) - 2016 Edition If you have a job-hunting or career development resource resource you’d like to share, please contact Ben Forstag, Mac’s List Managing Director at ben@macslist.org. -- Thank you for listening to Find Your Dream Job. If you like this show, please help us by rating and reviewing our podcast on iTunes. We appreciate your support!Opening and closing music for Find Your Dream Job provided by Freddy Trujillo, www.freddytrujillo.com. -- FULL TRANSCRIPT Mac Prichard: This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life. I'm Mac Prichard, your host, and publisher of Mac's List. Our show is brought to you by Mac's List and by our book, Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. To learn more about the book and the updated edition that we're publishing in February, visit macslist.org/eBook. Thanks for joining us today. When you hear the phrase "technology sector" you probably think about multi-million dollar companies like Google, Apple, or Amazon. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley or Seattle to work in tech. It's no wonder many people move to these places to work for technology companies, however. This sector grows faster than the rest of the economy and the jobs pay above average salaries, but there are opportunities across the globe, not just California or Washington state. It's a field not just for startup founders, engineers, or coders. This week on Find Your Dream Job, we're talking about tech jobs. Ben Forstag has an online site you can use to find the highest paying jobs in the sector. Cecilia Bianco has answers for what you need to do when any employer googles you. Finally, I'll talk to an engineer who helps people find tech jobs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. First, though, let's start as we do every week by checking with the Mac's List team. Ben, Cecilia, how are you two doing? Ben Forstag: I'm doing great. Cecilia Bianco: Doing really good, Mac. Mac Prichard: Good. It's great to have you both here in the studio. Now, tech jobs. Before you all came here, did either one of you work in the technology sector? Cecilia Bianco: Yeah. I actually had an internship at a startup in college. It was called NOUO and it was a database for everything going on at the university restaurants, bars, and what to do on the weekend. It was an interesting experience. Ben Forstag: When I was in college, I was an intern at Compuware in Detroit. They are a software services company. I was in the marketing department so I wouldn't call it a tech job per se but it was where I first learned how to use HTML which has been a great skill for me. Mac Prichard: I have not worked in the tech sector. I had the good fortune, way back in the early 80s when IBM first introduced their PC's, to work at a non-profit that actually bought them. That was, in those days, bleeding edge technology. I learned all about floppy disks and Wordstar 3.0. Speaking of discovery, let's turn to Ben who's out there every week looking for resources that you, or listeners, can use. Ben, what have you learned for us this week related to technology? Ben Forstag: Mac, since today we're talking about technology I wanted to share two different blogs that I found, specifically blog posts, around technology. The first one comes from Glassdoor.com which is a resource we talked about last week. This comes from their blog which is around all kinds of workforce issues. This blog is the 25 highest paying jobs in demand. It's a list of the highest paying jobs that there's a huge demand for, as you would guess. The key takeaway of this job post is that almost half of the jobs listed were in the tech sector. I wrote out the top tech jobs. They are software architect, software development manager, solutions architect, analytics manager, IT manager, data scientist, security engineer, hardware engineer, database administrator, and software engineer. I don't know what most of the jobs do, I'll admit, but these are all jobs where the average salary is well over $100,000 a year. There's clearly a lot of money and opportunity in the tech sector. Thirty years ago our parents or grandparents might have been urging us to go and be doctors or lawyers because they thought that's where we were going to make a lot of money and take care of them in their old age. Nowadays, parents are probably urging their kids to go off to Silicon Valley and become software engineers and analytics managers because that's where all the money's at. Mac Prichard: That's an impressive list. I know we'll include that in the show notes, too. Ben Forstag: I'll include this specific URL to this blog post in the show notes. The key, I think, here is knowing the coding languages that are most in demand, if you want to get into the tech sector. I did a little bit of googling and what I found were the most in demand languages were SQL, Java, JavaScript, C#, C++, Python, Ruby on Rails, and iOS Swift. Cecilia, I saw you shaking your head when I read that list. Do you know any of these coding languages? Cecilia Bianco: (laughs) No, I don't. I did recently discovered that Mac's List runs on SQL. While I have no idea how to run it or anything about it, I know what it's called. Ben Forstag: You know we've got it. How about you, Mac? Mac Prichard: I'm doomed because I don't recognize any of these languages. I have some Spanish but I don't think that's going to cut it. Ben Forstag: Ten years ago, I thought I was really advanced because I know HTML. No, I don't know any of these either so I'm doomed as well. Here's the good news for all of us in this room and all of our listeners, you can learn almost all of these languages online, in your home, in your pajamas, and often for free, which brings me to my next blog resource for the week, which is a blog post on a website called hongkiat.com. That's H-O-N-G-K-I-A-T .com. (I don't know where these names come from!) The blog is the top 10 websites to learn coding, interactively, online. There are a lot of different websites out there where you can take courses, where you can learn just about any one of these languages, and other tech skills. Some of these websites you may have heard of before, Code Academy, Codetree, Treehouse, or Khan Academy. Khan Academy, I know, has been making the news a lot recently because they teach just about any subject you want to learn. The really cool thing about this is most of these sites offer at least some free training. You can scale up and pay for extras, but the baseline on most of them is free. The one reason I really like this hongkiat.com blog post is it gives a good summary of what each site teaches in terms of what languages you can learn, price point of what you can get for free and what you have to pay for, the teaching methodology, and the difficulty level for each online course. They have a matrix at the bottom of the blog post that displays all this information in a really easy and intuitive way. I would suggest you check out this blog post. It's, again, the top 10 websites to learn coding, interactively, online. I will have the URL in our show notes. Mac Prichard: Great. I know that our listeners will look forward to seeing that. Thanks, Ben. If you have a suggestion for Ben for a resource you think would be valuable to our listeners, write him. His email address is ben@macslist.org. Let's turn to you, our listeners. Cecilia, our community manager, is here to answer one of your questions. Cecilia, what are you hearing, this week, from our listeners? Cecilia Bianco: This week our question is, "I have an upcoming interview and I'm curious how I should prepare my online profiles. What are employers looking for when they google my name?" I think they're looking for a few different things, but the main reason an employer is googling you is to check your credibility. They want to see what pops up when your name is googled. Are you saying who you say you are? Do your online profiles align with what you've said about yourself thus far in your cover letter, resume, and any other correspondence you've had with them. Especially if you're applying for a tech job, this is important because you want to make sure what's popping up in a google search, that whatever comes up shows your credibility in your field. Are you a part of online tech groups? Online communities that are having conversations around the technology sector? Are you tech savvy and active online in social media, and with tech writing? Firstly, I think to prepare you should start by googling yourself and seeing what pops up. From there, you can focus on what you need to improve. Mac and Ben, I know I've googled my own name before, have you googled yours? Ben Forstag: I have. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I've got a last name that is not very common and it's probably the case that I know, or am immediately related to, any Forstag out there in the world. If you are a Forstag and you don't know who I am, please give me a call so we can chat. I have googled myself. I get the usual mish-mash of old posts that I've written for Mac's List, or other websites, my social media profiles, press releases I've written for other organizations. I would like to make one quick addendum to your suggestion, though. When you google yourself, I think it really helps if you're in blind mode or user mode on your browser because Google remembers a lot of your search history, and that doesn't show you what everyone else out in the world is looking for or finds when they type in your name. If you use, I think it's called "Guest Mode" in Chrome, or Blind Mode in other- Mac Prichard: I think it might be called Incognito. Ben Forstag: Incognito Mode in Chrome. That cleans the slate and shows you what everyone else in the world sees when they google your name. It's a good way to see what other folks see. Mac Prichard: I have googled myself and it is a good practice because you want to see what others will see about you. I made a deliberate effort some years ago to make sure I filled out online profiles for common sites like LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook. Those are the ones that pop up. Cecilia Bianco: I saw a lot of the same stuff when I googled myself. Past work, past blog posts, and all my online profiles came up, which I think is a good thing. After you google yourself, you want to figure out where you can improve what's popping up on Google. The first and most important thing to focus on is LinkedIn because you can get the most value out of an employer looking at your LinkedIn profile and it's really common to want to see that. If your LinkedIn profile isn't popping up, what you want to do is change the URL on your LinkedIn profile to include your full name. That way, it'll make you a little bit more searchable. That's pretty easy to do. You just hit edit profile and you'll see it pop up so you can make a change to that long URL.LinkedIn is very important to make sure that's popping up. It's good to have your profile setup and ready to go for an employer to see before you even apply for the job, because they might google you right when they see your resume. You want to be prepared for that. Once LinkedIn's taken care of, you want to see what other social media accounts of yours are popping up, if they are. You want to make sure you don't have anything on those accounts that you don't want an employer to see. If you're using Twitter and Facebook, you want to make sure your privacy filters are set to only show things to strangers that you want them to see. They can be great tools to support your credibility because if you're showing on all your social media platforms that your interests and passions and things you like to talk about are the same in what you've said in your job application, that demonstrates that you're a credible applicant and that they're going to trust you more. You want to make sure those are all cleaned up before you apply. If you don't have time to clean them up before applying, just make sure your privacy filters are locked tight with just what you want them to see. Mac, we've talked about this before. I know you've googled past job applicants. What were you looking for when you did that? Mac Prichard: Two things. One, I wanted to see that track record of accomplishment or experience in the area for the job that they were applying for. I think you're making a really important point, Cecilia, about the importance of showing rather than telling. People can say that they're interested in a topic or they have experience in an area, but if you go online and you see that they've actually done work and there are examples of that work then that's very powerful. The second thing I'm looking for is what clients and colleagues will see when they google that person because if I do higher than candidate, as an employer, they're going to become part of the time. The image that they're projecting to the world becomes part of our company's brand. I want to make sure that that aligns with the values and the mission of our firm. Cecilia Bianco: That's definitely really important. One last tip, the more profiles you're active on and feel comfortable with an employer seeing, the better. This gives you the most control over what's going to pop up into the Google search and what they're going to see when they google you. Overall, the easiest way to control what an employer will see if they google you is to google yourself and then determine where you can improve. Mac Prichard: Good. Well, thank you, Cecilia. That's excellent advice. If you have a question for Cecilia please email her. Her email address is cecilia@macslist.org.These segments by Ben and Cecilia are sponsored by the 2016 edition of Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond. We're making the complete Mac's List guide even better by adding new content and making the book available on multiple eReader platforms. In February of next year, we'll launch the revised version of the book and you'll be able to access Land Your Dream Job in Portland and Beyond on Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other digital devices. You'll also be able to get, for the first time, a paperback edition. Whatever the format, our goal is the same, to give you the tools and tips you need to get meaningful work. For more information, visit macslist.org/eBook and sign up for our eBook newsletter. We'll be sending you publication updates, share exclusive book content, and provide you with special pre-sale prices. Let's turn to our expert guest this week, and that is Albert Qian, who is a high tech digital marketing and product marketing manager. He's originally from Silicon Valley and he now works in Orange County, California. He's also the founder of Albert's List, a Facebook Jobs Community with more than 10,000 members that includes recruiters, hiring managers, job seekers, and more. Through the use of social media, Albert has helped fellow group members find work at companies like eBay, Google, and GoPro. Albert, thanks for joining us. Albert Qian: Thank you for having me on, I really appreciate the time. Mac Prichard: It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Let's talk about tech jobs. When people think about technology they think, "These jobs are in Silicon Valley, they're for coders, engineers. If you don't have a degree in electrical engineering you're out of luck." What's been your experience? Albert Qian: My experience is that when you look at the entire technology and high tech ecosystem for what's out there, there's actually a lot of opportunities available even for people who aren't engineers. I was out at the Golden State Warriors basketball game on Sunday and I ran into somebody who is a designer, so User Interaction Designing, UI, UX, that kind of thing, which is a really hot field right now in the area of high tech. You have a lot of people who need to design their websites, their web applications, there mobile applications. When I asked her what her background was she said that she was somebody who had gotten a degree in counseling psychology with an emphasis on education. I've seen similar stories where people who have psychology backgrounds also get jobs where they're in project management, PMP roles where they're working on, and with, engineers on getting a lot of products to market. There's a lot of different areas. Mac Prichard: Let's pause there for a moment, Albert. I can imagine our listeners thinking, "I've picked up my BA in Psychology. How do I make the leap into design work and doing user experience testing?" How do people make that journey? Albert Qian: I think the journey is made where you think about a product as just an end user, right? Many of us have smartphones today. We, no doubt, use a bunch of different applications whether it's on our phone, or on the web, we're all Facebook users, Twitter users, Uber users, things like that where we're using all these different apps. The way where we can apply a Humanities degree into a technology job is by applying our very own experience. Obviously, there's a little bit of knowledge in needing to know how some of this technology works and domain knowledge will always set you apart, but because we're all the end user of so many different types of technology today, we can always have the power and the ability to share these with the technology teams that we work with, and take those ideas into fruition into a product. Mac Prichard: Technology matters but so does human experience and understanding human behavior is always a marketable skill in technology. Albert Qian: Right now, you see a lot of technology that's out there on the market, a lot of prospective users. It takes a keen human eye to be able to look in-between, where you have the ability to use that technology, the solution to be able to really get users to come and user the product and stay using the product. Mac Prichard: For people who don't have psychology degrees, I know there are a lot of other opportunities in technology. Can you talk a little bit about that and the kinds of backgrounds and skills that help people thrive in this sector, outside of engineering. Albert Qian: I've seen people who have English degrees get jobs where they're doing things like technical writing, they are marketing specialists where they focus on writing collateral, or doing blogging content for a lot of technology companies that realize that they need to find a way to reach a broader audience. There are folks who can go into technology sales. If you're able to speak the language and also use your charisma in being able to sell technology products to others, that works as well. There's everything along the lines of the post-engineering process. Once you create a product, you've got to find a way to sell it. Selling the product includes everyone from product marketers, to sales folks, to people who manage social communities, to people who do the accounting/finance stuff in high tech, and really everything in-between. Mac Prichard: How do you see people break into that world, Albert? Whether it's after they've graduated or perhaps they're mid-career and they experience in another field but they want to break into technology. What do people that stand out or are successful at that do? Albert Qian: I think understanding the important of a particular domain is important to start out with. I think knowing what and why the technology is important is something that people are always looking for. Even though we live in such a technologically connected world a lot of people are great at using the technology but they don't understand why the technology is important from a business perspective. Mac Prichard: Albert, when we're talking about the domain, explain that for our listeners? Albert Qian: A domain would be a technology area. For example, one that I'll use is cloud computing… Mac Prichard: There's a lot of opportunity there and it's important to know the field that you want to focus on. What about training if you want to break into technology, there are code academies out there, online training schools, how helpful can those be to people who want to work as programmers, particularly those who didn't have that training in college and, maybe, want to make a career switch? Albert Qian: I think it's an interesting way to go about switching from one career into another. I've spoken to people who have taken these courses and people who are naturally interested in programming and they see people in these courses ... I've seen the example where these types of courses can really be beneficial for somebody who is interested in coding. One of my friends from college decided to go and take one of these 12 week boot camp courses. Now, he leads a technical team at a startup out in Santa Barbara. That's an example of where it is successful. Another one of my friends took one of these courses as well and now she has transitioned from an account management sales role into a product management role for a company out in Boston, Massachusetts. Have there been successes? Absolutely. I think, on the other hand ... I've spoken to programmers, as well, who look at this type of audience and they question whether they really get a lot of effective training out of it. On one hand, while you do know how to code, your ability to be creative within this coding knowledge is somewhat limited because you're working from a very limited perspective where, maybe, understanding coding isn't necessarily a natural forte of yours. This goes back to the original point where within technology and the technology sector, there is not necessarily a need to just become a programmer and that's just technology in its whole. As we've discussed throughout this podcast ... If you have the skills to be able to write, you can be a marketer, you can be a technical writer. If you're a person who can talk to people and to a very good job on that, you can be a salesperson. You can be an account executive, you can be a business development individual within any of the companies that work in tech out there. If you have in degree in, say, accounting or finance, you can go work in a money perspective in many of these different companies. You can do very well for yourself. Programming doesn't have to be the end-all, be-all. However, there are a lot of different resources out there for people who want to pursue that path. Mac Prichard: When does it make sense for people to get training in programming? If they want to be a programmer? Can that be an asset if they want to be a project manager or work in marketing or sales or communications in tech? Albert Qian: I certainly think that being technical is very helpful, especially in an area where you might interface with a lot of engineers. If you are a web marketing individual and you want to launch a product, being able to talk about the interactive features of a website may help a lot. Being able to talk about how something can be marketed as a product marketer when you're interfacing with your social media manager who may know how to code can be really helpful once in awhile. A lot of the jobs these days are merging together. Your technical writer may need to know how code works and write about how that works from purely a writing perspective. Mac Prichard: Coding can help, and other skills matter a lot, too. If someone is thinking about getting training in coding, and you mentioned your two colleagues that have had a positive experience, what advice do you have for people who are shopping around for either an online course or a boot camp or a code academy? What should they look for? Albert Qian: For the boot camps that exist in 8 to 12 week increments, a lot of them have interesting payment plans where either you give them the $15,000 to start and they put your through that process. Or, there are ones that take a portion of your salary when you start. That's one pricing model that exists out there. Another model out there that exists are the massive open and online courses, the MOOC's, that exist. You can go to websites like Coursera, or Code Academy, or U-2-me.com and you can pay for anywhere from $30 to $200 to $300 course where you can do self-directive learning on coding. I think when you're doing the coding learning process, it's always important to have a project in mind that you're doing.If you're just doing the code to learn how to code, you don't really get much out of it. If there's a website that you'd like to make, or a business that you have that you'd like to improve upon and develop a web application, or a mobile application, I believe that's usually the best way to take and the best course of action to approach with when it comes to learning how to code and gaining technical knowledge. Mac Prichard: Have a project that engages you and actually produces a result. Stepping back to shopping for a course, you mentioned 3 different options, and they have 3 different price points, obviously, but are there any warning signs that people should look out for when they're considering signing up with one of these boot camps or an online course? Albert Qian: There's a lot of financial consideration. For example, there's a lot of these coding academies that have popped up in the last couple of years that have already seen their doors close. If you're learning how to code and you go to one of these coding academies that ends up closing after you leave, you may be no better than where you began. I think name recognition counts a little bit. I think understanding the practical outcomes of what you're learning is also important as well. If you're going in and you know you want to do front end web development, knowing the right types of languages that you're going to be taught is a very important first step. That's one thing as well. Looking at reviews from students who have attended in the past and seeing where they've landed and going with that as well. Mac Prichard: Look for companies that have a track record, have good reviews, and can talk about their outcomes and how they've helped students. Albert Qian: It also doesn't hurt ... If you do want to go on Coursera or u2me and you find yourself a $15 course that teaches you how to code, you can't really lose with that. Having a little bit of extra knowledge never hurts. Mac Prichard: Let's move on. In our earlier conversation before this interview, what struck me was when we were talking about how people find tech jobs, you brought up a lot of techniques that I hear about any job search. One point you made that stuck with me was that networking still matters. Can you talk more about that and how networking can make a difference in getting a tech job? Albert Qian: Networking can make a difference because you put yourself in front of a live person. If you email people, they have the option to ignore you. If you call people, they have the option to never return your voice mail. Putting yourself in front of another individual and putting your best foot forward is always a plus. Humans respond very well when they see somebody that impresses them. Going out there and giving out your business cards in a reasonable method, obviously, and immersing yourself in front of a lot of people who speak tech, perhaps even a lot better than you do, is really a great way to start. If you're in a major metropolitan area around the country, there are quite a few, actually, events one can attend on a bi-monthly basis. They can meet up with people who work in technology. Mac Prichard: Ours is a national audience. I know you're in California, but are there groups that you see that operate across the country that our listeners might want to check out? Albert Qian: Yeah. One major one that I've gotten to know a little bit here in my time in Orange County is called Workbridge Associates. They host an event in all major cities across the country called Tech In Motion. Tech In Motion is a monthly networking event. Sometimes, they have content, sometimes they don't. Various technology professionals in technology marketing, people who program, all get together to share insights, exchange business cards, and get to know each other. I think, just from my understanding, they've got people in Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, LA and Orange County, Chicago, Tampa Bay, New York City, Austin, Texas, and so many more. Mac Prichard: Excellent. We'll be sure to include that in the show notes. We're coming to the end of our interview, Albert. What else would you like to share with our listeners? Albert Qian: I'd like to invite any of your listeners to look at joining Albert's List. We, are you've mentioned, are that marketplace where we bring together job seekers, recruiters, and numerous opportunities. Like what you do with Mac's List. We have a main California group that you can find under Albert's Job Listings and Referrals. We also have groups that cover Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and New York City. We invite you to join. You can go to our main Facebook group at bit.ly/findyournextjob. That's B-I-T . L-Y / find your next job. All one word. You can also visit us online at albertslist.org. We currently just have a signup page for our email list. We send out emails every 2 to 3 weeks which includes everything from an update on the jobs report that the US Labor Department sends out every month to highlights of jobs that have been posted in our group, to upcoming live networking events, mainly available in the San Francisco Bay Area, where you can meet other professionals and get referred, and just get to know the people in your community. Mac Prichard: We'll be sure to include both of those links in the show notes. Albert, thanks so much for joining us this week. Albert Qian: Definitely. Thank you, again, for having me. Mac Prichard: Great. We're back with Ben and Cecilia. Now, what did you two thing of the conversation with Albert? What were some of the most important points you heard him make? Cecilia Bianco: I really liked what he had to say about applying for a tech job just with experience with human behavior and human experience and what a user experiences on a website. I think that's good to have in your mind going into an interview at a tech job. I think it can be a lot more valuable than I ever thought it was from what he said. Mac Prichard: I think you're right. Working the technology sector isn't just about coding. The experiences and values that can serve you in one field, whether it's marketing, sales, project management, human resources are also valuable in the technology sector. What about you, Ben? Ben Forstag: I think Albert went back to one of the golden rules of job searching which is networking and how important it is to network within the field that you're interested in exploring. I like the way he put it when you show up at a networking event, it's really hard for people to ignore you. It's an opportunity for you to present yourself in a positive light in front of people who matter and decision makers at companies. Mac Prichard: I agree. It doesn't matter what the sector might be. Human connection still matters. People always will tend to hire people they know or people that are recommended to them by people they trust. Well, thank you both, and thank you, our listeners, for listening. We'll be back next week with more tools and tips you can use to find your dream job. In the meantime, visit us at macslist.org where you can signup for our free newsletter with more than a hundred new jobs every week. If you like what you hear on our show, you can help us by leaving a review and rating at iTunes. This helps others discover our show and helps us help more job seekers. Thanks for listening.