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Episode 32: Command Post vs Tactical, Triage and TransportAn important discussion on the fundamental difference between the work that gets done at the tactical, triage, and transport area versus the work that gets done at the command post.Bill Godfrey:Welcome to the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast. My name is Bill Godfrey, I'm the host of the podcast and I'm here today with three of the C3 Pathways instructors I got with me on the law enforcement side, Ron Otterbacher. Ron, thanks for coming in.Ron Otterbacher:Thanks for having me.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. We also got Don Tuten, coming in from Jacksonville. Don, how you doing?Don Tuten:Hey Bill, doing great. Thank you.Bill Godfrey:And a familiar voice to many of you Mark Rhame, like myself on the fire EMS side. Mark, how's it going?Mark Rhame:Very good. Thanks Bill.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So, let's start off talking about what is the fundamental difference between the work that gets done at the tactical, triage, and transport area versus the work that gets done at the command post? Ron, why don't you start us off.Ron Otterbacher:Tactical operations, which I include triage, transport and tactical, they are focused on the tip of the spear, they're going after whatever the situation they face at that time, whether it be to provide Rescue Tack Force support, whether it be to stop address the driving force where in fact the command operation has got a broader perspective and they're looking at things well beyond that, how it may affect the community, how we communicate, what we want people to do, how we notify our political oversight group, which is so important in these situations. So, just their perspective is a little different, we all want the same end but how we go about it and we also understand that we don't just say, okay, tactical you go do what you want because there has to be some oversight.Don Tuten:Yeah. And I agree with that. And tactical, triage and transport is utilizing those resources that are currently on duty. They're utilizing what they have to make that problem go away. They're not looking at the command side of that broader cold zone answers to questions on political payment, how much of this is going to cost? What additional resources you're going to need that the tactical triage and transport is how do we fix this now, utilizing the resources that we have while operating in this hot and warm zone.Mark Rhame:In addition to that, the command post keeps the heat off of that tactical, triage and transport group because you do not want the police chief, the fire chief, the mayor, elected officials, their supervisors, coming to the scene and wanting to interact with those tactical, triage and transport individuals because they've got a right now, right now, problem, they're dealing with everything in that hot and warm zone and that's what that command post is going to do. They're going to deflect all that stuff and take care of it in addition to what Don and Otter said.Bill Godfrey:So Mark, why not just have the command post deal with all of it and just add some people to the command post? Why do we need to put some layers in here?Mark Rhame:Because it needs to be a true separation between the two. I mean, as I said before, tactical, triage and transport are dealing with all that stuff in that hot and warm zone. They are dealing with things that are right in their face and if they don't deal with them right now, right now, people will die. I mean, that's the bottom line. They've got to take care of those issues right now. The command posts can reevaluate stuff, they can look at it as Ron said as a broader picture, broader view if you will, and they can maybe make more calculated decisions based upon, what's going to happen an hour from now? What's going to happen 12 hours from now? And what do we need to accomplish those goals? But again, we've got that tactical, triage and transport, they're dealing with the things that are right in their face right now, which is that threat and all those people who have been injured.Bill Godfrey:So Ron, talk to us a little bit about what goes into deciding or what should go into deciding, I guess I should say where tactical, triage and transport should establish themselves and position themselves versus where we parked the command post.Ron Otterbacher:Again, as you look things out, I'll answer it probably in a different way though. The hardest transition I ever had professionally was going from being a tactical operator to being an incident commander because it was entirely different. I was used to being right there, taking care of the right now, right now, stuff and then I had to focus beyond the right now, right now stuff. It's a situation where the tactical operations whether it be triage, transport, whether it be the tactical group, they're using the tactics that are down there. Your command post representative may not be familiar with all the tactics so he has to count on the people that are downrange and say, these are our options and the commander weighs out those options say, okay, I agree with this house safe, can we do this? And they simply make a logical decision or at least the most logical decision they can make with the information that they're provided.Bill Godfrey:Don, you got any insights you want to add on that?Don Tuten:Yeah. I just want to say that the tactical, triage and transport and like Otter and both Mark said, is there downrange handling the right now, right now problem. They're not thinking about the little things like, is there a school in session? What am I going to do with the kids getting off the school bus that is two blocks away? What am I going to do about the library that's around the corner that's open 24, whatever the case may be. They're worried about that threat, that threat going mobilized or continuing, diminishing that threat as soon as possible. And then transporting those victims, if there is victims on scene, out of there as soon as possible and not the impact that it's having on the community. That is the command responsibility is diminishing that impact on the community, as well as supporting this incident and the first responders there, if this is an elongated event.Mark Rhame:But also think about it, if you didn't have two different groups dealing with this incident and you have a school administrator or that owner of the mall or that airport official administrator who comes to the scene and you've got this person, who's the tactical director or the tactical person and they're dealing with the right now, right now problem and now all of a sudden they got this person in their face asking them questions and saying, Hey, when are you going to reopen the mall? When are you going to allow me to bring planes back to the airport, all that stuff. They don't have time for that, they got to deal with that threat and all those people who are injured and clear in that building, that's why the command post can separate it and deal with those other issues in a more sterile environment, if you will in that cold zone.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So, tactical, triage and transport are handling that downrange piece, the hot zone and the warm zone. How close should they be? Because they're obviously, want to be close to the problem not in the problem but close to the problem and tactical is going to be the first one there, right? They're going to tactical is going to stand up a for triage and transport does, what goes into picking a spot?Don Tuten:I think tactical, triage and transport number one, they all work together. They have to be in a position where they can evaluate the scene whether it be visually, whether it can be within close proximity but they have to get a common operating picture that is clear to them. They can't be miles and miles away because then they're operating off communication and we all know what happens with communication. So, they have to have that visual, they have to see what's going on, they have to make determinations based upon their experience and the resources that they have. So, they do need to be in that warm zone area, they need to be in an area to where they can obviously, they can redirect if possible but they have to be close enough to actually make those tactical sound decisions on like I said, doing tactical work, as well as removing patients.Mark Rhame:Plus you got to give them the option if they choose to do so of doing a face to face direction on the contact teams or RTFs or any of the teams that come into that location. Have them come to their location and say, this is where I want you. Here's a map, here's where you need to go and go forth and conquer. If you're a mile away, you're not going to be able to do that, you're not going to be able to give them that face to face direction.Bill Godfrey:So, we're talking about them being edge of the warm zone?Don Tuten:Yeah. I think depending on your location of your incident would dictate a lot of how far away that edge of warm zone is, but I think that's a fair valuation.Ron Otterbacher:I think, where you can say fairly safely ensure that your triage and transport can be there with you and doing a relatively safe fashion because we surely don't want to put them in a kill zone and because we want to be close and maybe we should be, then we put everyone in harms way. We've got to weigh the two out and make the best decision for the operation.Mark Rhame:Consider that if you neutralize that initial threat, you don't know because you haven't cleared the rest of the building out. Is there another threat? Is there something else right around the corner? Is there a secondary device? So, obviously you don't want to stick that triage and transport person so close that they are in harm's way. Obviously, we don't want to send anyone into that area let them be in harm's way, but obviously that tactical officer has that advantage in the very beginning. So, whatever place you decide, you've got to have that ability to hunker down, hide behind something large but it's close enough that you can get that visual and give direction.Don Tuten:And be fluid based upon the intelligence coming back out of that incident, be fluid. Be fluid to make adjustments.Bill Godfrey:So Ron, I think if I was reading between the lines on where you were going with that, tendency might be for the tactical group supervisor, maybe to get a little closer than triage and transport might be comfortable with?Ron Otterbacher:And I think it's got to be a marriage and it's got to be a marriage that works. You may have to, if your tactical, you may have to back off a little bit from what you're more comfortable working with because triage and transport may not be as comfortable working in that area. So, it goes back to being a marriage. We're a team, there's a reason we [inaudible 00:10:32], there's a reason we want them hip to hip. And so, we'll want to do it in a safe fashion or a safer fashion as we can do it. That I've seen tactical commanders that want to be right at the front door and this isn't the time to be right at the front door probably.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So, I'm going to call out some tasks that would need to be done. You guys tell me whether it's tactical, triage and transport or whether it's the command post. We need more contact teams to do whatever?Group:Yeah. Tactical. Yeah.Don Tuten:Absolutely.Bill Godfrey:We've got one or two RTFs but we need more RTFs so we need more manpower?Mark Rhame:Well, the build the RTFs is going to be the responsibility of direction from triage but to get the assets to staging, that is what our medical brands should be looking at those asset management. Do we have enough pieces and parts and do I need to order more of them?Bill Godfrey:Okay. But in terms of you get a call from downrange it says, I need more RTFs or I need more medical people. Who's handling that problem?Mark Rhame:Triage.Bill Godfrey:Okay. All right. And what's some other good examples that fall in the gray zone. I'm just trying to give some illustrations of the differences in the roles. What some of the other things that tactical, triage and transport would be handling?Mark Rhame:Well, one may be perimeter. Where you may think that that's a job of tactical really that's what that command posts with the law enforcement supervisors is going to make a determination. Do I stand up an inner and outer perimeter? Think about it for a second. If tactical right now is just trying to figure out, is this the only threat? Do I have more intel that's coming in that says, there maybe someone else in the structure because we've taken down the initial threat. They shouldn't be worrying about where the perimeter is being set up, that's what the command post can do because they're in that sterile environment and they can make a rational decision based upon the intel they're getting and send those teams in from staging.Don Tuten:As well as your federal response. Your guys that are downrange right now at tactical, triage and transport, when you get these outside resources coming in, they need to be vetted to some extent, what do they bring to the fight? And your command post has an opportunity to do that? What are your resources? What are you bring to the fight? And where can I best utilize you within this situation?Ron Otterbacher:I look at it where if the tactical command person is focused on where I'm putting perimeter units, my focus is wrong. I've got other people to do that, I've got other people to take care of that, my focus should be right downrange, what's happening right there again, are we talking about a driving force? Is it to stop the killing, stop the dying. That's where my focus should be. I've got other people, if I'm doing my job as tactical commander that are responsible for those other things and I need to understand that.Bill Godfrey:So Ron, you've used the word focus several times here, and I think it really is fitting because part of the reason that we've set the structure up the way we have is so that nobody ends up with too much focus. Nobody ends up spread too thin. What are some examples you've seen where somebody takes on too much? They're maybe a little bit outside their lane without realizing it and they're getting themselves overloaded. Can you give some examples?Ron Otterbacher:I think we see it everyday when we do these exercises is people want to run everything. They don't realize that their focus is to contact team downrange, the RTFs, the ambulance exchange point and anything beyond that is beyond our focus. I look at it as shooting at a target. If I'm shooting a rifle at a target, my focus, if I'm going to shoot well, although I've got an 18 inch target, my focus should be about a quarter inch. And if I go beyond that, then my angle [inaudible 00:14:37], is far greater so my shot's worse. But I've also got people on my side that are focused with everything else downrange so if something else pops off over the left, they've got it in their sights and I don't have worry about it.Don Tuten:I don't think there's any incident where one person can handle it all. And I think at the end of the day, our focus is we work together with all aspects of emergency services and public safety. I think we all have the best in our fields, no matter where you're at. And if we don't rely upon those, then we're doing ourselves and our community a disservice, if we're not utilizing those resources that are the best in their field.Mark Rhame:But If you want to dig down to some of the important issues but they're the boots on the grounds decisions who makes a decision where the casualty collection point is or where the ambulance exchange point is. If the command post is making those decisions, they have no visual acuity. They have no clue what's going on inside of that building and they are not going to be the best source for that information. That's got to come from those people who are actually inside that structure, relaying that back out to tactical, triage and transport to approve what they've come up with and then to say to all those responding units, this is where you need to go because this is where it's been established. If command post is trying to make those decisions, they're probably going to come up with a wrong answer 99.9% of the time.Bill Godfrey:And you guys were in the fire service, you guys were chiefs, how many fires did you fight from your office on structure fires at the guys were downrange? And was that successful or not successful?Mark Rhame:How many times did we try to put out a fire on the radio?Bill Godfrey:Right?Mark Rhame:A lot.Bill Godfrey:Correct.Ron Otterbacher:Getting back to what Mark was saying just a second ago. We tell everyone to paint a picture. The only people that know what's actually happening in this whole thing are the boots downrange, everyone else is guessing. And like he said, if we're guessing as a command component, that this is the best place to put someone we're in error. We've got to count on the people that are downrange that are actually seeing what's going on to let us know, wait, if we put our ambulance exchange point at this location we don't have to care, our patients is far. We don't know we're guessing. So, that's critical.Mark Rhame:But on the flip side of that, we wouldn't expect tactical, triage and transport to determine where's a good place for reunification. We don't expect them to take out a map book and go, ah, let me think of this place, let's make some phone calls and see if they will accept all of these witnesses survivors at this location and build out how we're going to do that. No. They are dealing with things that are right now, right now problems and the command post has got to handle that sterile, clean environment in that cold zone.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. That's not their job. One of the ones that popped in my mind, is it a specific example, and I'm wondering if any of you can think of any others that I see on a fairly regular basis. When the incident first kicks off, there's a heavy role for law enforcement obviously, and tactical, it's a tough job and it can get overwhelming very quickly. One of the things that we train on is how not to have that happen.But once you get the triage and transport group supervisors up with you, and you've got your RTFs downrange, all of that medical traffic, all of that medical information that's coming across the law enforcement channel should really almost die down and go away because it should be going on the fire department channel or the EMS channel or the medical channel.And I see fairly often, they just miss the opportunity to do that transition and we end up, instead of the medical traffic, basically disappearing from law enforcement and shifting over to the EMS channel, you end up with duplicate medical information coming across both channels. So, that's one specific one I've seen. Can you guys think of any others?Ron Otterbacher:No. And I think a lot of the times we see that is because we forget to stay on our own lane. Most of the time that happens because law enforcement tries to drive what's going on in the medical side and you turn them say, wait, this person next to you as a medical person, anything that has to do with medical stuff, they take care of it. Stay focused and same with triage, transport. If I'm tactical, I should just say, Hey, my guy is saying they need to extra RTF. That's all I should say, nothing else.I don't care as far as tactical how many reds I got, how many greens I got, how many yellows I got, someone's taken care of that. I know they're taking care of it. And if they need my help, they turn and say, Otter, I need some more cops down here and I send them more cops. We got to make sure again, getting back to focus. What is your focus? If I'm tactical, my focus is the tactical side of things, if I'm triage and transport, it's the medical side of things. And we need to maintain that.Mark Rhame:But also I see in the, where we don't have that true separation of duties, when you get a medical branch command posts start asking who transported what patient to what location? Well, we already have someone doing that job. That's transport. And you go into the command post and you look on their board and they're writing those notes that you know the transport supervisors already doing.That's their responsibility, they own that lane, same thing with deploying the RTFs. You've got medical branches hearing that RTFs are being built out and staging and all of a sudden medical branch from the command post says go ahead and deploy the RTFs and you're going, no, no, no, wait a second, that's not your job. That's not your lane of traffic. That's triaged job, let them do their job.And for me, it's a very simple concept from the command post, if you have people doing that work for you downrange in that hot and warm zone and there's two things the command can do wrong in that environment. First off is micro-managing. All of a sudden they try to get into their world. To me, if that individual's not doing their job, you need to replace them or support them otherwise, get out of their business back off and let them do their job because that's why you put them in that position.Bill Godfrey:And Mark, I would not only echo that but the word that I would also add is over driving. Sometimes it's not necessarily micromanaging, it's, you don't need to be on the radio that much, you're asking questions that are not appropriate, they're not timely, it's not stuff you need to know right now, you're asking questions that's in their job and their business, you're just over driving it. They're down there, they have a job, they should have your confidence to do the job and if they don't then replace them and put somebody else down there. But you can't do your job and their job.Mark Rhame:Yeah. In fact, I would say most successful command posts are silent command posts. They're listening, they're taking care of their own jobs but they're not getting on the tactical channel unless there's something they have to take care of, they're not getting on that medical channel or that transport channel, they're letting those people do their jobs. Again, either let them do their jobs or support them or replace them.Ron Otterbacher:Most times we see a situation go sideways, especially in these exercises is because of that same thing. We've got someone from the command post trying to overdrive everything and the way we fix it is, we tell them, turn off your radio. You've got someone here that will listen to the things that involve you but you're not. It doesn't matter if you're incident commander, doesn't matter if you're medical, doesn't matter if you're law enforcement branch, if you're overdriving the situation, oftentimes the best way to fix it is, shut off the radio. We've still got someone that's listening and taking all the calls for that person, just this person isn't on the radio talking all the time.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So, let's flip to the other side of this coin and when I say that, I mean, let's get to some of the situations where the command post should step in because something's not getting done or they're not hearing something get done. Now, on the medical side and then I'm going to ask Don and Ron to chime in on the law enforcement side and maybe give some examples. On the medical side, Mark, what I'm thinking is we always teach, you're looking for a handful of benchmarks, you're looking for the report that the threat's neutralized, RTFs are up, AAP is established and then ambulances are transporting patients.And so, one of the things that when I'm doing the command post coaching is saying, look, you're listening for these benchmarks, if you hear the threat's neutralized and five minutes goes by and nobody's talking about RTFs, that's a call on the radio to say, medical branch's a triage, where are you at on your RTFs? And maybe there's a very good reason for it, but let's, tell me what that reason is? And if the RTFs have gone down range, and nobody's talking about an ambulance exchange point, and I'm not here in transport talking about moving ambulances, same thing. It's like, all right, medical, you need to find out, get an update on what's going on with that because we should hear them out. Are there any others, Mark that jump in your mind on the EMS side?Mark Rhame:When you mentioned that issue about the medical branch inquiring, thinking why aren't the RTFs moving down range or why aren't the transport units engaged in going into the scene and start moving those people off the scene? What I see that becomes a conflict is that we've got some issue going on between tactical, triage and transport. There's a conflict there, there's maybe a little in-fighting, maybe Tactical is holding a ground and saying, I'm not going to allow you to bring in your triage or maybe that triage person is a little reluctant to send people in even though tactical is telling them they got the green light-Bill Godfrey:The whole thing a warm zone. If the whole thing's not a warm zone, we're not-Mark Rhame:Exactly.Bill Godfrey:We're not going to move.Mark Rhame:And that's where the command post probably needs to ask that question, is this the right person for the job? Do I need to get support in there or do I need to give them some recommendation? The clock's ticking, that's the enemy, that's red is our primary enemy, but that clock is going to kill those people. So, if they see that this scene is not moving in an efficient quick manner, especially after law enforcement says that the threat has been neutralized or contained and RTFs are being held in place, you probably need to ask the question what's going on over there?Bill Godfrey:Yeah. And then, now the flip side of that is there can sometimes be a very legitimate reason.Mark Rhame:Yes.Bill Godfrey:Something we've missed in the command post and tactical and triaged are having a conversation about, well, we still got a threat over here, we're not ready to move them up or, and sometimes there's a very good reason for that. So, Don, Ron, what jumps out at you on the law enforcement side where the law enforcement branch needs to step in on the radio to get something clarified from tactical?Don Tuten:Yeah. The biggest thing, Well, there's two ones that just stick out to me right away. That's one, there's no longer a threat. What are we doing for the intelligence piece now? Where are we putting the investigators moving down range to start getting the information out, doing the back check on what happened? How it happened? how are we messaging this? And how are we putting our message together to notify the community? And then I guess there is a third one is, what are we doing with the people that are not affected within this area? How are we setting up a reunification? If this isn't moving fast enough. Where are we to do this? How are we going to message those parents and those loved ones?And those are the things that are time sensitive, that when you're handling the right now, right now problem, you're not thinking about that as tactical, triage and transport but as a commander an incident commander, you should be thinking about it because it's just a matter of moments before you start getting those telephone calls in and setting up those hotlines and all the little ancillary things that as these events evolve, unfortunately around the country that make the news because the first thing is the news comes on and wants to answer all of those questions versus, how was the suspect killed? Doesn't matter. They don't care about that. They want to know how have you lessen the impact on our community.Bill Godfrey:Ron, what about you? Anything that jumps out.Ron Otterbacher:Right. I think the benchmarks aren't that far apart. If you hear they're sending RTFs and you're saying, okay, did they establish an AAP? I want to hear at the same time where my people downrange are saying, I've got security for the AAP. I better hear that. I better hear once I say the bad guys down, okay now, where is your casualty collection point because now we've got to send the RTFs to a location. We don't just send them to a building, we got to give them a specific location, specific route to get to that location.So, we're listening to similar thing, we just understand different responsibilities for those similar things. So, I don't think our benchmarks are that far off, they're all co-located and that's why it's so important to work co-located. Because we could turn around and say, if I'm tactical, I can turn around a triage and say, okay, we've got the AAP set, it's here, I've got security on AAP, you're good to start sending in your ambulance, so transport starts sending in ambulances. It's just all that communication.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely. And Ron and Don, have you guys seen occasions where okay, the rescue operations going fine. So we've dealt with the threat, priority number one. Priority number two is to deal with the rescue. Rescue operations move, and it's unfolding, it's good but you've got a tactical that may not have shifted gears to start with this clearing operation simultaneous with this rescue operation. You've got another 50 cops in staging, you've got plenty of people to put together some more teams. Is that one where sometimes there might need a little prompting from the command post to say, Hey, what are you working on this? What's your plan?Ron Otterbacher:Yeah, absolutely. You may have to look at it. But again, as we focus on what our driving forces at that time, my priority is getting the injured people out, providing security for the uninjured people that are there and then we start clearing. But we can do a lot of that, like you said, in conjunction with each other but I don't want our zeal to finish clearing. We always talk about the plus one factor and most of the time, plus one factor is not there. So, I don't want their focus to be clearing, when in fact we've still got people we're trying to move off the scene and I don't want to compromise security for that to say we cleared.Don Tuten:And I think we as a nation-Bill Godfrey:I'm sorry, before we do that, can you explain the plus one theory because not everybody listening may know.Ron Otterbacher:Okay. Well, we talk about plus one theory is we've got one bad guy, so there's always got to be another one. We've got a bogeyman behind the counter. We've got a boogeyman somewhere else and it could be a boogeyman, but most of the time there's not. And we waste valuable time and we talk about the clock being one of the threats we have to deal with to save lives, we waste time because of that. Still in the mentality more of a lot of law enforcement is, before we can send anyone downrange to try start saving lives is, we've got to clear and make it safe. And we've had to change this paradigm shift that we had to go through and we all have to understand that.Don Tuten:Yeah. And I think Otter brings up a good point and I think we're at that shift. And I think this class talks about it, I think this class shows a cohesiveness behind it, I think with the education of the clock is the enemy, not just the bad guy downrange. And it's funny because as we teach around the country, we're starting to get the seriousness of how fast these cops want to move these patients off scene as well. So, I mean, it's phenomenal through a tragic event that we're re-educating ourselves in our response.Bill Godfrey:So, if I'm hearing the two of you correctly, our priorities are threat rescue clear. We don't want to get into the clearing phase unless we've either number one, got the rescue well in hand or we've got capacity to do the two things at a time. But if it's going to jeopardize the efficient rescue, then we don't want to get into it. Is that-Ron Otterbacher:Absolutely.Bill Godfrey:Am I saying that right-Ron Otterbacher:And we may decide because we've been so involved in everything that's going on, whether it be going after the bad guy, treating the patients, getting them transported, we may decide as we go to clear that these people may not be the best ones to do the clearing, let's bring in other resources so they can be focused, they can be fresh and they can take care of going from there.Bill Godfrey:All right.Mark Rhame:Well, one other issue that and this is a law enforcement lane, so I'm really going to pose that question back to you guys is that we don't want that tactical officer to be chasing every single little bit of intel that's coming in because they could be chasing their tail all day long. I mean, that's what the command post has an intel officer standing up, and they're trying to clear and clean all that information and relay all that information, that good information to that tactical officer, so they have that awareness and presence and the ability to send their contact teams in there.But the worst thing to do, if you're the command post is every time you get a social media hit, every time you get an intel blast, every time dispatch gets another text message or 911 call, they send that to the tactical officer and it's not cleaned, it's not sterile, they haven't reviewed the information to see if it's valid or not. But I mean, from a law enforcement perspective, I would think that'd be very problematic if tactical got all that stuff, all that information.Don Tuten:We've seen multiple information that's never been vetted and that's one of the things we talk about is putting the investigative piece and intelligence up in communications. And I'll stick to the communications because that's one of the biggest ones as you get multiple calls come in that have a variance of the same information that gets put out as 10 different pieces of information or suspect information or suspects. And it ends up being the exact same. And we've seen it at different places where this is a long elongated events, too.Bill Godfrey:It reminds me, we have one of our instructors that was the incident commander at one of these events a while back, and there was an international flavor to it. He was chasing ghost reports or echo calls of the shooter man with a gun, people still injured, a guy was seen last seen here, last seen there. Four hours after they had neutralize the threat, four hours later they were still chasing that stuff. And one of the things he said is he readily recognizes looking back on it, there was plenty of information. Had they had somebody going through it, there was plenty of information to say, that's a repeat, we've already done that, we've already checked that, we've already cleared that and not chase his tail so much. So, that's a really interesting comment Don.Don Tuten:And that's a piece where your incident commander should be forward looking to say, look, we don't need to be chasing our tail. We need to put the right people in the right positions and let's get ahead of this thing.Bill Godfrey:So, that's a great jumping off point to talk about some of the things that are unique to the command post. So, what are some of the tasks that command really needs to be looking out for? So, I think, we've covered the downrange stuff and frankly, I think everybody gets that anyways. What's some of the stuff that's going to come up to the command post that they're going to need to deal with? Mark.Mark Rhame:Standing up PIO, the community message. Remember standing up PIO is not a one way directional message or whatever, PIO has got to look at social media hits. They got to look at what's the information they're hearing out there in the field and give that back to the command staff so they can properly address that when they get into a press briefing. But also remember we talked about that initial press briefing is controlling the environment. I think I've heard Ron, say this numerous times that if you don't get the message out quickly and you don't control the message, it's going to be mismessage, they'll be chasing that message all day long, if not days, if not weeks. So, PIO is a very important and vital thing you need to stand up as quick as possible as a command post.Don Tuten:I'm going to say the intelligence piece as well as the reunification. There are so many things once again, that they need to get together and find the right resources to get those things handled. They can't be handled downrange by tactical. So, the intelligence piece that obviously feeds the PIO and then the reunification piece.Ron Otterbacher:I'm going to speak of something we don't like to talk about necessarily and that's a political oversight. We have to brief either the chief of police, the Sheriff, the Mayor, the Governor-Bill Godfrey:The Feds.Ron Otterbacher:We had everyone. And it's not what we like to do, but it's something we have to do and a lot of times the only person they will talk to is the incident commander. So, we've got to be prepared for that, we got to understand that we may have a press brief but our press brief may not be the same thing we give some of these people but we also understand if we go too far out on a limb with these other people, they're going to turn around and go right to the press and leak everything that we just told them in confidence. So, we've got to understand what we're dealing with and how to deal with it in a professional fashion.Mark Rhame:And one other issue that probably doesn't get addressed in training enough is that the command post also has to think about what is the cost of this thing? Because if you're a tactical officer, if you're the triaged or transport, you going, just keep giving me stuff. I want that, I want this. But the command post has got to look at the bigger picture. Is there a price tag to this? And I mean, literally, is there a price tag to this? And they've got to look at and say that for our organization, we got to re-evaluate that request. Maybe we can't do exactly what they're saying but here's what I can give you.Bill Godfrey:And I think the one I'm going to mention since Ron stole mine, I think the one I'm going to mention is that transition planning for what's the next step?Ron Otterbacher:Next operational period.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. And I hesitated to call it the next operational period because it may actually just be a few hours in, but you're going to have to transition. Once you've dealt with the threat and you've got the patients transported, you've got to get the uninjured off to reunification, family assistance center stood up and get the messaging out, messaging to the community. So, all that's the first couple of hours. Then what? You've got to begin to get to work on your investigation. You've got to begin, what is the long-term recovery in this facility? How long are we going to have operations going on? Are we going to be here overnight? Or we're going to be here for several days-Don Tuten:Tip lines.Bill Godfrey:Several weeks? Do we need fencing to lock it down? And I think all of those things are absolutely responsibility to the command post and if they're neck deep into the tactical piece of this, it's two hours before they ever start thinking about this stuff.Ron Otterbacher:Sure. Absolutely. Yes.Mark Rhame:And also you need to consider emergency management standing up and assisting the command post. How about dealing with your local communities and letting them know what you're dealing with because they may be dealing the same thing and you don't know it. How about your state notification site? How about your fusion center? Those discussions need to take place at the command post.Bill Godfrey:Well, and speaking of emergency management, we don't like to see the incident commander have to get involved in doing the callback and move ups for covering the rest of the city or the rest of the county. That responsibility should fall to somebody else but it takes some coordination, it takes some communication and emergency management has obviously a huge role, not only in the incident but also in the continuity of operations for that community, that's had a lot of their resources sucked down by this incident.Don Tuten:And the recovery.Mark Rhame:Yeah.Bill Godfrey:Absolutely.Mark Rhame:Debriefing your people, rehabbing your people, backfilling your troops, I mean, all that falls on the command post. You cannot expect the tactical, triage and transport to be even thinking about those issues. They're dealing with the stuff right in their face right then.Ron Otterbacher:I also think something a lot of agents are doing now is create an incident management teams to respond to all of these situations. So, the incident commander doesn't have a single focus. Anytime I responded to something, I had an incident management team that responded. And if it went into another shift, I had a relief team that responded too. So, it gives you those extra resources to help you with what's focused on use, but they've also have that relationship with the emergency management folks that, as their requests and extra resources for you, it allows them to know where those resources are going and everything else. So, it all works together.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, absolutely. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much for this conversation today. And for those of you listening, I hope you've enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for future podcasts or some questions that you would like us to address, please send them in to info@c3pathways.com. That's info@c3pathways.com. And until next time stay safe.

Hey Folks How is everyone doing today. I am doing great like always thanks for asking. Today's guest is an Ontario Indy main stay and had done everything you can in wrestling from booking to ring announcing to commentary and was even the most hated heel for a few years! We talk about all that and more but for me this was a fun chat because tbh I was having a total shit day and I almost cancelled the call but he brought me back up talking about one of the things I love ..... Wrestling lol. Thanks Bill. Hope you enjoy this as much as i did recording it. If you want to send in ideas for the Guilmy Talks Ten just send them to the socials. Talk to you next week Justin Guilmette aka Guilmy   Follow Guilmy Talks on Social Media   RATE - REVIEW - SUBSCRIBE - SHARE   You can find Bill's podcast at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfY5fyY2U7E_UQ12EsW1ePg   Twitter https://twitter.com/Guilmy Instagram https://www.instagram.com/guilmytalks/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/GuilmyTalks Sound effects & Music provided by www.freesounds.org Have a great day thanks for listening. Talk to you next week. Also check out the Ontario Indy Wrestling Podcast Network Stogiemainia Ocho and Ortiz Straight Talk Wrestling Thursday Night Throwdown Shwa Style  Scumbags of Wrestling Knights of the Squared Circle It's time to fight  Ontario Indy Road Trip Shooting up North Diary of a Wrestling Fan

Bill Cates recent book, Radical Relevance, is truly an excellent read! Sharpening Your Marketing Message is a must in todays fast paced world full of distractions and chaos. Listen to our interview and find several nuggets of value to use in your business and life. We get into his path to success in training, teaching, writing and speaking. Great success principles from a very humble man. Thanks Bill, for being on the show. See more of what Bill can do for your business at www.referralcoach.com on Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/ReferralCoach on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/billcates/ As always like, rate and share with someone who needs this valuable information.

John and Jude get together to discuss Anthony Daniel's book, hear Jude's opinion on the Mandalorian, John begs you all to check out Nirvanna The Band The Show and hear about Jude's car crash! Loads more besides. Recorded in an incredibly noisy branch of Bill's. Thanks Bill's.

Our look back over Exodus reminds of God's power, faithfulness, holiness, leadership, redemption and presence.  The time covered by the book shows the rescue, unification and plan for the new nation of Israel -- God's people who have been promised an amazing future (if and when they take it).   Answers to the "homework" (Thanks Bill!) are shown below:       Why do you think Exodus starts off with a review of Jacob’s family? Jacob’s family (Israel) had been in Egypt over 400 years and the story of how they came to be in Egypt had most likely been lost through the years. In fact the promise of a gift of land forever that God made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob most likely was also lost on the generation at was residing in Egypt at this time. The story of how God’s provision through Joseph was most likely forgotten as well.  History, knowing what has happen in the past, it important for each of us. Why was Pharaoh such an affront to God? At this time in human history Egypt was the most powerfully nation on earth. Pharaoh thought he was the best or in his mind he was god. As we learned in Isaiah, God said through the prophet “I am God and there is no other”.  Pharaoh was who he was because God allowed it and in the end, God showed His power to Pharaoh and the world. Why are the plagues such an effective condemnation of Pharaoh? Egypt had many gods and each of the plagues showed just how ineffective--false Pharaoh’s gods were. (1) The Nile turned to blood—Egypt had a god to the Nile-Hapi and Isis. (2)Frog’s—frogs were a fertility symbol. (3)  Gnats Set-god of the desert (Bible Knowledge) (4) Flies were especially to the Egyptian god of Uatchit (Wiersbet). (5) Egyptian cattle die—some of the gods were farm animals-another attack on the Egyptian religion. The Israeli cattle was not harmed (6) Boils on everything living thing—Sekhmet the goodness with power over disease (Bible Knowledge) (7) Hail—Nut the sky goddess (8) Locusts—Osiris god of crops (9) Darkness—Re and Horus sun gods (Bible Knowledge) and (10) Death of the First Born—god’s of reproduction and childbirth. How is the parting of the Red Sea echoed elsewhere in Scripture? The Red Sea is mentioned two times in the new Testament Acts 7 in Stephen’s sermon and in Hebrews 11—the Faith chapter. In the Old Testament the crossing of the Red Sea is mentioned several times to remind Israel of God’s faithfulness—Moses in Deuteronomy, In Joshua, in Nehemiah, in Psalms (106 and 136) and in Jeremiah. All the reference was to remember history. What are the implications of God giving the Law to His people? In Exodus the Law was given to restore order after having been slaves for so many years and to teach them to love and obey Almighty God. Paul told us in Romans 7:7 “I would not have to know sin except through the Law” What are the implications of the presence of the Tabernacle? God has always wanted to have fellowship with the human race, His highest creation, and He chose Israel to be His own possession (Ex 19:5). In the process of bring order; the Tabernacle was a place of Worship and place of God’s presents. It was a shadow as Hebrews tells of things to come, that is a better Priest and sacrifice in the Lord Jesus. What Biblical Themes does Exodus Illustrate? Deliverance—Freedom—God’s Leading—God’s Provision—God’s Faithfulness—God’s Power

We're back with Episode 2 and ready to go with 2 more episodes of everybody's favorite Alien! Join us as we discuss cat eating, nuclear arms, strange 80s TV connnections (Thanks Bill!) and general chit chat about everything and anything!

We're back with Episode 2 and ready to go with 2 more episodes of everybody's favorite Alien! Join us as we discuss cat eating, nuclear arms, strange 80s TV connnections (Thanks Bill!) and general chit chat about everything and anything!

This episode is brought to you by the best for the best - you, the C10 Nation! www.accuair.com The leader in air management and creators of the ENDO system.  www.classicperform.com - Use "C10 Talk" at check out and save 10% for  www.dakotadigital.com - Have you seen the new RTX series gauges? They are a thing of beauty.  www.azproperformace.com - Looking to upgrade anything from STOCK, we don't blame you - they have it!   Hey C10 Nation - sit back, hold on and enjoy the ride. Everything from What you need to wire up you LS motor to your C10, to converting an LS motor to a Nissan Transmission - Yep, its a thing.    So many good guest - you'll have to tune in and listen, from the Burnout Kid - Dan Glauser, to Miss Boosted Erin herself.  Like I said, get in, sit down, and hold on - we going for a ride - and LS Fest Ride!!    Thanks Bill and Holley for the hospitality and support, Ronnie

Bill is the co-founder of the Hard Times Website and Podcast. The Hard Times is a website dedicated to fake punk news. It's the onion for punkers. Founded 4 years ago, Bill and online buddy Matt Saincome started the website to bring fake news to the masses and website has been gaining some recognition with headlines like " Pop Punk Band Running out of Obscure Movie Quotes to Use as Song Titles" & Entirety of Drum Lesson Spent Learning to Do Twirly Thing With Sticks  There's 1000's more of super funny satirical views on punk rock and it's always a great read! Check out the podcast as well https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-hard-times-podcast/id1450779291 A good talk with a fun dude! Thanks Bill for being on the show!Hard times twitter: http://thehardtimes.net/podcasts Bill Conway Twitter: https://twitter.com/ihatebillconway Brought to you by http://www.betterhelp.com/apologueAffordable, private online counselling anytime, anywhereSupport my ride to conquer Cancer. A two day 200km ride to raise money to find the cure for cancer: http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/simonheadIt doesn't matter where you're from. Give and feel good! Shop with amazon.ca, amazon.com and amazon.co.uk  Bookmark the link and support the show!!Pledge monthly with Patreon https://www.patreon.com/apologueShop Apologue products at http://apologue.ca/shop/

Download the mp3 file. In this episode, we discuss the power and potential of LinkedIn for business development in manufacturing organizations. Bill Sterzenbach from Upward shares ideas, suggestions and real stories about how you, the manufacturing marketer, can and should use LinkedIn for business development; more qualified leads, higher conversion rates and a full sales pipeline. or go to mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook   Guest: Bill Sterzenbach, Partner at Upward Brand Interactions Highlights: There seems to be a bias against social media, therein lies a huge opportunity for the industrial enlightened. [2:50] LinkedIn is a place where professional go for growth. [5:50] 62% of B2B marketers find LinkedIn to be the most effective way to engage with their target audiences. The people who get the most benefit are those who understand the people who make up their target audience. [7:00] It's about people talking to people more than a brand talking to an audience. [9:30] Bill shares a case study about Parker Hannifin and Caterpillar are using LinkedIn well and having had great success on LinkedIn. [12:20] Here are three things you can do right now to have better success with LinkedIn: [15:20] Put in a practice to get more followers and set an objective. Post at least weekly on a regular basis. Use your internal team to help promote the channel. Learn about how paid or sponsored content works on LinkedIn. [19:10] It's a good practice to use both pay-per-click and LinkedIn sponsored content. [25:40] Get out there and do it badly, don't wait until it's perfect to start. [26:50] Interview Questions: Question 1 – Let’s start of broadly and talk about social media in general. How should manufacturers view social media when it comes to their business development? Is it table stakes in this day and age? Is it a good way to grow awareness? Is it a waste of time? Question 2 – Let’s zero in on LinkedIn. Rather than assume everyone knows what it is, would you first share, what is LinkedIn? How does it work? Real example of how a manufacturer might use LinkedIn… Question 3 – Sounds like it could be a pretty powerful business development tool. Suppose there is a manufacturing marketer out there listening, they have a LinkedIn company page, but aren’t doing much with it. What are 3 things they could do right away towards using that page for business development? Question 4– I know LinkedIn offers paid advertising. How does that work? A couple of examples would be great. Is there one ad type you recommend over others? (which one and why that one?) Is it for everyone? Challenge Question: Send in your challenge question! This week our challenge question comes in from New York, a manufacturer of industrial gases. Here it is, “I’m the VP Sales and Marketing at a company that manufactures and delivers industrial gases. I listened to your podcast a couple of weeks ago about sharing content to differentiate. Would that work with a commodity like Nitrogen or Oxygen used in an industrial environment? If yes, could you throw out a couple of examples on your next podcast?” Helpfulness is a great differentiator for commodity products. In a survey, purchasing and buyers will choose a company offering helpfulness over all others. The larger, more premier companies value helpfulness most. Better customers value service on the front lines and all around helpfulness. Use social media to prove your brand is helpful. TOMA + credibility + reciprocity = differentiation and bigger market share Takeaways: Set some goals for your social media program. Get buy-in from stakeholders. Offer from Bill and Upward - free lunch and learn in person or via webinar.  Prefer if you can bring at least 20 people. Fill out the form here and request to learn more about LinkedIn. Transcript: Bruce McDuffee: Welcome to Manufacturing Marketing Matters, the podcast produced by the Manufacturing Marketing Institute, the center of excellence for manufacturing marketers. I'm Bruce McDuffee. Thank you for listening.   Hello, manufacturing marketers. A quick reminder today, I'm still offering a free digital copy of my book. It's called "The New Way to Market for Manufacturing." You can get one with a short registration form at mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook. I'll put that in the show notes, too. Now on to the show. Our guest expert today is Bill Sterzenbach. He's a partner at Upward. Welcome Bill.   B. Sterzenbach: Pleasure to be here, Bruce.   Bruce McDuffee: Great to have you on the show today. Looking forward to it. Folks, the topic today is about how manufacturers can use social media. Mainly we'll be talking about LinkedIn, how you can use it for business development. I saw Bill present this topic at FABTECH down in Los Vegas back in November, and I can tell you it's powerful stuff. If you listen up, you can really learn how to use a tool that's available in social media to really grow your business. Before we get in to the interview, Bill, could you please introduce yourself to the audience and a little bit about your expertise and experience around using LinkedIn or other social media to grow a manufacturing business?   B. Sterzenbach: Sure. I'm a partner at Upward Brand Interactions. We've been doing online marketing primarily for about 10 years. I've been at the online marketing business for about 15 years myself. I primarily focus at our place on business growth for global industrial brands. We tend to look at tool systems and processes that can grow the business without respect to channels so much. That's kind of how LinkedIn made its way into our world. We were just looking at the different channels that are available objectively that may help businesses grow their pipeline.   Bruce McDuffee: Great, thanks for background. Bill, I know a lot of manufacturers have put up pages on social media. Probably the most common are Facebook and LinkedIn. I don't hear of too many manufacturers or industrial companies who are on Instagram or Pinterest or Snapchat, for example. Before we can get in to the questions, are you seeing the same type of thing? Or what do you see as far as adoption of social media by industrial companies?   B. Sterzenbach: I do see a strong sentiment or a bias against social media by a lot of the especially industrial B2B folks out there. I see that as a great opportunity for the enlightened marketers ...   Bruce McDuffee: There you go.   B. Sterzenbach: ... because there is quite a bit of opportunity out there. A great example, we'll talk to clients or I'll even talk to guys I know in the space, and they'll say, "Well, okay. Maybe I can do something on LinkedIn, but I'm certainly not going to be on Instagram." I'll say, "I personally just bought a $2,000-tool because of a company I follow on Instagram.   Bruce McDuffee: No kidding.   B. Sterzenbach: It was a B2B tool. So Instagram is a powerful channel as well. I would be hard pressed to name a channel that I wouldn't recommend. People say, "Is this the answer?" I say, "Well, we just need to help you with the question. The answer's always, 'Yes.' You just need to know what's my question. Each channel has its fit in your mix."   Bruce McDuffee: Got it. Good. That's interesting. Frankly, I didn't expect that answer, so we're already off to a great start here.   B. Sterzenbach: Good.   Bruce McDuffee: Let's start broadly and go more into that topic and talk about social media in general and develop [begin 00:03:50] what we were just talking about. How should manufacturers view social media when it comes to business development? For example, is it table stakes this day and age, or is it a good way to grow awareness? Is it a waste of time? Where is it on the spectrum?   B. Sterzenbach: I think it's table stakes if you have a pretty well rounded platform for your marketing. I think the companies that are out there doing it well today are in all the spaces. So I would say if you're playing in a space where they're doing it well, it's table stakes. If you're in, I'll pick on somebody, powder coating, for example, you look at powder coaters, a lot of those guys are working for OEMs and they don't really need to do a lot of marketing, and so it really isn't table stakes for those guys. They're getting most of their business right from two or three large OEM clients, and they're just chugging right along. But if you're in a space where you need to find those new clients, it's a must have. It really is. I think a lot of the folks that are out there doing it but they're doing it so badly that it doesn't really even count as doing it at this point.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I see the same thing. That's interesting. You mentioned earlier that there's a big opportunity here, and I agree with you. It's like everything in manufacturing, not everything but a lot of things in manufacturing marketing, there's so much bad practice out there that there's an opportunity for those, what did you call them, Bill, enlightened.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: A huge opportunity. In this show, folks, we're going to talk about how you can capitalize on that opportunity. Let's zero in on LinkedIn because I know that's a specialty of yours, Bill. I guess we probably shouldn't assume that everybody knows what LinkedIn is, so maybe, Bill, give a good, quick description of what is LinkedIn.   B. Sterzenbach: It's broad. It's a social network for professionals. I used to say it's Facebook for grownups, but now everybody on Facebook is a grownup.   Bruce McDuffee: That's true.   B. Sterzenbach: It is a social network for professionals, but more importantly in terms of how we would look at LinkedIn as industrial marketers it's a place where professionals participate for growth. They might be growing their career, growing their business, or just trying to grow knowledge around the industry, but typically people that are out on LinkedIn participating are trying to grow in some way. If you keep that in mind and everything you do in LinkedIn, you're going to find a much higher success rate as opposed to just yelling at everybody on LinkedIn. If you know they're there to grow, you can tailor what you're putting out there to meet the needs of someone who's trying to grow in one of those three ... or some other way I haven't thought of but primarily in one of those three ways.   The crazy thing about the social media and the LinkedIn space is the greater majority, probably three quarters of B2B buyers are halfway done with their buying process before you hear from them. If they're out there making more than half of the decision before you talk to them, you have to ask what percentage of that decision is being made in the LinkedIn space? Without exception, when you stack LinkedIn up to all the other platforms, it's not even close. I think the latest statistic I looked at said 62% of marketers find it to be the most effective social channel for B2B marketing.   Bruce McDuffee: LinkedIn?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: Wow.   B. Sterzenbach: There's numbers that are even more telling than that, but LinkedIn is an extremely powerful network. Again, the people that are getting the most benefit from it are the people that understand their target. I tell people sometimes that if you were going to go deer hunting, it's so much more convenient to do it in a Walmart parking lot. You could get your little chair and you could put it in the parking lot. You could have your little cooler and just sit there and be comfortable all day, but that's not where the deer are.   It's a little like LinkedIn. If you're not in it, you have to go in the woods to get the deer, and these people are in LinkedIn. You have to go in to LinkedIn. You have to actively participate. Then one thing I recommend to people all the time is don't be in such a hurry to drag them out of the woods. If you can engage them in LinkedIn and stay in LinkedIn, you're going to find that the engagement's going to be longer and more meaningful as opposed to immediately trying to pull them to your website.   Bruce McDuffee: Interesting. That's a great metaphor: the LinkedIn forest.   B. Sterzenbach: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Bruce McDuffee: Love that. What about, Bill, LinkedIn versus Facebook? Let my share my impression and tell me if you think it's right or wrong. I feel like Facebook is where people go for ... share pictures of their grandkids or their kids. They do family things and talk about vacations and non-professional things. Whereas I see LinkedIn as where you educate yourself on professional aspects. You improve your career. You make professional connections. Is that a clear separation? How do you see it?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah?   B. Sterzenbach: I think you're right. I think when you're prioritizing or you're triaging your marketing efforts, you have to start with the most obvious things. If you're just getting started in a social space or you have a limited set of resources, I would definitely start with LinkedIn. But once you've played out the LinkedIn space, once you feel like, "I think we're doing everything we can do on LinkedIn," then I think it does make sense to have a look at Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter. I should have changed the order. Twitter would have been number two and then the rest of the guys. I'm not saying that I feel like your position is this way, but I don't think Facebook is without merit for the B2B.   There's a guy, I think he works at [Etón 00:09:20]. He has this ... I don't know if he came up with it or if he just shared it with me, but he calls it B2I. He says it's business to individual. You have to stop looking at ... No one wants to be talked to by a brand, and nobody wants to talk to a brand. His point is as a brand let's stop talking to demographics and let's stop talking to categories. Let's just understand that people are on all these networks, and it's a matter of using the network in way that's comfortable for the person. If you are going to market on Facebook, you just need to craft your message to fit within that ecosystem. But there is still a place, even on Facebook, for industrial B2B activity.   Bruce McDuffee: You've seen some industrial folks have success on Facebook then?   B. Sterzenbach: I certainly have, yeah. They've been ... I guess the word would be sophisticated in their use. Again, it's an enormous channel. You just have to understand what the audience is there for and what they're after, and there's use there, for sure.   Bruce McDuffee: I guess that's the key. If someone says, "Which channel should I be on?" You should ask, like you said, the people who are in your target audience where are they, and what are they doing on the channels? Is that fair?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, that's right. I would start with if a person said to me, "Which channel should I participate in?" I would say all of them starting with LinkedIn, then Twitter, then Instagram, then everything else. You're not probably going to attack them all simultaneously at least not with the same fervor that you would one. A case could be made for going after them all cohesively, but I think it's a little like to go to someone who's just getting into social and say, "Yes, you need to be on LinkedIn, but you also need to be in these other spaces, and let me start telling you about all the work it's going to talk to get there."   It's a little like advertising a Caribbean vacation by showing the guy sitting next to you coughing in the airplane the whole way there. Nobody is going to get excited about the trip. They're going to get excited about the destination. It's nice if they can get in one of the platforms. LinkedIn, obviously, being probably the most immediately effective and they get to sample the destination a little bit without going in to all of that background work that it would take to approach all of the channels simultaneously. While that might be academically a better approach, I just don't think you're going to influence people to do it by having them go through all of those fundamental steps just to prepare for approaching all channels.   Bruce McDuffee: That makes sense. That's good advice. Let's get back to LinkedIn. I strayed a little bit on that. I got excited about you sharing that information. On LinkedIn, could you share a real-life example of a manufacturer or industrial company who's having great success on LinkedIn and how they're getting that?   B. Sterzenbach: I would go straight to Parker Hannifin. They're a pretty large company. They're probably a, I don't know, $9 billion manufacturer. You don't get as industrial as Parker. They are in there. They are doing the stuff in the industrial space in a big way. They've a great brand, and they've got phenomenal products. Their presence on LinkedIn is staggering in a word. I mean they really have done a phenomenal job. They've got ... I haven't looked recently, but a shocking number of followers for their company page, and they get a very high level of engagement from their followers. They're really, really thoughtful in how they use LinkedIn.   We don't do Parker's LinkedIn stuff so this isn't a plug, but when they put something on LinkedIn, you can see the thoughtfulness and the care that they put in to the post. I believe that the readers see that, too. People respect your organization if you show some respect for them and what you put in their feed. They'll tend to stay with you a lot longer if you're putting quality things. Maybe not every single post that you put out there is directly applicable to their need, but if every single post looks like you put some effort into it and you respected their time, they won't unfollow you, so to speak. So I think Parker does a really nice job of working LinkedIn. I'm trying to think if there was another manufacturer that I saw out there. I think Caterpillar actually does a really nice job. I don't know how ...   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I've seen that.   B. Sterzenbach: I don't know how orchestrated it is. I don't really follow them too closely but I see them in my feed. Just anecdotally, I've always had a pretty positive impression of what they were doing out there. I don't know what kind of results they're getting, but I feel that there's a couple of companies that are really capitalizing on LinkedIn well.   Bruce McDuffee: Is it fair to say that Parker Hannifin ... are they not pitching their products so much in their feeds and they're more sharing helpful information? Is that one way they're being more thoughtful and engaging?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. It's a little bit of a mix. Every now and then you'll see something pop in there that is pretty directly tied to a valve or an assembly or a product, but it's always, not always, but most often when I see it, it's couched in some sort of usefulness or at least plausibly objective usefulness to the reader.   Bruce McDuffee: Fair enough.   B. Sterzenbach: I think that's the key is not being overly pitchy.   Bruce McDuffee: I've heard folks talk about a formula where you share four to one or three to one where four posts for helpful information and then one pitch for your product. I do that with some of my clients. It's pretty effective.   B. Sterzenbach: Then we'll talk a little bit about paid advertising. There's a whole nother channel within LinkedIn there that's even more directly and quantifiably effective. But I know I'm jumping ahead of you a little bit as far as ...   Bruce McDuffee: That's okay. That's okay. It sounds like LinkedIn could be a pretty powerful business development tool. Let's imagine there's a manufacturing marketer out there listening, which I hope there are a lot of them, and they have a LinkedIn company page. They put up the information; they're not doing much with it. Maybe they haven't even posted much at all. What are three things that that person, that manufacturing marketer with a LinkedIn company page could do right away to start leveraging it for business development?   B. Sterzenbach: I would say if you're directly approaching how do we build our company presence on LinkedIn, the first thing would be to start building a list of followers so think about what activity should you be engaging in to just get more followers. Because if you have followers, people are going to see your posts and engagement's going to increase so creating some sort of an objective around building followers.   Now the second thing would be post at least weekly to get started. If you're not posting regularly, habits can't be formed. That's where number three comes in, which is promoting your LinkedIn presence internally. I tell a lot of our clients support starts at home. What often happens is you'll have these marketing groups start a LinkedIn presence and the members of the marketing team aren't even supporting the posts they're putting out there.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I've seen [crosstalk 00:16:12].   B. Sterzenbach: It's not out of some desire to be malicious. It's just everybody's so busy and you can't mandate it. If you tell your team, "You're required; your review will include how many times you've liked our posts," that's not going to work. But you can influence the behavior, and there's things you can do to incentivize your team to participate in your company's presence on LinkedIn without making it feel like some sort of fundatory activity, because nobody wants to participate on a social media platform from a mandatory perspective.   Bruce McDuffee: Fundatory. That's a good word.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right. That's right. It's fundatory.   Bruce McDuffee: So you just got a company page. The three things are, number one, make an objective to get more followers.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: Number two, at least a weekly post on a regular schedule.   B. Sterzenbach: Correct.   Bruce McDuffee: Number three, use your internal people, your employees, and encourage them to share without making it mandatory.   B. Sterzenbach: Exactly. That's why number two comes in to play because if you're not posting regularly, you'll never get your internal teams into a habit of supporting it. If you're only posting once every quarter or once every blue moon, they're not going to get in the habit of jumping out and looking for your posts so they can support them. So the consistency allows them to develop habits as well.   Bruce McDuffee: Makes sense. Can I ask on number one, in addition to posting on a regular basis, are there any other tricks you could share about getting more followers?   B. Sterzenbach: A big one is having folks in your organization that have an existing network to participate. For example, if you have a couple of people on your sales team and they have a pretty good LinkedIn network, going out to them and evangelizing your LinkedIn activities a little bit and asking them, "Could I ask you as a favor to help support our LinkedIn presence? It's going to bring you new leads. It's going to grow our business." So you're generating that activity.   There's a couple of just tactical things you can do. One of them is there's a button that you can download from LinkedIn. It's just a little piece of java script code. You can place that on your webpages of your website, and it just can live anywhere on the page. If the viewer of your website if they're logged into LinkedIn, the button'll say, "Follow." They can click it, and it'll just automatically follow the company without too much fuss. There's a couple of other things like that you can do to promote follows, but the idea is that first you have to start engaging in some activities that could even create an interest.   Bruce McDuffee: Sure. Okay, great. Thanks for that. Finally, I know LinkedIn offers paid advertising. You alluded to it a little bit earlier when you were trying to jump ahead. Let's talk about how does that work. I know a lot of the social channels now you have to pay to play when you're a business to show up. How does the LinkedIn paid advertising work? Maybe a couple of examples would be great.   B. Sterzenbach: I'm a big advocate of the sponsored content campaigns. There's a couple of ways you can use LinkedIn. You can do essentially display advertising, which are the ads that live across the top and down the right side. You can use their InMail platform, which is essentially sending mail. LinkedIn sends mail on your behalf to a list that you've created. Or you can do sponsored content, which essentially places a post in your followers' feeds, and it looks very organic. Now, when you sponsor a post, they're not your followers. They're anyone that you've targeted with the post.   There's some pretty funny stories about how specifically you can target ... The story I like most is a guy who was trying to get a startup going and he was looking for investors. He had a specific investor that he wanted to attract. He went in to LinkedIn and he created a sponsored content campaign. I don't remember the guy's name. Let's say it was Ted Phillips. He created an ad that said, "Ted Phillips, this is next your company. You should invest in it and here's why" or something like that. In the targeting he said, "I want to target my ad to this company, this role, and some other criteria." LinkedIn requires that your list be of a certain size, so it first said, "Your list isn't big enough." So he said, "Okay, also this role." It was CEO and vice president. He had to add vice president. It added two more people to his list. Pretty soon, he was putting this ad right in that person's feed regularly. He actually did secure funding. Ultimately, he said he spent $1.80 on the advertising.   Bruce McDuffee: That's awesome.   B. Sterzenbach: That's how he secured his funding. That's how finitely you can target your advertising. We'll run ads for clients that we say, "Engineers that have eight years of experience that work for companies that have 500 or more employees or 10,000 or more employees that are in these states." I mean you can get really specific. That really is, in my opinion, probably the most powerful aspect of LinkedIn is how tightly you can control that filtering. You're not getting the waste that you get on so many other platforms. You really are putting that ad right in front of the people you want to see it. You're always going to have some people who either accidentally categorized themselves incorrectly or intentionally categorize themselves incorrectly, but by and large the majority of the people who see your LinkedIn ad are exactly the people you want to see it.   We see that evidence playing out time and time again in these campaigns where we'll run a LinkedIn advertisement either for ourselves or on behalf of a client, and the people that arrive at whatever ultimate objective that we set for the program are exactly the kind of people we targeted with the ads. It is remarkably accurate in the targeting. It's one of the things, I think, LinkedIn has done really well.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I agree. I've done some sponsored ads myself, and it's amazing how specific you can get.   B. Sterzenbach: That's true, yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: It's incredible. You're right. That's the real power of LinkedIn paid ads is that selection because I don't think any other platforms get that granular.   B. Sterzenbach: No, they certainly do not. Again, if you're targeting these ads in a way that speaks to someone who's there for growth reasons, you not only target the people that you want to target but you get an actual response. So many platforms, their click-through rate ... and in a lot areas, a 1%-click-through rate is phenomenal.   Bruce McDuffee: That's great, yeah.   B. Sterzenbach: So you're getting a great response rate and the type of people that you want to respond are responding. Another thing that's interesting about LinkedIn, if you're in a business where you would like to attract clients that are growth-oriented or that like to try new things or would like to learn or even if you target a demographic of prospect by the sheer fact that they're active on LinkedIn ...   Bruce McDuffee: Can you?   B. Sterzenbach: Oh, yeah. If they're active on LinkedIn, they are probably interested in growth in some way.   Bruce McDuffee: That's a good point, yeah.   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. For example, I know a guy who advertises on LinkedIn. He doesn't work through us. He just does it on his own. One of the reasons he uses LinkedIn is that he wants people who are working to better themselves in some way, and so it's a perfect platform for him because most of the people on LinkedIn are there just to do that.   Bruce McDuffee: That's a great point. I never even thought about that. But it does; it's almost a self-selection segmentation.   B. Sterzenbach: It is, yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: That's great. Is one ad better than another? You mentioned sponsored content, InMails, the ads. Is one better than the other have you found in your experience?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, sponsored content is head and shoulders above everything else. Now, I haven't done much with the InMail yet. I just haven't really found a good case for it. Not that there isn't one. To be honest with you, we spend so much time on the sponsored content campaigns, we really haven't had a reason to venture into the InMail yet. And people are a little uncomfortable with what they perceive as interrupting their prospects or their clients. So I suspect that InMail might be pretty effective. Personally, I haven't used much of it. We've used it a little but not a lot.   The other thing on the sponsored content, you can choose whether you want to pay by click or by impression so CPM or CPC. Paying per click, at least in our experience, is much more effective. It just looks like you get more at bats when you pay per click because I think economically LinkedIn looks at it like, "Well, if I'm going to get paid every time somebody clicks this thing, I'm going to show up more." It just seems like your ad gets shown a lot more when you go on the pay per click advertising basis.   Bruce McDuffee: I've seen the same thing.   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, that's funny.   Bruce McDuffee: I've heard also that LinkedIn cost per click is a lot higher on LinkedIn than it is, for example, on AdWords. Is that true?   B. Sterzenbach: It might depend on the company, but our experience has been that that is true. As a matter of fact, we ran a campaign for our company, a test campaign. I basically took on one of my AdWords guys. There's a guy in ...   Bruce McDuffee: Oh, yeah?   B. Sterzenbach: His name's Jerrod, and he's ridiculously competitive. I said, "I'm going to run this LinkedIn program against the AdWords program you're running. I think I'm going to whip you." He was like, "Let's do it. Let's see what happens." He cleaned my clock.   Bruce McDuffee: He did?   B. Sterzenbach: Oh, yeah. The cost per click AdWords, it wasn't significantly lower but it was lower. The difference being, though, that a lot of the clicks on LinkedIn, I still maintain, were probably more directly targeted to the people I would want to see, but I think you can get more looks for the same money on AdWords. I tell everybody it isn't one or the other. It is not an either/or. If I were advising a manufacturer, I would say, "Don't even go near LinkedIn if you don't have a working AdWords program." Start with AdWords because that's just a good foundational advertising activity. Then go to LinkedIn but I wouldn't try to replace AdWords or Bing or [Thomas 00:26:00] with LinkedIn. I would at it as one more channel that I'm using to promote my business.   Bruce McDuffee: Got it. That makes sense. It sounds like from our discussion here, Bill, that every manufacturer out there should be using social media and at least using LinkedIn. Is that fair?   B. Sterzenbach: I would agree with that statement, absolutely.   Bruce McDuffee: That's what I'm getting here. I agree. This is the world we live in. This is the age we live in nowadays. Email's still powerful. You got to still do your email marketing, but you got to be out where your audience is. They're doing that investigation. They're checking out options. You have to be there so they can find you in that 50% of their first part of the buying phase.   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, I would agree. I would encourage, especially your manufacturing, your industrial marketers, just get out there and do it badly. We work with enormous global brands. It would be easy for us to say, "Don't do it if you can't do it well." But quite honestly, so many things would never get started if that were the requirement.   Bruce McDuffee: Absolutely.   B. Sterzenbach: A buddy of mine I worked with for years used to say ... His parent company was in another country; I won't say where because I'm sure it's not true, but this is how he felt. He said, "They will start nothing perfectly." He said they're masters at planning and planning and planning until it's not even important to do anymore. I think people get caught up in that sometimes. I'd said go out there and do LinkedIn badly for a couple of years. If your option is to do it perfectly or not do it at all, I would say take option three, which is just get out there and start doing it badly. It's better than not doing it at all.   Bruce McDuffee: Absolutely. One of my favorite quotes was by Voltaire, I think in the 17th century, and it's, "Perfect is the enemy of good."   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: That's one of my favorites.   B. Sterzenbach: I would agree with that.   Bruce McDuffee: Great. That takes us to the second part of the show here, Bill, and that's the challenge question. Folks, send in your challenge questions. Email them to me: bruce@mmmatters.com or hashtag them on Twitter @mfgmarketing. Any question you have about business development, marketing, even sales, send it in. I'll pose it to one of our guest experts. This week our challenge question comes in from New York. He's a manufacturer of industrial gases. By the way folks, these are usually anonymous. I just give a little bit of background. Here's the question, Bill. "I'm the VP of sales and marketing at a company that manufactures and delivers industrial gases. I listened to your podcast a couple of weeks ago about sharing content to differentiate. Would that work with a commodity like nitrogen or oxygen used in an industrial environment? If yes, could you give me a couple of examples on your next podcast?" Bill, what do you think?   B. Sterzenbach: Absolutely. Every commodity still has differentiators. As the builder of your brand, you get to pick what those are. The one thing I would say that we see time and time again, especially in commodity-type spaces, is a big differentiator is going to be service, or more accurately what we call helpfulness. We recently interviewed a group of, I don't know, I think 11 enormous B2B industrial buyers so procurement and purchasing folks from companies that buy things like valve seals and the components that make up products. One of our questions was, "What's one of the top criteria you have for working with a discretionary partner?" so someone who isn't on some list of 'go here first.' By and large, they said, "Helpfulness."   Bruce McDuffee: Really?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. What we heard time and time again was the vendors that are able to help us solve problems and are helpful in walking through our decision process are the vendors that we'll typically select. I was surprised. It isn't surprising when you really think about, but I was surprised to learn the larger, more premier organizations tended to value helpfulness and service, and the smaller, what you might call your core customers, tended to value speed and price. There's no crime in valuing speed and price. It's just when there's a lack of anything else, speed and price are important in a commodity, but if you can illustrate helpfulness or customer service, you are going to differentiate yourself from most of the people in the commodity space.   One of the things that we do with our program is we listen to all calls, and so we listen to literally thousands and thousands of calls every month. One of the things that we find is the evidence that we had ... Actually this is what led us to do this study. We found that better customers typically value services. So you end up with the self-fulfilling prophecy situation where you have organizations that maybe they don't value helpfulness or service and they don't include it in their brand, they don't talk about service, so when customers call, the customer doesn't typically experience great service. So the customers that are wonderful move on, and the customers that are core stay. They end up getting more and more core customers, hiring more and more people who really don't value service because they customers really value price and availability first.   Bruce McDuffee: Self-fulfilling.   B. Sterzenbach: It's just a terrible cycle. It's not a terrible cycle. Some companies really do want to serve those are only after price and availability. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to move up that quality of customer ladder a little bit, the go-to is going to be service. It's not easy either. The first thing that has to happen is your team has to understand that helpfulness and friendliness is part of who you are as a company. If they aren't taught that regularly, they're not going to demonstrate that day-to-day.   To circle back to your question, it feels like we've taken a big loop here, but my point is you can use social media to illustrate that a core component of your brand is helpfulness and service. It's not so much talking about how helpful and what great service we provide, but talking about the things that support that element of your brand. If you say, "98% of our industrial customers have been with us for three years or longer," that says that there's something that's keeping those customers. That's the kind of you can share. Now, that might be a little salesy, but that's the kind of thing you can share on social media where people can scan through, see that, log it away, and move on. You're communicating something other than the typical commodity elements about your brand.   Bruce McDuffee: Great, great answer. I'm going to add in my two cents here, folks, is on that helpfulness aspect. The way you differentiate with content is to develop content that addresses a problem or a pain point that's common to the people in your target audience.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: We've been talking about that today. You've got one company out there that says, "We've got this feature, this feature, this feature. We're low price, and we're fast." Then you come out and say, "Well, let's understand our audience. Let's understand a problem or a pain where we have expertise. We can help you. We're going to help you solve that problem." The problem, of course, is related to the thing you're trying to sell, naturally.   Solve that problem and you get three things from your audience. You get credibility because they're going to say, "These people know what they're talking about." You get top-of-mind awareness because they're going to remember you. Just like Bill mentioned in the LinkedIn feed, you start to see a regular trickle of helpful content. They're going to remember you. You're going to be top of mind when the day comes and they're ready to buy nitrogen or oxygen, you're going to get the call. The third thing they get that you get is reciprocity. When you give a gift of knowledge, helpful content, useful content, the person who received it wants to reciprocate. The way they do that is by buying from you even if it's at a higher price. That's what I would look at. Anything to add there, Bill, before we move on?   B. Sterzenbach: No, I would agree with every bit of that. It's one of those things you almost have to experience to truly believe.   Bruce McDuffee: You do. Once you experience it, boy, is it powerful.   B. Sterzenbach: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Bruce McDuffee: The final part of the show, Bill, is takeaways. I always ask our guest expert to share one or two takeaways. It could be a summary of a couple of things we talked about, or it could be a couple of actionable nuggets to go forward. What do you have for our audience today, Bill?   B. Sterzenbach: I would say the first thing would be to set a goal today. It's going to take five minutes. Sit down and say, "By July, I want to have posted this many posts and gained that many followers." Even if you say, "By July, I'd like to have 10 posts and five followers," set some goal. Then get buy-in from your internal team. You can't force them to do it but you can influence them. Bribe them, beg them, do whatever you have to do to get them to participate in your efforts, but start by just setting a simple goal and move forward with it. I share this people and often they'll say, "But it's just something I write on paper." I say, "Yeah, but it's like a diet." A diet is just an empty wish until we don't eat the first thing. It goes the same way here. Until you do the first thing, which is write your first post, even if it's terrible, you're really not doing it. It isn't that hard if you set out to just do something. Even if it's wrong, just get started.   Bruce McDuffee: And give yourself permission to be bad at it, right?   B. Sterzenbach: That's right. Because you're not going to be as bad as the worst no matter how hard you try.   Bruce McDuffee: That's right. That's true. Great, two great takeaways. Thanks Bill. Before we sign off would you like to share anything about yourself or your company with our audience?   B. Sterzenbach: Sure. To your point of reciprocity, we are big on giving. If there's anyone out there and they have a sales force of 20 people or more, that's where it gets worth it for us to do these complementary lunch and learns, Upwards does offer ... it's a free lunch and learn if you can get 20 teammates to come to either the webinar or in person, and we'll take you through specific things you can do tailored to your organization to grow your pipeline through LinkedIn. You can bring your sales guys into the call. You can bring them into the meeting, and we'll give them actual activities they can start engaging in right away to build their personal pipelines. We've found that either in a webinar or in-person formats, the sales guys walk away feeling like it was a really, really effective use of their time. You can just go to our website at goupward.com and you'll see there's a 'Contact Us' link and just say, "Hey, I'd be interested in having you guys talk to us about LinkedIn."   Bruce McDuffee: Great. That's a great offer. Thanks Bill. I'll put that in the show notes as well, folks, so you can ... I'll put a direct link and you can go sign up if you feel the want. Bill, thank you so much for being a guest today on Manufacturing Marketing Matters. I know I learned a lot today. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience and just thank you.   B. Sterzenbach: Thank you, Bruce. It was great being here.   Bruce McDuffee: That was Bill Sterzenbach, partner at Upward. For more information about Bill and Upward, visit the guest bio page and check out the show notes at mmmatters.com. By the way, if you are subscriber on iTunes for this podcast, consider leaving us a review. It helps us get found and helps us spread the word to help manufacturers advance their practice of marketing.   Thanks for listening to Manufacturing Marketing Matters. If you find this podcast helpful and useful, please subscribe at iTunes or Stitcher.com. You can download this episode of MMMatters and get the show notes and learn more about the podcast at mmmatters.com. I'm Bruce McDuffee. Now let's go out and advance the practice of marketing in manufacturing today.  

Here’s episode 98 of the PetaPixel Photography Podcast. You can also download the MP3 directly and subscribe via iTunes or RSS! Leave a comment in this post, or use our voicemail widget for feedback/questions for the show. In This Episode If you subscribe to the PetaPixel Photography Podcast in iTunes, please take a moment to rate and review us and help us move up in the rankings so others interested in photography may find us. Sponsor:  FreshBooks. Get your FREE 30 day trial at FreshBooks.com/PetaPixel and enter PetaPixel in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section. SI photographer and NebraskaProject.com's Bill Frakes opens the show.  Thanks Bill! After more than 70 years, storied Brooks Institute comes to and end. (#) Additional rumors about the Canon 5D Mark IV. (#) Eye-Fi kinda sorta changes its mind on its older cards. (#) An inventor in Japan creates a gyro stabilizer inside a microSD to SD card adapter. (#) A photographer in Poland rescues a young eagle stuck in coastal mud for a second time and it's all caught on amazing drone video. (#) Connect With Us Thank you for listening to the PetaPixel Photography Podcast! Connect with me, Sharky James on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook (all @LensShark) as we build this community. We’d love to answer your question on the show. Leave us an audio question through our voicemail widget, comment below or via social media. But audio questions are awesome! You can also cut a show opener for us to play on the show! As an example: “Hi, this is Matt Smith with Double Heart Photography in Chicago, Illinois, and you’re listening to the PetaPixel Photography Podcast with Sharky James!”

1- I value New York Values 2- Face tattoos. So that's it. Thanks Bill. 3- Yep, I told you, NASCAR 4- Bernie vs Hillary 5- Damn Bill, even you? 6- I have met the enemy and he is us. Not the government 7- No American Airlines. It's not me. It's you

...on facebook this morning an old friend, who now drives truck across the country shared a story about his waitress at a truck stop this morning. He inspired this On Top of the World...Hope you enjoy. Thanks Bill! Chris www.OnTopoftheWorldRadio.com

BrushnSoapnBlade Wetshaving Podcast – Where we look forward to shaving every day!BrushnSoapnBlade@gmail.com – Wet Shaving Questions and Feedback always welcome.@BrushnBlade Everything Wet Shaving on Twitter (and other stuff for fun!)(864) 372-6234 on GoogleVoice – The Wet Shaving Hotline, call me anytime   Answering an email about Straight Razor restoration My experience with a PAA Double Open Comb Razor Listening to Old Episodes of the BrushnSoapnBlade Podcast PAA Lavender & Ceder Soap A Straight Razor Tribute to Bill T. - Thanks Bill! Spartacus Slitter Blades (or Spartacus DE Blades?) Straight Razor Weekend Roasting Coffe with a bunch of Hot Air A quick SOTD A shout out to Maggards Razors - Impeccable Customer Service! Building a center console for the truck

I think we've all gone through the sorrow of losing a loved one too soon. Even worse is the pain of the passing of a furry friend. Please take this time to think of your own late companions and pet your living friends extra hard. Thanks Bill!

Thanks Bill for the Cool Interview. Go check out Mr. Bill Hale, this guy is a phogotographer who back in the glory days of true rock/metal shot the world's best, we're talking Alice Cooper, Kiss, Metallica, Motley Crue, Slayer, W.A.S.P...the list is endless, his work was published around the world in all the leading rock publications (Rolling Stone, Kerrang! etc..), his work needs to be seen and soon it will in the form of a new book entitled POWER SURGE, so do yourself a favour and go visit/add Bill over at his MySpace page and show some support for POWER SURGE...Make sure you check his work out whilst there, IT ROCKS!!!!!! http://www.myspace.com/photo_books_by_bill_hale

• Nancy van Euw – a Peacecorps Returned volunteers talks about meeting her husband Ed Van Euw who is a cUSO RV 1986-1987 Volunteers from many organizations often are working together . They meet and start their journeys and in this case it was a journey of a lifetime. They are married with 3 children. Wonderful story! • Bill Raikes was in Sierra Leone 1975-1977 . Teaching O levels Geography and like many volunteers really begin to become a part of a community and learn about issues facing the community. Bill tells the story of rice and stones and how a small project he helped with is still there and can be seen on Google. Thanks Bill for taking the initiative and finding even more to do on your assignment. • Juanita Tupper Uganda 1967-1969 Uganda has just become independent and Juanita is teaching. She tells the story of Idi Amin and her encounter with him. Thanks Juanita for your service and for serving on the CUSO Board for many years. • Tony Akester- VSO not only once but twice! Tells of Presidents and encounters. • Arzena Turner ( both her and Neil Turner - husband) served in Thailand 1993-1995 She tells a great story about beginning your work in a new country, the languages to learn! Great story of starting out and the funny things that can happen. Thanks for the story and for your service!

•Nancy van Euw - a Peacecorps Returned volunteers talks about meeting her husband Ed Van Euw who is a cUSO RV 1986-1987 Volunteers from many organizations often are working together . They meet and start their journeys and in this case it was a journey of a lifetime. They are married with 3 children. Wonderful story! •Bill Raikes was in Sierra Leone 1975-1977 . Teaching O levels Geography and like many volunteers really begin to become a part of a community and learn about issues facing the community. Bill tells the story of rice and stones and how a small project he helped with is still there and can be seen on Google. Thanks Bill for taking the initiative and finding even more to do on your assignment. •Juanita Tupper Uganda 1967-1969 Uganda has just become independent and Juanita is teaching. She tells the story of Idi Amin and her encounter with him. Thanks Juanita for your service and for serving on the CUSO Board for many years. •Tony Akester- VSO not only once but twice! Tells of Presidents and encounters. •Arzena Turner ( both her and Neil Turner - husband) served in Thailand 1993-1995 She tells a great story about beginning your work in a new country, the languages to learn! Great story of starting out and the funny things that can happen. Thanks for the story and for your service! CUSO-VSOVolunteer for a better world! Share Skills volunteers in 43 Countries-Bangladesh,Bolivia,Burkina Faso,Cambodia,Cameroon,China,El Salvador,Eritrea,Ethiopia,Gambia,Guatemala ,Ghana,Guyana,Honduras,India,Jamaica,Indonesia,Kenya,Laos,Malawi,Maldives,Mongolia,Mozambique,Namibia,Nepal ,Nigeria,Pakistan,Papua New Guinea,Peru,Philippines,Rwanda,Sierra, Leone,South Africa,Sri Lanka,Tajikistan,Tanzania,Thailand,Togo, ,Uganda,Vanuatu,Vietnam,Zambia and Zimbabwe.Support our workwww.cuso-vso.org

Towards the end of last year I had so many things to do I switched from a weekly to a bi-weekly show. I thought I could switch back, but I still don't have enough time, so for the foreseeable future I'll work hard to get one out every two weeks. This week is kind of short, but a lot has been happening. Following a screening of my film a couple weeks ago I got an invite to a local radio to talk about the film and pottery. I was joined by Linda Gerr of Birch Mountain Pottery, who is one of the subjects in my documentary. By the way, send me an email and ask me for a link to the full film and I'll be glad to send it to you.There's a link in the show a one or two episodes back if you thinking looking for it is easier.' The radio call letters are WILI, you can find the link to the audio online here (posted April 23) or you can link directly to the audio file. Watch out, it's a Windows Media file. Bill Meems left a comment on show #86, which was about the National Association of Broadcaster's show in Las Vega that I attended and commented on this time last year. Thanks Bill. I mentioned the Digital Production Buzz show as a source of news about industry announcements during the event. I've gone for the past two years and enjoyed it a great deal, but I'm glad for the chance to take a year off.

In this special episode, straight from the 2008 New York Anime Festival, I interview prolific voice actors Tony Oliver, Kyle Hebert, and Steve Blum. All three of them worked on Gurren Lagann (ADR Director, Kamina, and Leeron respectively), but they've also played characters from Robotech, Eureka Seven, Dragonball Z, Cowboy Bebop, The Big O, and even Toonami! On a more technical note, I'd like to extend a special expression of thanks to Kyle and Steve, since when the room we were in didn't have power (hence making my laptop useless), they used their iPhones to record the interview. The recording used in the podcast is from Kyle's phone, so you have him to thank for saving this interview. Okay, funny story: This post's picture (left to right: Tony, me, Kyle, Steve) was actually taken by voice actor Bill Rogers, who I only recognized AFTER I had asked him for the picture. Thanks Bill! Stop by podcast.anigamers.com for show notes, supplementary links, and other good stuff.

0.00 - Opening. Racking my Brain by Eric Eggleston .30 - Intro: .30 1.20 - The GoToMeeting TechPodCast Roundup (see below for more details) 2.45 - William Sanders Part II. Discussion about DotNetConversions, a project that takes overdue DotNet projects and rewrites them in FoxPro. Thanks Bill for the interview. His main site is Ef Group (Audio may sound a bit off on this) 18.05 - OLEPublic Hacking FoxPro Tip 19.50 - Various News Escape From Yesterworld - Microsoft's Marketing SQL Server and Visual Studio 2005 FoxPro Case Studies Craig Boyd - Sweet Potato Software and Craig Bailey on a VFP Solution Explorer Rick notes that Sedna is not 10 Managing Product Development Advertiser note: Be sure to sign up for a live interactive Techpodcasts.com Roundtable on August 13th. Our team will highlight tips, tricks and best practices of podcasting, using GoToMeeting, a web conferencing application that enables you to instantly hold web conferences, meetings, presentations, training sessions and collaborations. As a special offer, you can try GoToMeeting free. Just visit www.gotomeeting.com, click the Try it Free Button and enter the promo code Techpodcasts to receive your special 30 day free trial! Comments to akselsoft@gmail.com! Thanks all