My CDE Experience

Working on a single project with a single focus can be intense sometimes. The sole goal is for me right now is to create and deliver (4) amazing webinars on the subject of QR codes, how they might be making a comeback and bridge the gap between online and offline in 2019 and beyond. With that goal, I've studied and researched for hours and hours on the topic of QR codes. I know a lot about QR codes, maybe too much. This webinar preparation reminds me of my early days as a budding musician. I'd be excited to learn a new song and I would play a recording of that song on a loop to listen to over and over. Each time I listened to that song and studied it, it became a little less exciting and a little less fun. Around the time you have that new tune rehearsed well enough to perform in front of an audience, a paying audience, you kind of hate it. All that time and effort, practice and study, but if I had to listen to that song one more time... Here's the trick though, I'd p...

It took most of my day, but I finally made it to Spark Central to work on my ShopWindow Webinar. Aside from participating in two internships this summer, I also run two additional side businesses. Gotta have a Side-Hustle and mine is fixing/ repairing fitness equipment at a couple of local Cross-Fit Gyms. Trouble starts when all of those schedules collide, causing priority shifts and unintended overlapping of time. I'm still working on these Webinars for ShopWindow and the Re-Birth of QR Codes. Having broken them down from one, massive presentation into 4 targeted and smaller webinars was tricky. What I had created originally was like a musical album to me. I made a bunch of 'songs' that I wanted to be played in that order. Like listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, in order is so much more engaging and encompassing. To break up the 'songs', they're still good, but not as impactful(IMHO). To split up the Webinar into parts, I had to group all ...

As I re-designed the the ChatBot into the proper form (see previous blog post about chatbots), I'm pretty happy to have the Landing Page workflow as a template. Once I'd finished recreating everything, I went to save and it wouldn't save. An error message popped up saying that I couldn't save. Couldn't SAVE?!?! What could I do? I opened a new flow-builder and made the Bot-Bot once again. I must say, i'm getting better at making work-flows for bots! Having re-re-created my Bot-Bot and successfully saved it, I was checking other settings on the Playbooks Page and discovered the tiniest, little "settings" button. The third choice form the top of the dropdown menu said, "clone as a bot"!!! So basically, where I spent half a day, I could have made 3 clicks and gotten the exact same result, way quicker. The lesson here is, Drift has some UI, navigation and labeling issues. That's the thing when utilizing new technology, it's new and I'...

Like King Henry said, "Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more..." The King was trying to rally his troops and again attempt to break through the tiniest weakness in a wall or if they fail, clog that hole with their dead bodies. Why do I bring this up? Just when I thought I was hitting my groove, getting all my tasks managed, it turns out that I was on the wrong track. If you've read my blog before now, you know I've been working with TechStak to develop Chatbots to help conversion of website visitors and I made one. I made the wrong style Bot! All my logic flows and choose your own adventure design was made to be a landing page. A landing page is a specially crafted webpage with the sole purpose of capturing a visitors e-mail, name, contact info, ect. I was suppose to be designing a "Pop-Up" Chatbot, something that lives in the corner of a webpage and pops-up when you need help. Basically, I have to create a brand new Chatbot, in the pop-up styl...

I finally met my partner Jessica Finley. We had a group strategy meeting at Spark Central today. The new TechStak website went live ( click to see the new site ). Nichol took us on a tour of the new design and showed us some new features. Unintentionally, we had an opportunity to troubleshoot the re-design, find small formatting errors and mislabeled sections, noting major, but important. They were able to trim 60 pages of unnecessary site data; dead links, repeated information, ect. Having the team all gathered in one place, I was able to demonstrate my prototype Chatbot to them. Once again, I received great feedback, a little constructive criticism and made some changes right there at the conference table. It was valuable for me to get instant feedback on my 1st Chatbot creation. With one Bot pretty much in the books, I've been  re-focus to Conversational Landing Pages. What are those?!? Drift has the ability to start a Bot conversation in a landing page, video or whitepaper....

After writing and re-writing my Chatbot adventure, today I had to demo the prototype I created to the rest of the TechStak team. You can track to workflow below or play with the actual bot right here:  Provider Chatbot  Refresh your window to reset the Bot and your adventure! I received great feedback on this bot, everybody liked it! It can be scary sometimes to be an intern and not have much experience in these fields and then be asked to create something of business quality and present it to business grade people. I'm new at using this technology. I'm teaching myself how to use it and I'm doing okay. I'm kind of excited to create more of these chatbots and explore more of this powerful Drift technology. I learned a lot about User Experience in school, but to create a user experience utilizing chatbots is challenging and amazing; chalazing!?!

I had the opportunity to take on another company in my internship this summer. Yesterday I officially met Nicol at TechStak and it was great! Nicol describes TechStak as the Angie's List of tech providers. They certify tech providers to ensure a certain standard of quality and competence and on a job seeker side, they verify the qualifications and skills of the applicants. My task this summer, will be to become a specialist in  Drift  Conversational Marketing (play with the chat in the lower right corner, you think it's a person, but it's NOT, well... most likely not). We are using the Chat-Bot functionality to aid in on-boarding new clients, from both sides and ease the burden of human staff by automating and filtering with Drift. Drift's design software makes it pretty intuitive and there are plenty of easy to understand videos to get you started. Now that I've got my Drift pitch out of the way, it's on to mapping out and creating some workflows. Imagine w...

Crushed it again on QR research, man do I know a lot about QR codes now! My day at Spark- East was split down the middle today. As you may have guessed, I worked on my slideshow for my webinar. I I researched proven and concrete examples to share with my potential viewers, focusing on actionable strategies they can implement themselves. Included is a sample of these new, revamped QR codes. The second half of my day was spent on an exciting new project. Gavin came up with the idea of creating a small booklet on the ease and benefits of using QR codes for local businesses. We brainstormed the basic strategy and then located a Booklet Template online and started creating a really rough draft. Soon after we set out to find pricing from area printers. Within a short time we had fleshed out the booklet idea into a full-fledged project, which we can totally incorporate into my webinar series. Teamwork makes the dream work!

With the webinar series being my major focus, I spent most of today's time diving deep into 'Use Cases' for implementing QR codes in 2019. There is a distinct pattern to QR adoption by marketeers from 2011 to the present day. Initially, QR was hailed as the next big thing, a revolutionary new way to interact with the people at large. Many advertisers added QR to promotions, advertisements and events to utilize this new point and 'snap' ability (I've decided to popularize the term 'snap' to indicate capturing a QR code with your phone and successfully being presented with whatever that code is linked to). With a setup like that, why is it you don't 'snap' a QR everyday? It's all about the apps baby. Having to download a specific app to use the QR code killed the QR code. Event marketeers were getting complaints from festivals directors about having lower than usual attendance and then they take a hit from the other side, the ticket holders...