How Do You Deal With Technological Problems When Doing Online Business? | Facebook Walk With Reid
Reid: Hello Facebook! Sex geeks! It’s Reid from https://reidaboutsex.com/. Creator of sex geek summer camp and when I’m wearing the camp shirt that means this is business advice and today is very interesting day. So as you log on, please you know say Hi! Tell me I’m a good person ‘coz I was so excited today and then a bunch of stuff just went wrong! And I’ve decided to talk to you about things going wrong because one of the things that we talked about at camp, one of the things when I lectured about businesses stuff for sex educators and workshop facilitators you know anybody who is trying to you know get their advice out into the world using technology is that technology will often bite you in the butt and not always in that consensual way.
So, what happened today is I was I got all said yesterday to try doing a longer Facebook live this morning about just a… what I like to call show-and-tell sex education and why I think that’s important because I’ve got my…my wondrous vulva puppet which you can get on Etsy. The wondrous vulva puppet ready I had this thing I was going to do is going I was going to demonstrate a…a pleasuring technique that you can do on scrotums, I had some eggs and I got… had this whole thing all ready. I was putting my microphones together. I was going to I was going to do it at 11 a.m. I had the email ready to send to blast out everybody and I thought just before I hit send on the email you know what I should check and make sure that that I have my sales page my registration page open for a couple of show-and-tell sex ed things that I’m doing later this year like I should have the registration page open so that I can share with people you know where you can go to register if you want to go on a two-day deep dive retreat with me and basically do “Oh, there’s a horn” that enthusiastic horn is not how my day started. So, basically I went to check the registration page just to make sure I had it open so I could direct people to the things and tell them what the right prices were and the lo and behold everything looked great except that the actual registration buttons which are I used images ‘coz there’s I think [Inaudible 00:03:01] of button that I like to have, those were all gone! They were broken. The links to the images were broken. So I was like freak! Like you can’t send it’s very hard to have people register for something if you get them all excited and then they go to the page to register and there is no there’s nothing for them to click on like that just does not work. So in a moment of uuhhhh! I’m taking a pause here and look at the pretty flowers. Take a breath hmmmmmm in a moment of like “oh my goodness. What do I do?” ‘coz it was you know for those of you who know me I like to kind of try things on the fly and the…and so it was you know 10 minutes before I was going to go live. I am like I can’t do this like this is not going to work. So I had to scrap the live this morning for the demos you know emailed support @ you know the system I’m using to figure out why the links are broken because all the other images were loading and then I figured well you know to me be somehow proactive and as a form of therapy, I would do you know go for a walk, get out in the sun, take a deep breath and share with you something that’s probably going to happen to those of you who are doing online type you know business and promoting your events and whatnot is that sometimes the technology is going to fail you right when you’re ready to use it. Not always it doesn’t happen that often but I have had situations where I forgot to renew a website URL because I didn’t have it on automatic or something like that and you know people can’t get to the event because there’s no URL for it anymore.
So it’s like…like interesting little things kind of Murphy’s Law of things that will go wrong and things that happen when it’s really the timing is super bad and how can you as an educator draw on the skill sets and the knowledge and the emotional IQ that you have to not panic? It’s not the end of the world. I’ll do my Facebook live thing tomorrow. I’ll probably figure it out today what happened. We’ll fix it and then we’ll just keep chugging along. In a similar way that if you’re somebody who teaches a lot of live events you know when something unexpected happens in your live event but you’re still kind of you still remain in charge and keep all your attendees you know safe in the boat of your container for your workshop. It’s just so much more difficult for a lot of educators that I know to maintain that same groundedness when technology fails you. Like we’re good we’re good when…when something goes wrong in a workshop or somebody starts to have you know a big emotional release or epiphany and it’s unexpected but when it’s unexpected and its technology based a lot of us just lose our shit. And I just want to let you know like this happens not all the time, thank goodness but enough at this point that I’m like “okay it’s going to be one of those days” and to just not freak out about the inconvenience and just keep chugging along which is role modeling kind of probably the advice that we’re giving people I hope for their relationships when the unexpected happens you just stay grounded. You stay present and you just keep chugging along. And it’s really noisy in my neighborhood this week. It’s a today.
So I’m just going to keep turning around and hiding in the back alleys here. So what do we got here? We got some comments, use redundant links not all devices and browsers usually really…really recognize all links. Ahhh. You’re good Renee! Good job! Yes, they… I do have that. It’s just not the way that I want it to be with the images and yes, that’s great advice. Thank you Renee! So, I tend to do redundant links in my emails where I’ll have an embedded link it says click here and then later in the email I’ll have just the full link so that people can copy and paste it. You know like there’s great just like Renee said like good link protocols but when you have image-based situations and the image link is broken and you don’t know why, it’s definitely inconvenient.
I would love for those of you who are watching to leave comments about a situation where technology failed you and how did you keep going or how did you regain your balance or recoup…recoup or reset yourself after something surprising happens? There are situations there was a situation years ago when I forget what television show came out. There was some it was some big television shows that I had a…a piece of part on and the night that it aired for some bizarre reason my website went down. And to this day we still can’t figure out exactly what happened it just went down. So then it was all this amazing you know media going on and nobody could go to my website. And you know what? I’m glad that that happened early on in my career because it got me over that and because I’m still here. People eventually could find me. It didn’t ruined my career but at the same time it would be really great that to have things work when…when you want them to and you need them to. And most times more often than not thing seem to work out great and it’s that thing about just being a human where we notice we notice and we remember the bad stuff, we tend not to notice when everything’s going great. We tend not to notice when everything’s smooth because we’re just chugging along. So again, you know these are just things that I think will be helpful for you to get used to or you know hopefully this video is reminding you in a future date when something goes wrong. Oh! I remember that time that Reid talked about something not working. So I’m in you know I’m in good company and you know I hope that the things that…that will fall upon you are smaller and…and more easily fixed and solved and…and in the turnaround time for technological difficulties go smoothly for you. I don’t anticipate that my buttons will be unavailable for the rest of my life. They will somehow magically reappear and we’ll figure it out but again it’s just a big pain in the butt and I was like super excited but I can tell everybody, “Hey this is what’s happening. We’re going to try again tomorrow and…and maybe that’ll build more excitement and…and delicious tension and maybe not.” But if I’m playing for the long haul and I’m not going anywhere then then we’re just going to keep moving forward and you build better protocols in future for how to prevent things like this from happening and just sometimes things will pop up last minute. The event or the live broadcast will go the way that it’s going to go. Are you able to stay present and you know continue just role modeling moving forward? Which is a lot of the role modeling for life I think.
So, that’s about it. I’ll read the comments when I get back inside. I’m going to enjoy the rest of the…the rest of my walk today. Share your stories of going technological things went…went wrong for you. How you solve them? Or at least how you approach them? And that way we can normalize in our world that the tech sometimes just kind of craps out on you. It’s not because you’re a bad person. It’s not some karmic curse following you everywhere and check your links folks. Check your links and the… make sure you have everything that you need hopefully before you go live ‘coz if you’re somebody like me who…who likes winging it and uses you know tying themselves to rock and then throwing the rock off the cliff as a means to make sure that we take action that’s great. And sometimes when a…when you throw the rock off the cliff and it dragged you over the edge, you realize that a… that your images aren’t showing up on your registration page and that’s okay too.
Alright, this is a Reid Mihalko signing off from a nice sunny day in a noisy neighborhood and the… my intention is to do my live Facebook live tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. and now I’ve checked my calendar make sure I haven’t double booked something but a 11 a.m. I’m going to do some demos and talk about show-and-tell sex education and just share my thoughts on why that’s important and share some show-and-tell Sex Ed stuff that I’ve got coming up later this year and the…and hopefully invite people to register on a page where there are beautiful, bright buttons that they can click the registration. So that’s what we’re going to do.
Reid Mihalko from http://www.sexgeeksummercamp.com/ signing off. Oh, oh, oh! And for those of you who are thinking about coming to camp or coming to you sex geek design studio, we have a special a special not two for one but if you if you register for both I created a special 7 pay thing. So the way to go to that crap, crap, crap. How am I going to do that? I’ll post the link in the comments when I get home because that offer was only made to people on my email list. But I’ll share with you all because that might be useful today and that expires like in two days.
I think that’s it! I love you all! Thanks for letting me share I feel a little bit better now and I’m going to go tackle those registration buttons and do battle with technology [Inaudible 00:14:39].
Alright, mwah! Have a great day everyone! Leave a comment. Hit some emoticon buttons. Make it rain! Bye!