web viewand then we can use our mobile type sites ... are we gonna use devices like the cameras on...

Bringing Non-Visual Access

to a Social Media Playing Field

Seminars@Hadley

Bringing Non-Visual Accessto a Social Media Playing Field

Presented byLarry Lewis

Moderated byLarry Muffett

March 29, 2016

Larry MuffettWelcome to Seminars@Hadley. My name is Larry Muffett. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminars team and I also work in curricular affairs. Today’s seminar topic is Bringing Non-Visual Access to a Social Networking Playing Field. Our presenter today is the founder and president of Flying Blind LLC, Larry Lewis. Larry has worked very closely with Hadley through the years as a subject matter expert and writer of several of our technology courses. Today Larry’s gonna share his professional insights on making the most of the exciting world of social media. Without any further ado, I’m gonna welcome Larry and we’ll get under way. Larry, welcome, and take it away.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired of 35



Larry LewisGood afternoon. Before I lock my microphone I want to make sure that you can hear me and I’m gonna release the mic and then we can proceed. I’ll go ahead and lock the mic once you confirm.

Larry MuffettPlease go ahead.

Larry LewisAll right. Thank you, Larry. The mic is locked right now and the way I would like to run this is we have quite a bit to cover today with this presentation, so I’m going to be operating under the assumption that we have a number of different customers or consumers in the classroom right now for this seminar, and so I need to address the needs of those of you who have very little to no social networking experience. There are some of you who I see and who I personally know who have some social networking experience. I want to try to work to make sure that we accomplish a number of different things in an hour from very beginner type questions all the way up to how I might use social networking as somebody who runs a business and different things like that. We have a lot to cover and I think the best way to handle this is I’m going to speak for about 15 or 20 minutes, open it up for a couple of questions, and then we’ll get back into the latter part of the webinar where I can focus on a little bit more advanced




type things and do a little bit of product demonstration as it relates to actually engaging with these webinars.

Before I get started, I wanted to thank Larry and all the great folks at Hadley just for the opportunity to speak with you all. I got an exciting message this morning that we were actually fairly full as far as capacity goes for the webinar, and it is Monday afternoon, and I want to thank everybody who joined us. There are a lot of things you could be doing right now besides listening to me talk about a topic that’s very important to me, and you chose to be here. I’m very, very grateful for that.

The name of the webinar is Bringing Non-Visual Access to a Social Network Playing Field and I want to just go over a couple objectives that I want to make sure that we meet today. The first thing that I want to do is I want to define what a social network is. That may seem very simplistic to you, but I think we all need to stop thinking in terms of just going on Facebook or those sorts of things and think in terms of what actually is a social network. The second thing that I want to do is to optimizing communications with social networking. I want to focus on components of a social network. There are really three types of things that I want to do today. What is it, how can we optimize it, and then talk about the different components of a social network.




Let’s talk a little bit about what a social network is. I bet when some of you logged on today, you didn’t really think that you were social networking. I think there are probably some of you, when you hear the term social network, you think about sending a tweet, you think about making a Facebook post, but, in fact, this webinar, this Talking Communities room, would be an example of social networking to some degree. If we define social networking, we would do so by saying that it’s really a process by which participants interact online using online services through virtual communities designed to enable them to obtain, interact with, and share information. And from my perspective, this web conferencing service would be an example of how we might engage with one another through a virtual community, be it through my voice, your voice, text chat, or what have you. And so we are social networking right now. Everybody who’s here is part of the social network phenomenon. I’m sure there’s a few of you who probably didn’t think you were, but you actually are.

Persons subscribing to these services often – really what drives us to really engage with one another in social networks is we have very similar type interests. Those interests could be fun interests. Those interests could be employment based. Those interests could be educationally oriented. What you see a lot of times in high school and college and what not are teachers who use social networks to convey information to their students,




and vice versa; the students are able to engage with their teachers as well.

These persons may also wish to reconnect with colleagues and friends and so forth. I can’t explain to you how amazing it is for me having moved around quite a bit in my career, and also moved around physically a fair amount in my lifetime, how much fun it is for me to connect with individuals who I went to school with, individuals who I worked with before, who I used to work with in different types of employment situations. I have friends on social networking who I interact with all the way back to probably second or third grade. It’s pretty incredible, actually, just being able to keep up with folks personally, being able to engage with individuals who I’ve worked with in the past, see what they’re up to, explore ways that I can work with them in the future, and so forth.

Social networking can also be used for recruiting professionals and expanding networks and so forth. I know there’s a Center for Entrepreneurship at Hadley, and know Colleen and some folks are very engaged with that. Gone are the days of the want ads where you would go pick up a paper and thumb through the want ads and apply for a job. That may exist a little bit, but nowadays we have more online capabilities where we can search for jobs, apply for jobs, accept jobs, employers can be out there looking for us and so forth, and that begins to really




level the playing field for persons who are visually impaired who can’t go to the local convenience store and pick up their local paper. That’s very exciting, too.

Applications can be developed and shared through these social networks. We’re gonna take a look at that a little bit later on as I get into some of the demonstration that’s occurring.

As I alluded to earlier, social networking is not so much just about a couple of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There are in fact really – and it grows all the time – there are over 200 online social networks that we can account for. That doesn’t really take into account places like different organizations who create their own internal online communities for their employees and those sorts of things. These social networks really got started in the late ’90s, so to speak. And for those of you who have been around a while, and I see the list here, some of you have been using technology for a little while, you can probably think about, or think in terms of, hearing the phrase that you haven’t heard in quite some time called a bulletin board, an online bulletin board. What an online bulletin board would be would be more or less a website that you would go to, information would be posted there, and that information would be changed by webmaster; information for you to review, maybe you could make comments about it. That would really be the




first starting point as it relates to social networking as it’s morphed into what we know it today.

Those bulletin boards have given way to things like Listservs where you would have a list, an email list, that could be managed either through a website or through an email client. Somebody posts information and you can reply back to that information either through a website or through an email client. This industry, this adaptive technology industry that we’re in, still uses Listservs quite a bit just to share information, to send information out to email subscribers, and that’s all controlled through very rudimentary, very fundamental type social network type knowhow. But, sometimes bulletin boards and Listservs aren’t really enough.

In early 2000, social networks really began to evolve into what we know them today. Really, the underlying software for social networking that’s being used is cloud-based technology. That’s cloud, like a cloud that you would – you know, the sun and the clouds and so forth. Think in terms of applications residing in a virtual cloud that are just out there somewhere hosted on the internet. When you think in terms of social networking, really, some of the advantages that a cloud provides for a social network are accessing information in real-time anywhere and cross-platform. What that means is, right now on my desk for this webinar I have a laptop that’s running Talking




Communities for the webinar here, for the Hadley room, I’ve got a laptop to the right of me that I’ll be using in a demonstration, and I have an iPhone, I have an iPad, I have an android tablet. I have about 5 or 6 different types of devices in my office, all of which have their own methodologies for getting to the Cloud, for getting to the internet, and for accessing various types of cloud-based social networks.

The exciting thing about cloud-based technology is you can determine what type of social networker you want to be. Do you want to be a social networker – and there’s no right or wrong answer here – but a question you need to ask yourself, do you want to be a social networker that is tied to a computer? Maybe you’re very comfortable in your home, in your office or whatnot, and your social networking occurs from within your computer, and that can be a desktop or a laptop computer.

Do you want to be a social networker who’s in motion? What I mean by that is, we have all sorts of devices out here today, and I don’t want to digress and get into all the different types of technology out here, but we live in a time where we can utilize iPads, we can utilize Windows tablets, we can utilize android tablets, we can utilize cell phones, all sorts of types of cell phones, be it an iPhone or an android phone or whatever. Do you want to be that type of user where, instead of logging onto your computer




and going to the internet, do you want to be a type user that uses applications that are designed to access the same sort of information in the Cloud?

Or, do you want to be a type of user that – I would consider myself one of those types of hybrid users – where you think in terms of what sort of task do I want to complete and then what tool would be the best for completing those different sorts of tasks?

There are a few different components to your social network experience that I want to talk about, then we’ll talk about assistive technologies for social networking, and then what I’ll do is I’ll take a little bit of a break so that we can ask a couple of questions, and then we’ll actually get into determining how we actually use these sorts of networks before we ask a few more questions.

Selecting a social network is really important for a specific task. Do we want to tweet out a little bit of information? Do we want to share a lot of information? Do we want to search for a job? Do we want to upload our resume? Do we want to actually use an application like Facebook, which I’m gonna demonstrate a little bit later on, to grow our specific business? Do we want to link social networks together so that, when I make a tweet, it posts on multiple platforms, like Facebook, at the same time, so I can kill




two birds with one stone? We want to select what sort of social networking can get the job done.

The second thing that we need to determine is browser versus app. We talked a little bit about that on our desktop computer. We want to focus primarily on using a browser, and there are a couple of types we can use. We can use Internet Explorer, which is familiar to most. We can use Mozilla Firefox, which I happen to think, sometimes, does a little bit of a better job. We can use Safari, for those of you who like to use Macintosh. And then we can use our mobile type sites as well so that, instead of going to a full-blown website, maybe we want to use a website that is designed specifically for a cell phone or something like that on our desktop computer, to get the job done. I’ll talk a little bit about that as well. We can use a browser or we can use an actual app. There are actual apps that are developed for social networks. There’s a LinkedIn app, a Facebook app, a Twitter app, some things that we’re going to take a look at, and they organize things very differently than you will see when you go into a browser and you see a webpage. That will make quite a bit of sense as I get into the demonstration as well.

A couple of other things you will need to do is create an account for your respective social network, user name, password, and so forth, and then you’ll need to establish your profile. And again, depending on the social network




you’re using, that can be work information, that can be fun information about yourself, where you’re from, your different types of interests, and so forth. A lot of it will depend, but your profile sort of gives folks who want to connect with you a snapshot of who you are.

The different types of content that we can actually share with these types of social networks could range in anything from sharing in documents, uploading your resume to LinkedIn per se – pardon me. As I said, I have multiple things going on here. I just had a computer next to me log off. We can also share videos, we can share photos, we can blog and share different types of things from the internet and so forth. Now we to determine how we’re gonna share information. Are we gonna use devices like the cameras on our phones to take pictures and upload them, or videos and upload them? Are we going to visit, because we’re comfortable using internet technology on our computer, are we gonna go to specific sites, write a blog or what have you, and then go in and share that blog to the blogger site? There are different strategies where we have to determine how it is we’re actually going to share that information. Instant messaging, or private messaging, is very important, and we’ll talk a little bit about that as well.

Some benefits of social networking: the ability for participants to customize their profiles and content to




really just sort of determine how they want to interact with information. I used to subscribe to all different types of newspapers and pay money and do all that stuff for myself just to keep current with things. Not so much anymore. I really do all of my reading of the news and so forth through social networking. That would be one example of that. The ability to network to enhance one’s career, we talked a little bit about that. And an efficient means of connecting with friends and so forth.

A couple of other obstacles that we want to be aware of – there are really two major obstacles that we need to think in terms of. The first would be for, really, as it relates to desktop browsers. When you’re in a social network in an internet browsing session, two things can happen. Information can refresh automatically and the page can change on you before you’re ready for it to change; you could be using a screen reader. Or, information doesn’t change at all and you have to remember to press, in many cases, CTRL + F5 would be your refresh button, to refresh the contents of the screen so you have the most up-to-date information within your social network.

The second obstacle would be a little bit more apps based. It’s a concept that’s called Agile Development. What Agile Development is, Agile Development means people are making updates all the time, developers are making updates all the time, and your iDevice, your




android device, if it’s not set up properly, will just automatically install the latest updates of Facebook or Twitter or whatever you have installed. That can create problems if those get broken, so you have to understand that if you have your updates set to automatically update, it’s definitely an issue.

Couple of really quick things before I break for questions. As far as our access tools for the actual demonstration portion coming up after this question and answer session, you have your screen reading technology and your screen magnification technology that can be set up for either a mobile device, like your iPhone or your android device, or your full desktop screen reading technology or screen magnifier, such as, whatever, ZoomText, Window-Eyes, JAWS, Non-Visual Access, whatever it is you like to use.

You have a couple of different modes of input and navigation. On your desktop you’ve got your PC, and if you’re a visual user, you’ve got your keyboard and your mouse, if you’re a visual user, with either your PC or your Macintosh. If you’re not a visual user at all, you basically are constrained primarily to the keyboard access that your computer allows and your screen reading technology allows. If you’re a mobile user, the rules sort of change a little bit. You have your ability to interact with touch gestures, gestures for touching the screen, alternative gestures. You also have the ability to interact with external




devices like a Bluetooth keyboard or, like I use, I’m a big fan of using refreshable braille displays. You just don’t have your gestures that play into the mix. If you want to capture that desk type keyboard interactive knowhow, you would then have a Bluetooth keyboard and you would have your refreshable braille display, if you were so inclined.

I’m gonna unlock the mic and we’ll take time for a couple of questions.

QuestionLarry, what can you tell us about LinkedIn and their accessibility? I was just at CSUN and the sentiment is that it’s becoming less and less accessible and more difficult to maintain a profile.

Larry LewisI’m gonna be demonstrating LinkedIn. I find that there’s quite a bit more mobile access in the make. I think the desktop is getting worse and I find that, with myself, as far as being able to connect with people, interact with people, join groups, interact with groups, I have a bit more luck doing that with my mobile device and I’ll demonstrate that and show some of the complexities of that. But I would agree. It’s getting more and more difficult to do things like change your resume stuff like that online.




Larry MuffettOther questions for Larry before we start up again? Larry, we have one in the chat box. It says, “Are there some tricks to getting around all the crap and getting right to what you are looking for on, say, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.?”

Larry LewisYeah, I think the best thing to do would be for me to jump into the demonstration and to show you a couple of ways that I like to access things, and that might best answer the question.

Larry MuffettSeeing as we’re not getting a lot of questions, whenever you’re ready, Larry, go ahead.

Larry LewisOkay. I appreciate everybody taking it easy on me today. I thought for sure I was going to be in a situation where I had to – it was gonna be like machine gun questioning. A couple of really good questions, though, and I think they’ll best be served if I get directly into the demonstration.

I want to focus specifically on a few different tasks that I would perform this day-to-day type situation. We’re gonna be focusing on four specific social networks and I’m gonna




be moving quickly through them. What you need to think about with these social networks is if you choose the internet, if you choose a desktop computer, you’re gonna have to think about page hierarchy, and you’re gonna have to have really good web browsing type skills. You’re gonna have to think about how many frames are on the page, how many headings are on the page, and what does my screen reader allow me to do to find things a little bit more quickly.

Somebody had a really good question about how to – sorry about that. I’m going to switch gears to my computer, first of all. Somebody asked a very good question as it relates to how do I find stuff quickly using Facebook, per se. I’m gonna go ahead and plug this computer in and unlock it. I just apologize for a quick second. I had a computer that logged off on me and it’s kind of tied specifically to – here we go. Bear with me just a quick second. I have multiple things going on right now, so what I’m going to do is actually switch gears and switch back to the computer that I’m using Talking Communities because I’m having log on issues with this other computer. I thought it would make it easier. Here we go. Give us a little bit more volume here.

I always go to the search field for Facebook. I’m gonna take you to the normal Facebook site just by going to www.facebook.com, and we’ll open up Facebook. Here


http://www.facebook.com/



we go. I’ve got Facebook opened up here and somebody asked, “How do you get past all the junk?” and so forth. I like to use browsers that use find commands and so forth, and a few of them out there do that. Internet Explorer does that. Mozilla Firefox does that as well. For this webinar, I used my Flying Blind Facebook page, which I set up. I use Facebook as a personal type situation for friends and that sort of thing, but there’s a business component to Facebook for me as well. If I wanted, on the Facebook site, to just very quickly get to flying-blind.com, I would quickly use my headings command to move specifically to my pages heading – I’m just pressing that – and I’m moved down to my pages just with three keystrokes.

If I wanted to look for pages that I had set up under Facebook, I could just arrow down or I can tab, or, if I knew that I had visited my Flying Blind page before, I could just select a command that will allow me to move to where I’ve been before by visiting the link. I’m just gonna press that command. Basically, within four keystrokes – I’m speaking in between it – I was able to get very quickly to my Flying Blind Facebook page. I’m gonna press enter to open that. So we’ll open up Flying Blind on Facebook, and we’ll open that up. It drops me right into the search field.




Now, I used Flying Blind to promote this seminar. What I did was I created a little ad that went out in a weekly newsletter that we put out last week just announcing the seminar, mostly to Hadley texts that went out, with a few modifications, and I also attached a photo of me presenting at a conference just for the visual user and so forth. What I did was I kept that ad and put it on my Flying Blind page last Thursday, but then, in order to get the word out about the ad – because an ad can just be out there, it can be just like a post on my Flying Blind page – I actually boosted that post. What that means is I went in and paid a nominal fee just so that all Flying Blind’s – everybody who likes the Flying Blind webpage, all of their friends and everybody connected to them would have this ad as a sponsored ad front and center.

I’m just gonna take you to that ad. I’m just moving down through headings. Basically, this is my ad. I moved down just by using my headings command through all the superfluous things, how many people like the page, and about, and Flying Blind’s mission, and all that stuff that’s up on the page. Just with a couple of keystrokes, it went down to this ad. I tagged myself in this ad so that all of my personal friends would see my photo associated with this ad. Basically, what I have here is just the contents of the email that Hadley sent out, with a few modifications. We posted that in March.




I know that if I wanted to get past this ad quickly and see how the ad did as far as how many people viewed and so forth, I can just go to view results button. I’m just gonna press a V and I move to view results. I know that because, again, if you’re gonna use a desktop computer, you want to really know what’s a link, what’s a heading, what’s a button, what’s an edit field; you really have to know your internet basics. You have to know how to get around the internet quickly otherwise you’re gonna be erroring around forever. I just happen to know that on this site, what’s a button, what’s a link, what’s a check box, and so forth. If I want to view results, I can just press enter on this button and it would tell you how many people were organically reached, how many people viewed it, how many people liked the ad. We had about 120 likes for this particular ad. People were pretty excited about the webinar and it being available today and so forth. It was pretty successful.

I do that, also, as it relates to some of the things that Flying Blind sells and some of the professional services that we offer, as a means of growing revenue. I find, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, social networking, like Facebook and Twitter and so forth, to be a lot more cost effective than maybe doing a little bit more expensive things through Google and so forth. Now, something else that’s interesting here is when we posted this ad, and when we post anything on Flying Blind, we have it linked




specifically so that it also goes out on Twitter. I personally don’t like Twitter, probably because I have to stick to 140 characters to make a tweet, per se, but what is nice about this is I could actually post something on my Flying Blind page and it will also go out on Twitter as well. This was promoted on Twitter and I’m basically killing two birds with one stone. So I can view who liked it, I can share it again, I can re-up the post or re-up the ad, or whatever I want to do.

I have some very strict guidelines about myself with social networking. Larry the friend or Larry the person uses his Facebook page for fun, for sports, for politics, religion, whatever you want. But Larry the business page, the Flying Blind is more of a business page, that’s more open to the public, linked to Twitter, and so forth. That’s something that you really need to think about as you get into social networking. You just need to really think it through. Do you want your employers seeing, necessarily, what you’re posting all the time? Do you want a prospective employer to see certain things that you’re posting? Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and all these different types of things, when you get into the social networking game, there are privacy settings, but there’s no such thing as privacy. So you really need to think in terms, for those of you who are career minded, just be mindful of what you’re doing out there. Don’t do anything too crazy. It’s okay to have fun and so forth.




I have very strict guidelines where I have my friends and we have a good time as friends, but then I have some professional standards for the Flying Blind page. I don’t let just anybody post on my Flying Blind page, because I just don’t know what’s gonna end up there and I’m not always around to monitor it. So we pretty much take the lead on posting; people can comment and share those sorts of things, they can instant message me, and so forth through that page. But you really want to have a set of rules in place so that you’re operating under constraints that are comfortable for you and for your career.

That’s an example of how I use Facebook for my business and so forth. Now, I do want to show you that this is the normal Facebook site. I personally feel like NVDA and the later version of JAWS does a fairly good job interacting with the Facebook site. For those of you who maybe don’t want to be quite as intense in some of your activities as it relates to sharing information and boosting ads and tying videos into things, and so forth, and you still want to use your computer, you can do that simply by going – most of these social network sites like Facebook and Twitter and so forth do have mobile sites. Where I went to www.facebook.com, if I just went – I’m just gonna go and open up a website. I’m just typing m.facebook.com – and I’m not gonna get into all of my stuff on my Facebook – but what I have is a very much dummied down mobile version of the site by the search field. I see that I have a


http://www.facebook.com/



notification. And then I’ve got my pages. I could go here. And I can access Flying Blind through the mobile way as well. It’s just a little cleaner, not as crazy as all these headings and frames and toggle buttons and so forth. Very comfortable. You could probably do about 85% of what you want to do using the mobile sites for Facebook and Twitter on your computer.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn has a fairly nonexistent, really, mobile site, and when they had a site that was mobile, it was pretty bad. They’ve invested a lot more energy into their application development for their handsets and so forth. If I were to go to LinkedIn here just to show you how chaotic it gets on a computer, like a desktop computer – I’m just typing LinkedIn, just opening up LinkedIn – and now I have all kinds of stuff up here on the screen. I always start by moving through my headings and so forth. I can look at who’s viewed my profile, who hasn’t. I can go here and answer – basically, the more you fill out your profile, the more interests you put in and so forth, the more recruitable you can be. I will echo some of the concerns I have about being able to change resumes and upload resumes and so forth.

What I like about LinkedIn is being able to belong to different types of groups that have similar type interests as it relates to growing my network; different types of technology interests and so forth. I find LinkedIn to be




very difficult to use on a PC. There are some things that I do with it. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have messaging clients for private messages, which is pretty much like Webmail, and I find the LinkedIn webmail to be a little tricky to use on a computer. With that, I’m gonna switch gears from my computer to my actual iPhone, show you how I use LinkedIn.

Switching speakers here. Here we go. What I’m gonna quickly do is just connect my braille display here, because I tool around a little bit faster. We could use gestures and so forth, but I would rather just quickly unlock my phone. Okay, perfect. I’m just gonna go to LinkedIn quickly. I’ve installed LinkedIn from the app store. We see that there’s a new update since I’ve been inside of LinkedIn before. I’m gonna go ahead and open LinkedIn. So I’ve opened that app.

Now, one thing that you should be aware of with LinkedIn is that in an application with all these social networks, instead of headings, you’ve got tabs that are along the bottom of your screen. If you’re using an iPad, chances are they’ll be along the top of your screen. The first thing that I do is I go down to the very bottom of my screen, and it says “Me” and it’s 5 of 5. So there’s 5 tabs within LinkedIn, and if I were to slide back four or five times to my first tab – so we have our Home tab, My Network, Instant Messaging – and “Me” is where I would go to




change the profile. You basically have Home, My Network, Messaging, Notifications, and Me. I find that to be a lot more easily navigable than one big website where you have to sift through all sorts of types of headings.

If I want to know what’s up in my network today, who’s got a new job, who’s made some updates, who wants to connect with me, I’m just gonna go to My Network and double tap the screen. When I double tap it says My Network selected on the braille display, and if I go to the top, tap the top left corner, and select here, and I have a number of invitations that I’ve saved just for this particular last few days. I usually get a couple of invites a day. I really try to work LinkedIn, that’s for sure. I can decline invitations, which I really do in LinkedIn, or I can chat just by double tapping on the connect button. So I’ve got all of my pending connections up here. Or I can just move on if I didn’t want to send an email to them.

I’m not gonna keep staying here, but basically I’ve connected with two people just with a swipe and a couple of taps within the LinkedIn app. That takes a lot longer when you’re fiddling around with a computer. This is why I like the mobile mode of operating with LinkedIn. As far as being able to participate in groups and so forth, if I want out of this, I’m just gonna close this dialog box, I’ll switch over to “Me” by going to the very bottom of my screen and double tapping, and I’ve transitioned from My Network tab




to my Me tab. I’ll tap on that. I’ve got invitations and so forth and I can do some different things for searching for people. The nice thing about LinkedIn is if you want to link it to your contacts in your phone or what have you and search for people you might know, there’s all types of third party type of things you can do for that as well. Big fan of LinkedIn, but echo the sentiment that they have a lot of work to do, and it’s real important. I view it as an employment tool. I’ve applied for consulting opportunities through LinkedIn and have had people seek out our services through my profile on LinkedIn, and so I’m a very big fan of that.

I want to do a couple more things before I open things back up for questioning again. Let’s assume that we want to switch out of LinkedIn and go to something like Twitter. I see that my LinkedIn has changed because of me going inside of LinkedIn getting some different types of updates. I’ll see when I close LinkedIn that there’s actually two new items that need to be viewed that I haven’t viewed since I’ve been in there.

Moving along though, I’m not as fond of Twitter for personal reasons, but it probably is one of the easier networks to get into because it is pretty self-contained and it is pretty straightforward. Again, I’m gonna stick with my phone and use my phone for that. I also have tcConference on my phone for being able to deal with




Talking Communities and logging into rooms because I’ve actually gone to webinars such as this and done that on my phone. I haven’t gotten the guts to present using my iPad or iPhone at this stage, but I have participated in those sorts of activities using my mobile device.

Here’s Twitter. I’ll double tap on that. And again, we have our tabs. Whenever you go to a social network with an iDevice, I always go to the bottom right corner and flick backwards because all these social networks have tabs. On your iPad, chances are those tabs will be along the top for visual purposes, but on your phone they typically run along the bottom. I’ve got my “Me” tab. I’ve got Home, Notifications, Messages, and Me; that’s all Twitter can – and every time I double tap on a specific tab, the screen will change to accommodate that tab.

I want to compose tweet. I’m gonna double tap on that. I’m just gonna do a brief tweet. “Enjoying this social networking webinar with a special shout out” – and I’m gonna do the shout out or the tweet to Hadley’s Twitter page, which is @hadleyinstitute. I’m just going to quickly switch to that, and I’m gonna write “hadleyinstitute.” I put @hadleyinstitute, which is their name, which means it’ll show up on their Twitter feed as well. It shows my location. You might want that turned off. I don’t personally care if people know where I’m tweeting from. I could have taken a picture and posted it here from my




phone. I’m just gonna quickly click tweet and Hadley Institute will be notified of that. They can retweet that, they can reply to me, they could like that tweet and so forth. It’s just a nice, easy way through your phone to be able to do those types of things. You could do it on a computer as well, but Twitter is seen more as microblogging and so I don’t see any reason not to use your phone or your iPad or what have you.

Last thing that I want to show you is how third party apps can interact with a social network. Earlier in the demonstration I showed you specifically how I could link to my Flying Blind Facebook page through an internet site. There are apps that are designed, third party apps, that are designed to help you manage that stuff mobile in a much more neat and tidy fashion. I’m gonna get out of Twitter and I’m going to go to an app called Pages, Facebook Pages Manager. It’s a separate app from Facebook and it’s designed specifically to help you manage your pages on Facebook through your phone.

I’ve got Pages here, I’m gonna double tap on that and open that up. It’s specifically tied to Flying Blind. If I go to the bottom right of my screen, which is my mobile thing that I always want to do, I see that’s my More tab, there’s my Notifications, Insights, and Page. Right now Page is selected. It just gives me different ways to manage my Flying Blind page; to promote it, to invite people, to create




ads specifically on my iDevice or my android device. I can post photos, I can publish a post, I can actually upload video that we’ve done sometimes. I can actually plan an event, such as another type of webinar or whatever, and invite folks that like the page to that specific event, all from the confines of my touchscreen here. Right now my page is sitting at about 1132 likes right now; people come and go and so forth. I can make posts, I can promote posts, I can invite more folks, I can do things to promote my website. There’s a whole host of tools that these third party apps can give you as you become more familiar with them. Again, these don’t really exist so much as it relates to using a desktop PC.

I want to save a little bit of time for questions. I’m trying to cram what I typically do in about 4 to 5 hours into about 60 minutes, so it was definitely a jet tour. I do want to save a little bit of time for questions for folks. I just wanted to demonstrate what I do on a day-to-day basis, Larry the person, but Larry the business owner as well, how we actually engage with social networks. I hope it made sense. I tried to slow things down a little bit with speech and juggling different types of equipment, so I hope you were able to follow. I will unlock the mic and we’ll make questions available for about the next 8 minutes or so.




Larry MuffettColleen, this might be a great opportunity for you to talk about FCE-260, the FCE social media course, and how today’s seminar would lead nicely into people taking that particular course.

Colleen WunderlichLarry, thank you for the opportunity. Yes, we have a social media course that focuses in more depth on what Larry is discussing here. It’s – I can’t think of its name – Connecting With Social Media – Larry, you can help me on the specific title. I’m sorry; I’m blanking on it right now. But it goes into exactly this that basically focuses on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and it helps you understand each site and you can make a decision what you want to use the site for. Strategies to Connect With Social Media is the name of the course. Anyway, you learn about how each site can help you, and it basically emphasizes that you pick a site based on what you’re trying to accomplish, and it’s important to maintain that site throughout. It does have a business focus as well as it talks about LinkedIn as being a professional network for people who want to look for employment, or be recruited, or spread the news of their professional work to other people in their network. And it does focus on mobile devices as well and how it’s easier to use mobile devices in some of these instances, as Larry demonstrated. It’s an FCE module and it’s available to any Hadley student, or




any person who is wanting to become a Hadley student, free of charge.

Larry MuffettLarry was the author on that particular course and I had a part in it also and, if I do say so myself, I think it’s a great course. I highly recommend that to people. Again, I’m going to turn the microphone over and if people want to ask questions, now is a great time.

Larry LewisYou folks are being far too easy on me. I just want to say that I want to echo Colleen and Larry’s sentiments that I really loved doing – I’ve probably done all five or six courses for Hadley and the social networking course was my favorite. It’s something that I’m very passionate about and, again, it was very difficult to jam the essence of what we tried to do in that five-lesson course into an hour. It’s definitely worth taking and will answer a lot of questions that you might not be comfortable asking right now.

QuestionThis is Marsha Mackey [ph]. I’m just saying that I use my social media – I use LinkedIn as my primary site being that I’m pretty much professionally focused, as I gather you are too, and I’ve found that the connection sites and everything on the PC are not too bad. I mean, I guess I haven’t had a whole lot of the access problems that you




have had, but that doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot. I mean, not to say that you haven’t, but I’m just saying I haven’t had an awful lot of the accessibility problems.

Larry LewisFirst of all, I’ll address both questions. Marsha, it’s great to hear your voice. I know you from other webinars, so I appreciate you coming. I personally don’t have a horrible time with LinkedIn sites on the computer, but it is awfully busy for the intermediate web browser type, the web user. I use LinkedIn on my computer too, but I do find, and especially when you’re dealing with more of an intermediate user, sometimes transitioning between those tabs on your mobile device is a little bit easier. But, I agree. It’s not the end of the world to use your computer and it can work out pretty well.

As for the lady who asked about taking pictures. VoiceOver on your iPhone will help you, as far as letting you know when you’re using the actual camera, how blurry or how clear something is. It will also tell you how many faces are in the picture. While it doesn’t give you, really, so much a bulletproof way for taking a perfect picture if you’re visually impaired, it does provide some visual output for you, some audible output, as to how things visually look.




As for uploading, typically when you are using anything, like LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, you’re going to look for a photo button and you’re going to double tap on that photo button and there will usually be – once you’ve tapped on that, if the photo assists don’t show up, it’ll probably prompt you to allow the camera to access this application, or the application to access your camera, I should say. So that would mean you would get a message Facebook would like to access your camera, whatever, and you would want to swipe over to allow access and double tap on that. If you’re not getting that message, it means that you’re good to go and you should be able to swipe over to open camera, double tap on that, and your photos will show up.

Typically what will happen is your photos that you have taken using your camera will show up chronologically from most recent, and as you swipe to the right, it will be chronologically from most recent to least recent. Your most recent photo will show up and you swipe over and the photo a few minutes ago might show up, or a photo three weeks ago might show up; it just depends on how much you use your camera. You’ll double tap on that and then there will be a done button. You can post more than one photo. You can double tap on the photos you want and then you’ll need to locate the done button and you’ll be able to post those photos. It will prompt you to say something about those photos and it will also allow you to




select a place where those photos are taken. And, lastly, if there are friends who you want to tag in those photos, depending on your social network, you’re able to associate them with the photos as well, which means those photos will show up on their newsfeeds.

Larry MuffettWe have time for one more question, so whoever wants to do that, go ahead and jump in.

QuestionHi, Larry, this is Raquel. My question is about Twitter. Let’s say you have three Twitter accounts. Like me, I have a personal Twitter account and I am the admin for two Twitter accounts of two of the organizations that I am involved with. How can I access them or how can I switch between the three of them? Can I do that in Twitter, or is there an app that I can use to switch between the three accounts?

Larry LewisI believe if you go to your Me tab on your iDevice or whatever device you’re using that’s mobile, there’s a Me tab, there’s a “switch accounts” button. As I said, I don’t tweet, probably because it’s hard for me to keep it to 140 characters. That’s only because, I always joke, because I’m not interested enough to tweet. It’s pretty much a business thing for me with Flying Blind. But if you go to




your “Me” I believe there’s a “switch accounts” button that will allow you to pick which account you’re using to tweet with.

Larry MuffettI want to let everyone know that this seminar, like all of our seminars, will be archived on our website and available for your use anytime around the clock. Also, each Hadley seminar is now made available as a podcast, which you can download to your computer or mobile device. If today’s seminar has you interested in this or related topics please check out the seminar archives and Hadley’s course list and, in particular, as we mentioned, FCE-260: Strategies to Connect With Social Media. Both Larry and I give it our highest recommendation. Larry and I both thank you for your participation. Your questions were outstanding and greatly contributed to the value of the seminar.

Hadley values your feedback. Please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar and please give us suggestions for future topics. One way you can do that is by dropping us an email to [email protected], that’s [email protected].

I’m gonna turn the microphone back over to Larry one last time if he wishes to make any closing comments. Larry?


mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]



Larry LewisI just want to thank the staff at Hadley once again for having me for the last hour and I want to reiterate how appreciative I am that you decided to spend an hour of your afternoon with me. I hope that I was able to – again, the challenge is always jamming as much in as you can in an allotted amount of time. So I’m hoping that you all got something out of it. I very much appreciate everybody’s joining the webinar and have a great rest of your Monday.

Larry MuffettGreat. Thanks, Larry. I just want to let people know if this sort of got your interest and you want to hear more and you want to dig deeper, this course, FCE-260, is gonna be right up your alley. I think you’re really going to enjoy it. I also want to personally thank all of you for taking time to be part of this today. Thank you so much for your great questions and goodbye for now.

[End of audio 0:59:05]


web viewand then we can use our mobile type sites ... are we gonna use devices like the cameras on...

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