[vc_row][vc_column][vc_video link=”https://youtu.be/2XD-tylUn3w”][vc_column_text]Mike Blackmore is all about connecting consumers and his clients. With the “Top Contributor” title from Google and certification from nearly every social media advertising giant, he takes his technology seriously.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeblackmore
https://twitter.com/MikeInEdmonton
https://www.bigclick.ca
Join us as we talk to Mike Blackmore about the tools that keep him engaged, on-schedule, and delivering for his clients!
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Hi, I’m Mike Blackmore and I am the CEO of Big Click Media here in Edmonton, Alberta. I was born and raised in Edmonton, my whole life, so I’ve got a really good feel of all the small businesses around here, all the different industries, and I’ve kind of made my bread and butter on things that you can’t do. So, when people always present that challenge of, “This can’t be done,” or, “You can’t do that.” I’ve made a living off that.
I don’t know if it’s just something of the challenge, being married 18 years with two kids, I’m pretty grounded in my why. Why I get up and why I do what I do every day. Motivation comes easy to me. As I get older I feel like the clock is slowly ticking and the young guys are coming up in this industry. Although I’ve got a plethora of experience, I’m always mindful of keeping my act sharp, so that way I’m relevant, and I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned so far in my life is that persistence beats resistance, in almost any facet. A lot of times in my career, I wasn’t maybe the most talented person, but I made up for it with hard work and being dedicated to the process.
I am probably one of the most tech junkie people, next to yourself, because you do a lot of reviews. I use technology in every facet of my life, including my house. I use If This Then That, so if somebody comes by and the nest camera gets alerted, I get an email or the lights go on so that it appears somebody’s home. I use it for my everyday scheduling. I have a virtual assistant, it’s x.ai, and it frees me up. One of the biggest things, I think, is time is the new currency. So, anything I can do to kind of use technology to offset that and free up some more time, I’m all about that. From smartwatches to like … our house is filled with GoGo gadgets, every type of laptop device. I try to stay on the cutting edge of things with upcoming betas, and the reason why I do that is so I can provide value to my clients. So, if there’s maybe something early on that somebody’s having some success with, I can transfer that to almost any industry and almost repeat that.
Well, I mean, I live with my basic music. Obviously music is a big part of my daily job, so I have Spotify on there, I use like, Allo, Duo, a little biased of course, with Google. What we use internally though, we use a lot of Slack, we use a lot of Facebook Workplace. So, when you start getting multiple projects or departments, it’s really important that everybody stays on the same page, so we’re big on organization apps. Anything for productivity, like G Suites, we use all the Docs, Drive. I use If This Then That. As far as apps, I use all like AdWords Editor, Facebook Ads, the pages manager, just Snapchat, all that stuff that makes my life day-to-day, so if I can’t get to a desktop or my MacBook, I can easily on a flight, or waiting for a flight, I can get a lot of stuff done.
As far as messaging goes, I use Facebook quite a bit obviously, WeeChat, WeeChat’s more for work and clients. Some of the other apps I use for productivity are, like image video apps, so Selfissimo! is one that’s on my phone right now. What that does, it takes a video and it actually turns it into a comic book cover, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that. There’s a lot of great apps out there. I stick to my 80 pretty consistently, I would play with, you know, 20% I [inaudible 00:03:47] try a couple of apps, delete them. But, for the part I’d say my favorite app that I use every day is definitely AdWords Editor, that’s where I spend most of my time.
Yeah, great question. So, we do, we use multiple calendars where you layer them. So, one’s for this video project, one’s for social, so that we can kind of stay on, they’re color coded, so if we kind of … we use Cal as the app, so every morning we wake up, it’s a widget on our phone, so we don’t have to dig in anywhere, it’s right in front of you, and it’s very visual. I have to do that, I’m very busy. So for me, one of my early mistakes was probably taking on too much, not knowing how to say no, so I’ve learned how to get better with that, so that Calendar app is kind of how I start my day.
Yeah, I think for the most part we use an assistant, it’s called x.ai, as I mentioned. What that does is it goes through my calendar and it finds open spots, and then my clients can pick an open spot. A lot of it is virtual, so we have clients down in Kentucky that we will do UberConference or Google Hangouts with, do some screen sharing, share some reports, let them ask any questions. It’s very transparent that way, so yeah.
Yeah, I think anybody that’s coming into this right now should really be considering anything to do with artificial intelligence, virtual reality. I know right now Facebook’s working on a actual avatar where you build yourself into a 3D person and me and you can go interact at the London Bridge. I can really see that opening up some possibilities with the advertising world. Actually, I know it will because the way it’s going to work it advertisers are going to have the ability to buy space in the virtual world. So, it’s really going to open up some interesting things, and I think it’s going to be called pay per view, is going to be the actual term, so get ready for that. That’s in every pipeline right now, so it’s kind of a race to win that.
Kind of like self driving cars, I’m very invested in that right now. I’m in that community with Udemy, I’m in that course right now, and I think that’s going to be very relevant over the next 10 years. I think people are going to adapt into these ride sharing … I mean, in most cities it already is, right? But, I think it’s going to become when Uber hits it, when some of these big companies like Crysler, and Google, Apple. Whoever gets there first, I think, is really going to open up the doors, and I do believe there’s a huge appetite in the Millennials and under right now. They don’t even want to drive, they would rather have that free time to text, to Snapchat, to get more productivity done as opposed to having to drive. So, I do think that whole shift is upon us, I think it’s imminent, and I think it’s just a matter of time.
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