AP 0192: How Does SpeakPipe Work? Do I Have to Worry about Trolls?

AskPat 192 Episode Transcript

Pat: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 192 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

I'm in such a good mood right now. I hope you are too. Before we get to today's question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, an awesome site that you need to be using if you're just doing anything in regards to money online. Seriously, it's the easiest cloud accounting solution that's helping millions, millions of small business owners with their accounting and invoicing and their bookkeeping and all that great stuff. Something I wish I knew about when I was first starting. You can actually try it for free. You could try it for free right now if you go to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and enter “AskPat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section. Again, highly recommend it.

Okay, now let's get to today's question from Merinda.

Merinda: Hi, Pat. My name's Merinda Garrett. I'm starting a podcast for harmonization products that I've developed called Rethink and Renovate. I've been having a discussion with my web developer, and as I'm recording this question now on your recorder device on your website, he was advising me that he thought it would be abused by trolls and people who are just making mischief, and I was wondering whether you've had that experience with this particular function on your website. If so, does it chew up a lot of memory or a lot of space on your server? He was concerned that it would block my server if I was to put this sort of function on my website to use on my podcast. So if you could provide some infinite wisdom around this, I'd most appreciate it. I hope you recently enjoyed your trip to Australia. Ciao.

Pat: Merinda, thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it, and yes, Australia was amazing. I brought my entire family with me including my one-year-old daughter and my four-year-old son, and we all loved it. It was just amazing. I cannot wait to go back. Everybody there treated me so well, and I got to do the opening keynote at the ProBlogger Conference which was just amazing. We are coming back. All of you listening will know when that's happening. I know I have a lot of listeners in Australia. I'd love to do more meet-ups and more events and things like that over there for all of you. You guys are great. Thank you.

Now, let's get to your question. SpeakPipe is the tool that I'm using for those of you listening. It's the tool I'm using to actually collect these voicemail questions. A lot of people use it for this purpose of collecting these voicemails and putting them on their podcasts or putting them somewhere else. It's really cool because when people send in their questions, it converts it automatically into an mp3, which is great. That's a really easy file to use that you can then put on a podcast for example. A lot of people also use SpeakPipe for customer service which is a really fancy way to do it and a really personalized way to do it because when somebody has an inquiry on a SpeakPipe or a voicemail like this, you go into your SpeakPipe account and you can hear it. You can actually reply with a voicemail.

It's almost like voicemail online, so it's pretty cool. You could use it that way too. If you have a small amount of customers in your business, perhaps higher end customers for some higher end product, that might be a cool way to do customer service if people can't call you directly or chat with you live online, this might be the next best thing. Again, you can go to SpeakPipe.com or if you want to go through my affiliate link, you can go to AskPat.com/speakpipe. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

Do I get a lot of trolls? Well, I'll tell you Merinda that I get about a dozen questions a day now since doing AskPat, and no. I've never gotten any trolls. I think it actually helps that it is done with a voice because I feel like trolls . . . if you go on YouTube or any other blogs that allow comments to go wild, you'll see that people with the written form, they go crazy. They are not afraid to speak up because they know that they can hide behind their avatar. They can hide behind their little screen name. When it's on voice, it's a little bit different because people are hearing your voice. I think people are a little bit more intimidated to speak up and become a troll.

The most negative . . . well, I've had critiques. I've had respectful critiques of things that I do and suggestions and things like that. Those I completely welcome as long as they're respectful, and to hear it in somebody's voice is even better I feel, but nobody's ever been a troll. Seriously, if somebody becomes a troll on SpeakPipe to you, just turn that audio file off the minute they become trolly, and don't waste your time. That's my advice for anybody. If you're going to use this tool, and you start to get that type of stuff, just throw it out. Don't even waste time. There's more people out there who actually need your help and your attention.

That's the cool thing about SpeakPipe. I think it offers people a cool way to interact with you, and I think it's a great idea for you to include these voicemails you're getting from SpeakPipe on your podcasts. So to answer the first half of your question, no. I don't get lot's of trolls, and I don't believe you will either. I don't know exactly what your content is about, and sort of how you present your content. I can imagine if you were to talk about really strong subjects and touchy subjects, that you could perhaps get a troll or two, but that would only mean that you are very strong with your position. Sometimes it means to make change in this world, you need to be strong and get a couple trolls coming your way. I mean I do have trolls, but nobody's ever been a troll in SpeakPipe.

Another thing you could do, which is something I've been doing recently, is you could have a virtual assistant sort of listen to all your SpeakPipe questions and then sort of transcribe them really quickly for you, so you can just scroll through them and find the ones that you want to answer. That's what I do right now, and it makes it so much faster when going through this and creating an episode of AskPat. That way even if there are trolls, I don't ever hear about them, or I don't need to know about them. So my assistant takes care of all that for me. That's a cool thing you could do if you can afford to have a VA, and often when I say that I'm like how could you afford not to have a VA?

Now moving forward to your second question, Merinda, on server load. Is it going to slow down your site? Well, all the storage and all of the processing of these questions and stuff happens off of SpeakPipe's server, not yours. You can sign up, and depending on what plan you get you get a certain amount of storage, and minutes of storage. As these voicemails come in, they get stored on SpeakPipe's server. You could sign into your SpeakPipe account, and there are all the voicemails that have come in, and you can play them. You can delete them. You can download them, and then you've got the mp3 files. It's that simple. It's not going to slow down your site one bit. You can tell your developer they don't have to worry. If they want more information, you can send them to me and I can talk to them more about that process or have them connect with my developer too even though it's really not all that complicate.

You can always ask questions to those guys too. They're really, really friendly, and they've actually added a number of features from requests that my team and myself has had for the purposes of streamlining the show which is going to help people streamline their shows or whatever it is they're doing in the future as well.

Awesome. Thank you so much for the question, Merinda. I really appreciate it, and an AskPat t shirt is definitely going to be headed your way, so I can't wait to see perhaps a picture of you wearing it down the road sometime if you don't mind. For everybody else out there, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there using the SpeakPipe widget that's on that page.

Also, I want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks.com. FreshBooks, thank you so much. You guys are awesome. You can get a free trial of FreshBooks if you go to FreshBooks.com/AskPat and enter “AskPat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section. Especially if you are a consultant, or you do coaching, or you have any clients of any kind, it just makes invoicing so easy and professional looking and just with a couple clicks, you've got it done. So check it out. Again, Freshbooks.com/AskPat. Enter “AskPat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section.

I also want to end with a quote today. Well I always end with a quote, so it's no surprise to you, but this quote comes from Mark Cuban. His quote is, and for those of you who don't know he is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks in the NBA. So his quote, which has to do with the NBA says, “The NBA is never just a business. It's always business. It's always personal. All good businesses are personal. The best businesses are very personal.” Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.