Pants Optional 👖

WHO 'DIS?

The next generation of Trainual is officially here

Early in his entrepreneurial career, Trainual CEO Chris Ronzio founded an event video production company. And like any small business, things (occasionally) went wrong. 

People would quit or get sick, and he'd be forced back into the day-to-day operations. Because like most founders, he was the one who had the company's processes, training, and best practices filed away in his head.

As a result, Chris worked long hours, missed family functions, and did whatever else it took to keep his business running. But after missing Christmas one year, and he knew something had to change. 

After the holidays, Chris started building the world's first business playbook. AKA a centralized place for the company's profile (who the company is), people (who's who and who does what), policies (the need-to-knows), and processes (the how-tos). That way, anyone could jump in and play any position. 

Fast forward a few years, and this idea grew up to become Trainual, the world's premier playbook software. 

And as of last week's major update, the software now mirrors how businesses actually get work done. With the new Trainual, business owners don't need to give up what's most important for their business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R7qaX5vBzE

The biggest changes include: 

• New navigation. Company knowledge can now be sorted by processes, policies, people, and company information. That way, people can find the information they need in seconds.
• New org chart feature. Admins can easily map out who reports to whom, get a high-level look at the organization's structure, and plan for future growth!
• Revamped roles and responsibilities. Managers can now seamlessly set expectations around who does what and how to get those things done. As a result, teams get held accountable, and no task falls through the cracks.

👉 Learn more.

COINCIDENCE?

Facebook’s biggest outage since 2008 - what happened?

On Monday, Facebook went completely dark in a matter of minutes, bringing Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and internal employee tools down with it. Then, it stayed that way for over 6 hours.

While Facebook engineers scrambled to get the app back online, brands and influencers quickly took to other platforms like Twitter to throw shade. 

• iHeartRadio checked in on fellow social media managers by asking, "y'all doing ok?"
• Twitter said hello to "literally everyone."
• Edward Snowden polled 119k+ people on what happens tomorrow if "the internet giants go offline today and never return."

But what they all really meant was, "thank goodness we're not Facebook right now." 

Late Monday night, Facebook confirmed theories that the massive outage was caused during a routine update to the company's Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Meaning, bad configuration knocked their ecosystem off the internet's maps, so other servers couldn't find it.

In other words, it was an innocent human error that could've happened in any IT department - regardless of company size or resources. But for Facebook, bad timing made Monday an especially dark day at the office. 

The platform outage happened less than 24 hours after former employee Frances Haugen stepped forward as the Facebook Files whistleblower on 60 minutes. She shared thousands of internal documents with the WSJ, claiming that the company cared more about engagement than user health.

Zuck, of course, denied the WSJ claims in a public statement a few weeks back. He noted that the report is "simply not accurate." But stocks were already sliding, as Facebook shares were down nearly 5% in a matter of hours, thanks to the report.

OUT NOW

Get your copy of The Business Playbook

Want to build a company or team that doesn't rely on you putting in more hours? The Business Playbook will show you how!

This book is a culmination of Trainual CEO Chris Ronzio's 20+ years of SMB experience condensed into the business-building documentation system we use at Trainual. Now, he just wants to share it with as many folks as possible.

So, we convinced his publisher to discount the e-book version from full price down to $0.99 until this Friday, October 8. That way, you can get it at a reduced cost!

👉 Grab your copy.

OPEN THIS

Email marketing gets rattled by iOS 15

Your marketing email open rates are about to get better looking. But before you get excited, it might not be because more folks are actually opening your emails.

When Apple rolled out iOS 15 on September 21, a few of its privacy changes aimed to better protect customers' data. This includes a new "Mail Privacy Protection" feature that blocks email senders from tracking IP address data.

This data has historically been collected to determine open rates via a tracking code. This code is built into marketing emails by CRMs like HubSpot and triggers when an email has been opened.

However, with Apple's new update, their devices will now trigger the tracking codes when the email is received. Meaning, CRMs will count unread emails as opened.

Sure, this will only impact data for Apple users. But nearly 39% of people check their emails on iPhones. Meaning, the 64% of small businesses that rely on email marketing might be misled by their open rate metrics.

Luckily, these updates will not impact the delivery of your emails or drip campaigns (phew). Plus, there are a few alternative metrics for measuring email success that iOS 15 won't affect, like click-through rate (CTR) and reply rate. 

But no matter what you do, focusing on creating engaging emails with great content is still the move. Because even if you can't tell who's opened your email, providing value should still (and always will) be the goal of email marketing!

👉 See all the changes.

TL;DR

This week's highlight reel

• ‘Tis the season. With ongoing labor shortages and more demand, US retailers are increasing wages and adding benefits to secure seasonal workers.
• Excel(lent). The TikTok account @excel.friend has garnered 2.7M followers by exclusively sharing helpful Excel tips.  
• Mo’ money. Google slashes revenue share from 20% to 3% for all 3rd-party apps sold on its store as big tech faces pressures to lower their “take rates.”
• Wait - what? Meet Minus. The social app where you can comment infinitely but only post 100 times.
• Say that again. Spotify launches interactive polls and Q&As to bolster podcast engagement. The only catch is your show has to be on Anchor.