Matrix Group International

Category: Content Marketing and Social Media

  • Is Blogging Passe?

    During the Fall and Winter, I meet with many clients to help them formulate their web plans and budgets for the following year. During many of these meetings, I suggested to clients that they consider a leadership blog to raise awareness of their industry’s issues, make leadership more accessible and approachable, and showcase their thought leadership. Surprisingly, a couple of clients recently remarked, “Blogging, isn’t that passe?”

    My initial reaction was “no way!,” but since several clients had made the comment, I decided it was worth doing more research.

    If you google “is blogging passe,” you’ll get nearly 150,000 results, many of them with the exact title of “is blogging passe?” Some of these articles and posts go back as early as 2008. The general thinking goes like this: with the rise in popularity of Facebook and microbloggins platforms like Twitter, putting up and managing a corporate blog is passe. Put another way, since it’s much easier to create short-form content on social networks, long-form content creation (blogging) is dead.

    So is blogging passe? Here’s why I think blogging is not dead. In fact, I think niche blogging with high quality content is more important than ever.

    Casual bloggers have migrated to social networks, leaving the blogosphere to more committed bloggers intent on developing and sharing quality content. When blogging first appeared on the web scene, everyone started blogging. People blogged about their pets, they posted photos, they shared links. This type of casual blogging is now found mainly on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, etc.

    Blogs by experts and thought leaders continue to be very popular. We’re actually seeing that people prefer corporate, association and non-profit blogs to corporate, association and non-profit websites because of the perspective and the voice that come from blogs. Blogs simply feel and sound more human than corporate websites, which is why they often get more traffic than corporate websites. Webbiquity says corporate blogging is more important than ever.

    Producing unique, original and useful content is the only way these days to approach the myriad changes in the search algorithms being put in place by Google and Bing. In other words, the search engines like blogs because they tend to have unique and original content that searchers are looking for.

    Google is about to roll out Author Rank. With Author Rank, Google wants to make it easier for users to find the work of specific writers, and leverage its ability to use authors as an element for ranking pages and sites. Author Rank means you have a blog, you connect it to your Google+ account, you get verified, and your blog content contributes to page rank, which directly affects where your site shows up in Google search results.

    Blogs continue to be a great way to educate your members and customers. I tell clients that blogging requires a greater commitment than Twitter or Facebook, but it provides more benefits. If your organization is not yet blogging, I hope you’ll ignore the hype and consider a timely, niche blog that speaks directly to your target audiences

     

  • Social Media Gives Each Of Us Our Own Reality Show

    Social Media Gives Each Of Us Our Own Reality Show

    Remember The Truman Show, released in 1998? Truman Burbank thought he was an ordinary guy, but in reality, his whole life was one big reality show. It was a great story but a ridiculous premise.

    In 2003, MySpace was launched. All of a sudden, teenagers had a way to create personal web pages to share their profiles, photos, videos, artistic creations.

    In 2004, Facebook gave college students a way to broadcast their status so that their friends knew how to find them and know what they were up to. Over time, Facebook would open up, allow anyone to create an account, and allow us all to share status updates, photos, videos, interests, and our location.

    After a few years, critics, predicted that privacy would be the downfall of Facebook. Why would people want to share so much of their lives?

    Today, nearly 900 million people share the most intimate details of their lives on Facebook. Millions of people check-in from their current location every hour on Foursquare and other location-based networks. Over 100 million people tweet the details of their lives from Twitter: what they’re thinking, doing, eating, reading. The reality genre is the single, hottest genre on television.

    Just like Truman Burbank, social media has given each of us our very own reality show.

    Think about it. If you subscribe to a friend’s account on FriendFeed, you can see EVERYTHING she’s doing on the Web: what she’s tweeting, what she’s posting to Facebook, her blog posts, her photos on Flickr, her videos on YouTube. It’s sort of like stalking, only we encourage it and we admire those with the largest followers.

    We even title our social media reality shows. On most social networks, I’m jmpineda. I’m not a very big star. I only have 1,591 followers on Twitter, 302 connections on LinkedIn and 233 friends on Faceook. Meanwhile, a good friend has over 1,200 LinkedIn connections, over 10,000 Twitter followers, and nearly 800 Facebook friends. She’s got an amazing Klout score.

    The next time you pooh pooh the reality TV genre, ask yourself: Are you part of the craze with everything you’re posting and sharing on social media? What’s the name of YOUR social media show?

  • It’s All About Mobile and Social At The Olympics

    It’s All About Mobile and Social At The Olympics

    I love the Olympics. During the two weeks that they’re on, I’m up way too late and I spend too much time checking results during the day. I never miss opening and closing ceremonies and watching the swimmers and gymnasts just makes my day.

    Which is why I’m so happy that NBC and the IOC created mobile apps that let me watch all of the races in real-time or on demand. For the first time, I can watch events that don’t normally get any airtime (like tae kwon do) and I can get as much detail as my heart desires on specific athletes, races and sports.

    • I love, love, love NBC’s Live Extra app that lets me watch the events by sport and by day. I was able to get my son to bed with the promise that he could watch Michael Phelps the next morning on the iPad. These videos go beyond the 2 minute highlights on standard news sites. If I want to, I can watch 3 whole hours of swimming finals from each day. There are ads and wait times between races but you can see everything. Amazing. You can also watch Live Extra from your computer.
    • The NBC Olympics app on the iPad has results, news, photos and video highlights. This is where I go for results and short videos.
    • The London 2012 app is terrific. It will tell you everything going on in London this summer, where to go, and how to get there. You can coordinate meetups with friends and you even create a personal calendar. My friend Sue turned me on to this app and she hopes the city of London will keep this app long after the Olympics are over because it’s a great travel app for local and visitors alike.

    There have been all kinds of news stories about how the apps aren’t ready for prime time, NBC is delaying posting the videos, sometimes pages and videos are slow to load, yada, yada. Me, I expect there will be glitches and I’m just grateful that this year’s Olympics are so much more accessible.

    The Olympics aren’t just big on mobile devices, they’ve been HUGE on social media. Every morning, when I check my Twitter and Facebook pages, the people I follow are overwhelmingly talking about the Olympics.

    • I love this branded Twitter hashtag page for #Olympics.
    • I’m enjoying tweets from some of my favorite athletes, even some I never heard of!
    • I’m enjoying status updates from the NBC Olympics Facebook page. I’m tracking the events and results elsewhere but it’s fun to read  the comments. There are nearly 650 comments on the post about Michael Phelps winning his 19th medal!

    How about you? Are you watching the Olympics on your TV or some type of mobile device? Are you participating in the social media frenzy over the races, results and athletes?

     

  • Why Matrix Group Brought Back Its Email Newsletter

    Why Matrix Group Brought Back Its Email Newsletter

    A few years ago, Matrix Group stopped sending out a weekly email newsletter.Why? We were launching a company blog, we were getting more active on Twitter and Facebook, and other organizations were dropping their email newsletters. The marketing staff was spread thin, so killing the Matrix Missive seemed like the right thing to do. We didn’t abandon email; we still send emails about events and service announcements, we just didn’t have a marketing newsletter.

    Several months ago, we revived the Matrix Missive and just today, launched a new newsletter for our Association Management Software product, MatrixMaxx. Why?

    Our target audiences aren’t all on Facebook (shocking, I know.) After years of trying to get all of our clients and prospects to subscribe to the blog and follow us on social media, we’ve decided it’s just not going to happen. The disintermediation that the media keeps talking about is true. Even though we only have several thousand people in our database, they are all over the map in terms of web use, social media and blogging. Our CEO contacts are decidedly NOT on Twitter and Facebook.

    Social media isn’t great for direct marketing and selling. All the research shows that companies and brands that do nothing but sell on social media don’t get the follows they want. So on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and even this blog, we try to provide really great, information-rich content. It’s great for thought leadership but not so terrific for direct marketing. Sometimes we really need to promote our design, development and mobile app expertise.

    Some topics are great in email, utterly boring in social media. On a regular basis, we need to tell clients about upcoming maintenance, new versions of CMS (content management system) software they’re using, upcoming CMS and AMS training, yada, yada. On our social media pages, this stuff is just boring, not at all interesting to a general audience. But to our clients, who need to know when we’re upgrading their systems and what’s in the latest release of the Sitefinity CMS, these communications are vital. Email is just better for certain types of messages.

    Our best response rate comes from email. Every organization is different but when we’re promoting our events and services, email just works best. For example, we offer a Spring and Fall webinar series on a variety of web topics. We promote these webinars through email to our house list, social media, and discussion lists around town. Hands down, most attendees come from our house email list.

    No matter what the platform, the challenge is getting views and clicks. Okay, so we’re back to sending out a regular email newsletter. We get pretty good open and clickthrough rates but as with social media, it’s all about generating good content that people want to read, good writing and a hot subject line.

    So here’s the challenge. How do we create something new and different with our emails that clients, prospects and partners will want to subscribe (and stay subscribed) to our emails and still subscribe to our blogs, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and view our photos on Flickr?

    I’ve blogged before about how we strive for a layered approach with our marketing efforts. We don’t simply post the same content across all channels. Rather, we strive for a layered messaging strategy that utilizes the capabilities of each platform and features different perspectives and voices will help us connect with clients and prospects better. With the relaunch of the Matrix Missive and the new MatrixMaxx newsletter, we’ve brought email back to the mix so that we can talk about projects, promote our events, comment on webtrends and share some fun websites.

    BTW, here’s a sample of the new and improved Matrix Missive. I hope you’ll even consider subscribing!

    How about you? Do you still have an email newsletter? How is the content in your email newsletters different from your website and social media pages? How are you juggling the mix of platforms? What’s working?

  • Are You Suffering From Social Media Fatigue?

    Are You Suffering From Social Media Fatigue?

    Tired Woman Asleep In Front of Her KeyboardA friend asked me recently if I’m on Pinterest, the hot, new social network where users “pin” products, places and articles they like to Pinterest and explore the feeds from their friends. Confession: I’m on Pinterest and I have pinned exactly one thing as of this evening: a beautiful photo of Angkor War in Cambodia.

    BTW, I’m not on Banjo, Path, Glancee or Instagram. I’ve abandoned Amplify (which I just learned tonight is shutting down), Bebo and FoodBuzz.

    Yeah, I know, I blog about social media. I’m supposed to try out everything new, but the truth is, I’m suffering from a bit of social media fatigue. I tweet every day (most days anyway), I do a weekly YouTube interview, I blog for Matrix Group once a week, I blog occasionally as a mom, I post to Facebook personally and for Matrix Group, I try to post to my Google+ page, and I write for several other blogs. Today, there simply isn’t room in my schedule for another nifty site.

    I’m not alone. A recent study by JWT Singapore  found that “50% of young adults find it too time consuming to keep up with all their social media commitments.”

    And yet, 94% of marketers say they use Facebook in their marketing efforts, 74% use Twitter, 41% use blogs and 30% use YouTube.

    It’s clear that social media across a multitude of platforms is here to stay. So how do we, as marketers, prevent social media burnout? Here are some suggestions:

    • Create an editorial calendar that details the topics and themes you want to post about. This prevents a lot of wasted time worrying about what to blog or post about.
    • Develop a reasonable schedule. If you are on social media sites for business, it’s okay to NOT post on the weekends. And if you can’t tweet 10 times a day or update Facebook every day, scale back to a schedule you can manage and stick to.
    • Test out new platforms one at a time, at your own pace. Even though new platforms are coming online every day, you don’t need to be on every single one, unless you have the time and inclination. I like to try something new every few months; it takes that long to figure out how it works, what it’s good for, and if it will work for us or our clients.
    • Abandon platforms that aren’t working. For example, just because 200M people and businesses are tweeting doesn’t mean that you should be, too. If Twitter isn’t meeting your business needs, you’re not getting enough return, or you haven’t figured out how it can be useful in your marketing toolbox, stop using it for a while and evaluate whether your time could be better spent on another platform.
    • You don’t need to be on social media, all the time. I used to beat myself up when I missed tweeting for a day or two. Today, I realize that’s just part of the ebb and flow of my day and frankly, I don’t think my followers notice if I miss tweeting every once in a while. If I stop tweeting altogether, that’s a different story.

    How about you? Are you suffering from social media fatigue? What are you doing to combat it?

     

  • Does Facebook Have Staying Power?

    Does Facebook Have Staying Power?

    Everywhere I turn, I’m hearing about Facebook’s IPO on Friday. The media, economists, pundits and the public are speculating about stock price, total valuation, and on and on. And of course, people are questioning whether or not Facebook will have staying power in the long run.

    Mark Evans from Forbes Magazine warns readers to “Stay away from the Facebook IPO” because of social media fatigue, Facebook is no longer hot and sexy, and Facebook has not figured out how to make money from mobile, which represents nearly half of Facebook’s users.

    A poll by AP-CNBC this month reports that half of Americans think Facebook’s appeal will fade. But if you look closely at the numbers, nearly 60% of those polled under 35 say Facebook is a good bet. And you know how we talk about the 800 pound gorilla? Facebook now reports that it has 900 million subscribers around the globe! Who can argue with numbers like that?

    Me, I’m influenced on this issue by an article written by Michael Mauboussin back in 2005 on ecosystems. Mr. Mauboussin is the Chief Investment Strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management. In the article, Mr. Mauboussin says that “the crucial battle is not between individual firms but between networks of firms.” Ultimately, “keystone companies—businesses at the center of a healthy economic ecosystem—are the most likely to deliver sustainable value creation.” In the article, Mr. Mauboussin was talking about eBay, which has created an entire ecosystem to support its business, including hundreds of thousands of sellers, drop off stores, auction service shops, and payment processors like PayPal.

    Is Facebook a keystone company? On the face of it, I think the answer is yes. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that have created business pages to promote their products and services, hundreds of companies have been formed entirely for the purpose of creating social, gaming and business apps for Facebook, Facebook has thousands of advertisers, thousands of companies are now selling their products through a Facebook store, and there have got to be hundreds of thousands of consulting companies helping clients take advantage of Facebook.

    Like eBay, I think Facebook will lose a lot of its hip and sexy aura, and Facebook will likely develop plenty of rivals. Will Facebook stick around for decades, even generations? No idea. But if people continue to spend a lot of their social time on Facebook and companies and advertisers continue to advertise and promote on the platform, I don’t see how Facebook can be a bad bet. Does this mean I’m going to buy a bunch of stock on Friday? Nope, I’m going to see where the stock settles and then I’ll give it more thought.

    How about you? Do you think Facebook has staying power? Are you going to buy Facebook stock? Do you think Facebook is a keystone company?

    P.S. If you want a copy of Mr. Mauboussin’s article, go to the LMCM Vault, then do a search by Author = Mauboussin and date range = 2005. Sorry, I could not figure out how to get a direct link to the PDF. I think the article is absolutely worth reading. I also highly recommend subscribing to Mauboussin on Strategy, a monthly publication. (Nope, I am not affiliated with LMCM, I don’t own their stock, and I’m not related to anyone there.)

  • Just Say No to Adding More PDFs to Your Website

    We build a lot of websites at Matrix Group and most of them are loaded with PDF files. Clients post PDF files of their newsletters, their legislative updates, their magazines, their white papers, and on and on. While it’s easy to create a PDF from Word, InDesign, Quark or Illustrator, and yes, PDFs look pretty, I think organizations should post fewer PDFs and convert more of their content to html. Here’s why:

    PDF Files Are Not Search-Engine Friendly

    • The user experience when reading a PDF on a monitor or mobile device can be miserable. So many PDFs are formatted with columns, but since screens aren’t necessarily the same size as a printed page, readers often have to scroll up and down to read the same page or reduce the overall size of the PDF, which makes reading the PDF much harder.
    • If you post your entire newsletter or magazine as one PDF file only, you can’t post individual articles to other parts of the site and you can’t tag them by category. Imagine this: a visitor types “green energy” into your site search and she gets back your organization’s legislative position on green energy, several news items, articles from past issues of your magazine, and articles from past issues of your newsletter. If you post your entire newsletter as a PDF, your site search will pull up the issue, but visitors will have to navigate the entire issue to find the specific article.
    • PDF files often don’t contain proper titles needed by search engines. For example, most people just use a PDF creator to create PDFs, never bothering to populate the file’s properties, including Title, Author, Subject and Keywords. Remember that Google first looks at the file’s title and properties to try and figure out what a page is about. If there isn’t a helpful filename or document title, Google scans the document’s content and tries to guess what the page is about, often incorrectly.
    • PDF files don’t contain the markup that provide helpful information to search engines. For example, html files usually contain title tags, body tags and headline tags. The text in your H1 tag provides search engines with the most important topic covered in the the page. PDFs do not contain H tags, again leaving the search engines to guess the topic or most important content in the document.
    • You can’t add mobile styling to PDF files. These days, we use mobile stylesheets and responsive design to make pages behave appropriately for different size screens. A legislative alert on a phone might turn into a single column of text, with no left or right rails; this makes the text readable on a small device without a lot of pinching and zooming. But a PDF stays fixed, which means a person on a phone has to zoom in and out to read your alert; not a great user experience.

    When Should You Use PDF Files?

    • If you want to post an exact replica of the original document. For example, if your organization sent a letter to the White House, you may want to post the text of the letter as html to the site and have a linked PDF of the original letter.
    • If the document needs exact styling. I often see organizations post information in html about a conference and allow visitors to download the beautifully designed brochure as a PDF.
    • If you want to make the full-text of the reference document available. Some of my clients issue lengthy, detailed research reports. To me, it makes sense that they post executive summaries in html but post the entire report as a PDF because most people will want to download or print the full-text of the report.

    Ways to Make Your PDFs More Search-Engine Friendly

    If your site does have PDF files, follow these tips to make the files more findable by search engines.

    • Create PDF files from original electronic files or OCR a scanned document. This way, the text of the document is available to the search engines.
    • Fill out the file’s properties.
    • Rename the file to something meaningful to search engines. If web pages need friendy URLs, PDF files need meaningful and friendly titles as well.

    Want to learn more?

    • Duff Johnson talks about why PDFs are problematic for search engines.
      Joel Geraci has great tips for making your PDF files more search-engine friendly.
    • Mark Aaaron Murnahan talks about how the heading tags improve search engine placement.
    • Galen DeYoung has 11 tips for optimizing PDFs for search engines.
  • The Facebook Timeline is Coming on March 30 – Is Your Organization Ready?

    The Facebook Timeline is Coming on March 30 – Is Your Organization Ready?

    The much awaited Facebook timeline for brands is coming. On March 30, whether you like it or not, your organization’s Facebook page will convert to the new timeline format. Here’s what’s new:

    • It’s All About the Timeline. Facebook says the big, huge deal is the timeline. Facebook will automatically show a timeline on the right side of your page that shows previous months and years. Your fans will be able to click on a month or year and see updates and posts from that time period. Here’s the HUGE DEAL: you can customize the timeline to show events in your organization’s history pre-Facebook. For example, the New York Times’ timeline goes all the way to the 1800s!
    • Brand Image. Your new brand page will have a large cover photo at the top of the page. Instead of a tiny logo and a few photos, your brand page can and will feature a large branding image that you can design yourself. Coca-Cola’s brand image has images from their current advertising campaign, showing happy people of course.
    • Posts and Conversations. The rest of the page is divided into 2 columns to represent the passage of time AND separate your posts from conversations and messages. In the right column, you’ll see messages to your company, posts about you, etc.
    • No More Left Navigation. Many brand pages had multiple tabs along the left rail for their various apps like photos, videos, donation, yada, yada. In the new timeline page, your top 4 tabs will be visible; visitors will have to click to see all of your apps.
    • Messages Between Brands and Users. Finally! Brands and their fans can now have private conversations!
    • Featured Content. The old Facebook pages displayed all posts equally – you had an image, a title and a blurb. The new timeline page lets you feature content at the top of the page. Featured content is bigger and takes up 2 columns for added impact.

    Screen shot of the new Matrix Group Facebook Timeline Page

    So how can you prepare for the new Facebook timeline? Here are our recommendations:

    • Preview your new Facebook page NOW. Don’t wait until March 29 to figure out what your new page will look like. Start looking at it now and making adjustments.
    • Create a cover photo that communicates your brand.  Use the period between now and March 30 to create the image and test it. You may need to make some adjustments. You can test how your cover photo looks by clicking the preview tab at the top of your page. BTW, only admins can see the preview.
    • Review your Facebook strategy. What kinds of posts will you feature? Which apps will be prominent? How will you communicate with your fans?
    • Start featuring posts. Highlight recent posts by hovering over the right hand corner of the post and clicking on the star. You can also remove it by clicking on the star.  If you want to promote a past post, you can actually move it up by hovering on the right hand corner of the post, clicking on the pencil tab in and selecting pin to top.
    • Check your insights page regularly. As a marketer, the Facebook insights leave me wanting for more, but there is more and better data now available, including who recently “liked” the page and recent comments.

    Are you ready for the new Facebook timeline pages? What’s your strategy for taking advantage of the new format and features?

  • Making Our Webinars More Social

    Matrix Group hosts two webinar series each year, one in the Spring and one in the Fall. Topics for this season’s series are Google Analytics, Integrating your CMS with your AMS (association management system), Advanced Twitter and Creating Content-Rich Mash-up Pages. Here’s the issue: although our webinars are pretty well attended and clients tell us that they love them, we weren’t getting many questions during the webinars nor were we getting many responses to the survey that we sent out after each webinar.

    So I challenged my marketing team to come with ways to make the webinars more interactive, more social. Here are some of the ideas that we recently tested during our most recent webinar on Google Analytics (GA):

    • A couple of days before the webinar, we sent out a survey to find out why people registered for this specific webinar and get questions in advance. Half of the attendees filled out the survey. We got great information that we used to customize the webinar.
    • Instead of the usual powerpoint presentation, we decided to use a case study/Q&A format. We compiled a list of most frequently asked questions about GA from the survey and from our recent calls and meetings with clients. The webinar became a conversation between me and my co-presenter, Eric Fair, the resident GA guru at Matrix Group. Instead of talking about what you can do with GA, Eric did a deep dive into the Matrix Group GA reports and showed attendees exactly how we are using campaigns, creating customized dashboards, driving traffic to our site through search and our blogs, yada, yada.
    • During the webinar, a marketing staff person was assigned to monitor the Webex chat and be on the lookout for questions. As a presenter, it’s too confusing to present, run the slides and monitor for questions, so it was helpful to have someone else monitoring the chat window. We got more questions during this webinar and I think the Q&A format made the difference.
    • At the end of the webinar, we announced that Eric Fair would take follow-up questions about GA on our Facebook page. This way, attendees who have a question after the webinar still get a chance to ask it AND we get more interactions on our Facebook page.

    These were small changes but I believe they made our webinar more engaging for attendees.

    How about you? What are you doing to make your events more social? What’s working?

  • Now That’s What I Call a Multilingual Strategy!

    Now That’s What I Call a Multilingual Strategy!

    Crossword puzzle showing many languagesI went to IKEA the other day to pick up a bookcase (doesn’t everyone have an IKEA Billy bookcase?) and a lamp. As usual, I ended up with a bookcase and lamp plus a pillow, chocolate and sparkling pear juice. When I got home and opened all the boxes, I marveled once again at the ingenious packaging and the instructions in multiple languages.

    When my clients at Matrix Group talk about a multilingual strategy, they’re usually talking about Spanish, maybe French. Several have recently taken the dive and are publishing web content in Chinese, Arabic and Russian. But the IKEA instructions make me think that here in the US, we have got to make a HUGE commitment to being a heck of a lot more global and multilingual. Check this out: the little brochure that came with my new pillow has care instructions in 31 languages, including Magyar, Serbian and Bahasa Malaysia!  If you visit IKEA.com, you have a choice of 41 sites in probably 31 languages (at least according to my count!).

    Clearly, global brands like IKEA must adopt a multilingual strategy in order to thrive in the world economy. But I wonder how many US brands have a web presence in 31 languages or more?

    A multilingual strategy like that adopted by IKEA is clearly not possible nor necessary for all companies or brands. I tell my clients that if they want to create a site in another language, they need to be able to respond to the inevitable e-mails, questions and complaints in that language. They also need to think about not just creating a static site in another language, but having an ongoing plan to post news and updates.

    Is Google Translate an option? Maybe. But here’s something to consider. When Matrix Group was designing its holiday card last year, one of our designers plugged Happy Holidays into Google Translate and then cheerfully put the resulting translations into the comp. Trouble is, Happy Holidays doesn’t really translate well into all languages. We might say Happy Holidays in the US as a general holiday greeting, but in the Philippines, you say Maligayang Pasko, or Merry Christmas. Google’s translation of Happy Holidays was a hilarious Happy Vacation.

    So hats off to IKEA for its global, multilingual strategy. And hey, IKEA recently reported a 10.3% jump in net profit for the year ending August 31. Could there be a connection?