Our January 2023 Zoom social mixer

Yesterday, we held our first Zoom social mixer of the year.

The premise for a Zoom social mixer is simple, we gather customers and prospects together online and we make sure we deliver a beverage or food of their choice. There’s quite a bit of legwork involved, as we’re often sending deliveries to three or four time zones.

See also: Our playbook for Zoom social mixers

Customers, prospects, and staff from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Colorado, Florida, Oregon, Texas, and Hawaii joined us for relevant conversations and hosted beverages.

See related: HIPAA Compliant Email: The Definitive Guide

Special guest speaker: Ryan Patrick from HITRUST

In this special edition of our social mixer, we welcomed Ryan Patrick, VP of Adoption at HITRUST, to give a 15-minute presentation about the HITRUST certification and what's new with HITRUST in 2023.

Here are some highlights from his presentation:

• HITRUST is a non-profit organization that develops and maintains a security framework that sets the standard for compliance in the healthcare industry and other highly regulated industries.
• The value of pursuing a HITRUST certification:
  • Requires your organization to adopt a culture around security and mature your security programs.
  • Identifies areas of security risk that your organization should invest in (this is a great tool for getting budget approved for IT and security enhancements).
  • Elevates the level of trust that consumers, partners, and other organizations have in your organization.
• What's new for 2023:
  • HITRUST is introducing new certification tiers for HITRUST, including the Essentials tier which identifies the minimum practices an organization should have in place.
  • Added authoritative sources including NIST SP 800-53 and HICP, among others.
• FYI, Paubox has the highest tier of HITRUST certification.

Discussion highlights from the mixer

Topics included:

• What keeps you up at night? End users was the overwhelming consensus. Training staff to keep up with secure email practices is a big focus for many attendees.
• Preston Terada from Kahala Nui, shared his "3 strikes you're out" policy for phishing training. Consequences for falling for a fake phishing attack increase in scope involving training, managerial involvement, and more. Their policy has ways that employees can wipe their record by completing training and integrates positive reinforcement to encourage employees to keep up best practices.
• Paubox customers are big fans of ExecProtect, Paubox's patented approach to stopping display name spoofing attacks.

Last night's raves for ExecProtect:

"ExecProtect is the best invention since the invention of email security." - Chris P.

"Two weeks after implementing Paubox we had two major spoof[ing attempts] so I was able to tell our accounting department, this is why we pay for this…ExecProtect is legit." - Brandon H.

 

Zoom Social Mixers

The idea of Zoom Social Mixers came to us during the pandemic. Prior to that, we held in-person social mixers across the country.

See related:

• Paubox social mixer in Boston
• Paubox Social Mixer at The Pacific Club (Honolulu)
• Our social mixer at David’s Bar and Grill (Orlando)

Through reading and our own trial and error, it's been our experience that a proper social mixer must include:

• Customers
• Prospects

Once both parties are in the same place, our primary job is to make sure each person has food and drink in their hands. That’s it. No blatant sales talk.

When the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, our in-person social mixers immediately stopped.

The concept of a Zoom social mixer was thus born from a simple premise:

How do we recreate things we used to do in real life (IRL) on the internet?