Eric and Jeff Share Apple Stories and Chat About Google (all in the same show)

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, December 9th, 2015 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I'm with WSI Internet Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. With me this week is my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins. Jeff, say hello to everybody out there in Free Webinar Wednesday world.

Greetings everybody, this is Jeff Simpkins. I'm with Community Bank Consulting, Inc. and you can learn more about me and Community Bank Consulting at www.communitybankconsulting.com.

Excellent. I feel like I am in North Carolina, not Michigan. We had a good friend come over this weekend for dinner and he's got one of the little Nissan Z— if you're in Canada, you say Nissan Zed— sports cars. He said that in all the years that he's owned it, he has never driven it in the month of December. We have no snow. It was close to 50 degrees this weekend here in Michigan. I got in some awesome mountain biking on the trails. It just feels like winter's never going to get here. I'm kind of hoping Santa Claus is going to see some white stuff when he shows up, but I don't know. I bought a fat bike, and I've been riding the heck out of that. And I'll be honest, it's been nice not having to slip and slide on the snow, although the fat bike's pretty much going to ride over anything that you want it to. It's like pedaling an SUV.

So, have you had any snow?

We got snow probably 3 or 4 weeks ago. We got dumped on about 10 inches. It was beautiful, and within a week it was all melted and went bye-bye. It showed once but then disappeared, so we're not holding our breath for snow anytime soon.

Yeah, we're having a spring-like week. It's 61 degrees right now. Tomorrow it's supposed to be 64, 72 on Sunday, so Good few days to enjoy.

Absolutely. Well, we took the RV in and got it winterized, and kind of feel like, you know, better be prepared than—

and on using GoToWebinar, and then after you finish, I want to Mention something to our audience that may be of interest.

Our housekeeping items, if you are joining us for the first time or if you're a repeat visitor and you just like hearing it again, all free Webinar Wednesday sessions are recorded. This is where I kind of sheepishly say, when I get to webinarwednesdays.com, they're made available online. I just seem to have been super busy lately, so my apologies. I've been slacking in getting the email notifications as well as the webinar archives up on the site. In a perfect world, you'll find those at freewebinarwednesdays.com so you can go back and check them out. If you've got questions or comments during today's session, please feel free, if you're listening live, to go ahead and use the chat function. We'll keep an eye on that. If you've got some interactivity there, which we always love hearing from our audience, feel free to go ahead and do that during You have a public service announcement from the folks at AT&T, do you?

I do. One of the issues that I have run into a time or two, as have several other listeners, is the number that comes up first, the 514 area code number, is actually a Canadian phone number. And from my office, which Canada is a local call from, but I've been on my cell phone a couple times, which I use AT&T as my service provider and have gotten dinged for $20 or $30 for free Webinar Wednesdays. Just a little public service announcement to any of you that use AT&T as a service provider. I learned recently that they, they've done some modifications to their plans. Their Family Share plans that have, I believe it's 10 gig of data or more, you can actually add— and you have to go in and do maintenance to your account or call them— but you can actually add from the United States free calling to Canada and Mexico. On a plan of— I think it's 10 gig or greater. They actually have changed their data plans. The data plan that used to include 10 gig of data is now available with 15 gig, so 50% more data at the same price as the old 10 gig plan. Plus it allows you to add the free calling to Mexico and Canada. Another cool thing that they've done is As part of that same package, you can actually travel to Mexico, use your United States serviced cell phone to make calls back to the United States at no additional cost, so no roaming charges or anything like that.

Wow.

I believe— I was just going to say I'm not 100% sure. I think they may have a similar program from Canada, but if you're interested in that, go on— and AT&T is your service provider— go on to their website and check out their service plans. But you want Family Share in order to take advantage of that. Actually, and I'll tell you, Eric, the way I learned about it, I've got some friends that are at a place in their life that they're able to get away for 6 months They live in Colorado and decided they wanted to experience a non-snowy winter. So they are traveling to Mexico and just traveling around Mexico in their RV for 6 months to take a vacation from snow this year. And when they were checking out what their communication options were, they ran across this plan and let me know.

Wow.

The other thing is— When you are in Mexico, you get a limited amount of data as part of that plan at no additional cost as well.

Interesting. Yeah, I know, I haven't checked it recently. We're on Verizon and it seems I've not traveled back to Canada as often. For those of you that are kind of wondering why the default dial-in number is Canadian and not US, because Jeff and I obviously are both here in the US, The GoToWebinar account that we use is actually run through my corporate account at WSI, which is a Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based organization. So the default phone number that comes up if we select Canada and the US is set to Canada. So there's really not any way for us to change that. But the folks at Citrix are a corporate partner of ours, and barring any of the little webinar gremlins that every once in a while jump up and bite us. It's been a pretty reliable source. But anyway, the Verizon plan had an option where I think you could have added it, and I had it on for a while for an additional $10 or $15 a month that gave me Canada and Mexico roaming, but I've taken that off. I don't think that they've made any drastic changes like what the folks over at AT&T have done.

The other thing the AT&T modification does, I mean, I've gotten dinged a couple times for text messaging even to Canada at like, I don't know, 20 cents, 50 cents a pop. If you switch to this new enhanced plan that costs the same, you get free text messaging from the United States to 120 countries. Yeah, my guess is AT&T is doing this for competitive reasons against T-Mobile. I think T-Mobile has added some pretty lucrative or some pretty attractive international roaming plans.

Yeah, speaking of T-Mobile, you're just kind of jogging my thought as we talk about competitiveness in the mobile phone carrier world. One of the platforms, I don't know if you've heard of this before, but it's an effort from Google called Google Fi. And what they have done is they partnered with T-Mobile and Sprint, but they also have enabled Wi-Fi-based calling on their Nexus devices. So if you're at the house, and the whole concept around this is that you can get away with a smaller plan than what you normally would, because if you're at home or if you're someplace where there's a Wi-Fi connection, you can actually use the data connection, not the cellular signal, to place your phone call, so it doesn't incur any minutes. And then when you leave your house or you leave the office, it has a seamless handoff within it. So when you jump off of a Wi-Fi network, it'll grab whichever signal is strongest, whether that be a Sprint or a T-Mobile signal. And, you know, there have been a number of reviews that I've read. I'm a big fan of This Week in Google, part of the TWiT, This Week in Technology, the TWiT network, which has got some really great podcasts. And Leo Laporte tested it, and there's several people within those different webinars and podcasts that have used Fi and say that the handoff actually works pretty good. They'll leave the house, get in the car, drive down the road, And the person on the other end never even realizes that you've actually taken off and switched networks. And if you get out of a Sprint signal and T-Mobile is stronger, it's going to flip over and grab a T-Mobile as well. So you've actually got 2 networks to work with, plus Wi-Fi-based calling. So the one caveat— and I know, Jeff, you're a— I don't know if you still actively use it, but Google Voice— back in the day it was known as Grand Central— but the Google Voice number. The one thing that I have heard is FYI will give you the opportunity to port your Google Voice number over. I've heard if you have a Google Voice number, don't do that. Get a different number because when you port your number over to the FYI, you lose several of the call features that are included with Google Voice and there's no way to get them back. So if there is folks listening that have a Google Voice number Certainly, it'll give you the option. You'll think, wow, that's a really cool idea. It's Google. I'll swing everything over. Don't, because the folks that have done it have regretted it, unfortunately. So, but it's interesting you mentioned T-Mobile. You know, T-Mobile and Sprint seem to be the laggards in this area. So with Google now kind of using both of them, And Wi-Fi. I don't know if that gives them a huge competitive advantage to the Verizons and the AT&Ts, but the Wi-Fi calling is saving people a good deal of money on their bill. Kind of cool. So it is, as you can see, it's invite only right now, so you do have to request an invite, and it does require a Nexus-based device. But if you're interested, pop over to fire.google.com and check it out. Thanks, Eric.

I read a service that— I don't remember if Greg McPherson is who introduced us to this, but a service I used for a while, I think you have used, and I've referred other people to that really love it, is Mailbox which is owned by Dropbox. It's going away in February. Oh, is it really? It is. They sunset it and I think they've set an end date of like February 6th or something like that.

I never used it. I know Mailbox had an option. I know Google's Inbox is a different way of also looking at your Gmail. Organizes things a little differently which is what I think Mailbox was also trying to do. Dropbox also made the announcement that their photo management app, which is called Carousel— I've used that since it came out. If you're a Dropbox user, and I have a paid account with Dropbox, any of the photos that you take on your mobile device, you can tell Dropbox to synchronize those. For a while, it actually made those photos available through a separate app called Carousel, which I thought was kind of cool because You could create different portfolios and folders. It gave you a really nice kind of drag-and-slide timeline. If I needed to find a picture last year when I was in Madison at the Graduate School of Banking, and I knew I was there last August, I could just grab the timeline and go to August of 2014, and there were all my pictures from my time at GSB. I got an email from Dropbox saying that they are sunsetting Carousel program and going to be incorporating some of the features of Carousel into the native Dropbox photo folder photo feature. It's kind of interesting, and I don't know if we'll see the same trend with Facebook or some of the others, but a lot of the big Web 2.0, 3.0 companies started unbundling their apps about a year, 2 years ago. You saw Facebook roll off Messenger, Pages Manager, they've got a different photo sharing app with Friends. LinkedIn created Connected and Pulse. So they splintered all these different apps into different standalone apps, and now we're starting to see people kind of bring these apps back underneath one centralized app because maybe they're realizing that We're at a point of app saturation and we just don't want any more apps. Give me one app that does what I need to do and let me navigate within it to get what I need to get. It'll be interesting to see what's going on there. Let me see if I can pull up—

I think Google does a pretty good job of introducing apps for specific purposes and then bringing them all together under Their suite that many of us use is Google Apps for Business. Some just use it as regular Gmail with the add-ons. But an example I'll give is I like Google Photo. It's just an amazing mobile app. I use it on the iPhone. I suspect you use it on the Android.

Yes.

It does some really cool things. It automatically creates movies from groups of shots and other things. Things like that. You have the option of bringing all of that stuff into Drive, which I've done. I really like the way it gives you an app for a specific purpose. It does a really good job in the app for that purpose, yet it can incorporate it under a single tree of all of their products in a place that you can access online.

At the risk of just pulling up in a separate A separate little note here. You mentioned Google. If you're not using Photos, they provide a free version that you can get. Of course, if you're using Google+, it comes along with it. The cool part about Google Photos is the intelligence that's built within it from a search perspective. I'm just going to do a quick search. Of course, they didn't come up. Whoops, I spelled your name wrong. Let me see if it finds anything. Nope, it doesn't. If I go into my Google Photos and I do a search for dog, it gives me a quick way where Google is recognizing and tagging photos. You can see here's Lily chilling out on some pillows on the floor. That's my brother's dog, which is a completely different breed in a completely different house. There's some sheep that thinks there's a dog, which is kind of funny. You mentioned— and I'll kind of give it a second to hang out here— you mentioned the ability for Google Photos to create different sorts of things for you. This is an animated GIF image that was created. I took a series of photos. Of Lily and Ryder enjoying some pup cups from Starbucks. And it took all of these pictures and stitched them together as an animated GIF. And you can see it's got the little sparklies up here that give you the indication that it's created something for you. So I don't know, Jeff, is that— are the dogs licking their pup cups coming across on the webinar?

Say that again, Eric.

Is the animated dogs enjoying their pup cups coming through via the webinar screen share?

It is. Yeah, it is. One thing I'll tell you is I have about 20,000 pictures in my photo library. Sort of like with my music, I keep it backed up on several places. It gets backed up with my backup service. It gets— so I use kind of Photo from Apple as my hub for all of my photos. Everything that's in Apple Photo then goes over to Google Photo. It also gets backed up on Amazon. One of the things that I'll tell those of you that are creating the animations on Google Photo is you actually have to go into it and save it as a movie for it to get— for the animation to actually get picked up on Apple Photos. There's some tricks to getting those to move from application to application.

Yep. It also will recognize either based off a geotag that's associated with the photo or it can look for recognizable landmarks which is kind of cool.

That is really fascinating.

Some of these are legitimately from Paris. This is Lafayette.

I've actually scanned family photos and had it identify the place that the photo was taken when it was a scan of a paper photo.

Yeah.

It's not perfect by any means. The other thing that it will do is it will— it's not 100% on face recognition.

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure when I pick bicycles, it pulls up pictures of my dog unless I took pictures of biking while I was on the same There's my after-bike pizza, so I guess that's legitimate. It looks like it's by no means perfect, but it does have some pretty cool capabilities to it which are kind of neat. One of the things that I wanted to share during today's call, and it's not that I'm opposed to Apple, I've got a MacBook Pro. I know.

Pro.

Actually, I've had a couple of them over the years. I've not switched to an iPhone or an iPad. I've got Android devices. Although I had an experience with Apple, and I know everybody talks about them having good customer support, I had an experience with Apple that I wanted to share because I thought it was worth repeating. And in my opinion, they really went above and beyond. And I'll abbreviate this as best I can, but I recently had a situation where my computer, the U and the Y and the I and the O keys stopped working. I called AppleCare, and I will caveat this by saying this is a 2011 MacBook Pro that I upgraded the hard drive to a solid-state hard drive, so it's not even the original hard drive on it anymore. It's at least a year, if not 2 years, out of AppleCare because I think AppleCare only lasts for 3 years. But despite the fact that I'm out of AppleCare, I called. They took care of me, spent about half an hour on the phone, tried troubleshooting it, and unfortunately couldn't figure out a way to fix it with screen sharing and software, you know, little keystrokes. So they suggested I took it into the Apple Store, and the closest one for me is over in Ann Arbor. So I had to be up north. My wife took it in to depot it. Now where the story kind of goes off the rails a little bit is unfortunately the gentleman that helped her with the check-in of the laptop, I will not go into details, but suffice to say it was a less than desirable experience for my wife. She was treated rudely, and the guy must have just been having a really bad day, but totally uncharacteristic of Apple, but my wife was really upset. They reached out to me afterwards just to see how the visit went, and I shared my opinion. They were shocked and asked if they could escalate it to a manager, and I said, absolutely, I'd appreciate that actually. The laptop arrived yesterday, and when it got here, I found out that it had the hard drive swapped back to a 500 gigabyte hard drive. And they included the 1 terabyte drive that I had upgraded to, but in the notes it said that the hard drive was unrecoverable, which seemed very strange because it was working fine other than the keys not working. And they swapped out a bunch of memory and put a new keyboard on it and put a new chassis around. I mean, basically they sent me a brand new 2011 MacBook Pro. laptop, but the fact that I had purposely upgraded to the 1 terabyte caused me concern because if I go restoring all of my data, I'm going to run out of space. I called them back, shared my experience. They looked in the notes, explained that that really was policy, but they were very concerned about the way that my wife was treated. The Apple technician that I spoke with said, I really can't do anything more on your hard drive. I suggest getting in touch with the store. Maybe they would be able to help you. Without me having to call the store, the store manager of the business department reached out to me, read all the notes, and said, we feel really bad. I think it must have been a recurring issue. I don't know if the gentleman that waited on my wife is even still there. And there's a lot of different ways that they could have taken care of this and made me happy, but they blew me away and said, if you bring your computer back to us, we'll give you a new 2015 15-inch MacBook with a terabyte hard drive, twice the RAM that is included because it has more RAM capacity now. I was shocked. I wasn't surprised because I've heard of Apple doing amazing things like that where people have taken in their phone or they've taken in a computer where the Ethernet port's broke and they're like, you know what, we'll just get you a new laptop, you'll be all set. But I never expected that to happen to me. And I'm telling this story, one, because I want to spread the word and reinforce the fact that holy crap, I can't believe how well they took care of me. But also, Jeff, I will tell you, if there is a time for them to sell me an iPhone, it's right now.

That's funny.

I don't know if Apple's listening to this or not, but holy smokes, that was amazing.

That new feature that you actually press hard on the iPhone screen, when I heard about it, I thought that's lame, but I have to admit I've gone in the Apple Store and played with it a few times, and it seems pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah.

So are you willing to share with us how much this, this new MacBook cost you? Oh, I—

it's not going to cost me anything. They're going to give it to me.

You had to pay for the repair, didn't you?

Yeah, the repair I think was a couple hundred bucks because it was outside of warranty, and that's fine. Um, man, there's, there's You know, and their cost probably isn't obviously nearly what retail is, so I know that there's some pretty significant markup in all of these, and for them having a fanboy out there sharing the story, you know, not that everybody's going to be able to send their wife in to get poor treatment and get a free computer out of it.

I was going to say, Alicia should send a thank you note to the jerk who gave her such a bad time.

Depending on, you know, a $4,000 computer with a really, really upset wife that isn't willing to help you in the future, you know, may not even be worth it. So you kind of have to pick your battles there. But, you know, I've never hesitated buying a MacBook. I know that they tend to be a little bit more expensive than others, and I've been running off of a Lenovo in the interim, which I have as a backup for this exact purpose, and that's been a great machine. But I'm willing to bet that Lenovo or Toshiba or anybody, while they certainly would take care of you, I have a hard time believing that the level of resolution where it would be somebody just— he called me up and he said, hey, it's Matt at the business center. I talked to my colleagues. It was funny. He said, unfortunately, you are going to have to come back to the store. And I'm like, oh great, what's he going to do? He says, but when you get here, we'll just swap it out for a new one. And I was just about like, okay, well, I'm just going to get in my car right now then. So that's not unfortunate at all. I'm happy to do that. So, you know, think about— and I guess I'm telling that story also to think about, you know, because when things go sideways in your business, It may not be you, it might be an employee, it might not even be a situation that you can control. The short-term loss of going above and beyond and fixing a problem versus the long-term gain of taking somebody that's been wronged and turning them into a raving fan, I think that's what Apple has done here, and they've done that several times in the past. I've heard that. I told the story to a friend of mine. And he's like, yeah, they did that for a buddy that had something minor and they couldn't fix it. And I had a friend of mine stop by on the way back from the airport to have a phone looked at, and his wife had an issue and they just gave her a new phone. No questions asked, no guilt. It has to be legitimate, but I just thought that was really cool. And I wanted to publicly give Apple some kudos for stepping up to the plate and taking care of things. Who knows, Jeff, you might be seeing me with an iPhone in my hand in the very near future, which I'm sure would be an even better feather in the cap of the Apple folks after today.

I don't think Greg McPherson would believe it if you got an iPhone.

He would be the first person I would call on it, probably.

I had a good Apple story this week that's not nearly as good as yours, but It is also reinforcement that overall they have their challenges, but I think for the most part they really do an outstanding job with customer service. I had originally set up my subscription to Apple Music for a family plan. It was $15 a month and just ended up not using it. I tried to set up the family plan features and there are some things about it I didn't like. And I couldn't figure out how to switch back to an individual plan. So the difference of $10 worth versus $15. And a couple months passed, and finally this week I had a few minutes and I thought, okay, I'll just chat with Apple support. And immediately got connected with somebody, told them what I was trying to do. The guy actually switched it for me. He said, you're gonna—

be charged.

Is that okay? I said, well, it's fine, but if you can give me a month free, that would be even better. He came back a few minutes later and was more generous than giving me a month free. Not on the level of your experience, but also something that I really appreciate.

You get a MacBook Pro out of it.

I didn't, but it still made me— didn't do anything to change my feelings of loyalty towards Apple.

Yeah, so I— it was a good experience. So I got a couple follow-up emails from some of the other guys in the department, and, you know, of course I called the senior technician back and thanked him again. 'Cause obviously he put some notes in the case that kind of, you know, gave everybody all the information. And I resisted the urge. I typed up the email when I gave my feedback, and I let it sit for a little bit, which I would advise, because when you are emotional like that, you may say some things that you'll regret. So I let it sit for a little bit and went back and I reread it. I changed a couple of things. So I tried to keep it professional and constructive. Which is maybe sometimes uncharacteristic, especially if somebody's being rude to my wife. I usually am going to get my claws out and be very confrontational and jump right back at them. But they said that, you know, you handled it the right way. You gave us, you know, the facts and didn't get emotional. We really appreciate that. You could have gotten very upset.

You didn't.

So obviously this is something that you thought about, and we're apologetic about what this did to your wife. And We really want to make sure that you leave with a good taste in your mouth with Apple and do the right thing. It was cool. I was very impressed. Good stuff. Friday I get my new toy. Now the only downside is I have to reinstall everything and get it set up, but that will be a labor of love, I suppose. I'll be doing it with a smile on my face over the weekend, so it's all good.

It doesn't tend to be that hard with CrashPlan. Or similar services.

Yep, so shouldn't be too difficult. My biggest challenge is going to be network connectivity. I might have to stop by the local coffee shop and see if I can borrow their Wi-Fi for a little bit. A couple of things that I kind of had on my list to chat about, I know we've already scratched the surface a little bit on Google, but there were a few things Recently with Google that I also wanted to mention. One of those happens to be particularly in the banking industry. So for the bankers that are sitting in on this, maybe pay attention. The website thefinancialbrand.com actually had an article talking about this. But Google has been known for obviously its search prowess, and it has Google Shopping, and there's been discussions and talk about them creating an online shopping service that could potentially compete with the folks over at Amazon and eBay. They have recently launched, and it's only in select states now, but they've recently launched a Google Mortgage service, and it's been in the UK under a slightly different name for about a year. But what's going to happen over time here in the States is if you are looking for a mortgage loan, you can go and start a search and put in information Google will aggregate mortgage information. It looks like right now they're working with primary partners Zillow and LendingTree. If you are a financial institution, you also, I think, have the ability to request a direct connection with them. I don't know if there's any sort of mortgage volume size or bank size that you have to meet in order to do that. You know, whether you are a bank or a consumer or you are in a business that also offers a product that could very well be the next target of Google, it's kind of interesting to see, you know, how this works. I know that there's a service out there called MortgageBot that has had a platform called Mortgage Marvel for a number of years, which aggregates MortgageBot client sites, and MortgageBot provides services for online lending to banks and credit unions. You can go to MortgageMarvel and you can kind of do the same thing. LendingTree has always had the tagline, when banks compete, you win. Google is just basically taking that to the next level and doing it themselves. If you're interested in buying a house, you can go into purchase mortgages, for example, You can plug in— now zip code-wise, I can't get a quote here in Michigan because they're not in Michigan yet, but you can go in and essentially put in the information, indicate what credit score range you're in. If you want to enter more information, you can, and then that will just further help with the validation process. And then on the back end, you know, banks are basically going to be paying for these leads for customers to get mortgage loans. So, I mean, Jeff, you work a lot in the banking space. I'm wondering, is this anything that's hit your radar yet? Is this something that you think your clients would be excited or scared about? I've got several of my clients that are just wondering, how do we at least get included so that our mortgage rates will show up as an option? What are your thoughts?

I think this is the way that the financial services business is moving. There are so many places that you can get financial services type products today. I think that, you know, I did a presentation for your banker series recently on branch transformation. We didn't really talk about this, but I think part of branch transformation for community banks, the group that I specialize in working with and you do as well, is that the branch not only has to make a transformation inside the brick-and-mortar or the physical spaces, but it also has to integrate services and tools that are available outside the brick-and-mortar space, and I think this is an example of one such tool. Honestly, I think financial institutions that don't embrace this are really missing the boat. What about you? You come from banking. You actually worked in a bank more recently than I did. I'm interested in your thoughts.

I agree. I think the challenge that this is going to present for a community bank, because, you know, I'm an avid component of the community bank model and the smaller, you know, institution, you know, the challenge that they're going to have is if they have to participate through a LendingTree or a Zillow, those are services that cost money. And if they're going to set up through those services and it's going to cost them money to participate, And then they're going to have to pay a referral fee when they get a loan application. That's going to cut into profitability for the bank, and it may be one of those necessary evils that you either do it and accept the fact that you're going to get 80% of the revenue that you would have normally gotten, or you don't get any of it. But it's becoming more and more of a challenge for, I think, the smaller community banks. and credit unions to be able to maintain their viability as more and more things— because what's going to happen here is the big banks that are able to offer the great rates and have the money to pay for the services and the fees are the ones that are going to come out of this. Not that everybody is going to go to Google for a mortgage, but the next generation, it's kind of the Google generation. We go online and we search first. People that are our age, if we need a mortgage, we're gonna go back to the company or the bank where we got our first mortgage and where our checking account is. We've got that sense of loyalty. But again, I know you and I talk a lot about banks because that's our background, but I think just from a general consumer perspective, whether you're an attorney and you've got services, you know, like LegalZoom and other sorts of, you know, that can displace you, well, Why would I call my attorney when I can go on to LegalZoom and I can get information that way, or I can download an LLC form, and then if I want to talk to an attorney, it costs me $50 versus $150. I think the digitization of the search process and the information gathering, I think, is one that is going to cause lots of different industries a challenge and cause them to rethink their business model. You know, you go back, you mentioned your branch transformation, you know, webinar you did for me last month. One of the options was an intelligent ATM machine, which replaces several people tellers with technology. And in that cost savings, instead of maybe that money running to the bottom line and saving money, maybe the cost savings that you experience from creating a more efficient process has to be used as an expense to be visible in different market areas. So it's a break-even, and you, you just increase your visibility, but you're necessarily not saving money or making any more money, but you're allowing yourself to maintain status quo or possibly go up a notch. But it'll be interesting when this starts rolling out into different areas, and if it really is just big banks only, or You know, the Quicken Loans and the big mortgage brokers that are there dominating because they can offer maybe the lower rates because they don't have as much overhead as a traditional bank. But then you get into service-related issues and, you know, who's servicing the loan, who do you go to if you've got a question. None of that really matters until something happens and you need to get in touch with somebody. Having a community bank taking care of your mortgage certainly has an advantage in those instances. And I just don't know if that's really going to be conveyed through a service like this when you're just shopping on price only. So anyway, curious if any of our live attendees have got any thoughts on this, but I think it's a sign of things to come. And again, last week's show I talked about how awesome The Amazon app was because I was able to, you know, look at stuff and do impulse buys. Some of the things that I bought, I very well could have bought from a local store or a local retailer, but I bought them on my phone and I bought them less expensively. So, you know, it's, I guess, a catch-22 when it comes right down to it. Other thoughts on this before we move on to the next item?

Let's go to your next tab.

Yeah. The other element, and I caught this in a couple of the podcasts that I listen to, a lot of times if I'm on a flight or if I'm out for a run or taking the dogs for a walk, you know, This Week in Google is one of the networks that I go to and I like listening to their stuff. There's been a lot of talk about Google+ and Google's social network. They've made some changes, they removed some things, and so I've held off on going through the Plus Hey, What's New process until we're on Free Webinar Wednesday. I'm trusting that it's not going to review any confidential information here. I don't think that it will. If it does, I'll just edit it later. If you are using Plus, I've enjoyed Plus. It's been a pretty cool platform to get information. It's not as cluttered, probably because there's not as many people on it as maybe Facebook. It's got some real nice advantages. Unfortunately, they didn't really take off. I think the 2 things that really were popular with Google+, and we've already talked about one of them, is the photos. I think the other one is the Hangouts functionality and the ability to do a webinar with screen sharing. They recently allowed non-Google accounts to be able to join a Hangout. You can use it almost as a Skype-type replacement, and you can send an invitation to somebody They don't have to log in with a Google+ account if they don't. They just need to tell us about yourself, what's your name and what's your email address. Those 2 things I think are going to live on, but all the other stuff that's been associated with Google+ like circles and news feeds and communities I think are going through some changes. If you've not been to your Google+ page for a while, Google will know that you've not been there. It's going to give you an introduction to the new Google+. If we click on let's go, it's going to go through and now you can see what was my profile now has switched over into the new profile. Maybe I should have taken a screenshot before, but you now have a different layout. It's much more material design, card-based. You can see that these are all the different interests that I've indicated. I can click on view all and it'll give me all the different interests that I've added. It's very much streamlined. If I'm going to go in and talk about anything digital marketing related, you can jump right in. Now you can see all the posts. Instead of it being a linear type feed like what you have in Google, you've got this card-based layout where all the different things are going to start laying out that way. You can pop back over into your home area here. Then they're giving this new option called collections, which is a relatively new feature where you can take certain posts and you can either follow things that other people have started to create. If I want to go in and take a look at specific golden retriever photos or digital marketing. These are different collections and categories. You can see, let's go, you can go ahead and do a search. If I wanted to search for golden retrievers, I could go in and see if I could find anybody that's got a cool collection of golden retrievers. Here's one that's got some followers and then anybody that's got a golden. Not a tremendous amount of activity going on here, but this kind of gives you some ideas. So it takes still some commitment to force yourself to go to Google+. Most people are hanging out on Facebook. I think I shared in our— there's Google+ and Facebook and an actual community right there. I think I shared after I got back from our global convention earlier this year, many of the folks that came in that were speakers If your business isn't present in Facebook or doing advertising in Facebook, the reality is, while people may not necessarily be going to Facebook to look for you like what they're doing when they do a Google search, the reality is that Facebook is where people are going to find you. Facebook is providing the tools to be able to present your advertising to targeted markets and segments and activities and be behaviors and characteristics. It just seems to be where everybody is at. If you force yourself to hop out of Facebook and end up over in Google+, there's still a lot of great information here that you can glean. They've changed it quite a bit. You're going to probably have to reacclimate yourself if it's something that you're interested learning about. Jeff, I don't know, do you ever spend much time in Google+ or has this just been an area that never really piqued your interest?

I have barely touched Google+. I have people in circles but I've never really spent any time there.

Yep, and from what I understand, even the circle concept, which I think in theory— and if you're not familiar with circles, just real briefly, what Google did when it came out with Plus is it came up with the idea of a circle being a group of people or characteristic that anybody in that circle shares. So it could be your family, it could be business acquaintances, it could be customers, it could be prospects. The whole reason around that is when Google+ was created or released, there was a lot of hullabaloo going on about Facebook's privacy settings and the fact that people didn't know how Facebook was sharing their information. People were worried that data was going outside of where they thought it was supposed to go. That was, I think, Google+'s big push that, hey, with circles you have the ability to control who sees your information. If you do a post and you only want your family members to see it, then you just share your family circle and that's where it stays. The reality is, I guess, 2 things. One, Facebook has that capability now where you can create different lists and you can create a family list and a business list and a prospect list and a customer list, but nobody uses it. I don't know if nobody uses it because it's inconvenient or if they just don't know about it, but regardless, people don't use it. I think what Google found was people weren't using that on an ongoing basis. It was kind of a cool feature when it was originally released, but it wasn't something that people were actually going to use on a regular basis. When somebody goes to a social network and they want to share something, they just want to share it. You think about Twitter, you either share it or you don't. It's either public It's Facebook or it's not. I think that's the mentality that most people now have. I don't know if it's people are just getting lazy and they don't care about privacy or if they're over it or more trusting or whatever the case is, but I just get the impression from Google and what I've read and heard that they just didn't think that it was worth the effort to continue. I think at some point, there's still the way where you can go ahead and create an option. You can see right here I can go ahead and post it, but you don't really see where you've got the ability to— okay, you've got this public now, and then you have to see more, and then when you go down into see more, then you are going to be presented with all the different circles. I can restrict that to only my company directory. I can share it with a post. If I scroll down to the very bottom, now you can see I've gotten to my circles. If I want to share this post only with people in my banking circle or only with other people that have been Free Webinar Wednesday speakers in the past, it's quite a cumbersome process. You're not going to want to go through that for every single one. They continue to I guess push that a little bit further away from the experience and just realize everybody just wants to be a transparent open book. When you post, it goes. That's just the way that it's going to be. I don't know. We'll see how much longer Google+ hangs on. I'm glad that they splintered off the photos. I'm glad they splintered off Hangouts. You can see that those no longer show up over here as part of the navigational components of Google+. They're now standalone. Those, I think, will continue to survive regardless of what happens with Google+. It's already pretty apparent Jeff and I are big fans of Google Photos. Anyway, food for thought. I'm sorry, I'm I guess the only other thing, started getting a couple more questions on that I'll mention. If you've not done so yet, you can go to Google My Business, and this is where you can go out. Tom Petty, not the heartbreaker, but the digital marketer from California, has been on the show a couple of times in the past.

Yes.

We've talked about sometimes the changes that Google has with regards to claiming your page, but making sure that your business is present. I think one of the things that will, I think, be a powerful component, even if you're not using Google+, but if your customers have a Google account, they're logged into Gmail or something along those lines. There are ways to leverage Google+, Google Search, Google for Mobile, Google Maps. While you may be showing up in just generic organic search, if it's somebody that's been to your site in the past and they've been logged in with any of the many different Google applications, that increases the likelihood that you and your business will be presented to them in the future. If you're a business, you probably really don't care how you're presented, but just the fact that you are presented when somebody is doing a search. You don't necessarily need to know that the reason that you showed up is because you've been previously exposed to the brand and you're logged in as Gmail and it knows the attorney's office or the pizza shop. All that you care about is that the customer or the potential customer sees your name, clicks on your listing, and contacts you because they want to buy whatever it is that you're selling. The process is pretty easy to go through. You can just go to this Google My Business and click on Get on Google, walk through the process. Of course, this is a service we provide, so if you need help, we can certainly assist with that, but I don't think it's one that, quite honestly, if you've got some time, sit down and kind of walk through It's one that I think is time well spent. So if you've not done this yet, I encourage you to go get your Google My Business page set up and get that taken care of. We're at the top of the hour, and I had my little checkmarks on my discussion. Anything that you want to mention before we adjourn?

I'm good.

You're good. I had put the announcement out for episode 9, but I hadn't put the link to actually register for it. I'm very excited. Deborah is going to be joining me for episode 9 on legal technology and social media issues. And granted it says for community bankers, but really any of the things that a business, particularly in the area of policies and procedures— I've seen her slides, she's got things on mobile devices and bring your own device and Bitcoin and alternative payment currencies. Android Pay is starting to make a big push now in the TV commercials with Visa talking about ways to use your Android device in addition to Apple If you've got availability next Tuesday at 3 PM, go ahead and click on this big old green button here and this will take you to the registration page where you can reserve your spot and join us for next week's episode. We'll look forward to hopefully seeing you there. With that, I think we are done for this week. We'll put this one in the can. Thanks, Jeff, for being my co-host as always.

Thanks, Eric.

Maybe next week we'll be touching base and I'll have snow here, but I'm not going to hold my breath. We'll go ahead and get this recording and the one from last week onto freewebinarwednesdays.com here shortly. We'll look forward to seeing you next week and every week here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, have a good week everyone. Bye-bye.