Exploring the Power of LinkedIn Polls (and a bit of a personal rant)

Alright. Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, August 5th, 2020 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook here coming to you from beautiful northern Michigan, our cottage on the shores of Houghton Lake. I am WSI Digital and now thelinkedbanker.com. Pop out to either poweredbywsi.com or thelinkedbanker.com to learn about us and all the stuff that we do to help community bankers fulfill their awesomeness online. I don't know if that's necessarily a tagline that's gonna stick, but I'm gonna go with it. I am really excited to bring you today's show. I've got a few things that I wanna talk about and then, I might do a little rant at the end because I've got something I wanna get off my chest in, if you'll indulge me. But we'll see. So anyway, before we get started, today's show and all shows are recorded and made available when I get around to it on freewebinarwednesdays.com. So I know I'm a little backlogged. The show we had last week with Ellie from our team was pretty awesome. We talked about Instagram Stories and TikTok and a bunch of different ways to build out your brand online and use some cool tools and some apps. And I just have not unfortunately had time to push that out to Free Webinar Wednesday. So I think there's 2 or 3 shows that I gotta get out there. So this has been a super busy couple of weeks. And as you may recall, I was down in Pennsylvania. Technology wasn't exactly the best as it related to Wi-Fi connectivity and data speeds. So I, um, didn't get a chance to upload those. And then when I got home, boom, all of a sudden things just got super busy. So it is on my list. I'm hoping to get a little bit of weekend time to hunker down and get those things taken care of. So thank you all for your patience while we get that organized. Um, I've got my Amazon shop Up, and I think I've talked about this before, but as I was sipping some coffee out of my Ember mug, the one thing that I love about this is it keeps my coffee warm all day long. It sits on a little pad, it recharges, it's got a Bluetooth connector that tells my phone exactly how warm my coffee is, which might be a little overkill. I don't know if I necessarily need that. But as I was sipping my coffee and jotting notes on my Rocketbook, I thought I would just use today's show just as a quick reminder because I do get a lot of questions from folks wanting to know about the gadgets and the little gizmos that I use. So you can go to amazon.com/shop/ericcook. You can see the Ember mugs in there. Got a couple of other cool tech things. And then from a productivity perspective, got my Rocketbook with Notes, which is the erasable note-taking, scanning, OCR character recognition platform. So it's pretty awesome. And a few other things that I use on a regular basis. So you can browse around. And if you're looking to spend some of that money since we're not going out to restaurants and we're not traveling and we're not doing anything that would cost us to spend money otherwise, You can go out to Amazon and give them some of your hard-earned money. I'm sure they'll appreciate it and make Jeff Bezos an even richer guy than he already is. So enjoy, and if there's a cool app or a gizmo or some sort of a tool that you use that you think is pretty awesome that you want to make me aware of, go ahead and drop a note and let me know. I thought what I would do is share with you because we have a lot of my banker friends that will join Free Webinar Wednesdays, and I thought I would just share. A couple of upcoming events that I'm going to be at, and one of those is an event that I was already at. This is a new channel. Um, I love the name Badass Banking, and so I've— you can see there's my little picture right down there. Ex-banker turned branding on social media. So I was, uh, busted out my, um, my Home Depot glasses because the other ones that I had been wearing Are at the bottom of Houghton Lake after having a little too much fun on a WaveRunner with my niece. So those disappeared. But, you know, Home Depot, nine bucks. They look pretty cool. And I actually got somebody on Twitter that complimented me on my glasses. So I guess I've got that going for me. But if you go over and you just do a search, and you're interested in banking and kind of the badassery that we're trying to bring back. to the world. Brian Claggett is the, uh, the guy behind the scenes. He's the one on the right-hand side of all of the, uh, interviews. And so he's created this channel, he's got a YouTube, uh, presence that he's starting to build, he's created a Twitter account, um, so you can go out and learn. But in the banking space, there's a lot of cool things that are going on, and with fintech and most customers spending their time at home and using mobile apps and different sorts of services to make it easier to use a bank these days than there ever have been before. We think that there's actually a little bit of badassness, if that's even a word, to the banking industry. And so Brian's making an effort to try to interview and bring people on his YouTube show that are talking about just different ways trying to shake up the banking industry. And I was really fortunate to have a conversation with him Monday night. It was after hours. So you'll see me sipping a little glass of Blackened Whiskey. If you're not familiar with that, it's actually aged in barrels to Metallica music, which is pretty awesome in and of itself. So hop on and go out to like Blackened American Whiskey. I think you can Google search for them and hear their story or Blackened Whiskey. Maybe that's the URL. But I talk about the, the development and the launch of the Linked Banker, which we're having our kickoff call on Thursday of this week, and a few other things that are going on. So if you're interested in a good chuckle and wanna listen to somebody that thinks he's badass because he's wearing sunglasses, you can hop over and check out that YouTube interview with Brian. We had a really good conversation. A couple of other things that are coming up for those of you that are bankers, and if you're in Ohio, you may already be at this convention, so you're probably not listening to Free Webinar Wednesdays, but I'm really excited. The Community Bankers Association of Ohio has asked me to be part of their annual virtual convention. Um, earlier this week, I participated in the Maryland Bankers Association's banking school. Normally I travel to Maryland and do a session with the seniors, but I did it virtually yesterday morning, and that went great. It was awesome to see everybody talking about social strategies and whatnot. Got some good questions. But the annual convention for the CBAO is coming up, so you can see I'm listed. Of course, I'm way at the bottom, but listed on there. The thing that I'm also pretty excited about is Peter, who is an attorney over at Hunt and Andrews in Kerth, he is actually going to be joining our faculty, or he has joined our faculty for the Graduate School of Banking's Digital Banking School. So a couple of the other events that are coming up down the road for me is the Digital Banking School, which I've talked about here on the show before. We actually came up with this idea to help build a school to help bankers understand and figure out ways that they could digitize their banks. We started this program and the discussions around the DBS back in spring of 2019, before COVID was even an issue or even a thought that something would happen that would cause us to have to hunker down and stay at home and really concentrate on digital. Well, when that hit us in 2020, the good news was we already had a tremendous amount of momentum. We had presenters and faculty members largely selected. And so as part of the digital banking school, you can see, I think he's on here somewhere. So there's Peter. And so he's on— this school sold out like that. I mean, we had 30 spots before we even really started aggressively promoting the program. It sold out. So we've added a second session with another 20 spots that I think already is half full. So if any bankers out there are listening to this, either live or on the recording, which we'll get up to the web sooner than later, but if you're listening to this and you're interested in being part of the program, you better act fast because this is filling up very quickly and we're really excited about taking bankers through the evolutionary process of all of the different things that need to be thinking about as it relates to digitizing their brand. We're gonna talk about vendor management, compliance issues, talent training, employee staffing, cybersecurity. I'll be talking about the marketing and the relationship building process online. And the last session, we're gonna have 8 total sessions, is gonna be a panel discussion with 3 bankers from banks that have gone through this evolutionary process and really kind of give it a culmination Explain what worked, what didn't work. And as people move forward after the school completes, provide some insight on what their first move should be and the mistakes that these banks made. And if they had to do it over again, what they wouldn't do again to help move the needle further, faster, I guess, for lack of a better, better phrase. So, just doing a quick check. I saw that there was a question on the chat area, but it looks like that was A false alarm. So no big deal there. If I didn't mention it at the beginning, if you are attending live and you have a question or a comment and you'd like to toss it in, let me know, and I'll continue to keep a lookout out of the corner of my eye to see whether that triggers a, hey, I got a question, and I'll go ahead and jump in. So a couple things I wanted to talk about and share with you today that I thought maybe you didn't know, didn't realize. I've talked about polls in the past on LinkedIn being reintroduced. But as I was navigating through this poll that I created, I have come across a couple of opportunities that I wanted to share with you today that I think are pretty cool and give you maybe a good reason to try doing some polls on your own to get people paying attention and create conversation. Because at the end of the day, your participation in social media really should be that social. And I would even say social networking instead of just social media. I know that they get used interchangeably a lot. Social media is almost more of the content that you're sharing. So it's the posts, it's the videos, it's the images. Social networking is more of the process. Where you're developing content and seeking to build a conversation or interaction or grow your list of connections with one another. But they both are pretty much dependent on each other because if you don't have media and content, there's really no reason to network and interact. So most of the world pretty much just uses them interchangeably. But if we take a look at this poll that I created, and I selected 2 weeks, which is the longest period that you can do a poll for. You can do, like, 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, or 2 weeks, I believe, are the options when you create a poll. And so what I did was I first off just wanted to get a sense because we were thinking about purchasing a Zoom subscription. I've been hearing a lot of people talking about it. A lot of people are using it. I know that there were some concerns as it relates to security and privacy, but I think they've done a good job kind of filling those gaps. And the thing that GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting, and some of the others don't offer, like, custom backgrounds or which means, you know, while I'm working here in the spare office up at the cottage, I gotta make sure that the trundle bed is made up. But you can see this cool LinkBanker poster. So I guess, you know, that's not too bad. But you can do things like cool backgrounds, and there's a lot of other platforms out there that are allowing for integration. With the Zoom platform. For example, on thelinkedbanker.com, we're actually using a platform called Thinkific to run our forum and to be delivering educational content. So down the road, if we decide to offer little mini lessons or courses, or anybody that subscribes or joins the Linked Banker Community gets access to a course, which is really just a video from me welcoming them into the course. But that Thinkific platform recently announced it's in beta, but the ability to go live in a course using Zoom integration. And so while we're gonna be conducting mastermind calls and group coaching sessions, we may actually be able to build those into courses, kind of, if you wanna call 'em that. And then people can join that course, but then participate in the actual livestream video webinar conference But then when it's over, that content can actually then live on. So if somebody joins the Linked Banker 6 months from now and they wanna participate in the August kickoff call, they'll have the ability to do that directly from within the Thinkific platform. And so GoToWebinar and some of their platforms don't have that type of integration. So I just wanted to get a sense of what people were using, what platform they're the most comfortable with. So I created this poll, and when I created it, I understand and I know the power of hashtags because if you use select hashtags that allow for you to put in keywords that other people might be subscribing to or searching for. So you can see I put in video calls, I put in webinar, I put in LinkedIn polls because this is a poll. And so anybody that was following those hashtags may have had, or at least it increased the likelihood that they would see that I posted a poll to the website or to LinkedIn, and they might catch it and then participate. So as I walk through, and if you were to visit my profile and take a look at my activity and see this, you're not gonna see the results of the individuals. You're gonna see some of this high-level stuff, but you're not gonna be able to jump in and actually take a look at the votes. Now, the thing that this did was I indicated, you know, is your favorite not listed? Share in the comments below. So when you craft a post, and we'll be talking about this in the Linked Banker as well, but when you craft a post or you create any sort of content for social media, it's a good— or social networking, there I go, using them interchangeably. But if you create any content for your social platforms, it's a good idea to Think about how you can structure that as not an overly obvious question because you don't want to make it sound like you're trolling your audience and kind of being cheesy about trying to get comments and interaction. But what you want to do is figure out a way that you can post something that will invite someone to comment and engage and interact with you. Because if you do that, then the platforms that you're using, whether it's LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or any of the others, They're gonna see that there's an interest between the viewers and the creator, which is you, which is gonna increase the likelihood that you're gonna be seen on a more frequent basis because the content that you're producing is getting interactivity. And that's what all the platforms are really shooting for is interactivity and trying to get people to work and interact with one another and build these conversations. So you can see that I've, you know, if your favorite's not listed in the poll, Please feel free to share in the comments as well. And so I had some people say that WebEx, some people say WebinarJam, some people said BlueJeans. But I also got a lot of people that commented, and I've been very careful and attentive to making sure that everybody that posts a comment, I like it, I engage, I interact with it. I say thank you very much. I wanna make sure that the interaction is there because if you're not interacting with your You know, your, your, your visitors or your followers or your interactors themselves, then you're missing out on opportunities and you have no idea where there might be a potential opportunity for a connection or a potential discussion that would lead you to maybe some business opportunities. And you certainly aren't interacting with each of these as if you wanna try to sell them something, just like you wouldn't go to a cocktail party and immediately meet someone and go, oh, I build websites. Can I build you a website? Do you need a website? That's gonna push them away. But if you start conversations and people get to know you and you get to know them, the dance starts. And at some point down the road, if that is consistent and there's a mutual interest, then that relationship can spark and you can have a connection. And the next thing you know, you might be talking about ways to do business with one another. So a lot of conversation, a lot of interaction, which I thought was awesome. I learned a couple of things, which is pretty cool as well. By and large, Zoom tends to be the favorite. Microsoft Teams is making a pretty good, and then you've got Meet and Webinar kind of at the bottom. So our decision to invest in a Zoom account was certainly Substantiated by this because a lot of people are pretty comfortable with it. The only ones that really said that they weren't super comfortable with Zoom are being restricted that way by their business because they've looked at the Zoom security and they're still not to the point where they're they're they're certain that they've got the things taken care of. But by and large, I'm not talking about national security type stuff. So I'm pretty confident that they've got at least the basics. And more security as far as what they were running into with Zoom bombing and unofficial people or uninvited people taking over meetings and those sorts of things. So, but the cool part that I wanna share with you that led me to the next thing that I've discovered is as I was going through and looking at the votes. So when you do your own poll, what's pretty cool is as you look at the votes, you can start seeing who is actually engaging with the different areas. So I can see who are the 73 people that voted for Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar. And what you'll notice is there are first-tier connections, which I think it's pretty logical to say that you would expect your first-tier connections to be interacting with you because they're the ones that you're connected with. But what I didn't expect was one, It's kinda cool that second tier, and if I scroll down to the very bottom, I think there might even be some third tier connections if you can believe that. So let's kinda scroll around and see. There's a second. There's a second. There's a second. Mostly seconds. Anyway, I've seen some third tier connections, which means in order for a third tier connection to show up and to participate, Someone that you know has to vote. Then what happens is their connections get a notification that says, hey, Joe Blow, or in this case, like Tanner, for example. Tanner's connections get a notification that says Tanner's participated in a poll. And if they're like, hmm, I wonder what Tanner's voting on, and they might not be a connection of mine, They would go to that poll and maybe they would click on it. And if we go up to the top, and I don't know if Peter is or isn't, but— and there's a third. So you probably all said, hey, goofball, there was a third-tier connection at the very, very top of your list and you didn't see it. So I see it now. So thank you for reminding me of that. But let's say Peter is a connection of Tanner's. Peter then could come to my poll and he could vote. Now, if Peter votes, it's gonna say Peter's voted in a poll and maybe Ballara. I think that's how I would pronounce that name. I don't know. The lead UX copywriter individual there listed is a 3rd-tier connection. She might be connected to Peter. She's gonna see Peter engaged on a poll. She might click on that, go to the poll. And then offer up some sort of a response, which is what she's done here, and she's voted for Zoom. So you can see that if I'm interested in growing my connections, first tier, yeah, that's great. But now all of a sudden, my first tier connections, by participating, are helping to spread the word. And if you create content that sparks conversation or interest, or it's something that other people would like to participate in, Peter might be somebody that I would like to connect with. I can scroll down here and I can look for other individuals. My market area is the banking sector. So I am interested in connecting with bankers around the country because that's what we do. The linked banker got launched. We do website development and digital marketing strategies for banks. So now all of a sudden I've got Sierra, for example. She's a 2nd tier connection. She's at a bank. I can scroll down a little bit further and I can find others. But the other thing that I noticed was a number of, like, I don't see the ability to connect with these people. They're not first or second tier connections. These are actually businesses. So brands, pages are out there interacting with content beyond just being the individuals. And if you are a page administrator for your business, whether it's your business or you're the marketing director and you work there, but if you're an administrator of your business, you can do this exact same thing. Now, on Facebook, it's really easy to be able to use Facebook as a page where you just select that, and when you're liking and engaging with content, you just change the voice and you basically select from the dropdown, and instead of using Facebook As Eric Cook, I can use it as the Cook Dogs, which is our golden retrievers Facebook page. They've got cute golden retriever pictures out there. Facebook.com/thecookdogs, in case you're wondering, just for what it's worth. So I decided, and I've been on LinkedIn for a while, like since 2007, and I've not really figured out, nor did I know exactly how this worked. So with a little Googling and some searching, I figured it out and it's actually pretty easy and it revolves around the power of the hashtag. So what we're gonna do here is I'm gonna hop down to the linked banker and I'm gonna pull this up. And from a page perspective, when you create a page, you've got the ability to select 3 community hashtags. And I used to think that, okay, well, that's important because if I create a community hashtag, then that just is going to alert me as a page administrator, hey, somebody's talking about digital banking or somebody's talking about community banking. And it would give me a notification, which it does, and is pretty cool. But the thing that's also interesting is if you visit your page, and this is where the magic happens, so it's gonna get cool here in just a second. If you visit your page and you're on your page right now, if I scroll down and let's say I wanna jump into community banking and see what people are talking about, I click on this community hashtag. Now you'll notice that I'm still at the Link Banker. It still has my Link Banker, so I'm not community banking. But now what I can do is if I scroll down and I start looking at content, let's say for Lori, who is the Director of Education over at the Wisconsin Bankers Association, if I decide that Emerging Leaders Virtual Series, if this is something that I want to Maybe comment on community banking is coming up because that's the hashtag that I've selected. But now if I go down here and I wanna comment, I'm commenting as the linked banker. If I wanna click like, I'm liking as the linked banker. So while Lori knows me because I've spoken for the WBA before and we're friends on other social platforms as well, She would expect maybe me to interact with that post. But now she may not realize that I've started a new initiative called the Linked Banker. And if I go through here and I click on like and make a comment, when she goes into her statistics, instead of seeing Eric Cook, she's now going to see the Linked Banker. And that might spur her to go back and go, well, who is the Link Banker? What is this? Oh, that's Eric. I know Eric. Well, that's pretty cool. And then that could spark a conversation without me feeling like I have to approach her or say, hey, I wanna talk to you about this new program. I can go in and I can use social media, or I can use, I can use LinkedIn, the page, to interact and engage. And so what that means is you gotta be pretty strategic on the community hashtags that you're picking because I had social media as one of the hashtags that I was following initially for the Link Banker because that's what the Link Banker does is we're talking about social media or social networking. But the reality is there's a lot of conversation going on about social media or social networking or social strategies. And not all of that conversation is banking related. And I am primarily interested in getting the Linked Banker brand in front of community bankers or people that are talking about digital banking, because building relationships online is part of a digital banking strategy. And that's what we do over at the Linked Banker. So thinking a little bit more strategically about your hashtags gives you an opportunity. So when you click on these items, It's going to present more opportunities for you to interact with others and get that brand out there in front of your target audience and participate and engage. So, like, Jim Maru from the Financial Brand, this would be a really good one as well where I could go through and I could interact and inject, inject some thoughts and some ideas. You can see that there's no comments on this. And so depending on how out there and obvious I want to be, I could really spend a lot of time instead of just being satisfied with the fact— if I go back to the Link Banker, I think we've got 21 followers. If I wanted to grow that volume of followers, I could go in and I could spend some time interacting with other posts that are digital banking and whatnot as the Link Banker. You could even strategically go through Swap out some hashtags. So if you're viewing LinkedIn as an individual and you happen to notice that there's some people that you'd like to influence and they're using hashtags that aren't one of your 3, there's nothing to say that you can't change that hashtag, go back in, and then see what people are talking about. I don't know as if LinkedIn has a limit on the number of times that you can swap out your hashtags. But if I decided that I wanted to see if fintech had any articles or opportunities for me to engage. I could take one of these. I could click edit, and I could swap out one of them with fintech, and then I could jump back in, engage, and interact from a fintech perspective, and then hop back in and maybe change it back to banking in general. So hopefully that gives you some pretty cool ideas of ways that you can leverage how to take a brand page And use it on LinkedIn to get your brand page a little bit more visibility. So hit me up in the comments or the questions if that didn't make total sense or if that did make sense. But I'm pretty excited about this. Now there are a few people that I've told this to, and I'm always very transparent, and I'm not big on secrets. What you see is what you get. Part of me could have said, oh, I should really know this. And the fact that I just learned this now, I'm supposed to be a digital expert. I should probably just shut my mouth and not tell anybody. But that's not who I am. So there have been certain individuals that I have, like, bragged about this, and they're like, yeah, you've had the ability to do that for a couple of years now, which is totally fine because there's so much stuff on the internet that you probably should know. But you don't, that this is just one of those instances. So if you already knew this, awesome for you. You're super smart and you nailed it before I did. But if you didn't know this, now you do, and you can take this newfound knowledge to build your brand and generate some awareness. So enjoy that little tip. The last thing I wanna talk about I'm gonna rant a little bit here. So, just because, because I can. So I'm gonna just get my control panel out of the way here. I don't know how many of you have actually seen this cartoon. It's from 1993, which is like a year after I graduated from college. So the internet was just in its infancy. Infancy. And this showed up in The New Yorker, and I apologize if that's a little small. Let me see if I can blow that up a little bit for you. But I've used this as an example in other instances, but the cartoonist created this, and it's got 2 dogs sitting at the computer, and it says, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, which, if you think about it, can have a lot of different meanings. So back when the internet was originally introduced, The cool part about the internet was its anonymity and the fact that you could go online. And while certainly there were certain people that likely abused it, you know, you're really not a 14-year-old girl, you're a 30-year-old man that's pretending to be a— so that's kind of the dark side of the internet. But from a business perspective, from an influencer perspective, The concept of on the internet, nobody knows that you're a dog is one that a lot of businesses kind of got started with. They could produce a website, they could have a really nice online presence, they could create a shopping cart with products, and nobody would really know that it's somebody's business that they're running out of their basement. They would think that it's a large e-commerce store, and maybe ultimately that business grew into something that became really large and they got office space and they hired employees. But the whole concept of on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog is one that made a lot of people comfortable that they could embrace a persona that maybe wouldn't otherwise be one that they could embrace if it was in the, in the real world. I wouldn't go to somebody's house and buy something out of their garage or go into their basement, but if they had an online store that gave me access to the products that I was looking for, That'd be kind of cool. So the anonymity is there, and then evolve that another 10 years or so, and now the transparency and people, you know, I don't really want to work with a dog. I want to know exactly who you are, so I'm gonna do more research. And so some of this was like transferred in a different direction where Okay, people are gonna figure out if you're a dog or not because you really have to be who you are. And if I purport to be one thing when I participate in social media and I give that outward appearance, there's a lot of falsehood that I would have to create if I wanted you to think that I was something that I wasn't. So there's a certain era of kind of dialing that back. The article that I'd thought of writing, and there are individuals out there that still feel that on the internet you can be a dog, and that gives them the excuse to be an a-hole. And I debated about, like, dropping some serious profanity, and you know what I really wanna say. But there's people out there on the internet, just like people that get behind the wheel of their car or whatever the case is, that they feel that because they've got the keyboard in front of them, they're somewhat insulated. And they can say what they want, they can do what they want, and there's no repercussions, and they can just be a jerk. And while certainly on the internet nobody knows if you're really a dog, if you behave the way that I'm explaining, the entire internet is gonna know. And I'll say it, you might not necessarily know that you're a dog, but everybody's gonna know that you're an asshole. I think that's the first time I've actually sworn on Free Webinar Wednesdays. But they're gonna know that that's the case because they're gonna read your posts. And the thing about social media, social networking, whatever, that I just wanna make sure everybody understands is that stuff is permanent. That doesn't go away. And it doesn't mean that you can send messages to people because those get screenshot and they get shared. And I've seen some of them. And if you are participating online and you're embracing a persona and you're just being a jerk and you think you can get away with it and you're no repercussion— there's no repercussions for it, I got news for you that that will come back and that will haunt you. And you will basically— and maybe you don't care. And If that's the case, then that's the case. But I've had the unfortunate circumstance of experiencing some of this. One of the very early things that I experienced, which really grinds me, is one of the big reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing is while I was a banker and I met someone at the Graduate School of Banking, I had started doing web development on the side and was doing the bank's website. His daughter got cancer at the age of 5, and I built a website for the family that allowed for them to share photos and their story. And so over the 4-year-long battle while Christy fought neuroblastoma, we were able to share a lot of information, and I saw the power of the internet and how it brought people together. And we Honestly, only developed or I created the website for the family just so that they could keep their friends and family members informed, and that ended up evolving into a global footprint. And we reached people from literally around the world that followed Christy's story and were pulling for her and were very saddened when she passed away. But we also had people that were taking her photos off of her website. And using those photos to pretend that they were the parents of a little girl that had cancer, and they were using it to raise money falsely and to collect. And so every once in a while, we would find one of these fake sites, and it was difficult to track them down. They weren't using their real names, but the internet has got jerks on it, and we couldn't let that. I guess convince us to not continue to tell Christy's story. So we continued to do that, even though that we knew that there were people out there that would abuse it. In today's day and age, there's so many divisive things, and I had a webinar with Deborah Gonzalez, and we talked about the legalities and the freedom of speech and the fact that yes, on the internet you can say whatever you want. If you want to be pro-Trump or anti-Trump, if you want to be pro-Confederate flag or anti-Confederate flag. I'm not going to get into that debate. I'm not going to politicize my social media. I'm out here to try to talk about all the cool stuff that you can do, the relationships you can build, and the power that you can use these tools for from a good perspective. But there are people out there that are going to be assholes and they're going to say stuff and they're going to try to accuse you of things that you know aren't true. And you're gonna try to defend yourself, and you're gonna wanna stand up. And sometimes you need to do that and try to put them in their place. But at the end of the day, there are individuals out there that they just feed on that. And they gotta rule a name for that, and it's called a troll. And the rule with trolls is you don't feed the trolls. You don't respond to them. You don't interact with them. You don't engage with them. And so I know that that probably isn't anything that Free Webinar Wednesdays folks experience because you guys are all awesome and I'm sure you don't get into this name-calling and you're probably not a target for people. But bullying's an issue. I mean, there's just so much stuff out there that you don't realize words can hurt and things can be done in a way that you, you might think you're being all funny, but I know of relationships that have been ruined through comments on Facebook, which is just freaking ridiculous. That people have been friends for a long, long time, and then all of a sudden they feel like they need to go online and say something and accuse somebody of something. And, and it's a shame that that happens, but I don't want to discourage you from being part of this online party and using it for good and sharing content. So while on the internet nobody knows you're a dog, they will figure out if you're not nice, if you're a jerk. And that's definitely not something that you want to happen. So hopefully my message— I know I rambled and kind of went in a couple different directions there, and I'm not going to put a blog post out about it, at least at this point, but I just kind of needed to get it off of my chest. I've told a few people the story and shared with them some things, and they're just like, holy crap, I can't believe that that is going on. But there are all types of people out there, and social media just brings us out of the bushes and we can do whatever we want. You sometimes just have to look them in the face and go, hey, you do you, no problem, it's all good, and just move on. And they're going to continue to do what they want to do, and you have to be okay with that. So anyway, um, not that I want to end on a, on a sour note, because hopefully that was, uh, wrapped in a silver lining and had a good message there. But figure out a way that you can share the positivity of what you're excited about, what you're passionate about, the good stuff that's there. It's so easy to jump in and just start slinging crap on the internet because that seems to be what you hear on media and news and every place else that you go. But talk about the positive things, share the wins, things that you're excited about. And while it's certainly not going to change overnight, if We just all try to focus a little bit more on the good that's going on out there. I think that's going to help us at least when you go online, have a better experience. And the people that don't want to get on board with that, screw them. Just let them go. Let them do their thing and they're just going to live their own little miserable, tormented lives. And and that's their prerogative. Doesn't have to be you. So with that, rather. Deep and heady public service announcement. I'm gonna wrap the show for today. I appreciate you joining me live. I appreciate you watching the recording if you're doing that. Hop out to freewebinarwednesdays.com if you wanna check out some of the other shows. And if you are a banker and you need some help, look us up at the WSI side, or if you just wanna join a community and get some support to try to take your branding and your personal digital and social efforts to the next level, join us over at thelinkedbanker.com. We're not charging for membership at this point. We're just collecting a community of people to get an idea of what it is that you're looking for. Um, I would love to be able to build a community like that that goes even outside of the world of banking to try to foster that positivity, and that may happen at some point down the road. But for right now, we're keeping that just restricted to the banking space. But if you are a banker Join us at thelinkbanker.com. I'd love to have you come along for the ride and, and hopefully experience some of that positivity that I'm talking about today. So that is a wrap. Enjoy the rest of your week. Thanks for joining me. Make it awesome. And try to go out and spread something positive and make an impact in somebody else. Talk to you later. Bye.