Introducing Something Cool for Bankers - TheLinkedBanker.com

Greetings. Welcome to this June edition of Free Webinar Wednesdays. It's June 10th, 2020, and this is Eric Cook coming to you from our northern offices at Houghton Lake, Michigan, which is also our cottage. In the quarantine world, I've decided if I'm gonna be locked in someplace, I'm gonna head to the cottage and I'm gonna just work from there. So we're doing the show today from the cottage and, uh, future shows and pretty much everything else until I get into September, October before I start getting back on the road. But I'm excited that you're here with us today and welcome to Free Webinar Wednesdays. Um, something pretty significant happened last weekend and I joined the 50 and over club. So. I took last week off. Actually, I had some training that I was involved in, so I apologize for not having a show last week. But we did a scaled-back 50 party, not too many black balloons and other sorts of, you know, the typical 50 birthday garb. But it was good to join the 50 club. I spent some time with a buddy of mine on our bicycles, and I had the goal of Getting 50 miles in 50— for 50 years and was able to get just over 51. So that was awesome. Can still pedal the bike at this old age. And the other goal that I had was to raise $1,500 for neuroblastoma, which is a rare form of childhood cancer that impacted and took the life of one of my good friend's daughters at the age of 9, and also is the same cancer that one of our team members beat when he was a child and is continuing to kick butt and amaze me every day. So, um, it had special meaning, and I think at the end of the campaign— we did it as a Facebook donation— I was able to collect a little over $1,800 thanks to all my friends and other connections out there in the wonderful world of Facebook. So those of you that donated Certainly appreciate that. It really means a lot. And there's a whole, a whole big backstory around Christy and neuroblastoma and cancer that really changed my life. But that's probably a webinar for a different day. You'll see I'm carrying on the tradition that we started in our last show with Andreas of turning on the webcam. And one of the things that we're doing here within the WSI office is spending the month of June producing content and sharing information about the power of video. Ellie from our team, who heads up our marketing efforts, does a real good job of making sure that she selects a key digital strategy every month, and the month of June was focused on video. So we've started using video a little bit more in our client meetings. We've talked about this before. But I'm gonna try to make more of an effort to get on camera so you can see me. Maybe we'll figure out a way where I can actually see you, but certainly excited that you're with me today. Before we jump into the content that I wanna share, just as a reminder, if you are attending live, and I'm trying to do the eye contact with the camera, but I'm gonna look up and around and over. So if I break the gaze, you'll have to excuse me looking elsewhere because the camera just doesn't sit right in front of the monitor. But if you're attending live, first, thanks for being here. Appreciate you showing up and being part of today's discussion. If you've got a question or a comment, or I got a hair out of place and you just wanna bring it to my attention, you can feel free to use the chat function. That was kinda funny. Use the chat function in the control panel and just let me know. I'll keep an eye on that. And the webinar is a great way from a, a live perspective to be able to engage. If you're watching this, As a recording, join us live. We try to go live, or I try to go live every Wednesday at 1 o'clock. And I will tell you, I am kicking around the idea of leveraging a streaming service and pushing these maybe more so to social media. I'd be curious to see what you might think. I know I'm not always able to do a formal webinar, and the webinar exists if you show up, but there's a lot of— advantage in being able to push things out through social media as it relates to the longevity of the content, the reach of the audience. There's some multichannel streaming platforms that you can use that will allow content to be distributed not just to Facebook, but to YouTube and to LinkedIn. And I think the more that I do those, it might increase the likelihood that I'll get into the LinkedIn Live beta, which I am in the process of applying for the 3rd time. And because I've not done a lot of video on LinkedIn yet, even though I preach it, I need to do a better job of doing it. The hope is that that'll demonstrate to the folks at LinkedIn and the powers that be that grant the authority to take advantage of LinkedIn Live, that maybe we can do some syndication over there. But there's a lot of great platforms that you can use. Some of them are actual software that you install. Some of those are web-based and cloud. SaaS solutions, but they connect to all the different platforms that support live streaming. And just kind of kicking that around to see whether that might be a solution. So while we're talking today and going through stuff, if you've got a thought one way or another, feel free to toss it into the comments and I'll take a look and see what you think. So with that, I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the webinar series that I was doing, and it wasn't in the order of the chapters of the book Digital Minds. And certainly we had a couple of interruptions as authors couldn't join. But WSI pushed out our 3rd edition of the book Digital Minds at the beginning of this year. It was released on Amazon here in the United States, and I was able to talk with all of the authors, including Valerie and Cheryl, who also were responsible for the introduction. So all in all, There are 13 webinars that are related to the Digital Minds book. And what we've done over on our Powered by WSI website is we've actually taken the reprints— or reprints— the reposts, I guess, would be a better term. We've taken the reposts for all of those. And if you go to our Powered by WSI site and go to the webinar section, you'll be able to find all of those. Those are great conversations with a lot of really smart digital marketers from around the world. We had Francois from South Africa and Cormac from Ireland and Carlos from Mexico and just all sorts of other great areas, and I'm sure I'm forgetting folks, as I oftentimes do when I go off the cuff, but there were some really good discussions in each one of the 12 chapters and the introduction, just talking about the evolution of the customer, especially in today's COVID world. I thought yielded some really good results. And if you watch those and have pen and paper, if you don't come up with at least a dozen or half a dozen key items that you can jot down that should be on your roadmap for 2020 and beyond, I'd be surprised. So some really good stuff there. And a big thank you to all of my WSI colleagues from around the globe and here in the States that shared their knowledge in the book and also took some time spend with me here on the webinar series. So with that being said, if you are interested in snagging a copy of that book, I just wanted to make sure that you knew if you go and you click on this link, this will actually take you directly to the wonderful world of Amazon and you can snag a copy of it in Kindle version. If you are interested in a copy of my chapter, which I wrote, chapter 7 on conversational marketing, which includes chatbots, web chat, artificial intelligence, just different ways that you can have conversation and dialogue with your visitors, whether it's to your website, through social media, through mobile apps, through SMS text messaging. If you're interested in getting a copy of that, feel free to just shoot me an email at eric@poweredbywsi.com, and I will be happy to send you a PDF of my chapter as well. I also know that it is the plan of our corporate office to convert every single one of our chapters into separately downloadable PDFs and white papers. So while having it in a Kindle certainly is nice and convenient because it goes right into your app and you can browse right through your device, if you don't want to spend the $5— and believe me, it's not a moneymaker for us, we just did it to help educate and share the knowledge— but if you're interested in just getting free versions of that, stay tuned. We will likely be getting those released here very shortly. And we're just going through and kind of making sure that they're all designed consistently and going to put them together in a nice resource for you. So if you want my chapter, shoot me an email. Otherwise, sit tight and looking forward to getting that out there for the rest of the world. Speaking of Amazon, one of the other things that I think would also be worth mentioning, because I had a friend of mine reach out through a direct message and said, I noticed that you, You always use a little Bluetooth. What is it and do you like it? What do you like about it? And I don't know if you guys are familiar with a guy by the name of Brian Fanzo. He does a lot of speaking, was very prevalent in a lot of the digital marketing conferences and does a lot of corporate gigs. I believe he's out of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. Energetic dude and has been at Social Media Marketing World a number of times. Anyway, I noticed that he actually had an Amazon shop with all of the stuff that he's using, the ring lights and the microphones and the condensers and all the other tech that I'm starting to get into. And so I explored a little bit and I was able to convince the Amazon gods to grant me my own store and share some of the stuff that I like to use on a regular basis. And I know some of you that are watching have asked me questions about stuff and have bought some of the things that, um, that I've used. And, uh, full disclosure, this is an affiliate store, so if you buy something, Amazon gives me a very, very small percentage of that purchase. So by no means is it anything that I'm going to get rich on or retire from, but I have created this storefront. So if you go to amazon.com/shop /ericcook. This gets you right into my store, and under the Cool Tech, this is where the Plantronics Voyager 5200 is. And I love this little device because it's got incredible noise-canceling capabilities to it. Mark from our office was wearing his on his lawnmower, and his wife called him. She couldn't hear the lawnmower, and he could barely hear her. Over the noise of the lawnmower. That's how good the noise canceling is on this thing. I've been sitting in restaurants and coffee shops and done conference calls with customers, and clanging pots and pans and noise, um, just totally blocked out. Now, if it's something that's on your body, like if you scratch or bump something, it'll pick that up because that'll override some of the noise canceling capabilities. But this is just one example of the stuff that I'm Doing. I'm talking to you on this Logitech camera, and when I'm done, I'll probably throw my Voyager back into the charging case and get ready for my next conference call. But these are all the things that I use on a pretty regular basis. I know there's at least one individual here on the webinar, as I look at the names, that actually has picked up a pair of bone induction headphones. The cool part about these is they wrap around, but they don't go in your ear. So if you're out for a walk or a run or a bike ride, The bone induction technology allows for the sound to go through and you can still hear it because it's still entering the ear canal but through the bone as opposed to plugging the ear canal. So traffic noise, sirens, dogs barking, deer running through the woods about ready to crash into you while you're mountain biking, any of those things you can still totally hear, but it gives you the ability to then get some music, or I tend to listen to a lot of podcasts. And take the time while I'm out riding or exercising to use that as a, as a cross-train where I'm cross-training my cardio and my heart and my legs and my lungs, but I'm also cross-training my brain and learning new things. What's not on here that you may want to consider if you are an active person and you do listen to podcasts, one of the things that I've done, and I wasn't even planning on talking about this, but that's how these shows go. I just decide to go off on a little tangent and you get the benefit of that. But one of the things that I've done on my phone is I use Evernote a lot for like taking notes. I use their web clipper, which you can, you can see up here. You got this little web clipper guy. So if there's an idea or something that comes up on the internet that I like, I can clip that into my Evernote and I can tag it and it gives me the ability to pull that information back up down the road. But I create a little shortcut on my screen on my phone so that if I am out someplace and an idea pops into my head, I can stop, I can press a voice note, I can record it. It goes into a special folder or notebook is what they call it on Evernote. It's stored there so that those are just idea captures. And then the whole concept around that is to dump that into an idea capture, and then you go back and revisit it later on and say, okay, I've got these 5 things that I came up with this week, and chances are when you look at that list, you'll maybe remember 1 or 2 of those, and the other 4 or 5 will be like, oh, I'm glad I wrote that down because it was a good idea, but I totally don't remember. I would have never thought to jot that down. So, um, so the bone induction headphones took me on the Evernote, which took me on the notes to be able to record. Anyway, see how that goes. So if you are interested in just kind of checking out— whoops. One of the things that's pretty awesome about Amazon, by the way, is if you get a 404 error, which is a broken link, they feature all the dogs of employees. And so that's pretty cool. So if you click back, it takes you to the wrong one. So cool tech is one, productivity, organization, some of the reading list items, and then other on-the-go things. So the list will continue to grow as I continue to buy gadgets and grab things that seem to work really well. But if you've got some cool tech that you're using or something that you've got off of Amazon that works really well for you and you'd like me to check it out, drop me a note, let me know. I'm always interested in snagging other stuff. So, all right, so let's go and let's take a look at a couple of the questions. So Matt says, Do you think that they would ever make the book in audio format? You know, I've thought about actually reading my chapter and doing a recording of it and making it available as an MP4 or MP3, I guess would be more appropriate. I don't know as if we within WSI would ever convert that to an audiobook. It might be something that I could certainly chat with Cheryl about. She was on a couple of shows, our corporate marketing director who heads that up. But that would be a good question for me to ask. And I'm going to use my Rocketbook, which is another one of my cool tools that you'll learn about in Productivity Organization. I'm gonna jot that down and do audio and do a little note on that. So good question, Matt. Yes. And then my, my fellow bone induction headphone buddy out there. So Sony Noise canceling, got that. And now he's thinking about shaving, shaving his head. Oh, the joys of live shows! Think about shaving my head so I look just like you as well. You cracked me up. You got to grow some facial hair. I've actually been thinking about going like right to the scalp. It's always been pretty, pretty short, but I've been thinking about just taking it right to the scalp. Of course, there's contraptions and devices out on Amazon that you can get that will just do the shaving. Saving for you, so I don't know. Maybe I'll show up to a future webinar and I'll have to put a special glare filter on my camera because it's it's just got a little too much glare action. So keep the comments coming and the snide remarks and see who else out there can make me break stride and laugh at myself because I love it. So all right, one more. Let's see. There you go. Another affiliate opportunity. Absolutely. So too funny. Um. So the next thing that I want to chat with you about, I discovered, um, just yesterday actually. I got back from a bike ride and I was listening to a podcast on LinkedIn. So I hopped in not necessarily to find this particular feature. Um, I was hopping in just to kind of refresh myself on some video stuff. There had been some articles that I had read and the podcast talked a little bit About maybe LinkedIn Groups getting a breath of fresh air. LinkedIn now has a new CEO. And as I was flipping around on my phone, it made it a lot more evident. On desktop, you're going to have to search for a little bit. But when I was actually on my phone, if I go into my view profile and if I scroll down to the skills area, One of the things that has shown up is this thing called a skills quiz. And so, um, without any studying or prep, um, I decided to jump in and, uh, I cold-turkeyed the SEO quiz and luckily I passed it. I don't know what the actual score was. Um, I don't know what questions I got right or got wrong. But these skill quizzes allow for you to take a LinkedIn assessment, and if you pass, they're designed— at least the way that it was conveyed on my mobile device— was let recruiters know what skills you are proficient in. Well, I'm not interested in recruiters trying to find me a job because I love what I do, and I'm not going to ever work for anybody other than— again, other than my wife, of course. 'Cause, you know, happily married, she's the boss and we do what the wives say, right guys? But the— I thought that, you know, this might be something kind of cool because there's a lot of skills that I've got and I've been fortunate to have been endorsed on a lot of these. The most that you can get is like 99. These used to be a little bit more prevalent in the older versions of the profiles where you could actually see who is endorsing you for those. And that's not as evident now as what it once was. Um, but I think LinkedIn was looking at these and saying, okay, well, how can we then add an extra layer of credibility? So what you can do is if you go down to your skills area, you can see you've got a skills quiz. And when I clicked on that on my phone, it said, hey, we think that you might be— based off your profile, of course— that the following skills might be good for you. And it said Google Analytics and it said SEO. And I felt a little bit more confident in my cold turkey SEO than maybe Google Analytics. But as I discovered, when you kind of dive in, you can take a test. So, or I guess a sample is what they call it, but it gives you 2 questions. Each question you get like a minute, 2 minutes to answer. It's timed, so you don't have a lot of time to go out and Google the answers, which you probably shouldn't do anyway. Because if somebody hires you because you are proficient and you've taken the assessment and then you really don't know what you're talking about, You're gonna have bigger problems. So be honest, people, it's a good thing. But the skill is timed. If you don't achieve 70% proficiency, you can't take that quiz again for another 3 months. And I think it's 3 months. It's either 3 months or 30 days. There was a 3 in there, but I didn't pay a whole lot of attention. I was tired and I had like 12% battery left on my phone, and I just decided I was gonna jump in and give it a shot. So these are all the different quizzes that you have. at your disposal, and certainly it's the— it's alphabetical. So if there's an area that you would like the world to know, maybe you've got some good endorsements, you're up in the 50, 60, maybe you've got 99+ in some of those and you just want to add a little extra emphasis to those, then you can go in, search for the right quiz, and then go through that process. And if you don't get it right and you don't pass, don't worry, it doesn't blast out to your network and say Eric's failed the Google Analytics quiz. It just hides that for you for a period of time. I'm suspecting it's probably going to say you can take this quiz again on, and it'll give you a date or some sort of a countdown, or it'll say it's currently not available. But this is going to be a great way as people maybe look at your skills to then validate that. I don't know, and some of you might be connected with me on LinkedIn, so I don't know whether you got a notification similar to when a new job or a promotion or some sort of a change, those can be blasted out through the network. I don't have any documentation as to whether or not that skill proficiency with my quiz actually said, hey, Eric just got proficiency. It's a little more scaled back than like the LinkedIn Learning, which is more of the course curriculum where you go into LinkedIn Learning, you've got people that are actually teaching you. And then at the end of those, you can go through a test and validate your knowledge, and then that can show up as validation of your knowledge. You've completed the course on search engine optimization or Google Analytics or digital marketing or public speaking, whatever the case might be. This is just a quick— if you've already got some proficiency in areas and you just want to add that extra little validation to your profile, maybe check out Skills and go into the quizzes and see what it recommends for you. If it's recommending stuff that's totally not part of your profile and not what you do, then that's probably a sign that your profile needs some attention because it should give you some pretty good information or a pretty good recommendation as to what your quizzes should be about. And if this came back and said, you know, hey, looks like you'd be really good at AngularJS or AutoCAD, then, you know, my profile is not really teaching LinkedIn or anybody else that's on LinkedIn searching for what I do the right information about my profession and about the things that I like to bring to the table for my customers. So check that out. And, uh, when you go in, you can also kind of edit and move things around. So for example, When I did my, and you can do this on a mobile device as well as on a desktop. But after I took the course, or I guess I took the quiz and got certified, the proficiency 70% or better, I noticed that SEO was down here at the bottom. So I just grabbed this little guy and brought him up to the top so that he was there. Now you can pin 3 items to the top of your list if you would like to do that. And those are ones that show a little bit more detail. So if we go back to the skills and endorsements, you can see digital marketing, web development, and social media. I've got some endorsements for each of those. I've got 99+ endorsements from other connections on LinkedIn. So I've added those to the top because those are probably the primary things that we do here at WSI and just want to make sure that whether it's digital marketing or building a bank website or helping people understand and leverage social media, Those are the 3 areas that I really wanted to draw attention to. And if I decided to jump in and take a shot at the Google Analytics quiz and I get passing grades on that and I get an assessment, then I'll add Google Analytics to my list. You can only have 50 skills, I believe, and so one of them would likely have to go, but I can move that over unless I've already got Google Analytics included. But I would grab that, move it over, and be able to then include that. So you can gradually just go through the list of all of your skills. They're also nice just to refresh your memory on some of the questions and some of the things that you probably should know. And then maybe even take some of that information, you know, good blog posts, good blog content. Hey, did you know from an SEO perspective, if you really wanted to define the language for A web page. Here's how you do it, and you could weave in some of that knowledge as well and draw attention to the fact that you've passed a quiz on LinkedIn, and here's how the process works. So be curious to hear if any of you have have done this yet. Again, this is a little bit of a newer thing as far as I'm aware. So give it a shot and let me know what what quizzes you. Are interested in taking. Um, the last thing that I wanted to share with you is kind of some big news for us, uh, here at WSI and for myself personally. Um, about 2 years ago, a little over 2 years ago, I attended Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, which is now one of my most favorite events, uh, that and the Financial Brand Forum. Unfortunately, the forum was canceled this year It fell during global pandemic season and Las Vegas shut down. But I was able to get to Social Media Marketing World again this year and just love spending time in San Diego and just consuming as much social media as I can. But when I went the first year in 2018, Pat Flynn, who's Smart Passive Income and podcasting expert, did the closing keynote and got me thinking about ways that I could or should be doing a better job of educating my audience, my desired customer, my, my people, if you will. And as a banker, 15 years, and now running an agency that focuses almost exclusively on banks, with the exception of a handful of other clients that have been with us for a number of years, thought long and hard about how do I build a community around that for bankers to help them do what I think they should be doing, and that's connecting and engaging using social technology, digital tools, gadgets, gizmos, web apps, you name it. Those are the things that I love talking about, and I know when I get an opportunity to be at a conference or a convention or a banking school, sharing that information with my banking audience is one of the most fun parts of my job, and I really, really enjoy that. And especially When I get to have ongoing dialogue with folks that I meet that are really passionate about that, and they want to take their personal brand or their digital efforts to the next level. And sometimes they're in institutions that might not be giving them the support. You can imagine in the world of banking, there's a lot of compliance and security and regulation and other sorts of risks that we have to be really careful about. But at the end of the day, and I think that's one thing that this whole coronavirus global pandemic COVID-19 has shown us is we need to do a better job now and in the future with leveraging all the digital tools we have at our disposal to be able to build those relationships and to be comfortable with turning the camera on and smiling and saying hi and how to run a webinar and how to share content and post information and engage in dialogue and just be present in the digital world. And making sure that being present doesn't mean I'm trying to sell a bunch of crap. I'm trying to, you know, convince everybody to come to me for their boat loan or to buy a house or to put money in the bank or to pay me to do a website. Those are all things that, in my opinion, come after the relationship is there. And the relationship is really about how helpful, how friendly, how approachable. How relatable are you to your audience? And that needs to happen through different digital tools and apps and programs and platforms. And so without further ado, drum roll please, one of the things we're pretty excited about, and this has only taken 2 and a half years and a global pandemic to get out the door, and we're still not hardcore launched, but I'm comfortable sharing with you and If you're not a banker, I apologize because this is really only for bankers. But if you're not a banker, there are ways that you can do what I've done and build something similar for your industry or for your own organization. I've used a platform, or I say we because I've got a team of folks behind me that have helped build this out, but we have used a platform called Thinkific, and you can learn more about them at thinkific.com. But that's a platform that specializes in helping individuals create course material and communities to share knowledge and to engage an audience under a particular vertical. So if you go to thinkific.com and you take a look at some of the examples of what people have done with their platform, you'll get inspired about a lot of different things that you could do. If you love to cook, if you love to take photos, if you love to knit or do crafts, whatever the case is, you could create course material. You could sell that. You could just provide it for free. You could use it to build a community. And so one of the companies that we work very closely with actually used the Thinkific platform and they have one course that takes their employees through an onboarding process. And Thinkific allows for you, I think, to do one course for free. So you don't even really have to pay money for it if you're just going to do it for a little bit of internal kind of playing around. We ended up getting the paid version, obviously. And so our plan is not only to take thelinkedbanker.com and build off of their forum capability for dialogue of members, but we're going to use their payment processing because it's a membership-based community. We'll charge a small monthly fee for individuals to be a part of the community, which will get them access to recurring mastermind calls and group coaching sessions and other sorts of Thought leadership, and then discounts on learning material and other sorts of courses. So somewhat similar to what you may experience with the LinkedIn Learning, where you go online, you take a course. Thinkific gives us the ability to implement quizzes and scoring and certificates of completion. So for the banking community, we're looking at maybe providing some sort of a validation and using that if you need to. demonstrate continuing education or professional development credits. Maybe you've got your Certified Financial Marketing Professional designation and you need to take so many courses or do so many hours of learning. So we're exploring all of that, but we're really excited that the LINC Banker has now got a face to it and it's there. We'll be releasing the LinkedIn page shortly. We'll be putting LinkedBanker details on my LinkedIn profile. So those of you that are connected will probably notice a job change. WSI is not going anywhere. We are going to be very clear on the fact, especially for our customers, we are still 100% WSI digital agency. If anything, this is a supplement and an augment to All of the stuff that we already get to do with banks. We're just going to be able to do it even deeper with them now. But for any of our customers that are either on the show live or maybe catch this later, support and everything else that you've come to expect from us as it relates to your website is not going to go anywhere. So let me be very, very clear about that. I don't want you to think that we've decided to change our tune and go in a 180-degree direction the other way. WSI is still very much around, but the concept of developing a community is one that I just wanted to share a little bit more background about. And again, for bankers out there, would love for you to join up and create an account. We're not charging for an account yet. You can go through the process of getting an account. You join the community. I'm ready, sign me up. You pick a username and a password, get it into the system. You get access to an introductory video that Probably says a lot of what I'm saying right now because I'm telling you a little bit of the story, but that can show you the back end of what's going on. But think about the the distance learning opportunities that you may have with your customers or your employees that you no longer are seeing as much as what you once did before the pandemic hit and everybody worked from home and had to stay. 6 feet away from each other and all the other things that are happening, and your customers might not shift and come back. They may decide, you know what, all these electronic conveniences, they're actually pretty nice. I can do a lot of the stuff that I thought I had to do in person with you, now I can do it electronically. So we have to think more strategically about how we're going to get in front of our customers and our prospects and the people that we want to serve. with valuable content that they are going to be interested to help us demonstrate subject matter expertise and to be able to build that relationship and do a better job of doing it electronically. And that's what I really hope that The Linq Banker does for my banking friends and all of the awesome bankers that I've met over the 13 years of doing the digital. Plus, I still know a lot of the bankers from when I was a banker, so I'm really excited that this is finally launched. Um, you can kind of read through some of this, uh, referring to myself as your LinkedIn mentor. Um, so, you know, talking about what I do, why I'm doing it. Um, one of the cool things that we've also been able— been able to incorporate is our marketing automation platform, which we use a platform called SharpSpring. Um, we've been able to incorporate some of the forms with the SharpSpring system, with emails in our CRM. So as information flows through, one of the neat parts of the SharpSpring platform is there's a book time with me section where you can go through and when it loads, might be a little bit slow due to the webinar here. But you can click on that. So if you wanna have a chat with me and you wanna kick the tires and ask a question, you can click on that book time with me and it'll give you calendar availability. So if you said, okay, well, you know, next Tuesday I'd like to hop on a quick 30-minute call and just pick your brain a little more, you can select the 16th, pick whatever date— or I'm sorry, whatever time on that date you're interested, and it'll book a time, put it in our calendars, and then we can chat. We've started to see some of our banks actually implement this type of technology for their loan officers and business development and commercial lenders. Making it easier for people to get in touch with you and to be able to book a time. How many how many times have you exchanged email and said you know well when you would like to get together and then the email comes back and says well how about Monday afternoon and then you email back and you say well Monday afternoon is no good for me what about Tuesday yeah Tuesday works how about ten o'clock well can we do ten thirty before you know it you've got you know a dozen emails back and forth. Where what I like to do is just say, hey, here's a link. Visit it. Pick a time that works best for you, and then send me an invite. So I typically block out Mondays and Fridays for project work and wrap-up stuff. So on an emergency basis, if somebody's like, yeah, there's really no time, then I can always sneak them in on a Monday or a Friday if I need to. But this gives people access to my calendar to be able to book things and Just one of the other ways that we've leveraged technology to help us do our job better and give people the power in their hands to be able to connect with us and to be able to engage and interact and do more business electronically. So I'm just going to take a quick peek up at the questions and see if we've got anything else that's coming up here. So, um, so let's see. So yeah, the, the link to Thinkific. Um, And I don't know if they have an affiliate program. It'd be really awesome if I referred you and it got tied back to me, and then— but I don't know what that is. So if you go to— let me spell it right, that would help— thinkific.com. So if you pop over here, this gives you— you can kind of get an idea of what they do. There's some examples. Of other courses that people have put together, number of students that they've educated. So we looked at a couple of different platforms. There's another platform out there that Pat Flynn, who's the gentleman that inspired me to do this 2 years ago, he uses a platform called Teachable, and that was a very close second runner. The thing that tipped it in our favor for Thinkific was that Thinkific had the ability to support forums and the option to be able to build like message boards and chat boards. And there were a few other things pricing-wise, it was pretty similar. But we ended up going with Thinkific. I think in hindsight, I probably analyzed which platform to go with Probably too long, and that was analysis paralysis. I tend to do that a lot. And when I was down in Florida before we came back to Michigan as part of the, hey, stay where you're at, don't want to travel, I basically stayed up one night and I did a T-chart. Good old-fashioned accounting, but I did a T-chart with, you know, different functions and then which one did which one better. And at the end of the day, the T-chart just revealed for us that the Thinkific platform actually was the better choice. And so we ended up going that route. So hopefully that helps and you've got the link there for both Teachable and Thinkific. So let me check and see if there are any other questions. Alrighty, questions are clear. So, um, so the book time with me is pretty cool. And then let me get back to the Link Banker. Um, you go through the sign me up process. Now, when you get signed up, you'll actually provide your name and info. There's a question in there that asks, what do you like most about being a banker? I want to know that. That's why it's a mandatory question. You have to answer that. You got to tell me what you love about being a banker. If you don't like being a banker or like being a banker where you're at, you can, I guess, tell me that too, and maybe we can help improve your likelihood of getting a new job someplace else. I don't know if that's something that we'd necessarily want your boss to know that you're doing, but if, if you're experiencing some challenges, you know, maybe we won't be able to help there. But once you get in, you'll get access, and right now the Learning Center really has just one course, and that's the LinkBanker Intro. And it's just a video greeting, kind of shares my story a little bit, talks about what we've, you know, probably talked about here already. But over time, what's going to happen is these courses are going to grow. We've started working on a repository of different things. Part of the reason that I want to bring people in maybe even before we start charging is just gathering some information, gathering some feedback, and just saying, you know, what are the challenges that you're experiencing as a banker? What would you like to learn about? Do you want to get into things like what's a hashtag versus an @mention, and you know, how do I calculate ROI? Or do you want hands-on? How do I optimize my LinkedIn profile or my Facebook profile? Those are all questions that we want to know the answers to. So as we're developing curriculum, we're not just gonna put a bunch of stuff out that we think is is important that's not resonating with the audience. We definitely want to poll the audience to figure out what it is that they want to hear and they want to learn and then produce that content. So we're really excited. We've got an email that's going to drop to our customers probably sometime next week. Handful of other rollouts that we're looking at doing. I gave a soft mention on our TikTok, so— If you haven't heard yet, so let me just pull that up. TikTok.com/poweredbyWSI. And not that there's a lot of bankers spending their time on TikTok, I totally get that. But Ellie from our team had an idea at the beginning of this to say, hey, one, we know we need to do better at video. Ellie was with me when I was at Social Media Marketing World, so the two of us sat through a lot of presentations. And one of the overwhelming themes at Social Media Marketing World was getting comfortable with video, episodic video, storytelling video, fun video, silly video. And so being able to be comfortable in front of the camera, TikTok is certainly a very low bar entry. If you've ever spent some time on TikTok, I will give them credit. Their algorithm's really good at sucking you in and making you not realize that you've just been on TikTok for an hour. Flipping through videos, but you'll notice that the professionalism and the quality really isn't there, but it's all about fun and engagement and just trying to enjoy yourself. And there are tutorials and there are educational, um, there's a lot of funny voiceovers and there's a lot of dance tutorials, none of which I've done, but we decided we'd jump onto TikTok and play off of the fact that people are probably going to be spending more time on their phone. And we want to just be there. If we happen to catch a couple of bankers that are playing around, we'll also take the videos and we'll share them in the more traditional areas of social media. So we'll throw them into Facebook, we'll throw them into LinkedIn, we'll post them up to Twitter because you can take the videos and distribute them. But it's given us the ability to also play around with this platform a little bit as well. And you can see this just went yesterday and it's had 155 plays. But you can browse around and just kind of check things out. There's Madison from our team having some fun. So it's— and of course dogs have to be in them as well. So anyway, that really is the heart of what I wanted to chat about today. So no guests. It's been a while since I've just done a solo show and Decided I would just turn on the camera and talk to you guys and tell you what I've been thinking and a couple things that I've learned recently that I thought you'd like to know about. So I'm just gonna check the Q&A area one more time and see if there's anything else out there that you might have a question on. But doesn't appear that that's the case. So we're gonna wrap 13 minutes early. What do you think about that? You've got some extra time to go grab yourself another coffee or a cold beverage if you choose, or maybe get yourself a cold coffee, an iced coffee. You can do that. I'd certainly allow that. But I appreciate you joining me today on the show. Look forward to seeing you next week. Planning on doing a show. Still haven't decided if I want to jump over to just livestream only. But curious on your thoughts and if you've got any input or advice in either direction. But until further notice, we'll be back again next week here Wednesday at 1 PM Eastern. Until then, check out the videos at freewebinarwednesdays.com. If you're a banker, hop over to thelinkbanker.com and get yourself free accounts and plug in. Let me know what you think about that. And if you've got any other questions, Hit me up. Let me know. I'm here for you. And, just appreciate the opportunity to share some stuff and some knowledge. So have yourself a great week, and we will see you next time. Bye, everybody.