Put the Power of Facebook Groups and YouTube to Make You Smarter

Hello there. Let's try this again. Welcome to this week's episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. Today is What is today? Today is Tuesday. No, Wednesday. It's Free Webinar Wednesdays. Wednesday, July 22nd. I totally screwed that up, but it's a live webinar, so I'm gonna leave it in there 'cause that's just one of the things that makes this so darn adorable. It's Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020, and this is a tongue-tied and somewhat confused Eric Cook coming to you from WSI Digital and now thelinkedbanker.com. You can learn more about the WSI business over at poweredbywsi.com or thelinkedbanker, thelinkedbanker.com. Today's show, much to the fact that I probably would prefer not to record this so far, today's show is being recorded, and all shows are available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Although I'll admit I am a little bit behind on my video editing. So please, Accept my apologies, and we'll get those updated as soon as I can. But today's show is not coming to you from the front seat of my SUV, which is what we did last week. Hold on one moment, please. See if that does me any better. So today's show is coming to you from my remote office up at Houghton Lake, Michigan, and I will be hitting the road this evening, which is why I want to talk a little bit about my motorhome, my Winnebago View. And there's an angle here because I'm gonna talk a little bit about groups and why I think they're pretty awesome. And you should be participating in them and leveraging them for your business or for your networking strategy. But I will be taking off later this afternoon/evening and making a road trip solo by myself with me and my bicycles and headed down to the Alleghenies Trail in Pennsylvania at Raystown Lake Campground and Four Points Marina. Where I'm going to spend about a week and a half in the woods by myself in my RV with my bicycles, and I'll be working during the morning and riding my bike for a little dirt therapy in the evenings. And I am really excited. Normally, this is a trip that I take that gets me into Pennsylvania, and I teach for one of the banking schools there at the PA Bankers and Unfortunately, thanks to COVID and this global pandemic, we are not having the school next week. They have shifted the school to actually take place in January of next year. But I booked a campground because it's close by. I've got friends that live in the State College area, and so I'm going to honor my registration and my reserved campsite, and I'm not going to cancel. I'm gonna load up some food, some beer, some ice, um, and, uh, a lot of cycling attire, and I'm just gonna make my road trip and go down and ride some trails. If you are a cyclist at all and like to mountain bike, I would strongly encourage you to check out the Alley Grippus Trail. It's where Dirt Rag magazine actually has their Dirt Fest every year. I don't think they had it this year because of COVID but They, they are a frequent flyer down there at the Allegheny Trail, and it's pretty exciting. So doggies are going to the in-laws because the other reason why I'm making myself scarce is my lovely wife is having a bunch of her girlfriends that she went to college with come up to the lake. And so I've been banished, so I got to go somewhere. So why not? Go somewhere that involves my mountain bike and some trails and some beautiful scenery and not a whole lot of other people. So I'm pretty excited about it and looking forward to going. But the reason that I'm telling you all of that, not to make you jealous that I'm gonna be camping for a week, because I will be working from the campsite. I've got a hotspot and it gets good reception. So we still will probably have a Free Webinar Wednesdays. I might even do it from the picnic table. So we'll do outside. Assuming that it's not raining, which I hope it won't because that would make spending a week and a half in the woods pretty miserable. But I'm going to be taking our Winnebago View little Class C motorhome down there. And one of the things that I found out about when I was taking the RV in for service, uh, about a year and a half, maybe 2 years ago, is I had some questions. I met another guy at the service center that also had a Winnebago View. And so I was picking his brain because he was a little older than I was and had had probably— this was his third one, so he seemed really knowledgeable. And I just really enjoyed chatting with him, so we exchanged emails. And at the end of the conversation, he says, you know, you really should join this View kind of Navion owners group on Facebook. And I knew about Facebook groups, but I had no idea that one existed for Winnebago View owners, which I guess there's groups for pretty much everything out there now. So he told me about it, said that he knew the moderator was also, I think, based in Michigan, if I'm not mistaken. But he says you go to it and you submit your request. You gotta say what year and model you own, and then they'll review it, and then they'll let you in. And so when you post, you always post your year and your model. But it's a great place to ask questions and just get info. So When I joined the group, I just started browsing through, and before I knew it, an hour had blown by. And there was so much information in this group, and I had owned the RV now for probably two or three years, so I didn't know a lot when we first bought it. There's a lot to know. I mean, it's a smaller unit, so it's not nearly as comprehensive or confusing as a big Class A unit, but. There's a lot of moving parts and the differences between the generator and the inverter and the converter and the slide-outs. And so there's a lot going on. And, and like is typically the case, my grandfather had motorhomes for pretty much his entire adult life. And when we bought this, we bought it in Florida, and Grandpa was excited. But one of the things he said is, get ready Because stuff—he didn't say stuff, but he said stuff's gonna break. It's it's gonna it's gonna break down. You're gonna have problems. You're driving a house, and I kind of chuckled about that. And sure enough, the first year after we bought it in Florida and drove back home, the light from the hood over the stove and the fan fell out. The clip broke. Little things, and I could just hear my grandpa and. The, the back of my head just kind of chuckling and going, yep, welcome to the RV world, grandson. Um, Grandpa has passed away, and, uh, I did ask him questions, you know, when he was still around about how did you do this and how would you do that. Um, but I have found this View Navion motorhomes, and View and Navion are kind of the 2 different versions of the same vehicle produced by Winnebago. So this group, as I got in and I started browsing, it was amazing at how much information is in there, the resources that are there, how well organized it is. The moderators do a really good job of keeping things organized, which is an important component to having a successful group experience. But if I've ever had a question I no longer will call the dealership or call the place, the Camping World, where I actually bought the unit. I go right to the group first and I post information, I ask a question, and literally within 15 or 20 minutes, if I don't have a dozen responses, I'm surprised because everybody in this group is so helpful. They are so excited about owning this type of a motorhome. Everybody's really passionate about it, and they just want other people to enjoy it as much as they do, which I think is really cool. So, um, if you've not participated— and I'm curious whether or not you've actually been involved with groups, so that if, if you're on the show live and you participate in a group, if you want to throw something into the chat and let me know, I'd love to know what groups you participate in. Whether it's a photography group or a travel group or a food group. Food group, that's kind of funny, like not grains and meats and vegetables, but a group on Facebook that talks about food. That's what I really mean. But they've also rolled out, and I've not participated in these, but they've created these abilities to build rooms. They think it's pretty important since just within this little area you've got 3 opportunities to create a room. Everybody, anybody's ever told you, oh, get a room, you can now do that in Facebook. So you can create rooms, which is an area that if we really wanted to talk specifically, let's say I wanted to just create a room in this group about, you know, RVers that like to mountain bike. So now it's not going to be just mountain bikers and RVers, it's going to be people that own Winnebago Views like me and And they like to mountain bike. So I can ask them specifics about, do you tow a vehicle? Do you— what kind of a hitch do you use? Where do you store your tools? Do you take a portable stand with you so you can do repairs? How do you lock your bike up and secure it when you're not at the RV? Those are all things that now Facebook's giving us the opportunity to build these rooms out and to create more of a niche, or as they say for my Canadian friends, a niche experience in a niche conversation. So you can create these little rooms where you can dive in. But as you scroll through, you know, one post here asking about changing out things, recliners and tables, 90 comments. Another one comes down here. So this one only has 4, but then we come down. Here's one. It's a little bit bigger. This isn't a view. This is a full size, but they're they've got you know this is kind of a Winnebago throwback. They've got a 24J, but they took a picture of a classic Winnebago someplace. There's a mountain biker, but you can see 38 comments. So most recently, the thing that I benefited from from the from the from the group. Was we were driving north and the hubcap, which is this shiny little polished aluminum inset that makes the wheel look fancy, ended up becoming dislodged as we got on the freeway. And my wife was following me in a vehicle, and when we reached our destination, actually she called me on the phone. She goes, I think we just lost a hubcap because I just saw something like take off and go off into the ditch. And sure enough, when we got to our destination, I looked and it's just bare wheel metal. The shiny part is gone. It's disappeared. So the first thing that I did is I hopped into the group and I said, hey, does anybody have a good recommended source for purchasing a hubcap? And I also contacted the local Camping World and asked them, and they said, well, we're not sure, that's not something we have in stock, we'd have to special order it, um, give us some time. The group put me in touch with someone who actually lives in Seattle. He lost 3 of the 4 hubcaps on his vehicle over time, so he ordered a set of 4, and he didn't need the 4th one, which happened to be a wheel well. On the rear. And he reached out to me, we exchanged some direct messages right through Facebook and said, hey, if you're interested, $50 plus you pay the shipping, which was another $50. So for like $100, I'll get you a hubcap. And if I were to buy that through, it would have been probably double the price. And so not only does this place really provide me benefit as a place to go and answer questions about why something is working or what to check or a fuse issue, But this also gives me a place where you've got some swapping. So he sent me a Venmo request, was very kind and said, hey, when you get the hubcap and you know that it works, then go ahead and pay me. So very trusting. Not, you know, hey, send me the money before I ship it to you, because we're part of this group. It's part of a community. So there's a little bit more sense of trust. And, you know, I oftentimes, even though we primarily talk to banks and I try to encourage banks to leverage things like this, this is one of the examples that I frequently will give as just a good quality of life. I know there's a lot of crazy crap going on through social media with politics and social issues and COVID and distancing and do you wear a mask, do you not wear a mask. I'm not gonna get in the middle of all that. But when I get into this group, it's a happy place. And it gives me good information, and it just makes me go into a long drive or, or any sort of task at hand with a lot more confidence because I know I've got a big group of individuals that are behind me that are there that share the same passion and interest as I do. So Just gonna do a quick check. Looks like there is a food group out there. So thank you very much. I'm curious what food group it is. Maybe it's the pizza group. That's one of my favorite food groups. I don't know about you guys, but that's my favorite food group. Photography, classic cars. Thank you, Sean. Those are probably pretty cool to hang out in. So yeah, lots of different opportunities and getting into that community now. There could be opportunities where you could participate in groups where you might be able to bring something to value. I also participate in a paid community for Social Media Examiner, and that is kind of their, you pay, I think it's like $297 or $279 a year to be a part of this group. And then that gives you access to people that have similar interests in social media and digital marketing. But there have actually been opportunities where I've talked to people that were interested. I need to talk to somebody that knows SharpSpring, for example, which is one of the marketing automation platforms that we use. So I certainly don't jump into those communities expecting to sell something or expecting to try to monetize my time in there. But I also go in with my eyes wide open to see if there's somebody that's asking for someone that knows how to do something, there's no harm in chiming in. Maybe like the photography, you participate in a group. Um, somebody needs some help, somebody needs some guidance, somebody, you know, can't do a wedding gig and wonders if anybody else out there, uh, has experience in doing weddings or senior portraits or whatever. So there may be ways that you could actually, you know, maybe even monetize, or certainly If you contribute to those groups and you add value, people will explore what else you do and who else you are and what other things that you're involved in. And that might also be an indirect way to bring people to you to be able to take advantage of some of the passionate things that you're involved in as well. So if you've not given groups a try, definitely do it because I think they can be a lot of fun and very beneficial and Kind of put the fun back in Facebook, if you will, because I have to admit some of the normal posts that I see on my wall just don't really do it for me anymore. So, um, the next little story that I want to share, and if I had my wife next to me or anybody that knows me really well, I'm pretty good on the computer and I understand my way around technology, but when it comes to mechanical equipment and anything that involves Either like a motor, so combustible gasoline or anything that's responsible for generating movement, if it's not a bicycle that you pedal, or anything that involves plumbing and water, because I've tried doing that a couple of times. I should probably also stay away from electrical stuff too. So pretty much all the manly things, right? But in preparation for my wife's sorority sisters arriving at the cottage. We got in the pontoon boat and I heard a beeping noise that indicated that the engine on the back of our pontoon was overheating. And a neighbor made mention that, you know, hey, there's this little thing inside of your engine called an impeller. I didn't know, but there's a thing inside of the engine that's at the very bottom called an impeller. And it spins very quickly and it pulls water up into the engine. And if you've ever looked on the back of a motor on a boat, it's spitting water out. Well, that's just a signal that water is circulating through the engine and keeping it cool. So I got a little bit of an engine education from my neighbor, and he says, I'm not seeing any of that water squirting out, so your impeller is probably shot. So I'm thinking, great, I got to figure out how I'm going to get the boat Towed to the boat launch. I'm gonna have to figure out if one of the service, you know, marinas or service companies can fit me in. My wife's friends are coming; they're gonna want to be on the pontoon enjoying the lake, and it's probably not gonna happen. So her girl weekend, not gonna have a boat. So he he just kind of he he said it was kind of funny. He says. ever heard of YouTube? Like, I kind of resisted the whole, you know, yeah, we know YouTube. I'm a digital marketer. We do ads on YouTube. We help generate traffic on YouTube. I do videos, weekly webinars that are posted on YouTube. I didn't say any of that. I said, yeah, I know YouTube. He says, you could probably go out to YouTube and do a quick search for how to change an impeller, and it's probably not that hard. And until he said that, Knowing that I'm not exactly the most technically orientated, adapted, adepted, if that's even a word, technically adept individual, I was like, yeah, that's probably not going to be me. I need to figure out when I'm going to get a trailer and pull my boat and have somebody else take care of it for me. But out of curiosity, I'm like, you know what? Let me just see what's involved. So. I hopped over to YouTube. I did a search for Yamaha 90 horsepower impeller, and then replacement was the completion because apparently I'm not the only one that's doing searching for this. And you can see I found a variety of— now let's just say, see how that little impeller right there has got little fins on it? Well, when I got mine apart, and yes, I actually did change it and the engine actually does work, So I'm pretty excited. Like Saturday was a big day for Eric. My impeller basically was just a rubber circle. There were no fins on it whatsoever, and we've had the boat for like 12 years, and I don't know as if that's ever been replaced. And in these videos, it was saying, "Well, about once every three years or so, you should double check and check and replace the impeller and all these planned service things." And We have a marina that picks up our boat and they take it away and they winterize it, and I don't know if they've ever done that, so I have to ask that question. But long story short, I watched a couple of videos and went through— there was basically 5 bolts that I had to remove. Um, I pulled the unit off. I was able to find one of these impellers at a local parts store up here at the lake for $33. I did have to buy a deep set socket wrench set, so I got to go to Home Depot and buy some manly tools, which is pretty awesome. But I spent maybe $60, so all in I was less than $100, and the tools I'll use more than just the boat. So for really, for like $33 and a little bit of time on a Saturday afternoon, I was able to pull the bottom off of that engine. I replaced the impeller, I put it back together. My neighbor came over and helped me kind of squish things back because stuff was pretty tight tolerances, so I needed his assistance. But we were able to get that, and would you believe it, Saturday afternoon we took a cruise around the lake. Everything's working fine. And the power of YouTube— I've always been a big fan of YouTube, and I know the power of video, and that's why I'm also starting to get into more of a habit of making sure that when I do these Free Webinar Wednesdays, I'm enabling my webcam so you can see me, especially when I do a botched introduction like I did today. I still need to get that down a little bit better. Today is Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020, and you're watching Free Webinar Wednesdays. Why couldn't I have done that at the beginning? But anyway, I digress. So I'm not saying that I'm gonna turn myself into a YouTube mechanic, and anytime something goes wrong around the house, I'm gonna jump into YouTube, but I am pretty impressed at just how easy it was once you get some good instructions. Now, I've been doing webinars this week for one of the state banking associations, and that webinar was delivered, was delivered 3 times. So today was the 3rd of 3 deliveries that I was doing for the state. And in that, I was talking about different ways to connect and engage and be relevant with today's ever-increasing digital consumer. And as I was talking about, and this is why it kinda made me think I need to share this experience with you guys on, on Free Webinar Wednesdays. But as I was talking about ways to be found online, I was talking about owned traffic and earned traffic and paid traffic. And so as you're producing content and you're educating your customers about what you do, the services that you offer, Think about if it's something that you do that people haven't done before, and it's an and you're trying to explain people. So the example I gave in my banking webinar was there's a lot of people that are used to coming into their branch to do their banking, and they couldn't because the lobby closed and the employees were working from home. So they're having to figure out how they're going to do their banking without coming in. And while the bank has mobile banking and the mobile app and mobile deposit where you can take pictures with your check, there's a lot of customers that have never done that before. And so as part of that presentation, one of the statistics that I pulled from the folks at HubSpot was the overwhelming popularity and impact of an explainer video and why people prefer those to the tune of like, it's like 63% of people prefer a video to explain How to do something, and I can tell you right now, if I had gone out and downloaded the manual from Yamaha and had to read how to do the impeller replacement, there's no way I would have made the attempt to do that. Just like there may be people out there that would never really want to try to even scan and deposit a check electronically unless they get a video that says something along the lines of you know hey it's Eric here at the bank I'm gonna. Take my mobile phone and I'm gonna use it to scan some checks and I'm gonna deposit those right in the bank without having to leave the comfort and security and safety of my home. And the good news is it's free. It's included as part of your online banking application and it's already probably installed on your phone. If not, I'm gonna show you how you can get it as well. So let's go ahead and we'll get started. And then you just walk them through how that process works. And guess what? You're gonna get people using those services and banking online, using mobile deposit, whatever service industry you're in. It's gonna make it easier for people to take advantage of what you have to offer. So when I was kind of giving that delivery today and thinking about what I'm gonna talk on Free Webinar Wednesdays, I'm like, there's a real correlation to me and, and what happened to me this weekend because I I actually watched an explainer video that got me to do something that there's no way that I thought I would ever be comfortable doing, and it worked, and it actually turned out. Now, didn't necessarily go that way when I tried to do a little plumbing and ended up getting a leak that I couldn't fix, so I had to call in some professional assistance. But at least in this instance, the boat works and it goes across the water. It didn't sink and it didn't strand us in the middle of the lake, so that's pretty good. So Next time you've got a project, hop on out to YouTube, type in the question, the thing that you want, and see if there's any explainer videos out there that might be able to help you do more than what you think you have in you to be able to actually accomplish. I know I was surprised and pretty excited. So I think my wife's just about to the point where she's done listening to me talking about it. But, uh, I'm gonna milk it for as long as I can because who knows when I'm gonna get another chance to do something cool like that. The last thing that I wanted to share with you, and it has been made available, then it disappeared, and then it came back, but I follow a lot of podcasts on LinkedIn, and I've talked about The Linked Banker before here on the show. This is the new initiative that I've recently launched, and it's in the early stages. So we don't have a ton of followers on LinkedIn. We're not sharing a ton of content quite yet, but I use this as an example. If you are the manager of your company's page or you've created a page to, you know, support your passion or you've got a side hustle that you're doing, one of the things that you have access to until they might change their mind and take it away again is you can actually get in and see your followers and you can see who's actually following you. So you can go through and click on all of the different names. Now, doesn't necessarily mean that you have a lot of engagement opportunities here because you still have to click on them and interact. But if you're wondering who actually is following you, you can go into that and it gives you the ability, because one of the other things that I talked about in the presentation over this week was obviously remaining relevant and staying engaged in a digital world. The more you know who's following and paying attention to you so that you can go back. Now, granted, as a page, um, LinkedBanker can't go in and follow those people back. So that doesn't happen. A page can't follow somebody, but as a user, of LinkedIn, or as an owner, or the administrator, whatever you want to call it, the founder and chief mentor over at LinkedBanker. I can certainly go in. So anybody that's clicked on that like button or the follow button for the LinkedBanker, I can go visit their profile. They'll see me showing up, and depending on whether they're using the free version or maybe one of the paid versions of LinkedIn, That's gonna give them even more information. But if those are individuals that I'm interested in building relationships with, what I want to happen over time is people will start hearing about thelinkedbanker.com. They'll go into LinkedIn and search out this page, or they'll go to our website, and then they'll follow this page. And these will be individuals that I've never met before. Now admittedly, a lot of the people It's kind of like doing a webinar and your mom shows up and your best friend shows up, and you know it's everybody that already knows you that's there. That's a lot of what's going on right now because I recognize most all of the people that have clicked on the follow button for the Linked Bankers LinkedIn page. But over time, I might start getting people that could be second tier or even third tier connections because maybe some of those connections are going to. Share the Linked Banker story and, hey, I joined this community and it's pretty awesome and I'm getting good ideas and cool tips. And if that's the case, then all of a sudden it is important for me to jump in and take a look at who the followers are, because I might want to build a personal relationship with those folks in addition to making sure that they're following the page. So now there's almost a double exposure where they get to see the page and they get to build a relationship with me. As the primary driver behind this initiative. And so if you're an administrator, there's really nothing special that you need to do. If you visit your page, you can just go in and click on the followers link, and that will actually show you who all is following, and you can scroll through. It would be nice, and I've heard some webinars and some podcasts actually talk about, it would be nice if there is a way that you could maybe sort those. So anybody that's maybe particularly like Michigan-based bankers, or if you could organize it based off of their job title, but not really. You've just got a big list. I don't even think you can really export it and do any data manipulation, but at least you can go through and see. And at the early stage, which is where I'm at right now, 16 to maybe 20 to maybe 50, it's manageable. Now, if you are part of a very large organization and you've got like 3,000 followers or 10,000 Followers, then that's going to be a little bit pointless because if you go in, are you really going to be able to glean any insight by scrolling through? Maybe, maybe not. But for smaller organizations that don't have a lot of follower count, this could be a really good tool. And I know we have a lot of community banks that we work with that even though they've got individuals that might have a lot of connections. The pages themselves might not have a lot of follower counts, so it may not be as unmanageable as what you might think. So hop out, check that out, and that's just my little LinkedIn tip for the day for you guys to go ahead and take with you. So with that, I wanted to try to keep today's show at 30 minutes, and I'm just a little bit over, but I think we are good to go again. Next week's show will likely be coming to you One way or another from the Winnebago view down in the woods in Pennsylvania. Hopefully I can do it outside. Will give you a different sense of scenery. We've got the cool LinkedIn banker poster here. I'm not taking that with me, but you'll be able to see trees and who knows? Maybe somebody from the next campsite will photobomb me and give me a wave or something along those lines. But until then. I wish you all an amazing week. Thanks for joining me here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. Have a great week. What's left of it? Enjoy the weekend, and we will see you next Wednesday right here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.