Recapping Some Recent Shows and Initial Thoughts on Instagram Reels

I've got my microphone off of mute. I've got my webcam rolling, and I believe you can see my desktop. Greetings, everyone. Welcome to the Wednesday. Today is August 12th, 2020 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. You've got Eric Cook here with WSI Digital, working with our clients and customers primarily in the community banking vertical, helping them better connect and engage with their clients online. And I should also start working into my opening discussion slash intro, also the founder and chief mentor over at thelinkedbanker.com, where we're bringing bankers together to help them build their personal brand and get the most out of their digital and social tools. Hop over to thelinkbanker.com and learn more about that if you are a banking professional or happen to know of a banking professional. So today's show and all shows are recorded, and I am very excited to tell you that I got off of my butt earlier this week and actually got caught up. I think I had 4 shows that had been recorded here on Free Webinar Wednesdays that had not made it to the website. And they are on the website. I did them somewhat late in the evening. So if there's some grammar or some weird sounding sentences, please forgive me. But I wanted to make sure at least the recording was up. And if you've not had an opportunity, I see some names in the list of attendees that have been on prior shows. So this might be old hat. And if you are joining me for the first time, Welcome to the Free Webinar Wednesdays family. I'm excited that you're here, or if you're watching this on replay, join us live every Wednesday at 1 PM Eastern time, assuming that I am not off traveling, which is a very low likelihood these days. Used to be that I would be attending conferences and conventions and other places, and I would have to cancel the Free Webinar Wednesdays, but everything is happening electronically now. And Yeah. So it kinda is what it is. Sorry, my phone's making some ringing noise. So anyway, so just wanted to bring your attention to some of the shows that I've just recently posted. Last week, I talked about LinkedIn polls and the capability of engaging your audience in a conversation, getting their feedback, but also at a broader perspective, structuring any of your posts on social media, not just on LinkedIn, but other platforms, in a way that invites conversation and interaction with one another. Because I think it's important to use your involvement in social media if you are interested in building your brand and connecting with people, is don't just post information and then, you know, that's it. What you want to do is post information that generates some spark of a conversation. You could even be a little controversial, although I think getting into controversy in today's day and age on social media might be a powder keg just waiting for a, a light, and you may wanna stay away from that. But things that invite conversation of what you think, and the, the poll that I talked about last week went around the different types of webinar platforms. So you're all joining me on GoToWebinar, which is part of the GoToMeeting ecosystem. The winner of that poll, no surprise, was Zoom. Absolutely crushed it. And I know there were some people that were concerned about Zoom security, and I think they've done a good job. The thing that I like about Zoom is it continues to innovate and add new functionality. There's even some new things that I picked up on on Monday. I sat in on a webinar that Beth Z, your nerdy best friend— if you don't know who she is, you really should. I'm not even going to make an attempt to try to pronounce her name, but look for nerdy best friend. I've had the privilege of hearing Beth actually speak at conferences where I've been a presenter as well, and she's got a ton of resources on apps and tools and digital stuff for anybody. And in this COVID pandemic world, you know, her world has certainly shifted, so she's taken it upon herself to learn new tools and to get very familiar with a lot of different posting platforms and video conferencing. And so she did A deep dive session on Zoom and shared some new features that Zoom offers. I've been using the GoToWebinar platform now. We started using this back in— I wanna say we've been doing these since 2000 because I started doing WSI in 2007. It was like 2008 or 2009. We were using GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar. And they've really not introduced anything new, like backgrounds or frames or anything kind of fancy to the general public for a really long time. And so I'm maintaining my subscription just because I have so much information in the GoToWebinar platform. But we did pull the trigger on a Zoom subscription, which is gonna be the primary driver of the meetings that we're gonna be doing for the LINC Banker, and it has a lot more functionality built within it. So I'm, I'm curious. But anyway, I digress. That was all part of the poll. And so there are people that were posting other ideas. BlueJeans is a platform out there. Some people were dogging on WebEx. As antiquated and old as maybe what GoToWebinar seems, there's a lot of people that are certainly experiencing similar frustrations with WebEx, which really was kinda the first mover to the market And, and so they've kind of let things lapse. WebinarJam is another one that seems to be really popular with instantaneous webinars, but it, it kinda came in at Zoom and then Microsoft Teams and then Google Meet. And then at the bottom, kind of as a forerunner, kind of also was GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar. So, so I talk about that, and then I had a little rant that I'm not gonna get into. You can listen to that if you wanna hear me get on my soapbox. But suffice to say, just be nice to people and you won't have to listen to me rant. And I'm sure all of you are always nice to one another on social media, but it's so easy to hide behind the computer and just turn into a jerk when you think that nobody else really cares. Just don't forget that there's like humans on the other end of anything that you do on social media. So anyway, with that, I joined you from the RV the week before. I was actually on a little bit of a a work travel. I was supposed to be in Pennsylvania for some conferences. I kept my campground and took my RV with my new mountain bike and spent some quality time in the woods. And so I did a webinar. Ellie joined from our team, and I'm going to show you one of her creative little things that she's recently added, which are pretty cool that you can do for your business. Or you can hit us up and we can help you with it. But she's created some cool frames, which we didn't talk about in that webinar, but we did talk all about how we're embracing TikTok. And we joked a little bit about whether or not the president's gonna kick TikTok out of the country and ban it, or if Microsoft or Apple or whoever's gonna end up buying it. But just different ways that you can tell your story. And we're gonna talk a little bit about Instagram, moving closer towards that. Instagram is really good at R&D. And if you've ever heard that joke on Free Webinar Wednesdays, or maybe heard me speak, Actually, let's throw that into the chat. If you know what I define as R&D, go ahead and throw it into the chat. I'm gonna see if any of you know my— and if nobody chimes in, then I'll reveal what R&D stands for here in just a little bit. But some cool ideas that Ellie shared with some apps that she's using to be able to build stuff out in like Canva and our promo video service. And then I had a little bit of a me time session before I left for Pennsylvania. Where I shared, um, a really great experience I've been having within this Facebook group, which is all dedicated to folks that also have Winnebago View, uh, RVs like myself, and how that community is just one that I've really embraced. And Facebook has identified that this is a key focus of theirs. They're trying to get people to come in and collaborate and share information. This is one of the reasons why, quite honestly, we created the Linked Bankers, to bring people of similar interest in mind together. And so I talk a little bit about my experience in the Winnebago group, and then also, um, how I turned myself into a boat mechanic using YouTube, um, which not really, but, uh, I actually swapped out the impeller, which involved socket sets and, uh, grease, waterproof grease, and Whatnot. So don't forget, YouTube is out there as a resource, and it's the world's number 2 search engine. So most people, if they don't go to Google, they go to YouTube, and that's part of the same ecosystem really, because Google owns YouTube. But they're going to YouTube and they're looking for questions. And in my instance, I wanted a how-to video of how do I change the impeller on my 90-horsepower Yamaha motor that's sitting off the back of my pontoon. But there's a lot of business questions that you can also answer. Through video content, and if you're structuring your video that answers the question in the title and the description, you might find that people are discovering your video and seeing you actually on YouTube answering those questions and start getting positive SEO rankings. I think a lot of times when we talk to our customers about SEO, the old mindset is search engine optimization means I want my website to get on the first page of Google. And the reality is web presence optimization, although nobody really says WPO, it's still SEO, but web presence optimization is really more about getting your brand on the first page of Google. And that could be a video on YouTube, it could be a profile of a commercial lender, it could be a post on LinkedIn, or it could be a blog on your website or a frequently asked questions element on your website, but no more are search results just limited to your website. And so YouTube is a great way, and this is just one example of how I went into YouTube, did a search, how do I do this? And it taught me how to do that, and it was pretty cool. So I think that's the last one. The last time, I think this was the one announcement that was out on Free Webinar Wednesdays. For a long, long time was the announcement of the Graduate School of Banking's Digital Banking School. That is still open and available, so I'm looking through the list of bankers. If you are part of a bank and you would like to embrace more of a digital strategy at your institution and figure out things like compliance and how to deal with the fintechs and what sort of technology do you need to have and what are the legal issues and HR and staffing and talent, Those are all things that the Digital Banking School is gonna cover over a series of 8 recorded webinar sessions. They're either going to be 4 hours or 3 hours long. The 2 4-hour sessions are gonna have a 1-hour bonus application session that goes along with it for a little bit of learning and interactivity. But you can go to gsb.org and go to the course listing and learn all about the Digital Banking School. Of course, I am going to be teaching the session on digital marketing and relationship building and how that has shifted and continues to shift for all types of businesses, but particularly as it relates to banks and being able to leverage staff and building relationships with customers that you might not be seeing any longer in your lobbies because they're staying at home. Your lobbies might actually be closed. Who knows what's going to happen with this pandemic when schools restart? Is that going to trigger another uptick? If anything, 2020 has told us that we just have to roll with the punches and accept the fact that what we expect is gonna happen tomorrow probably isn't going to happen the way that we think it's gonna happen, and we're just gonna have to adjust and interact, and that's just the way that it is. So that should get you caught up on everything. Like I said, I know there's a few new people that are in the room today that have not seen those. And so rather than expecting that you're gonna— Bite off the fire hose there. I figured I'd give you a little Cliff Notes version of everything. So, let's talk about— so I'm just gonna take a look and see whether anybody has posted back what Eric thinks R&D stands for. Nobody has guessed. So the way that I typically use it is Snapchat. That came around several years ago. It started to become all the rage. With what's known as ethereal content. We talked about this in the show with Ellie a couple of weeks ago, which means basically it disappears, lasts for a period of time, and then it goes away. That was a concept that people initially thought wasn't gonna fly. Well, why would you create something that in 24 hours goes away and is gone forever? But the reality was, when you do something like ethereal content and you short-term You now command the attention of the individual that's watching it because all too often, if you see something on another social networking platform that's a video, it's easy to say to yourself, well, I'm just gonna come back and watch that later, and you just keep scrolling through with the intention of doing that. But we all know that that never happens. But if you know that that material is going to disappear at 24 hours and you're never gonna be able to see it again, it might only last for 15 or 20 seconds. But that 15 or 20 seconds, you have that individual's complete attention. They're going to stay and they're going to watch it because they know if they don't, tomorrow it's going to be gone. And so it's that fear of missing out or the FOMO effect that plays off of the psychological tendencies of the consumer to pull them in and make sure that they watch that information. Well, Facebook approached Snapchat and offered them a boatload of money, and they said, nope, we're not interested in selling. They said, pretty please. They still said no. So what they did is they did a little R&D, which stands for rip-off and duplicate, not research and development, but rip-off and duplicate. And they rolled out stories to Instagram. And these stories are temporary, ethereal content pieces that you can produce. Now with Instagram, you've got 2 different options. You can post something actually as a picture and it stays out on your profile forever. You can share it and it goes in, but it never disappears. You can also put some stuff in your moments area, which is the little section— Ellie talked about that on the webinar as well. But what didn't exist when Ellie and I talked that just recently got introduced and rolled out is their Reels program. And I've listened to a couple podcasts that have talked about this. It's still not Exactly the way that I think people would want it to behave because it's a little buggy. It's a little hard to find, and I've not even really had much of a chance to play around with it, to be honest with you. But I wanted to make sure that I brought it to your attention because that's what I try to do here at Free Webinar Wednesdays is at least bring you up to speed and make sure that you're aware of stuff that goes on out in the world of social. But the Reels program, it's got, um, this little like clipper here like you see in the movies where you go action and it kind of jumps. So that's the Reels item. Um, as you go into your, um, your Instagram account, if you look around, you can see you've got stories, but now you can actually generate a Reel as a result. Very similar to— Get out of here. I guess not Snapchat, but TikTok. The meteoric rise, I think the last number that I heard was 800 million users on TikTok, and that does not include India because India actually had it blocked. So without India involved in this, which I'm sure has several million of other people that would love to be part of the TikTok ecosystem, 800 million. So, I mean, it's more than Twitter. It's more than Instagram, or it's more than— I don't know if it's more than Instagram, but it's more than Twitter. It's more than LinkedIn for sure. And TikTok has, I think, still the title of the fastest growing app in the App Store ecosystem as far as downloads on a, like, an individual month basis until the next one comes along. So what Instagram is doing, or Facebook, because ultimately whatever Instagram does, it's what Facebook does. What Instagram is doing is trying to take that TikTok-like experience where you can create an in-the-moment, you do a funny video, you do a dance, and then you can kind of share it. In some of the podcasts that I've listened to, the, the big downsides are one, it appears as of the time of this recording that you can only go up to 15 seconds. And it's really difficult to get everything in in 15 seconds. With TikTok, you can go up to a minute. And so they're keeping it to 15 seconds because I think that is more closely in alignment with what the stories are. Now you can kind of tie stories together so you can do like progressive 15-minute items. You just keep the button held down and it just takes you to the next one and the next one and the next one. But in a reel, I don't necessarily think that that's possible. The other element that is missing somewhat, and again, this is kind of a first-round beta. They don't call it a beta, but it's the first round, is the discoverability. One of the things that's probably the coolest thing that I like about TikTok is its algorithm gets to know you very, very quickly, almost to a creepy extent. It knows what people want to know. Right, it finds what it knows you want to watch. So based off of your activity, it knows that I've watched some digital marketing, and it knows there's a couple of TikTokers out there that are in the late 40s, early 50s that are making references to movies and the types of food and things like Dungeons and Dragons and the stuff that I experienced when I was growing up as a kid. So it finds those people, increases their visibility in my For You page, but then it also finds others that are very similar to that. And as a result, that's one of the reasons why TikTok is being seen as, uh, as a very addictive— if people are not on TikTok, they oftentimes will be told don't get on it because once you do, it'll be difficult to get off. And I've known people that have actually forced themselves to remove the app from their mobile device because they just simply couldn't control the urge to fire up TikTok. And then it's 45 minutes later and they're still flipping through their phone watching these TikToks that— now I have to admit, there are a number of TikToks that I've watched that have been educational. And one of the things that we're trying to do with our TikToks at Powered by WSI is give some information and to be educational about it, but have some fun. So one of the ones that I did last week I was talking about one of my favorite content sources, and it's a platform called Flipbook. And so I talked about Flipbook, I got Ellie the video, and then she worked her magic and put a little border around it and a couple of other things. But if you follow that, you'll get some fun things every once in a while. But we're trying to use it as a fun way to educate people without making it look like we're trying to be teachy or educational in nature. But the For You page, the discoverability, some of the musical options don't seem to really be part of the Reels platform yet. And I suspect that's probably because it just doesn't have a ton of people in there. We'll see how that evolves. I'm sure there's gonna be other items that will come along down the road, but I would encourage you if TikTok and kind of this new way of communicating with short bite-size, not necessarily professional video, but in the moment, and some would say more genuine or realistic. If those seem to be of your interest, start doing some checks and seeing what's going on with Reels and just to see what's there. And, you know, at least be part of it while it's in It's growth mode. So I'll be curious from a chat perspective, how many of you have actually heard of Reels? If you've got an account, if you played around with it, go ahead and hit me up in the chat and let me know if that's the case. So the last thing that I just wanted to share with you would be, and I kind of knew— oh crud. Hold on just a second. Let me— there we go. I'm gonna switch browsers here. If I log in, I'm gonna have to go through the whole multi-factor authentication process. Looks like I cleared my cookies out. But if you hop over to my profile, you'll notice that I've got a little frame on my profile picture that talks about I'm a proud hashtag Linked Banker. And some of you may know how to do this. Here's a bigger version of this. And if you visit my Facebook profile— this is not my page, this is my profile, Eric Cook as an individual, as opposed to the Linked Banker or Powered by WSI— but if you look at my page, you will see this. And then this will give you the option if you want to make this your frame on your profile, and I don't know if you would unless you are a Linked Banker and you would like to be part of it, but if you want to give Linked Bankers some love, you want to share information about it and kind of support us in our effort to build awareness for the program, you will have a link where you can go in and it says if you would like that to be yours, you can click on it and you can make this your frame as well. But then it also gives you the ability to link directly over to the Linked Bankers Facebook page so you could learn more about it. And the reason I'm telling you this is if you could come up with some cool frames that you could get your employees to be able to use on their Facebook, that could then generate some additional interest. Maybe your organization is doing some volunteer work, or maybe you're raising money this month for a particular charity, or doing something else that would be warranted to distribute. You'd probably want to stay away from product promotions or anything that involves rates and fees and other sorts of salesy type things. But if you've got a feel-good element or some other way that you want to be able to share information, this might be a cool way to get the word out. And rather than just doing it at the page level, which I've talked about before, 94% or more of the fans of a Facebook page will never see anything that you post because the average organic reach is anywhere between 1% and 6%. Of a Facebook page. So if you can put together some sort of a frame that looks really cool and you can get your employees or your customers to be able to embrace it, that's a viral way of getting the word out that people may be interested in learning more about your business. But once you create these frames, you can go through. So if you were to go in and click on update, so go to your profile, go to Facebook, click on update. When you go to to here, you're gonna see you can upload a photo, you can pick another photo. So if I wanted to maybe grab a photo of Ellie and me at her graduation when she got her MBA, or a picture of Alicia with Winnie when we were bringing her home from the breeder, we could go ahead and do that and it would drop it in. But if you're cool with your picture but you want to add a frame, you have this option here for frames. So when you go into frames, you're gonna see all these different frame options that are going to come through. So if I wanted to talk about the Tour de France, tombstone, or what that is. But what I could do here is type in the linked banker. So the and then linked banker is separate. This then gives you the ability to see all the linked Banker Frames that we've created, that we've uploaded to the platform, that we've made available. So if you're interested in using them, you can go ahead. So if I wanna toss on the Founders Member badge, I could go ahead and I could do that. So now I've got Founders Member, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so there's kind of some cool ways to do that. There might be some other businesses or other organizations that you would like to support publicly on your Facebook profile picture. You can go in here. I don't know quite honestly if very many people are familiar with these frames, and it's kind of a cool way to do it. Ellie's created these in Canva. They're just transparent PNG files that she's uploaded, and once they're in there, they're available for anybody to be able to download. You can see they're actually created by the link banker, which is why when they're built as part of the page and then they show up You'll be able to click on those, and that's why it takes you to the Linked Banker page. We could do the very same thing for our Powered by WSI, uh, Facebook page as well, and then those would just link back to our WSI site. But because we're interested in getting the word out on the Linked Banker— that's a brand new initiative— we've really decided to go all in on the Linked Banker and push that out for the rest of the world to see what is going on over in Linked Banker world. So I don't know how many of you knew this existed, but give it a shot. You can also edit your thumbnail as well, and you can scroll down and even find more. You can just go ahead and upload a photo specifically if you would like to do that. So that— yeah, I wanted to keep this at 30 minutes, and I'm at 1 hour— I'm sorry, 1:28. I was gonna say 1 hour and 28 minutes, which is totally not right. But at 28 minutes, so I'm just going to check to see if there are any questions or comments. If not, we're going to keep doing some research here within our office to try to figure out exactly what's going on over at Reels, just to see what's happening. And as we get more familiar with it, we'll be certainly happy to share it here so that you guys know what's going on. But At least at this point, I would encourage you to go out and at least just do a little bit of searching. If you are a Flipboard user, you could go into Flipboard and do a search for Reels or Instagram news. I've done that, and but I found the official blog at Instagram, so I figured I would start here. But there's a number of other articles that I've got teed up from other third-party platforms that that I'm going to take a look at. Social Media Examiner, which is one of my favorite websites, you all know that. Social Media Examiner actually had a podcast, which is the one that I listened to, where they brought in a TikTok expert to specifically talk about Instagram Reels. And so that may be another one that you'd be interested in checking out. So with that, I'm just quickly checking the question area to make sure I didn't miss anything, and I did not. So I will bring today's show to a close. I thank you for joining me live and allowing me to Share a couple of updates with you and introduce a couple of new things that maybe you didn't know. We'll look forward to seeing you next Wednesday at 1 PM Eastern time here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. In the meantime, make it an awesome week. Share the positive. Remember, don't be a jerk. And best of luck to you, and we'll, we'll see you next Wednesday. Bye, everybody.