So Proud of to be Part of the WSI Family During this Time of Crisis
Eric Cook walks through practical tools for remote work and community engagement during COVID-19: LinkedIn's new Events feature, 16 free LinkedIn Learning courses, and live-video platforms like Facebook Live and TikTok. He also covers remote-work basics like daily huddles and shared calendars, and invites banks to submit stories to WSI's "Lending a Hand" page.
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Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, March 25th episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays 2020. It's certainly a strange time and I don't know about you, but it's been a weird couple of weeks. And I know I, I'm used to working from home and do it quite frequently, but a lot of our customers and the folks that we're talking to Lives have certainly been turned upside down, and it's just, just kind of a really strange circumstances that we're under today. But I'm excited that you've joined me today here on the webinar. I'm actually gonna try to do something that I've normally not done. I'm gonna go ahead and share my webcam. And we'll see if this works. There I am. Let me know if you can see me. I've got a shirt on. I just— before they stopped allowing for mass groups of people to get together, I was able to participate in a bike ride for fallen heroes, for fire and police down here in Florida where we're visiting our parents, my parents. And we're probably going to be here a little bit longer than we anticipated, but I'm working outdoors, staying connected, so I guess that's probably not necessarily a bad thing. But making more of an effort now than ever just to make sure we're connecting with our customers and our friends, and many of you on Pre-Webinar Wednesdays are kind of fall into both of those buckets. So just wanted to show my face and say hello. Hopefully you are safe and healthy and everything, I guess, all things considered, going well for you. And today's show, I wanted to just share a few things that have come up that you might find useful, some resources. I know we talked a little bit about this last week, but today, some other things that you might think about as being useful in your day-to-day. So with that, let's just get going. I'm going to look back and forth because I've got some notes and whatnot, so you might see the shine of my gourd, my beautiful hair. I did my hair especially for you all this morning, so I hope you appreciate that. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to minimize the webcam on my end, but you should all still be seeing me. As you can tell, Today's show and all shows are live. We record them and they're available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. It's good to hear that you guys are seeing me. I'm just checking the chat area. Many of you have already found that, so if you'd like to interact— good to see that you guys are seeing me, and hello to everybody that's chiming in. So if you've got some thoughts or questions, feel free to toss them into the chat. Would love to hear what you have to say. But today for the show, what I wanted to share is a couple things that I picked up. I've been listening to a few more podcasts than usual, not that I've got a tremendous amount of free time, but I've been trying to get out. Even though I'm not riding with a group of individuals down here, I'm getting out on my bike by myself. There's some power lines that I'm riding, so I'm not in traffic and I can throw podcasts in, and I've been listening to some stuff. So I caught a couple things that I wanted to share with you specifically about LinkedIn, one is more of a reminder. I think I mentioned it during the last show, but there's an update on LinkedIn events that I want to make sure that you're aware of. And then you can see right here, some of you I'm connected with on LinkedIn, and if not, feel free to connect with me. I'm— I don't think they refer to it as a LION, LinkedIn Open Networker, but if you're interested in connecting, just send me an invite, and I love getting connected with folks. But I posted this. I've sent an email around to our customers and some other folks, and We're in the process of writing a blog post about it. But one of the things that we wanted to do here at WSI is try to work very closely, and we do a ton of work in the community banking space. I was a community banker for 15 years, and that industry has really stepped up. A lot of you I see from the attendee list are from community banks. This is our moment to shine. I see many of you doing stuff for your customers and your communities that simply wouldn't get done by any other organization, any other type of business. I gave the analogy on a prior call this morning that, you know, the lump of coal that was created in the 2008 financial meltdown when all banks maybe were seen as being not necessarily good lost some trust, you know, just a lot of that stuff that went along. I think there's a diamond in the middle of all of that that's gonna come out at the end of this, and people are gonna come back and realize that their community institution, their local banker, was really the glue that held the community together from an economic perspective. You know, many of the states that around the country have gone to mandatory stay-at-home orders and only critical services are allowed to stay open, and one of those critical services is banking. We gotta have money. We've gotta make sure that it continues to be available to our customers, communicate that information clearly so they know how they can get access to it. I think bankers are paying, as well as any business really, a lot more attention to just the ways that they engage and interact with their customers electronically. I'm not gonna lie, as a digital agency, I don't want to say that this makes me excited because then it makes it sound like I'm capitalizing off of the coronavirus, and that's certainly not what we're intending. But we've been beating that drum here for the last 13 years, that having an effective digital presence that allows you to deliver a service remotely— not the only way, because we've always preached, and this is maybe the same for your business, you want to be able to provide the same type of service that you offer in person, electronically, and then let your customer decide what they want. So if they want to come into the office, great. If they want to do it all electronically, that's great too. But now we're finding a really strange circumstance where they don't have the ability to come in in person. And I think there's a lot of businesses, community banks included, that are realizing that some of the things that they just took for granted that people were coming into the office and doing are no longer possible, and they maybe don't have the actual solution available to be able to do that electronically. And so now they're scurrying around trying to figure out really how to make that happen. So what we did is we posted this article, and what I'm interested in— and I've heard a lot of anecdotal comments, and I've had several phone calls and conversations— but I'm interested in Collecting good feel-good stories. How you as a financial, as a community bank, are making a difference in what sorts of things that you're doing for your customers, for your employees, for your community, for the nonprofits, for your small businesses. Anybody that you are making an impact on, I would love for you to visit this. It's lending a hand powered by WSI lending a hand. I would love for you to visit this page and tell your story and tell me what you're doing. Share some of your. Updates, or just drop me an email. You can send us a support ticket. I don't care how you get in touch with us, but I'm interested in collecting as much positive feel-good because then I want to redistribute that information. And there may be an idea that you have that a bank someplace else in the country or across the state or across the town picks up on that they didn't think of that helps them make a difference in the lives of their customers. And it's the this whole communization of conversation and ideas that I think is going to help get everybody through all of this. So, so again, feel free to visit that Lending a Hand page on our website, share your story, or just drop me an email. I'd love to hear what you're doing and to be able to incorporate your story with the information that we're going to be redistributing. The couple things I wanted to share with you as it relates to LinkedIn, one of which is a feature they released, and I talked about it several episodes ago. But if you go to your home screen, so you just go to your little Me area, so that takes you to your actual feed, or you click on LinkedIn, you're gonna go down to the bottom left area and you can see we've got Events. And up until recently, events were only available to create at an individual level. So if I, Eric Cook, wanted to do an event, you can see there's a couple of marketing forums that I created events for. You could create an event, but it had to be done at the individual level, which seemed a little weird because while individuals maybe create events, it's probably more commonplace that the actual business, the bank or the, you know, mom-and-pop shop or whatever, is probably going to create the event and host it. And the business is going to be the one that's going to want to be the event organizer. But up until recently, you had to do it as an individual. So if you were having a career fair, the HR person did it. If you were having a lunch and learn, you know, maybe the wealth management person created the event because it was a lunch and learn about investment strategies or something along those lines. Now, and if you don't have events, don't freak out because I don't know if it's been totally rolled out to everybody yet, but now in the event area, if you click on the event and you go to create a new event, you can see you give it an event name. And one of the things that's really weird, I'll talk about in just a second, is the location. But some of the podcasts that I've listened to have talked about, they suspect— I don't know if it's documented— that LinkedIn was planning on releasing this at some point, but they rolled it out a little bit faster given the virtual nature of business today versus 2 weeks ago, for that matter, as people started shutting their offices down and having to do mandatory stay-in-place side. So when you create an event, you've got the ability to give it some branding. So you can see you can change out the background image across the COVID you can give it an event profile picture, you can give it an event name. I would suggest if you're gonna make this a virtual event, let's say you want to do like a livestream on Facebook and you're gonna get your CEO to share state of the industry, state of your business, state of the community, You put in here online event because in the next area underneath the organizer, and I'll come back to that, you have to actually put in a physical location, which is again really weird. So you have to type in the actual location of your office. So I would have to type in 12369 Verona Road, and that's our office in Battle Creek, Michigan. And so even though event's not going to be at that location. I have to put some sort— and you can see that it's a mandatory field— but I'm going to put virtual event, webinar, um, you know, live chat, hashtag chat, whatever the case is. This is the new part. Now you have the ability to click on the dropdown, and if I want to host this event as Cook Technology Solutions, which is the LLC that owns the WSI franchise, I can now make WSI CTS, the actual event organizer. And so that's one of the things that's, that's new. You can put your details in here for your venue. Now you can see you're no longer mandatory. You can put information, start and end time, pick your time zone. You do have to put some sort of a description here. So this is join us on Thursday at 1 PM Eastern time where our CEO is going to be going on to Facebook Live. Make sure that you go to our Facebook page and click like. Gonna give you the ability to have that information out there, people can see it, and then even though the event might not necessarily be on LinkedIn, you still are gonna have the ability to share that event and people can, you know, choose to go over to Facebook if they want. If you're gonna be using any sort of a ticketing website like an Eventbrite, or maybe you've got a place, if again, if this were an in-person event, which are kind of now not even possible. So I'll be very curious to see when— not if, but I would say when— LinkedIn decides to change the location to, you know, physical location or virtual. And then you can select like go to meeting, go to webinar, Zoom, Google Hangouts, or just maybe allow you to type anything that it is that you want in there. And then lastly, you can indicate whether it's a public event or a private event. And, and if it's an event that you want the whole world to know about, certainly make it public. It goes onto the page, and then your employees within the organization, if you set that event up as an organizer for a company page, that the employees within that organization can then share that event with their connections to help spread the word and try to get more people to know about it and to indicate they're interested in going or attending. And then that will really help get the word out. So if you've not tried events, even if you want to just play around with it, it's something to take a look at. Like with any of the new LinkedIn items, I would suspect that as they roll things out, the more you use it, the more it's going to gain their attention, and their attention is going to gain visibility. So, so kick it around the next time you've got some sort of an event. Feel free to go ahead and use that. Hopefully you've got access to it. I'm going to go ahead and cancel this because I don't want to create a nameless event. I'm going to do a quick check of the questions because I see I've got a couple over here. Let's see here. Let's see. So I don't have organizer available. Is that because I'm free versus premium? I suspect that is maybe more a factor of you not being an administrator of an actual LinkedIn page, and I don't know whether you are or are not. But for example, if you're not an administrator of your bank's Facebook page, and you can see we've been invited to be administrators for a number of our client pages as well, but if you're not an administrator And you can see it's also a beta feature, so it could just very well not rolled out to you yet. But if you're not an administrator on a LinkedIn page, you're probably not going to see that because it's not going to know what page to give you access to. So I don't know if that's the case, but again, being in beta could be just taking its own sweet time to roll out. But that's one of the other things to take a look at. So good question. Certainly keep an eye on that and, uh, and see what kind of evolves. Again, my gut tells me they're probably going to bring in some sort of a virtual type instead of a physical location because nobody can do physical events anymore. I was actually supposed to be in Pennsylvania this entire week doing a road show with one of the banking associations there at their, um, their member events, um, doing a road trip all the way across Pennsylvania, but that's obviously not happening. The other thing that I've been seeing more people do is going out and taking training and certifications out at Google, taking courses on Udemy, just jumping in. And some of it is by necessity. I mean, let's face it, if you are a waitress or a waiter at a restaurant that's had to close and you're not sure if you're gonna have a job, I would be spending as much time online as I could looking for training and other sorts of ways to hone my skills and to figure out if If I'm going to have to sit at home and not work, is there free resources or other sorts of training out there that I can use to feed my brain to make me more valuable? So when this does turn, and it will, we're not going to be in zombie lockdown mode forever, but when this does turn, how are you going to look compared to everybody else that just sat home and said, oh, woe is me, um, you know, and, and had a pity party versus taking this opportunity to Work, you know, as they say, work on your business instead of in your business and work on yourself basically to figure out how you can, you can be a little bit more, more valuable and knowledgeable. So I mentioned this, I think, in last week's, but I want to just reinforce it because it did come up on one of the podcasts that I listened to as well. And I've talked to a number of people that didn't realize that this was here. Normally when you're in LinkedIn, if you go into LinkedIn and you can see I'm a Sales Navigator subscriber, you can go into the work area here as a Sales Navigator user, and you've got access to LinkedIn Learning, which is the Lynda.com platform that LinkedIn bought a couple of years ago. But in order to help people, I guess, educate themselves, they've actually made 16 of their courses available at no cost. And you can go through this. And even if you're actively employed, like a lot of my community banking friends, you just might be working from home or on limited access because your branch is locked down. Um, got a little bug in my eyeball here, sorry. Your branch is locked down, you're letting people in by appointment only, you may have a little bit of free time, and this could be an area. Now the cool part about LinkedIn Learning is when you go through one of these courses and you actually take the course and go through the process of finishing it up and getting certified, it can show up on your skills as something that you've learned and validate the fact that you've taken the next step. So if you take a look at just some of these things, all the courses that they've made available are ones that deal with this new environment that we're in right now— working from home, managing a remote workforce, building resilience. Leading at a distance, you know, you're not face-to-face with people. So how do you do those sorts of things when you're communicating back and forth? It's one of the reasons why I'm starting to use web cameras and, and whatnot a little bit more proactively, just so that we can see each other. And it's funny, we've always worked virtually and we've, you know, we've used the webcams at times, but I feel now more of an urge Even though for us, our work environment really hasn't changed, I feel more of an urge to want to see people just because I know I don't have that ability if I wanted to. I had a really uncomfortable conversation and he totally understood, but we've got cousins that have— they're in the Florida area, they're not that far away, and they wanted to come over for a visit. We haven't seen them in a while. In a normal world, we would have said, yeah, come on over Sunday for dinner and we'll get together. The girls can swim in the pool and play with the dogs. And had to have that, probably shouldn't get together. And it's just weird having that in the back of your mind, like you're treating everybody that's not you like they're infected or like they're, you know, this toxic zombie that you can't come in contact with. But The separation thing is real and it's not anything to mess around with, so we're taking it seriously. The other thing that I wanted to mention, because we're trying to actually have a little bit of fun, and like I said, in a little bit of the free time exploring and experimenting with some things. We suspect, and I think the statistics are showing it, people are locked in at home, they get on the internet, the latest craze is TikTok. People download the app and then they just start scrolling through stuff. We actually made the decision as an office to hop on TikTok. And while I am by no means a TikTok master, Ellie from our office— we went to Social Media Marketing World and this was one of the sessions where they talked about getting comfortable with video, especially entertaining video. And so I'm not going to play the actual audio because you won't hear it, but if you go to tiktok.com/@poweredbyWSI, you can see the 2 videos that we've created. But just talking about working from home, creating a clean workspace, we're having some fun doing it. There's yours truly. I'm going to take a little break and go for a bike ride in my WSI cycling attire. So just lots of fun things that we're trying to do. We've shared this with some of our friends and we've gotten some positivity and I got a nice comment, you know, in the midst of all of this, watching that made me smile. Thank you so much. And, you know, we're not selling anything. We're not trying to convince anybody to do anything with us, but it's lightening the mood, sharing some information. I would kind of suggest that you think about in your business, is it time to break outside of what you've normally done? Is there an opportunity to do something different? You know, going live on video is sometimes an uncomfortable thing for people to do. You don't like to do it. That's why I've hidden my camera. I can't see myself talking to you. I know I'm talking to you. I know you can see me, but I'm not looking at myself talking because that would probably make me really freaked out and a little self-conscious. But rather than going onto Facebook or social media and talking to your customers and telling them what you're doing, Why not leverage the power of the social platforms, and they're giving it to you for free, and do something live? Get one of your senior managers to step outside of their comfort zone to be able to then do a live stream, promote it, share it, say, hey, Thursday afternoon at 1 o'clock, we're gonna go live. We invite you to join us on our Facebook page or over on Periscope or Instagram, whatever platform you like. You can use a service like Ecamm Live, for example, which is a Mac-based product. There's other PC-based products where you can stream to multiple platforms at the same time, but getting comfortable with that and then being there so that your customers and your community members can actually see you and they can ask you questions. You know, it's just like the question that I just got, you know, hey, I don't see it, doesn't look like I'm an organizer. You may get questions from the audience about You know, and if you're a banker, again, lots of banking analogies because it's in my blood, you know, but asking questions, you know, when do you expect the branches to open back up again? Is my money safe? Are you going to limit the amount of money that I can take out of the bank? I know compliance will probably be a little uncomfortable because compliance has a job to do, and that's keeping a bank compliant and making sure that things aren't said that you're not supposed to say. But you almost have to take the risk. And yeah, somebody could go on and they could say something bad, or they could drop an F-bomb. I mean, it's live, so who knows what could conceivably happen and who's gonna show up. But I think now's the time to try something new and differentiate and to be able to go out and to be present and to be accessible and to be transparent. And if you don't know something, Admit it. Don't blow smoke and try to, you know, give them the song and dance. Like, you know, if you don't know what's gonna go on, there's no harm in saying that. And then, you know, you probably by this point have built some sort of a resource environment on your website or some other way where people can go get access to things, status and official updates. You know, promise to follow up. So the things that you don't know, say, that's a good question. We're gonna check with that on the team. And we'll post it to our COVID-19 page or our coronavirus page, and we've built a number of those for our customers just so that they can communicate. But I think now is the time to try something a little different, and you might find that there's some appreciation for stepping outside of the box and doing something that people wouldn't necessarily expect. The last thing that I want to talk about is an event that took place last week that I was I was very humbled and very grateful to be a part of. WSI is a digital agency network. We have offices in 80 countries around the world. Each office is essentially a franchise, independently owned and operated, but we all interact with one another very much as a digital family around the globe. And our corporate office in Toronto actually put together a really powerful open forum. We normally have these once a month. They usually last 60 minutes, and it's just a way to get together, and corporate usually shares updates, and we typically have a consultant share a success story, and, you know, it's like anything else that you would expect to have within an organization. We put together a webinar that brought in experts from around the globe. I was one of the representatives from here in the United States. We had folks from Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa. And each one of us was asked as a subject expert, if you will, to be able to come in and talk about some different components or different issues or perspectives, whatever you want to call it, regarding the coronavirus and COVID-19 and just how that's changed our business and how it's impacting our customers. I was one of the first consultants to proactively put out a statement to our clients because we work with banks, and I know that banks have vendor requirements. And we got a couple of emails while I was drafting it saying, hey, what's going to happen to our support? What's going to happen to our website? More and more of our customers are going to be hitting our website wanting to get access to digital services, downloading things, mobile applications, the You know, are we okay? So I very quickly drafted a statement and sent that out to all of our customers just to reassure them that we were business as usual. We continue to operate and always have as a virtual organization. We don't have a physical office that everybody comes to, which sometimes is a little bit of a challenge, but in this case, I think it's very much an advantage of ours because we've all become accustomed to working from wherever. And not that there's a lot of people working from Starbucks or Barnes Noble or Panera Bread or anything like that anymore, but we all have setups at home or travel with laptops and whatever else is necessary. It's obvious I'm not in my office back in Michigan. I'm sitting outside at my parents' in Florida. Otherwise, certainly wouldn't be wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt going out for a bicycle ride. If I was still back in Michigan. So we're very comfortable with that. So I sent that information out. A lot of our customers are doing the same thing just to reassure their clients. But we got together during that open forum and we talked for 90 minutes and shared ideas and thoughts and insights, and it was just such a cool thing. I always valued the WSI partnership and the network and the friends that I've That I've, that I've developed over the years since I've been doing this for 13 years. But it was on that webinar where the real kind of solidification of family really hit home for me, and it was pretty powerful. So what I want to do in the last, I don't know, however many minutes we've got, I've got some notes from the actual webinar that corporate took. And I just want to kind of share with you some of the ideas that other consultants around the world shared during that webinar. Now, certainly there were some things that we talked about that would be really only pertinent to us, you know, sales strategies and other sorts of things and lead gen. You know, we want to make sure as business owners, you know, we remain viable. We have employees and staff that we need to make sure that we're taking care of. But we also very clearly understood the fact that, you know, this might prove to be challenging times for our customers. And now's not the time to necessarily really think about profit. Now's the time to think about being there as a partner, lending a hand, doing what you can so that everybody gets through this. Because I think the businesses that do that are going to come out of the other end like that diamond in the coal. I think they're going to come out of this a whole lot better. And with that relationship between them and their customers that much more Solidified. So kind of walk through a few of the things that came up as ideas, if you will. So those of you that are working from home now that maybe haven't done that before, you know, a couple of the consultants talked about one uses an online scheduling link to be able to book appointments if you've got Your calendar, and it's probably now more important than ever to make sure that your calendars are synchronized with your mail server, your whatever exchange back at the office, so everybody knows what's going on. But you can create a calendar link— Calendly, Doodle. SharpSpring is the marketing automation platform that we use, and they've got a calendar link that's actually in the signature of all of my emails. So if somebody wants to get in touch with me and schedule an appointment, they can very quickly do it without having to track me down and say, when are you available? What time's this? What time's that? I can just send an email, they can click on the link and pick a time that works. So being able to effectively get together that way, leveraging a second screen. Some of you have this at the office and really like it, but I would suspect if you're home working on your laptop, you probably don't have one, and you can pick one up for, you know, a couple hundred bucks. You could probably get just a regular old monitor. You might even have one laying around the house. Get the right connectors and then use that. That's going to make your desktop and your kind of your workspace environment a little bit more productive. Consider implementing if you've not done so already. Maybe doesn't have to be in all organization, but if you're responsible for a particular department, have an end-of-day huddle. And we actually started doing that yesterday, and we're going to try it for this week. So at 4:45. 15 minutes. If it goes over a little bit, that's fine. But every day at 4:45, we're all getting together. We're a G Suite Google shop, so we've got access to the Google Hangouts, Google Meet. So we just hop on that at 4:45. We talk about what our day was like, if we had any success stories that we came across, if there were any opportunities that we feel we, we need to bring to our customers to make sure that they're aware of. Any questions or challenges? And then, you know, it just kind of ends the day for the most part. The last, I guess yesterday and Tuesday were the 2 days we've done it so far. So the last 2 days we've ended the day on positives because we've had some really nice things to share. And it's just an upbeat kind of morale thing. You can get a free version of Zoom to be able to pull a handful of people together. There's other conference platforms out there now. That you can also use, but a daily huddle is also a good idea just to get together. Making sure that you proactively reach out to your most valuable customers, and if you can get to all of them, that's great. I know in a banking environment, getting to every single customer might be a difficult thing to do, but picking up the phone for some of your Like higher-end clients and just working your way down. We've started doing that, making sure that you reach out, you know, what can we do, how can we help. One of our banks— a number of our banks are certainly keeping an eye on any sort of government plans or programs that are going to be made available through whether it's the Small Business Administration, or if they want to implement some sort of a payment assistance plan where somebody that has a hard time Making payments. One of our clients shared they got a phone call from a very good customer, had a business that requires people to come in. They're not coming in. The customer reached out and said, you know, I'll be able to make my interest payments, but as far as interest and principal, it's probably going to be difficult for me to do that. Would you guys be open to allowing me to just go interest only for a couple of months to see how this all shakes out? And it's being able to invite those conversations. So talk to your vendors, talk to your suppliers. Don't wait until the last minute when things are really terrible. I think the proactive approach here is definitely something that that you can go into. Let me just see here what other stuff kind of. Jump back, you know, if you can get into your, like, crystal ball and think about what the normal world's going to look like, or maybe look for insights on how things have shifted in different ways that you can provide services electronically. So even after the COVID virus dust has settled, you know, ways that this is actually A positive for us and for your industry. That may be somewhat of a challenge for some of you, but it is something to kind of think about. Yeah, and I guess, you know, just lastly, and we're doing it here, and I mentioned it earlier, Take time to work on your business. Figure out if there's some stuff that maybe you wanted to do that you haven't been able to do. This might now provide the opportunity. I know I've got an idea for kind of an online learning environment. I will tell you in hindsight, if that platform were up and operational today, it probably would have been a whole lot more valuable than getting it done and launching it. in another month or two. But thinking about some of the things that maybe you've wanted to do, and if there is a downtime or you've got, you know, not as many work responsibilities, you know, you can do that. And I think I said lastly, but I'll say lastly this time, take care of yourself, obviously. It's easy to freak out. It's easy to Stay indoors and not go outside. You know, there's no shame, there's no harm, there's no restriction on getting outside and exercising. You can't do it with a group full of people, but grab your spouse, take your dogs for a walk, hop on the bike and go for a bike ride. You know, stay healthy in all of this. Staying indoors and not getting any sort of outdoor activity, you know, and just Sulking is not going to solve this. So making an extra effort, you know, we don't have children, so it's probably easier for me to say that because we're not balancing childcare. But a vast majority of our conference calls are with marketing directors who tend to be more female, and 2 that we had yesterday, both of them had small children at home. That I could hear in the background, and one said he's down for a nap. When he wakes up, I'm gonna have to get off the webinar. You know, I hate to do that, but it's just the way that it is. So embracing a little bit of flexibility with what's going on in your world and everybody else's. You know, the black and white lines are no longer there. It's a lot of gray, and people are just kind of figuring it out as we kind of go along. So I'm curious before I go ahead and wrap if there's anything that anybody else would like to share. Certainly would love to hear any insights or observations from the audience. As I stare wantonly into the webcam asking for feedback and ideas. So let me go back while we're waiting. Make sure that you jot down the poweredbywsi.com/lendingahand, hyphenated, and, you know, hop over there. I know I've asked specifically for content from community banks, but if, if you're part of an industry that's not community banking but you've done some cool stuff, I'd love to hear about that as well. So thanks for all the positive feedback. For those of you that are attending live, you know, I've been actually thinking about, as I look at on your business versus in your business, the future of Free Webinar Wednesdays. I know we've got a handful more chapters and authors that I wanna bring on the show to be able to share their information from our Digital Minds book. Which I believe is available now. So those will be coming, but taking a look at maybe re-engineering Free Webinar Wednesdays a little bit, maybe moving to more live streaming, live streaming across multiple platforms, using the webinar structure as a little bit more of a formal agenda-based, you know, we've got an actual presentation. Um, but figuring out how I can take these, because what I get out of these webinars, and, you know, not that I'm on here just because I like to talk, because they take time, and, you know, there's certainly other things that I could be doing for the hour or 2 that it takes to do the webinar and compile and write the post and all that stuff. But I do like the connection and the exchange and the interaction and be able to see Commentary from everybody and with live video and some of the tools that I picked up on over at Social Media Marketing World, which who knows if there's going to be an event of that size anytime in the near future. So fortunate that we were able to get that under our belt before everything got shut down. But you might be seeing some more live streams and some other stuff. And I also mentioned kind of a learning environment. Kind of a community as well for my banking friends. So my gears are turning just like I'm recommending your gears should be as well, because I've had a TikTok account for a while, but I've been one of those lurkers that's just watched the videos and I've never posted anything. And when Ellie said, hey, we need to do some TikTok, wasn't exactly sure what to do, but seeing the end product, it made me chuckle and looked pretty cool. So getting more comfortable, getting outside of the box, and Pressing the whole comfort zone. So looks like we've got pretty much all that we're going to say today. Again, thanks for everybody that joined live. Hopefully you don't mind seeing my face, and it's been good to virtually see many of you through your comments. Stay safe, stay healthy, take care of your customers and your employees, take care of yourself. And, um, keep an eye out on Free Webinar Wednesdays. We're going to start getting, uh, my WSI colleague authors back engaged and, um, look forward to seeing you on a future episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. Until then, have a great week, everybody. See you later.
